ABSTRACT
Debates in policy and practice are often oblivious to the replication of similar themes and solutions through the centuries. The idea that deprivation is transmitted through the generations via the mind of the child is particularly influential. The belief that early childhood experiences profoundly shape the personality, behaviour and destiny of individuals has exerted a potent allure across time, mutating and adapting to fit the political and cultural contours of the day (Kagan, 1998). Interventions focusing specifically on the interior of the child can be traced back to a religious reclamation of young souls from the dissolute poor, in effect promoting virtues of productive citizenship rooted in economic liberalism. Attention then shifted from the soul to the body and mind in the nineteenth century as psychological theories of child development emerged, eventually to endorse embedded liberal normativities through psychoanalytic models of family functioning. Current incarnations of infant determinism are conveyed through the language of cutting-edge brain science with emphasis placed on new discoveries and the transformative potential unlocked by such knowledge (Edwards et al., 2015). New morally infused prescriptions for family relationships have followed, inspiring legislative change and stateenforced coercion. Characterising each of these eras is an institutionalised effort to initiate behaviour modification in the name of prevention. In this chapter, we explore the history of ideas about intervention in family,
highlighting attempts to (re)engineer children’s upbringing for the sake of the nation’s future. We show how the specific goals of personal and psychological governance shift over the centuries to reflect politically grounded representations of the national good. In adopting this long-term perspective, we aim to unsettle present-centred assumptions and reveal the way that social concerns and psychologically directed remedies play out through extended cyclical patterns. In line with this approach, psychological governance is broadly defined as attempts to advance, manage and regulate the social good through targeting the minds of individuals as a means of changing their behaviour. We consider the relationship between programmes and activities designed to address social dis-ease (poverty, crime and disorder) and understandings of
the role of parents in the context of shifting emphases of political systems across time. We detail how nineteenth-century concerns about children’s moral development gave way to a preoccupation with their physical health and genetic heredity, which then transmuted into anxieties about their psychological development and, more latterly, the quality of infant neurological architecture. While the theorising of child psychology and related modes of family intervention shifts, a conviction remains that optimally formed minds and bodies can prosper within a capitalist system.
