ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the emergence of these theories and to discuss their impact upon parents, educators and ultimately on children themselves in the 1980s. It argues that theories which were intended to liberate and individualize children, and to professionalize motherhood, have come to oppress mothers and through them their children. The chapter provides a brief historical review of the development of childcare ideologies. Walkerdine points out that modern educational ideas about what is natural about children are not self evident, but are linked to a particular brand of psychological explanation whose theories and practices become self-confirming. The ‘ideal’ created by the literature is impossible to achieve within a multiplicity of social, economic and ideological constraints and creates a seam of guilt and doubt in the mothers’ role which is quickly exploited by young children via manipulation, their own conscious reaction to the contradictory position they share with their parents.
