Potentials of care: The uncertain politics of social and emotional ability and difference in American childhood

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines middle class children's and parents' complex engagements with contemporary practices of cultivation, care and surveillance focused on children's social and emotional capacities and differences. Emblematic of a sociality and emotion‐focused biopolitics of childhood, such care provokes moments of spontaneous connection and self‐expression for children even as they engage dynamics of disciplining control and normalisation, an outcome that may work against and towards the objectives of care. Moreover, parental investments in social–emotional care reveal adults' conflicted implication in dynamics of child normalisation, and the potential of this form of caretaking to generate politically valuable empathic insight.