Response to ‘The Normalised Child’, L. Grebennikov

Abstract

Grebennikov has chosen to present to the contemporary gaze, the so-called 'absolute' concepts of Maria Montessori regarding normalisation and deviation in childhood. A courageous move indeed, in times when few would dare to postulate such a singular interpretation of 'truth'. The issue of deviancy, however, was a significant topic in the early part of the twentieth century, as researchers in the new social sciences sought to establish causes for differences in behaviour. Montessori was an active researcher in this field and her expertise ranged through medicine, psychology, anthropology, and education. She began, in 1900, to work with children who were then known as 'deficients' and had previously been relegated to a miserable life on the streets or in adult asylums. Montessori had campaigned to set up a teaching and research institute, where she would have the chance to work with and draw out the potentialities of these children. Her hypothesis was that if such work could be carried out early on, then avoidance of later criminal or deviant tendencies would be achieved. A little later, Montessori had the opportunity to work with children in the early childhood field and applied somewhat similar methods with the result that the 'deviations' described by Grebennikov began to fall away and the possibility of what she termed the 'new' or 'normalised' child was realised. Grebennikov has focussed on the issue of challenging behaviour and the 'deviations' identified by Montessori 100 years ago. His discursive treatment of the topic complicates Montessori's simple point: that it is adults who largely create the problems of deviancy when they place obstacles in the way of the child (O'Shaughnessy, 2004; Zener, 1999). Zener suggests the term 'deviancy' means a deviation or detour from the path of development. The solution for Montessori (1936/1989) lies both in the adult facing their mistakes and in the environment we prepare for the child. In attending to these crucial matters, the child is thus freed to construct self in a holistic framework. Campbell (2002) suggests that the transactional-ecological view is now the accepted framework from which to interpret the psychopathology of young children. That is, the view that incorporates families, communities and other external influences along with the interior life and development of the child. In a detailed exploration of preschool child behaviour problems, she outlines the clusters of behaviour that help us to define typologies of behaviour disorder. In the same vein as Montessori (1949/1988), Campbell notes two major divisions, those relating to under-control--externalising behaviours that are expressed outwards in tantrums, fighting, destructive behaviour and disobedience; and those relating to over-control--expressed in internalising behaviour such as social withdrawal, fearfulness, unhappiness, anxiety and self-focussed expressions of distress. She notes that hundreds of studies have confirmed these clusters. …