Abstract
This chapter offers a reading of recent policy documents and research around children’s wellbeing and happiness.1 In the last decade educational initiatives have been introduced to address the perceived wellbeing needs of children and young people. These include Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning in the UK context2 and Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies in the US.3 This chapter aims to explore the relationship between ideas about childhood and education and to examine how these ideas have shaped these educational interventions. Changing expectations of education are explored through an analysis of the implications of placing the responsibility for children’s happiness with schools. The perception that children and young people’s wellbeing needs to be addressed within the context of the school is considered through discussions of educational values and the role of the teacher. Conceptualizations of children’s wellbeing are analysed and the appropriateness of government devised interventions to tackle perceived emotional deficits and dysfunctions are debated. In particular this chapter is concerned with how recent wellbeing interventions position the child, the teacher and the school in particular discourses of normalized emotional and social interactions, with the result of pathologizing and marginalizing those who do not conform (both children and teachers).
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Notes
DfES, Excellence and Enjoyment: Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning Guidance (London: DfES, 2005).
DCSF, Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning for Secondary Schools (SEAL): Further Reading Booklet (London: DSCF, 2007).
M. T. Greenberg and C. A. Kusché, Promoting Social and Emotional Development in Deaf Children: The PATHS Project (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993).
C. A. Kusché and M. T. Greenberg, The PATHS (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies) Curriculum (South Deerfield: Channing-Bete, 1994).
A. Ben-Arieh, Measuring and Monitoring the Well-Being of Young Children Around the World. Paper Commissioned for the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2007, Strong Foundations: Early Childhood Care and Education (Paris: UNESCO, 2006).
UNICEF, Child Poverty in Perspective, Report Card 7: An Overview of Child Wellbeing in Rich Countries (Florence: Innocenti Research Centre, 2007).
J. De Graaf, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic (San Fransisco: Berret-Koehler, 2002).
O. James, Affluenza: How to be Successful and Stay Sane (London: Vermilion, 2007).
R. Layard Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (London: Penguin, 2006).
S. Palmer, Toxic Childhood: How the Modern World is Damaging our Children and What We Can Do About It (London: Orion, 2007).
K. Lesnik-Oberstein, Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 9.
E. Burman, Developments: Child, Image, Nation (Hove: Routledge, 2008), p. 11.
K. Lesnik-Oberstein and S. Thomson, ‘What Is Queer Theory Doing with the Child?’, Parallax, 8: 1, 2002, 35–46.
K. Lesnik-Oberstein ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Children’s Literature Criticism’, Cultural Critique, 45, Spring, 2000, 222–42, 223.
The problematic relationship between childhood and innocence has been explored in the following: J. Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, series: Language, Discourse, Society, (eds), S. Heath and C. MacCabe (London: Macmillan, 1984, 2nd edn with new introductory essay, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).
J. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1992).
J. Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
M. Freeman and S. Mathison, Resesarching Children’s Experiences (New York: Guildford Press, 2009).
One of the prominent writers in this field is Jens Qvortrup, see for example: J. Qvortrup (ed.), Studies in Modern Childhood: Society, Agency, Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
United Nations, Conventions on the Rights of the Child (New York: United Nations, 1989).
M. Boler, Feeling Power: Emotions and Education (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 2.
L. Morrison Gutman, J. Brown, R. Akerman, and P. Obolenskaya, Research Brief: Change in Wellbeing from Childhood to Adolescence: Risk and Resilience (DCSF: London, 2010).
DfES, Excellence and Enjoyment; DCSF, Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning for Secondary Schools; DfES, Every Child Matters: Change for Children (London: DfES, 2003).
F. Furedi, Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age (London: Routledge, 2004); F. Furedi, Wasted: Why Education Isn’t Educating (Continuum: London, 2009).
K. Ecclestone and D. Hayes, The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education (London: Routledge, 2009).
N. Noddings, Happiness and Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 246.
F. Inglis, The Promise of Happiness: Value and Meaning in Children’s Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
M. Morgan, J. Shanahan and N. Signorielli, ‘Growing up with Television’, in Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research (3rd edn), Jennings Bryant and Mary Beth Oliver (eds), (New York: Routledge, 2009).
R. Veenhoven, ‘Is Happiness Relative?’, Social Indicators Research, 24, 1991, 1–34, 2.
M. Csikszentmihalyi and J. Hunter, ‘Happiness in Everyday Life: The Uses of Experience Sampling’, Journal of Happiness Studies, 4: 2, 2003, 185–99.
A. I Konu, T. P. Lintonen, and M. K. Rimpelä, ‘Factors Associated with School Children’s General Subjective Well-Being’, Health Education Research, 17: 2, 2002, 155–65.
S. Gibbons and O. Silva, School Quality, Child Wellbeing and Parents’ Satisfaction (London: Centre for the Economics of Education, 2009).
J. Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum and the School and Society (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1956), p. 7.
M. Warnock, Impact No. 11. Special Educational Needs: A New Look (London: Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, 2005).
A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1991).
J. Allan, Rethinking Inclusive Education: the Philosophers of Difference in Practice, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), p. 9.
See for example: P. Sharp, Nurturing Emotional Literacy: A Practical Guide for Teachers, Parents and Those in the Caring Professions (London: David Fulton, 2001).
K. Weare and G. Gray, What Works in Developing Children’s Emotional and Social Competence and Wellbeing? Research Report no. 456, (London: DfES, 2003), p. 6.
M. Greenberg, ‘Promoting Resilience in Children and Youth, Preventive Interventions and their Interface with Neuroscience’, Annals New York Academy of Sciences, 1094, 2006, 139–50.
A. Lendrum, N. Humphrey, A. Kalambouka, and M. Wigelsworth, ‘Implementing Primary Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) Small Group Interventions: Recommendations for Practitioners’, Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties, 14: 3, 2009, 229–38.
S. Hallam, J. Rhamie and J. Shaw, Evaluation of the Primary Behaviour and Attendance Pilot (London: Institute of Education, 2006).
E. Burman, ‘Beyond “Emotional Literacy” in Feminist and Educational Research’, British Educational Research Journal, 35: 1, 2009, 137–55, 146.
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© 2011 Hannah Anglin-Jaffe
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Anglin-Jaffe, H. (2011). Reading the ‘Happy Child’: Normative Discourse in Wellbeing Education. In: Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (eds) Children in Culture, Revisited. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307094_5
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