 Douglas, S., & Michaels, M. (2004). The new momism (pp. 1-27). E. Disch (Ed.). Introduction. The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and how It has Undermined all Women. By Douglas, and Michaels. Toronto: Free Press. Howell, J. P. (2010). Parents, watching: introducing surveillance into modern American parenting. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, there has been a significant expansion in the means by which parents in the United States might use technologies to watch their children. Watching and worrying about children are not new to the job of parenthood, but the ways of watching now available to parents represents a change of degree so great as to represent a change in kind. The parental gaze has become technologized. This dissertation investigates what happens when man-made devices insert themselves into this most basic of human endeavors.Marx, G. T., & Steeves, V. (2010). From the Beginning: Children as Subjects and Agents of Surveillance. Surveillance & Society, 7. This article examines the claims made by surveillance entrepreneurs selling surveillance to parents and government agencies responsible for children. Technologies examined include pre-natal testing, baby monitors and nanny cams, RFID-enabled clothing, GPS tracking devices, cell phones, home drug and semen tests, and surveillance toys. We argue that governments, both in the contest of health care and education, use surveillance to identify and “manage” genetic or behavioural deviations from the norm. Parents, on the other hand, are encouraged to buy surveillance technologies to keep the child “safe”. Although there is a secondary emphasis on parental convenience and freedom, surveillance is predominately offered as a necessary tool of responsible and loving parenting. Entrepreneurs also claim that parents cannot trust their children to behave in pro-social ways, and must resort to spying to overcome children’s tendency to lie and hide their bad behaviour. We conclude by offering some ideas to rein in the variety and complexity of the issues raised and to help order controversies in this domain.Rooney, T. (2010). Trusting Children: How do surveillance technologies alter a child's experience of trust, risk and responsibility?. Surveillance & Society, 7. The growing use of new forms of surveillance technology across the day-to-day lives of children and the spaces they inhabit brings with it potential changes to childhood experience. These technologies may change the way children interact with others and the way they come to understand the world around them. This article investigates the nature of these changes by looking at the impact of new surveillance technologies on a child’s experience of trust. It aims to show that an increased surveillance presence across a child’s everyday activity may be denying children important opportunities both to trust others and to be trusted.Henderson, A. C., Harmon, S. M., & Houser, J. (2010). A New State of Surveillance? Applying Michel Foucault to Modern Motherhood. Surveillance & Society, 7. This project analyzed how “New Momism” (Douglas & Michaels 2004) is perpetuated among contemporary mothers. Previous work has argued that New Momism is most powerfully represented through the media. Our results indicate that New Momism is also practiced intensively on an interpersonal level via Michel Foucault’s (1975) Panopticonic stage of punishment: poststructuralist surveillance. We analyzed data from a snowball sample of 323 mothers through an online survey tool. Results indicate that while the media remains an important influence, the strongest predictors of New Momism are surveillance of fellow moms (p<.05) and surveillance of self through guilt (p<.001). Results are discussed in light of Foucault’s conceptualization of post-
structuralist surveillance.Sparrman, A., & Lindgren, A. L. (2010). Visual Documentation as a Normalizing Practice: A New Discourse of Visibility in Preschool. Surveillance & Society, 7. The visual documentation of education for pedagogical purposes focuses on preschool children’s activities and is used by educators to improve their understanding of children while strengthening their own professionalism. By analysing three educational TV programmes concerning visual documentation in preschools, this paper challenges the positivistic way visual documentation is portrayed. Moreover, it questions political documents and the TV programmes’ unproblematic description of children as always ready to be visually documented. Applying a child perspective and children’s perspectives, the paper demonstrates that there is a fine line between being documented and surveilled using visual technologies. The paper describes how doing on-looking-ness (onlooker) versus being looked-at-ness (looked at) can be understood as specific discursive formations.
Children today are thus repeatedly video recorded for various purposes, by various people, in various contexts, and using different technologies (e.g., cell phones, digital video cameras, and fixed surveillance cameras). What might it mean to be brought up in an environment where being repeatedly looked at and monitored by video lenses is regarded as normal? Could the visual documentation practices used in everyday childhood institutions be regarded as training children to uncritical acceptance of surveillance techniques that are used with increasing frequency in western societies?Katz, C. (2006). The state goes home: Local hypervigilance of children and the global retreat from social reproduction. Surveillance and security: Technological politics and power in everyday life, 27-36. IN AN EARLY SCENE IN THE TERMINATOR, THE CYBORGIAN ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER walks into an L.A. gun shop and asks to see the wares. The shopkeeper lays out Uzis, submachine guns, rocket launchers, and other sophisticated means of overkill, nervously understating, "Any one of these will suit you for home defense purposes." The situation is likewise in the growing child protection industry. In keeping with the shopkeeper's sly comment, these businesses feast on an all-pervasive culture of fear, while creating a mockery, alibi, and distraction out of what they are really about -- to remake the home as a citadel through the peddling of private protective technologies that reinforce it against various forms of intrusion. These industries offer utterly inappropriate technocratic solutions for broad social problems. More important, the growth of the child protection industry is yet another response to the venomous and slippery fear-of-crime discourse that has become one of the key stocks in trade of the neoliberal state. Franklin, L., & Cromby, J. (2009). Everyday Fear: parenting and childhood in a culture of fear. The many forms of fear, horror and terror, 161-174. In a media fuelled society we are never far from hearing stories of paedophiles, abductions, health scares, recession, and violent crime. The lived world can often seem more terrifying than that portrayed in horror movies, as we hear tales of body parts being found in fields and fathers imprisoning their daughters in the basement for decades. The media acts to reinforce our material experiences of increasing individualisation, changing family structures, and decreasing community. Together, these symbolic and material influences constitute a fearful culture where we are mistrustful of fellow human beings, uncertain about the future, and subject to free-floating anxiety. The family unit is where this culture of fear is perhaps most visible as the relationship between adults and children is seemingly more fraught than ever. Child rearing is no longer a shared social responsibility, but is confined to the immediate family, while strangers are viewed with a mistrust that comes easily. Parents are bombarded with conflicting advice from ‘experts’ and battle to walk the line between allowing their children to be ‘free range’ and wrapping them in cotton wool. This paper explores some of the ways that this everyday fear is impacting on parenting and childhood. |
