Abstract

LOREDO NARCIANDI, José Carlos  and  JIMENEZ ALONSO, Belén. Small Citizens: The Construction of the Child in the First Subjectivity Spanish and Latin American Childcare. Univ. Psychol. [online]. 2014, vol.13, n.spe5, pp.1955-1965. ISSN 1657-9267.  https://doi.org/10.11144/Javeriana.upsy13-5.pccs.

In this paper we study the origin of modern scientific childcare as a practice of subjectivation. From this point of view, we analyse the parenting or child-rearing technologies which are proposed in a sample of 23 Spanish and Latin American early childcare handbooks published between 1898 and 1939. These technologies of subjectivation should be understood as an important element of a process for the construction of subject as a responsible, adapted and self-governing citizen. These technologies should also be understood in the context defined by the biopolitics and the development of eugenics, which helped many authors -most of them doctors- to defend the need to ensure the physical and moral health of nation through a scientific rearing of little children, that is to say, the future citizens.

Keywords : citizenship; childhood; childcare; bubjectivation.

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