Institutional borders, revolutionary imaginings and the becoming-adult of the child

Abstract

Questions surrounding children's capacities and abilities to exert responsible agency have increasingly become a topic of interest in studies of children. Using an empirical example from a Family Treatment Drug Court (FTDC) case in the San Diego area, we discuss how a child entangled in familial circumstances of drug addiction actively exerts care and responsibility in and for the continual remaking of different familial and institutional boundaries and spatialities. In the process, we argue, can be found the becoming-adult of the child: a movement of becoming understood not through developmental stages or forms, but through what children do and are able to do.

Keywords:

• children
• families
• agency
• borders
• revolutionary imaginings
• care and responsibility
• embodiment
• affection and affect

Notes

As we discuss more fully below, the ‘ethnographic present’ is located in the middle of a story, without beginning or end.

Federal bodies in the United States such as the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and Child Protective Services (CPS) work together and often operate from and reproduce essentializing correlations between ‘health’, drug use and child endangerment (for examples see DHHS 1999, Breshears et al. 2004). In the process this often limits different possible child-parent relations of care and responsibility and potentially empowering family development processes (see Moreno and Curti forthcoming).

This understanding of (children's) becomings differs in distinct ways from that of Jones (2008). In their differences, Jones' (2008, p. 210) question surrounding the ‘[possibility] to fully recreate child becoming in adult discourse’ becomes superfluous; it is impossible to fully recreate any becoming in any discourse.

FTDCs intermix child welfare, drug treatment and criminal justice courts into one system. Different representatives from each of these sectors actively make up FTDC teams. This includes judges, lawyers, drug treatment providers and counselors, recovery specialists and drug test administrators, CPS social workers, and mental health, psychiatric, and family counselors.

In this, we are in complete agreement with Richardson (2001, p. 34), who articulates it better than we could ever hope to: ‘People who write are always writing about their lives, even when they disguise this through the omniscient voice of science or scholarship. No writing is untainted by human hands, pure, objective, “innocent”. The old idea of a strict bifurcation between “objective” and “subjective” – between the “head” and the “heart” – does not map onto the actual practices through production of knowledge, or knowledge about how knowledge is produced'.

This is made most apparent by our explicit ownership of the names of the subjectivities of the narrative (‘Let's call this mother…’, ‘Let's call this daughter…’). Though widely accepted, we feel that the veiled and often mute use of pseudonyms in research and writing is highly problematic, as it is simply one more form of distancing that works through an imposition of language and naming to support a naturalized image of detachment and ‘objectivity’ and a prioritizing of fixed identities. Our overt language usage in and ownership of the naming process, thus, is both an honest recognition of our (power) positions in research and writing (i.e. knowledge production) and an ontological and epistemological move recognizing identity as a secondary principle to becoming.

This narrative is derived from 3 interviews conducted by C.M. Moreno with the parent in San Diego, CA between 2005 and 2007.

While not specific to Mary's FTDC case, operationally the general model or method constituted by FTDCs forces the parent, in order to reunify with their child(ren), to complete a series of court-ordered programs (e.g. drug treatment, drug testing and other wrap-around services related to anger management, counseling, mental health, domestic violence, and parenting education).

As Deleuze (1997, pp. 61–62) stresses, ‘Parents are themselves a milieu that children travel through: they pass through its qualities and powers and make a map of them. They take on a personal and parental form only as the representatives of one milieu within another. But it is wrong to think that children are limited before all else to their parents, and only had access to milieus afterward, by extension or derivation…There is never a moment when children are not already plunged into an actual milieu in which they are moving about, and in which the parents as persons simply play the roles of openers or closers of doors, guardians of thresholds, connectors or disconnectors of zones. The parents always occupy a position in a world that is not derived from them’.