Deconstructing post-World War II conceptualisations of children and child-adult relations

This article is a contribution to that stream of critical psychology that examines and challenges assumptions inherent in the work of early writers on children, such as Bowlby and Piaget, around ideas of gender, the 'natural' and the 'universal'. Specifically this article re-reads maternal deprivation theory as articulated by Bowlby in the 1950s, as an example of post WW II psychological texts about children, through applying a lens derived from theorists who challenge the dichotomisation of childhood and adulthood so that children are defined as passive, developing and dependent and adults as active, developed and independent. The article examines the ways in which a particular way of psychological thinking and writing contributed to the marginalisation of children's agency, through emphasising children as developing biological organisms - their activities interpreted as adaptation to environment with no acknowledgement of power as evidenced in the social context of their daily lives. Identified in the article is the way in which research into maternal deprivation theory reflected the 'modern' practices of investigating children as objects when writing children into research text - a practice still evident in much contemporary research on children's issues. Keywords: modern child; maternal deprivation; generation; methodology