158: Deconstructing Developmental Psychology with Dr. Erica Burman

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I read a lot of textbooks on parenting for my Master’s in Psychology (Child Development), I’ve read tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers on the topic, and part of the reason it’s hard work is that you can’t ever take things at face value. In her now classic book Deconstructing Developmental Psychology, Dr. Erica Burman explodes a number of our ideas about child development by calling our attention to what’s really going on in an interaction, rather than what we think is going on. For example, there’s a classic study where researchers put a baby on a solid surface which changed to glass, which had a design underneath implying that there was a ‘cliff edge’ that the baby would fall off if it went onto the glass. Researchers designed the experiment to find out what babies could understand about depth perception, but perhaps what they were actually testing was the extent to which the mother’s encouragement or lack of encouragement (and it was always the mother) could entice the baby across the ‘gap.’ These kinds of confounds exist throughout the research base, and because we’re not taught to look below the surface it can be easy to accept the results at face value. Dr. Burman specializes in looking below the surface so we can examine: what are we really trying to understand here? And in doing this, are we reinforcing the same old ideas about ‘success’ that aren’t really serving us now, never mind our children in the future? Dr. Erica Burman’s Book: Deconstructing Developmental Psychology 3rd Edition Developments: Child, Image, Nation (Affiliate links). Jump to highlights: (01:12) The contribution of Professor Erica Burman to psychology. (03:05) First studies about Childhood Development. (04:26) How general philosophical questions are linked in child studies. (07:42) Childhood as a distinct social category. (09:10) The Concept of Human Interiority and Childhood. (10:17) Our hopes, fears, and fantasies about childhood reflect our ideas about our lost selves. (13:23) How the study of child development shifted when behaviorism came into play. (16:28) We assume psychology is connected with child development. (18:27) Importance of Democratic Parenting in our society. (19:57) Developmental researchers oppressed working mothers and middle-class mothers. (22:23) Impacts of authoritarian regimes in our parenting. (27:19) Using visual cliff as an experiment in understanding depth perception in children. (29:06) A child is functioning within a dynamic system of people and objects and everything around it. (31:02) Mother’s appear as the sort of a presumed natural environment to children. (33:11) Nuclear family performs ideological functions for Capitalism. (37:00) Whether or not spanking should be banned. (38:09) The ways environments inhibit certain behaviors. (39:19) How welfare policies have affected families. (42:27) Discussing the important discourses in parenting’s social and political issues in the book DDP. [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Emma 00:04 Hi, I’m Emma, and I’m listening from the UK we all want our children to lead fulfilled lives. But we’re surrounded by conflicting information and clickbait headlines that leave us wondering what to do as parents. The Your Parenting Mojo podcast is still scientific research on parenting and child development into tools parents can actually use everyday in their real lives with their real children. If you’d like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a free infographic on the 13 reasons your child isn’t listening to you and what to do about each one, just head on over to YourParentingmojo.com/subscribe, and pretty soon you’re going to get tired of hearing my voice read this intro so come and record one yourself at YourParentingmojo.com/recordtheintro Jen Lumanlan 00:45 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we’re going to take a dive into a topic that cuts across many of the ideas that we discuss here on the podcast. We’re going to take a critical look at the topic of Developmental Psychology as a whole and what we can learn about it when we raise our eyes up off the specific topics like theory of mind, and language development, and attachment that we often spend a lot of time delving into and consider the topics that these sit within. My guest for the conversation is Professor Erica Berman. Professor Berman is Professor of Education at the University of Manchester, an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society and the United Kingdom Council of Psychotherapists, and a registered Group Analyst. She trained as a developmental psychologist and is well known as a critical developmental psychologist specializing in innovative and activist qualitative research. Her research is focused on critical development and educational psychology, feminist and postcolonial theory, childhood studies on critical mental health practice, particularly around gender and cultural issues. Much of her work addresses the connections between emotions, mental health, and individual and social change. She’s a past chair of the Psychology of Women’s section of the British Psychological Society. And in 2016, she was awarded an Honorary Lifetime Fellowship at the British Psychological Society in recognition of her contribution to psychology. She’s associate editor of the Sage Encyclopedia of Childhood and Childhood Studies and the author of a number of books, most significantly, Deconstructing Developmental Psychology. And since it seems as though friends of the book have the right to call it DDP, we’re going to go ahead and do that here too. DDP is now in its third edition, and was honored with a special edition of the journal feminism and psychology discussing the impact of the book on the 20th anniversary of the publication of the first edition of the book, which really critiques mainstream theories and research methods to help us understand whether research on child development tells us more about the child, the researchers or the social environment that both of these exists within. So whether you’re expecting a child or you’re a new parent, perhaps you’re newer to my work, or whether you already have a child who’s getting on in years, and you’ve been a listener for a while, you’re going to find something new in this conversation that helps you step outside these usual topics and ask well, how did we get here? And where are we going? And even is this where we want to go? Welcome Professor Berman. It’s such an honor to have you here. Erica Burman 02:55 Thank you for inviting me. Jen Lumanlan 02:57 So maybe we can start with a little topic at the beginning of all of this the study of child development. How do we start studying children? How did all this come about? Erica Burman 03:05 Well, yes, it’s not a small question. And I guess there are different ways of telling that story of how child development came about. The conventional story that you will read about in child development textbooks usually talks about the emergence of the Child Study movement. In fact, many men of a certain kind of class background started to take an interest in their own children, studying them in some detail. So the first studies about children and childhood are of a sort of semi-formal kind, observational studies by the fathers, not the mothers, otherwise occupied and not intellectual enough to engage in this esteemed new area of study. So their diary studies, and indeed, that methodological approach, remain a very important one for the study of early childhood in general, especially very early childhood and language development, and so on. So the child study movement, in a sense, is both the beginning of the study of psychology and also psychiatry. And in a way, slight child psychology and psychiatry really were elaborated alongside each other, almost indistinguishable. The questions that were motivating those first studies and inquiries, it’s fair to say, I think we’re not really specifically about children. It was an interest in the study of the child as a way to explore much more general philosophical questions. Questions about nature and nurture themselves are sort of laid on to older questions about original sin or free will, etc. And we continue to live with those big philosophical questions that people tend to look to the study of childhood to solve, and I have to admit that, in a way, that’s what kind of brought me to study developmental psychology. It wasn’t that I was interested in children particularly, I just sort of felt like a true modern rationalist that this was a way to sort of engage in, you know, very general interests. I had was the case for Piaget, who was motivated to study, but it wasn’t just him that the origins of knowledge and how it developed through the study of the child. So were these kinds of philosophical questions. And people were sort of starting to explore them alongside a set of political concerns of the time and of the political structures of the time with the rise of the nation state and so on about the state of the population, about molding, in a sense, sort of knowing about and also controlling the future workforce, future citizens, etc. Now, all of that is, I think, sort of one version of the story of the origins of child development that is generally quite widely accepted. I think there’s another narrative, I would want to add in their second one, which I’ve already alluded to, about the rise of the nation state. All of this was happening alongside imperialist wars going on. I mean, these gentlemen who were studying children, but also the gentlemen who were going off and studying the flora and fauna, were to them exotic places and bringing them back. You know, if you can look around the English countryside, it’s full of plants that were brought from all over the world that these gentlemen tried to recreate it in their land that they owned, so that, you know, Britain’s full of rhododendron, but that’s the national plant of the Himalayas, Nepal, I think it is. So what was happening was that, in a way, the study of children emerged quite late in the scene, because really, the flora and fauna were of more interest for quite a long time. And it was only when these other kinds of political agendas started to surface about managing populations, including colonized populations, that children became a good route by which to think about that, and the management of parenting. But all of this, of course, was happening. It’s not just about psychology or child psychology, it was happening alongside the rise of other social sciences, you could say, like sociology and social policy. And I think it’s also worth bearing in mind that, as I said, these child studies, in a sense, seem to kick it off. So that’s the sort of second narrative, I think it’s important. And this third one, I think, is important in thinking about why childhood came to be seen as a distinct category. I mean, that’s where we need to sort of think more broadly, historically, and culturally and think about how the invention of childhood, we know that there is a history of childhood and what that means from Philippi raise onwards, that the invention of the idea of childhood as a distinct social category, rather than something that’s integrated in daily life, that coincided with emerging ideas within and from European culture, about the idea of the individual and that individual has a sort of interiority itself. Now that is really something that in terms of our ideas about ourselves, and awareness of ourselves really kind of starts from the mid-18th century onwards, these ideas about childhood were emerging alongside the idea of the individual and alongside the idea that that individual has an interiority you know, some sense of awareness of itself can reflect on separately from others. And that was emerging alongside other disciplines like the ideas associated with what we would now recognize to be biology and, equally at the same time, psychoanalysis, the ideas that then eventually were to be sort of named by Freud as psychoanalysis, so ideas about nature and ideas about history. And this is where I mean, I’m very convinced by the account that Carolyn Steedman wrote a long time ago about it’s called strange dislocations, childhood, and the idea of human interiority. I think it’s sort of 18 something Tto 19 something, historians always do that. So you have to situate the interest in childhood alongside these other sorts of developments in people’s ideas about the course of history, having a cause, having a going somewhere and having consequences. And I think all that invites, you know, several other kinds of questions. The first one is that when we study children, are we only studying children? I mean, it’s one of the claims I make in deconstructing developmental psychology, that a child always involves constituting positions for others around that child, whether it’s the proximal positions of the caregivers, the gender positions of all of that, or family or the state or whatever. So we can’t abstract the child from a set of relationships. And you can see, I’m a psychotherapist as well. Our fantasies of our lost selves, or our better selves, or our true selves, something like that, that gets played out in people’s hopes and fears and fantasies about childhood. And that’s all been going on for quite a long time, from the mid 18th century onwards. Because if you look at that history that Sally Shuttleworth writes about in of European childhood, there were always sort of crisis about child labor, about hothouse children and then being cramming and there’s always been moral panics, you might say about children’s sexuality, that’s always been a difficult area, etc, wider historical view is useful to see, generally speaking, the sort of hot issues we encounter in our day are not new, but are just a new take on a very long standing set of themes. But also, I think there are consequences for thinking about that the ways our fantasies about ourselves get tied up with what we think about and want for children. Those typically get in the way, in my opinion of our engagement with the actual embodied specific children in front of us. And I think I say this quite a lot in the book. You know, the third issue that arises, given that there is so much going on in the study of the child, is genuine confusion about what the unit of development is, as well as what the model of time is. I mean, are we talking about individual development? Are we talking about child development? Are we talking about national development because all of these concerns are all international development, they all get wrapped up into the study of the child in a way that I think becomes remarkably inattentive to particular children. Jen Lumanlan 11:58 Yeah, and I’ve been doing a lot of research on resilience over the last few days. And I think it really comes out there that many of the criteria that we use to judge children’s resilience are related to things like their executive function capabilities, their grades, their employment, their criminality, or lack thereof. And it’s pretty clear that the state has a very vested interest in a particular outcome here. And to the extent that they can support development in the younger years, and have it be cost effective later on, then, yeah, we’re talking about the development of the state, as we’re talking about how to support individual children. And of course, on the international stage, it plays out in similar statistics and the league tables of standardized test results, I guess, would be the most obvious one that comes to mind that absolutely, clearly, there’s this huge framework that it all sits within that we’re not just looking at the child, this has so many connections to how we think of ourselves and our place within society as well. And we just sort of reduce it back and think, Okay, if we can go back to the source, we’ll make it easier to understand, when actually maybe it introduces a whole bunch of other concerns. But I’m wondering if it’s possible to briefly trace how our understanding of children’s development has shifted, particularly since the 60s, I guess, when behaviorism was sort of the in way of seeing things. I don’t know if you want to go any further back than that. But I think there have been a few really key shifts that have happened since then. I’d love to get your perspective on them. Erica Burman 13:19 Yeah, I suppose I would want to go a bit further back. Jen Lumanlan 13:22 I thought you might Erica Burman 13:23 A very psychoanalytically oriented study of the child. It was before, in an anglophone context, now quite a strict division between psychology and psychoanalysis. Although in other parts of the world, a lot of psychology is very psychoanalytic. So one has to be careful about the claims here. So those early child studies interested in emotions. And you can see that in Piaget, he was at of that whole sort of tranche of work. Although it was a bit later, he wasn’t interested in testing children, he was interested in trying to formulate the whole structure of children’s thought, and I don’t think he did it sufficiently relationally. But I think he was certainly doing some very interesting things that I did do by Piaget and sort of, like clinical or critical study myself at some point, as well as some, you know, engaging in a lot of the critiques. So before behaviorism, there was the sight of a few, like a very, sort of psycho dynamically oriented understanding of children. I mean, and it’s also worth saying in relation to psychiatry, too, we think of psychiatry as being very medical and empiricist and behavioral, but actually, the first DSM was very psychoanalytically informed. It’s important not to forget that sort of psychoanalytic history, because people kick back against it and don’t want to remember it, but it has its traces in various ways that I think we do need to be aware of in positive and negative ways. Social Work also used to be incredibly psychoanalytic both in the United States in North America and in Britain. And now it’s very hard to find traces of that. But It’s important to remember that there have been different models. Again, I’d like to just having made that point, step back once again, and say there’s one version of that story that you could...