Studying the Needy Child: Social Work and child study movement at the beginning of the 20th century

Though child welfare has a longer history in modern Europe the professionalisation and institutionalisation of child protection and child welfare services was strongly supported by the scientification of childhood at the end... [ view full abstract ]

Though child welfare has a longer history in modern Europe the professionalisation and institutionalisation of child protection and child welfare services was strongly supported by the scientification of childhood at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Namely the international child study movement helped to shape the modern understanding of childhood and legitimated children’s need of special awareness and care. The paper will present an analysis of articles published in the “Journal of Child Study” (“Zeitschrift für Kinderforschung”) between 1896 and 1914. This has been a central journal of the German strand of child study. It had been founded to support the scientific research on children and thus put Special Needs Education and Social Work practice on more solid grounds. But however powerful natural sciences and their developmental notions of childhood might have been, the argument is not that Social Work has been simply ‘hijacked’ by them. Moreover the paper reveals how religious, literary and pedagogical notions of childhood have been taken up and have been transformed to gain scientific knowledge about the child’s nature. From a Childhood Studies’ perspective children and their nature are not simply given but are constructed through discursive and material practices. The paper will reconstruct these practices through which a child that had to be protected and looked after by welfare services has been produced in the beginning of the 20th century in contrast to a normally developing child. In doing this the analysis may show how the scientific discovery of childhood and the foundations of modern child welfare are historically related.
Paper to be included in symposium "Shaping childhood in social work history: changes, controversies and consequences in England/Canada, Switzerland and Germany" (Paper ID 438).