The Regulated Kiss: Family as an Ambivalent Emotional Object in Preschool

Research topic/aim
In this paper I present an analysis of how children’s emotions gain attention in pedagogical practice in Danish public school aimed to secure the pupil’s emotional well-being. I argue that family and home become important objects of appropriate emotional expression within pedagogical practices situated in preschool.

Theoretical framework
The theoretical framework of this study consists of poststructuralist and affective theories, drawing on notions of emotion’s performativity (Abu-Lughod & Lutz, 1990; Ahmed, 2010; Butler, 1997). Emotions are explored as a social and historical phenomenon becoming object to pedagogical work. This process is seen as having social consequences in the shaping of hierarchies between groups, individuals, and life trajectories when emotional expressions and their objects become part of school’s normalizing processes.

Methodological design
Methodologically the study consists of observations in the first months of preschool in three classes and interviews with teachers, leaders and councelors responsible of the classes. I focus on how the children’s emotions are addressed by pedagogical professionals in the classroom, in schoolbooks and in interviews about well-being. I identify which emotions are being problematized and idealized. Furthermore, I pay attention to how the expression and objects of emotions have importance in the normalizing processes (Zembylas, 2016) of what I call pedagogical practices of well-being.

Expected conclusions/findings
The early findings of the study point to how preschooler’s families are produced and negotiated as an emotional object. Tears, love and kisses thus become ways of connecting children to their families. Emotional expressions are encouraged and regulated in ways that confirm the norms of a nuclear family and their central role for explaining child behavior and emotional responses within the school. I also show how an emotional aptness is cemented when e.g., kisses as a declaration of familiarity are being regulated.

Relevance to Nordic educational research
The analysis shows how school-home collaboration not only aims at parent’s investment in the school (Krab, 2021), but how family becomes an affective ambivalent object within pedagogical practices of well-being. With this analysis I seek to understand the ways pedagogical and political attention to children’s emotions are intertwined with norms of ideal schemes of life within and outside school. Judgements of emotions are not only a question of good or bad but are valued in terms of their objects.