Every rose has its thorns: Domesticity and care beyond the dyad in ECEC

More-than-human care and domesticity

Fisher and Tronto (1990: 40) extend the conversation about care from a private, dyadic phenomenon, to a politically relevant “species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible.” This definition resists the association of care with women’s biological, cultural and historical position, extending the notion of care to include a whole array of activities performed by both men and women. For example, working to earn money to provide for children, building a home, preparing food and in any other way working to maintain, continue and repair a common and shared world is, from a care ethics perspective, a form of care. Within the framework of an ethic of care, laws and regulations are part of a caring practice when they support and protect the ethical foundations and material necessities of a caring practice (Fisher and Tronto, 1990; Tronto, 1993). It is not only the direct engagements between cared for and caretaker that define care, but all that is done to provide care.

Extending Tronto and Fisher’s (1990: 40) definition of care as all that is done to “maintain, continue, and repair our world” with Barad’s (2007), agential realism that emphasizes intra-action and the epistemic relevance of materiality, “all that is done” is not only done by people, but also by other phenomena. Drawing on examples from the entangled behavior of matter at a quantum level, Barad’s posthuman thought challenges the Cartesian idea of the human individual as a self-contained subject set apart from the material world and other life forms (Barad, 2007). A posthuman understanding of materiality assigns agency and thus epistemic relevance to other-than–human phenomena, as well as humans. Materiality exerts agency, understood as “the ability to act in such a way as to produce particular results” (Alaimo, 2017: 415). In other words, the things that we do care with also do care with us. Care is always co-produced and the result of cooperation (Aslanian, 2017). The “we” that maintain, continue and repair the world includes all phenomena such as objects, animals, weather, emotions and other life forms. Barad (2007) explains: “Intra-acting responsibly as part of the world means taking account of the entangled phenomena that are intrinsic to the world’s vitality and being responsive to the possibilities that might help it flourish” (p. 369). Here care is taking account, being aware that we act with the more-than-human world and acting in a way that helps the world flourish.

Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) describes caring as thinking with, taking account of our entangled world, emphasizing that all things that live are somehow held together by relations of care. While humans can think with, care relations are not always intentional. Our relational world renders care an ontological rather than only moral issue (Heidegger, 1962/1927ch), and draws attention to material care practices that are not intentionally done (i.e. the sun shining, a blanket warming, a pacifier soothing), but that none the less care in the sense that they provide the catalyst for the flourishing of the human and non-human environment. Care, like neglect is and can be both something done, something experienced and something that happens beyond our control. To flourish, a person or thing has to have its holistic needs met, including the biological, sensorial, emotional and intellectual (Kraut, 2009). Needs are related to what it takes to keep us alive and intentional caring is only the small part humans can do, while entangled with the non-human environment, and thinking with to promote flourishing and becoming “as well as possible.”

Domesticity and care in ECEC

Domesticity is devalued in society (Stovall et al., 2015) and women have been keen to disassociate their work in ECEC with domesticity and mothering (Ailwood, 2008; Aslanian, 2015). The Collins dictionary describes domestic life as “Domestic duties and activities are concerned with the running of a home and family.” All that is done to run a household is, from a care-ethics perspective, a process of caring. The family, described as “a haven in a heartless world” (Lasch, 1977 in Holstein and Gubrium, 1995: 894) can be understood as a contrast to the unforgiving and law-based public space. Western domesticity rests on ideas such as marriage, family, religion, and economy (Pilkey et al., 2015). Related ideas are central to the field of ECEC, such as community, pedagogy, economy and politics.

The power of the domestic is at the heart of traditional Nordic kindergarten pedagogy, tracing back to the 19th century popularity of Schrader-Breymann’s supplementation of Froebel pedagogy with domestic chores and activities and a home-like atmosphere (Johansson, 2020). Until the past few decades, children referred to kindergarten staff as “aunts” and though rare, “uncles.” Today, the Norwegian full day, universal ECEC system is both a social institution, providing opportunities for parents to work outside of the home, and a pedagogic institution. Echoes of family life continue to ring through ECEC work, even as the diversities of families that are involved in ECEC grows. Ideas about “home” are heterogeneous and ideas about professionalism are increasingly divorced from ideas about care (Aslanian, 2018). Despite varied ideas of what materialities and practices make a home a home, Harwood et. al (2013) found that an international group of kindergarten teachers described their work as “mothering, providing, performing, producing, facilitating, observing, creating environments and opportunities, role modeling, foundation building, and being an extended member of the child’s family and community” (p. 9). Domestic life differs in what things people use and make to do things with, but necessarily involves essential life-supporting work and material processes that support our basic needs for love, sleep, food, stimuli and play. Children under three increasingly spend large portions of their lives in ECEC institutions across the world (UNICEF, 2008). Daily life in ECEC includes playing together, learning together and exploring together, but also domestic practices relating to basic sustenance, sleep, hygiene and grooming needs.

Care work is implicitly understood as domestic (Moss et al., 2006) and the “many-sidedness” of home life has long applied to care and learning in kindergartens (Brehoney, 2014: 187). Modern discourses of professionalism in ECEC obscure the domesticity of everyday life in ECEC centers, contributing to the occlusion of the already nebulous subject of care (Moss et al., 2006). Full day ECEC centers are liminal spaces, with what can be called hybrid functions of both a “here and now” life sustaining function and a “for the future” knowledge building function. ECEC centers necessarily involve domesticity, or, “the minutiae of everyday life” (Bone, 2017) which easily goes unnoticed.

The Norwegian context

Norway adheres to a Nordic conception of ECEC in which learning, care and play are understood as intermingled (Kragh-Müller, 2017). Children have a right to a government-subsidized place in ECEC from the age of 1-year, and over 82% of children under 3 years attend full day ECEC (Statistics Norway, 2020). Kindergartens have been described as a “second-home” in which relationships with teachers are more friendly than authoritarian, children are expected to explore and rearrange a prepared environment, children’s free play is prioritized and the focus is on processual rather than outcomes-based goals (Kragh-Müller, 2017). Since responsibility for the sector was moved from the Ministry of Children and Families, to the Ministry of Education and Research in 2006, the field has been under pressure to professionalize pedagogic practice and policy (Nygård, 2017). Political pressure to systematize learning goals and increase learning outcomes in ECEC in order to prepare young children for school has not resulted in formal learning outcomes, but have increasingly marginalized the subject of care in Norwegian early childhood teacher education (ECTE) policy (Nygård, 2017; Aslanian, 2018). The term “care” was for example completely removed from the most recent Framework for ECTE in order to convey a more professional view of the education and render it more attractive to the public (Aslanian, 2018). Though the word was removed, neither the government nor the profession intends to reduce the amount or quality of care children receive in ECEC centers, nor of abandoning the Nordic social pedagogy tradition that combines care, learning and play (Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, 2019–2020). At the same time, little time or money is invested in understanding the human and more-than-human production of care in ECEC.

Making ourselves at home in ECEC

In this article, I asked how care is produced beyond the dyad in a robust ECEC care environment. I sought to understand care as all that is done to continue, maintain and repair shared worlds, and as “taking account of the entangled phenomena that are intrinsic to the world’s vitality and being responsive to the possibilities that might help it flourish” (Barad, 2007: 369). The materializations of care I observed and participated in involved domestic staples, such as toys, bread baking, shared mealtimes, dinnerware and knitting. In this section, I will discuss how materialized care relates to making ourselves “at home” and how domesticity can open up new ways of understanding care in ECEC through a care-ethics and posthuman lens.

The dominant Western discourse of domesticity “rests on a dialectic relationship between the symbolic and the real, the individual and the collective, and the public and the private.”(Scicluna, 2015: 175). The tensions between the symbolic, ideas of domestic bliss, and the realities of domestic violence underline how the domestic space is paradoxical and does not necessarily produce caring. Domesticity embodies the individual and the collective, both isolation from the outside world, and freedom from the outside world. The domesticity of ECEC produces possibilities for care and for oppression or even violence within center walls. However, domesticity also provides the possibility for individuals to produce “subtle modes of resistance to the dominant order” (Fraiman, 2017: 10). The power domesticity offers to resist from inside is illustrated by the staff at Browny Center, who hang up the poster about how to respond to children according to the program they are expected to follow, but do not change their practice as prescribed, as they deem the advice pedagogically questionable. Inside, we can and must, make the rules. Until feminists distanced themselves from the correlation between the feminine and domesticity, the domestic was used as a means to exert power and transmit pedagogic knowledge, values and traditions (Allen, 2005).

Many kindergartens in Norway continue to follow the Nordic tradition of creating an atmosphere that resembles a second home, and a couch has until recent years been a common feature (Kragh-Müller, 2017). However, the classic idea of the kindergarten as a second home is slowly losing sway. A new generation of kindergartens have developed since the goal of universal childcare available for all children over 1 year has been politically prioritized. Larger centers ensure universal coverage, and municipalities increasingly utilize pedagogic programs to ensure learning goals are met. Accordingly, ECEC centers look less and less like traditional Norwegian/Nordic home environments and more like “workshop” environments, organized around particular activities or subject areas. How are “life sustaining” practices produced in these environments, and can they be produced without domesticity? The actual absence of the couch in an ECEC center for children under three-years produced frustration and longing according to interviews with staff in a kindergarten built as a workshop who believed that a couch would improve their ability to care (Berge, 2019). What does a couch do? Couches are obviously not a part of all caring environments around the world. Humans care in many places without a couch; just as places with couches are not necessarily good care environments—but what does it produce in Norwegian ECEC environments that is missing when it is not there anymore?

I sat on the couch much of my time at Browny center, and it was from the couch I noticed the sounds and smells that alerted me to care beyond the dyad. The couch, perhaps the most central symbol of domesticity in Norwegian kindergartens, was so much a part of my approach to observation that I did not photograph it before it was moved and “out of place” during the last few days I observed at Browny center, when the floor in the center was removed and replaced (Aslanian, 2017).

Much like the absence of the term “care” in the Norwegian Framework plan for ECTE, the couch is absent in this article in terms of being visualized as materialized care, though it was present as the bedrock upon which I worked to observe care beyond the dyad. The couch was certainly a central co-producer of care.

The absence of the couch in my photographs leads me to wonder what else I did not see. The methodology of portraiture insists on the validity of the researcher’s vision. English (2000) criticizes the methodology, arguing, “The artist does not see what is there (p. 25). The artist sees only through the images of gender, culture, social mores, and relationships.” How did the cultural image of “baked bread” I am immersed in affect the way I perceived it? There are countless other ways of understanding bread baking, and if the children were for example forced to eat more bread than they felt they could, the smell of bread baking could produce sensations other than care. I saw, heard, felt and smelled care because I perceived it as involved in the vitality of the world shared at Browny Center. For the bread, the toys, the knitting and the plastic cups to co-produce care, they must be involved in a process of flourishing with a “multitude of relations that also make possible the worlds we think with” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012: 198).

Understanding domesticity as an aspect of co-producing “our world” and making ourselves at home in ECEC raises questions as to how the materiality of domesticity is produced in other ECEC centers and traditions. What do domestic processes produce in ECEC centers that are increasingly influenced by modern discourses of professionalism that exclude the private, domestic world of home and non-pedagogic play? For children, domesticity also rests on the relationship between the biological and the political, what children need to flourish as living beings and the political interest in what children do and learn from an early age. It remains to be seen how care is produced beyond the dyad in ECEC centers that are not influenced by Schrader-Breymann’s Froebelian vision. How does daily life and domesticity seep through different pedagogic ambitions? The minutiae of everyday life (Bone, 2017) is not usually appreciated as central to care and learning experiences. Van Lære and Vandenbroeck (2016) found that ECEC staff in Belgium perceived tasks relating to hygiene and daily care as an obstacle to teaching practices. I argue that recognizing domesticity in ECEC as a way to support belonging and a potential source of human and more-than-human care may bolster ECEC educators’ morale, as much time is necessarily spent on caring through planning, performing and thinking with materials needed to provide for basic needs.

Extending the concept of care beyond the dyad reconfigures deep seeded care discourses built around the idea of women as natural caretakers (Ailwood, 2008) that overlook and make invisible the non-dyadic complexities and fragility of care (Nussbaum, 2001) practices. The relationship between non-dyadic care and domesticity is thorny. Relating care to domesticity reinforces contested connections between the traditional material work women have performed with, to care for children and families; and the care work a largely female workforce continually performs in ECEC centers. This article contributes to the literature on care in ECEC through identifying domesticity in ECEC as a non-dyadic, more-than-human care practice, and discussing the political challenges to the comforts that domesticity produces in light of care ethics and a posthuman perspective. Care is always done with something. It may be knitting a baby cap, or a well-worn couch, toys that can be thrown from an emptied shelf, a hummed song, the scent of bread baking, or an imaginary drink in a plastic cup. The materialized care conveyed in the portrait are moments that may be considered by some to be banal and unrelated to professionalism or quality in ECEC. However, banalities are what daily life is built upon. Thinking about entanglements of materiality and care may offer new ways of understanding how care is co-produced by the human and more-than-human environment through domesticity in ECEC.