Introduction

Policy and practice debates around social policies are often oblivious to the way that similar themes and solutions echo down the centuries. The idea that deprivation is transmitted through the generations is particularly influential. The belief that early childhood experiences profoundly shape the personality, behaviour and destiny of individuals has exerted a potent allure across time, mutating and adapting to fit the political and cultural contours of the day (Kagan, 1998). Interventions focusing specifically on how children are brought up can be traced back to a religion-inspired reclamation of young souls from their dissolute poor parents in the 19th century. Such initiatives were concerned with promoting the virtues of productive citizenship and were rooted in the economic liberalism of the time. Attention then shifted from the soul to the body and mind as theories of child development emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These theories eventually were to endorse embedded liberal ideas about what was ‘normal’ in family life and children through psychoanalytic models of family functioning in the 20th century. Today, incarnations of infant determinism are conveyed through the language of cutting-edge brain science as having transformative potential, invoking new morally infused prescriptions for family relationships. Characterising each of these eras is an institutionalised effort to initiate behaviour modification in the name of prevention.

In this chapter we explore the history of ideas about intervention in the family, highlighting attempts to (re)engineer children's upbringing for the sake of the nation's future. We show how the specific goals of intervention in the upbringing of children shift over the centuries to reflect politically grounded representations of what is good for the nation. Taking the sort of long-term perspective we adopt in this chapter unsettles current assumptions and reveals the way that social concerns and remedies play out cyclically, across time, through attempts to advance, manage and regulate the social good through targeting and intervening in how children are brought up. We consider the relationship between programmes and activities that are designed to address social problems of poverty, crime and disorder, and understandings of the role of parents in the context of shifting emphases of political systems across time.