Which childhood is psychology of development talking about?: Some reflections

Abstract

From which childhood is Psychology of Development talking about? Some reflections. Taking childhood as an invention of Modernity, this article aims to discuss how Psychology – through the analysis of a sub-area: Psychology of Development – takes childhood as a study object. In order to do that, we problematize the idea of a supposed childhood nature, showing that the characteristics naturally associated to childhood relate to the production of knowledge about children that not only describes them, but also produce a child subject, through classifications and criteria of normality and abnormality. So, the psychological discourse on childhood circunscribes certain ways of being a child and not others. Being that the emergence of studies on childhood came to mark, in the field of Psychology, the need to account for the tasks of prediction and control in alliance with the practices of intervention and social regulation.