From early intervention to troubled children in kindergarten

What happens when a kindergarten employee becomes concerned about a child and follows up the child according to formal procedures? Ann Christin Eklund Nilsen has tracked the procedure and reveals a complex area with many dilemmas where the need to fulfil politicians’ demands of "early intervention" may create standardised troubled children, with the consequences that entails.

Ann Christin Eklund Nilsen is defending her doctoral thesis titled "Bekymringsbarn blir til. En institusjonell etnografi av tidlig innsats som styringsrasjonal i barnehagen" (The creation of troubled children. An institutional ethnography of early intervention in kindergarten) on 3 April 2017. She has followed the PhD programme at the Faculty of Social Sciences.

The doctoral research fellow position is funded by UiA, together with the county governor of Aust-Agder and Vest-Agder county councils through the effort "Tidlig innsats for god start" (early intervention for a good start) - see also "tidlig innsats" on Facebook.

The candidate’s own description of the thesis’ essence: 

A disputation on the creation of troubled children

For her doctoral research project, Nilsen has explored the political initiative "early intervention" seen from the kindergarten’s perspective.

Out of the kindergarten

How are early interventions executed, how are they organised socially, and what are the effects of early intervention? Nilsen uses the methodologic procedure institutional ethnography.

The investigation starts with stories from kindergarten staff about their concerns for the children. From there the concerns are tracked out of the kindergarten and to the interdisciplinary cooperation about children of concern.

The investigation reveals a complex area where concerns become real through different discourses, terms and understandings of normality and deviations, which can especially be traced back to development psychology and attachment theory.

Two types of concerns

There is a divide between development concerns and caregiving concerns which are the basis of different institutional practices.

A central part of the work in revealing concerns is different mapping and decision-making tools, such as TRAS, ALLE MED and the Kvello model.

Nilsen shows how these tools are activated when concerns must be understood and implicitly creates fixed and standardised perspectives.

The research shows how the professionals in their work of adapting their interpretations of children to documentation that may form the basis of intervention, face a number a dilemma regarding simplification and nuances, standardisation and diversity, privacy and professional behaviour, and institutional and moral responsibility.

Concerned for those who fall between

The need for early intervention still leads to certain types of troubled children being created in the form of textual representations: in forms, journals and documents.

When these texts circulate between professionals and influence the type of measures implemented for these children, a fixed knowledge is maintained and reproduced about which behaviours and caregiving situations are normal and which are not.

There is an implicit danger that some children – those falling between categories or belonging to minority cultures tolerated in diversity discourses – will not get the help they need.