This article offers a case-study of specific shifts in the view of state responsibility for the less fortunate in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Current welfare policy aims to reduce the state benefits of parents if they do enrol their preschool children in an early childhood centre. I undertake a genealogical investigation and suggest that state…

In this essay, Robert Davis argues that much of the moral anxiety currently surrounding children in Europe and North America emerges at ages and stages curiously familiar from traditional Western constructions of childhood. The symbolism of infancy has proven enduringly effective over the last two centuries in associating the earliest years of…