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Since the turn of the century we see a renewed interest in the impact of hospital environments on children's well-being. With policy largely built around adult assumptions, knowledge about these environments from young people's perspectives is limited. Participatory visual research is considered helpful to explore people's perspectives in other than solely verbal ways. Conducting it with children in sensitive and hard-to-enter contexts like hospital wards, however, poses important ethical questions. Discussions tend to contrast procedural ethics with ethics in the field, showing how the former are unfitted for this kind of research. This paper takes a more constructive approach by reflecting on what we can learn from these ethical encounters while preparing and conducting a pilot study. We argue that exploring, rather than closing, the experienced gap between design research and healthcare ethical protocols establishes a shared space of reflection that offers a stepping stone to link both.

In this article we focus on how the language of developmental psychology shapes our conceptualisations and understandings of childrearing and of the parent-child relationship. By analysing some examples of contemporary research, policy and popular literature on parenting and parenting support in the UK and Flanders, we explore some of the ways in which normative assumptions about parenthood and upbringing are imported into these areas through the language of developmental psychology. We go on to address the particular attraction of developmental psychology in the field of parenting and upbringing within our current cultural context. Drawing on the work of (among others) Zygmunt Bauman, we will show how developmental psychology, as one of the instruments that contributes to a breaking down of our existential condition into a series of well-defined, and thus apparently manageable, tasks and categories, displaces rather than confronts the possibly limitless depth of the enormity of the reality of 'being a parent'. INTRODUCTIONThe language of developmental psychology has become part of our everyday way of speaking about childrearing and the parent-child relationship. No doubt, this is part of the intrusion of the language of the various sub-disciplines of psychology into everyday language and life in a more general sense-an intrusion to such an extent that we have been going through (what could be called) a 'psychologisation' of significant parts of our lives. In his recent book Psychologisation in times of globalisation (2012), Jan De Vos offers an insightful (and at times disturbing) analysis of the all-encompassing intrusion of psychology in all aspects of our human existence. The discourse of psychology, he argues, 'has invaded in an bs_bs_banner

In this article, we provide a critical philosophical analysis of contemporary early childhood education practices on emotions and well‐being. We develop our argument against the backdrop of an intensifying preoccupation, since several decades, with the psychological, social and emotional well‐being of pupils and students. Our focus is on one exemplary case: Het Toverbos (The Magical Forest), a Flemish nursery educational method evoking the principles of psychodrama to support the socio‐emotional development of toddlers. Drawing on the work of Italian philosopher Franco Berardi, we explore to what extent Het Toverbos promotes a kind of learning that seemingly prefigures a contemporary work ethic putting to work human affects, communication and creativity. We argue that the method seems to approach toddlers’ emotions, imagination and peer interaction as immaterial resources that can (and should) be mined in the name of their proper development. What seems to be cultivated is a willingness to endlessly reinvent the self and in line with Berardi, we suggest a link with the cultural psychopathologies of our time: panic, depression and burnout. We also explore how the method's permanent imperative to express oneself seems to subject everything to the claim of transparency and knowledgeability, thereby limiting the possibility of the child's ‘otherness’ or ‘newness’. We conclude by situating our Berardian take on these early childhood education practices on emotions and well‐being within the broader pedagogical tradition in which the potentiality engendered by the child's ‘newness’ is emphasised and articulated in various ways.

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