Conference Agenda

Parenthood is both a biologically ordinary phenomenon—humans have raised children across generations—and an existentially disruptive, transformative experience (Paul 2015). Contemporary parenting advice—delivered through support programmes, self-help literature, prenatal education, and an expanding ecosystem of expert-driven social media content—promises to help parents navigate this transformation.

Such preparation is typically mediated by professional expertise, most prominently psychological expertise, and is oriented toward children’s psycho-physical well-being and the management of developmental challenges (e.g., sleep training, regulating toddlers’ tantrums, fostering communicative openness in adolescence). Empirical research indicates that structured parental support can benefit both children’s developmental outcomes (Jeong et al. 2021) and parents’ sense of competence (Butler et al. 2020). At the same time, critical scholarship has highlighted how these forms of guidance may be experienced as patronizing (Schildermans & Vlieghe 2015), marginalizing, or alienating (Ramaekers & Suissa 2011). Ramaekers and Suissa (2011; 2012) describe this development as the ‘professionalization’ of parenthood: parents are implicitly positioned as responsible for acquiring expert knowledge, engaging in continuous self-education, and enacting their role according to professionalized standards. This expectation is not confined to highly educated parents—who may be particularly attuned to discourses of self-improvement—but appears to cut across social classes (Romagnoli & Wall 2012).

More fundamentally, however, the very project of preparation may be conceptually limited. As Paul (2015) argues, becoming a parent is a transformative experience that “radically changes what it is like to be you” (p. 156). If parenthood alters one’s subjective standpoint, then the promise of adequate preparation becomes philosophically questionable.

Building on this insight, this paper argues that the professionalization of parenthood has a paradoxical effect. While intended to equip parents for the demands and possible challenges of family life, it may simultaneously undermine their resilience in the face of its irreducible unpredictability. The dominant advice discourse privileges prediction, risk management, measurable milestones, and technique-based intervention. It thereby constructs an image of childrearing as a domain of control: apply the correct strategy and the desired outcome will follow. Deviations from standardized trajectories are easily interpreted as warning signals, generating anxiety and stress (Furedi 2011).

In fact, a recent Dutch study reports that parents’ most irritating moments include being interrupted mid-conversation, mealtime struggles, children not listening, persistent demands, and the constant need to tidy up (Lemmen & Luijk 2026). These are not extraordinary breakdowns of an otherwise smooth system; they exemplify the inherently non-linear, relational, and resistant character of upbringing (Meirieu 2013). These frictions —interruptions, resistance, chaos--, which are understood to be at the heart of parental daily stress, are not pathological exceptions but structural features of living with children.

I therefore suggest that the professionalization of parenthood fosters an imaginary of control that is at odds with the existential character of upbringing. Parenthood confronts adults with contingency, failure, and exposure to a future that cannot be fully anticipated. Rather than a technique to be mastered through expertise and knowledge, upbringing may require a responsiveness to unpredictability—a capacity to dwell with interruption and frictions rather than eliminate it.

Early childhood education (ECE) is largely shaped by dominant developmentalist discourses and developmental psychology, children are commonly categorised according to age and ability, and positioned as egocentric, unmature, or inherently fragile subjects (Murris, 2016; Taylor, 2013). Accordingly, childhood is often treated as a universal and temporally bounded stage defined by specific developmental characteristics in traditional early childhood (EC) research (Kromidas, 2014). Within this framework, digital technology can be typically positioned as an environmental factor or pedagogical tool that acts upon childhood from the outside (Arabiat et al., 2023). However, such an approach can limit children’s engagements with the technological world to the roles of user, consumer, or learner (Kumpulainen et al., 2020; Neumann et al., 2016), thereby reproducing a binary and hierarchical framing of human-technology relations (Radesky & Hiniker, 2022).

This study diffractively traces how the concept of childhood is produced and reconfigured through intra-actions (Barad, 2007) with digital technologies in Philosophy with Children (PwC) (Lipman, 2003; Murris, 1992) sessions. Drawing on Karen Barad’s agential realism (Barad, 2007; 2018), the study does not approach child-technology relations through a subject-object duality but attends to intra-actions that are always already in a state of becoming (Haraway, 2008), through which children and technologies emerge. Therefore, the study attends to the material-discursive encounters, the boundaries they enact, and the exclusions they produce, through which childhood comes to matter rather than treating childhood as a predefined category (Barad, 2007).

Philosophy with Children (PwC) is grounded in the concept of the community of enquiry and positions philosophy as an enquiry practice in which children participate actively (Lipman, 2003). This method is grounded in the posing of open-ended philosophical questions, which invite children to critically examine assumptions and to move beyond conventional, school-based modes of questioning (Murris, 2000). The primary reason for adopting the Philosophy with Children (PwC) in this study is that it positions children as epistemic agents and conceptualises meaning as emerging through dialogue, relationality, and collaborative thought processes. From the perspective of Karen Barad’s agential realism, meaning and subjectivity are relationally constituted through intra-actions of human and nonhuman (Barad, 2007). In this context, PwC sessions can make it possible to consider children’s entanglements with digital technologies (e.g., robot toys, tablets, interactive whiteboards) as intra-active ontological spaces in which the concept of childhood is discursively and materially reconfigured.

This study can offer a critical contribution to EC studies that approach childhood through fixed developmental categories (e.g. Copple & Bredekamp, 2009). Theoretically, the study can contribute to rethinking childhood, technology, and agency beyond subject-object dualisms (Braidotti, 2013). Instead of defining childhood as a stable concept, the study traces the material-discursive arrangements through which childhood is enacted. Therefore, it can offer a posthumanist analytical orientation for childhood studies. From an educational perspective, this study can enable a rethinking of Philosophy with Children (PwC) practices as sites in which childhood and technology can be co-constituted. The study foregrounds PwC sessions as material-discursive spaces where ethical relations and modes of becoming-child (Haraway, 2008) emerge through intra-actions. In this sense, the study moves beyond instrumental approaches to digital technologies in ECE, and contributes to a more expansive engagement with the pedagogical, ethical, and ontological dimensions of child-technology relations.

Philosophically, suffering can be understood as ontological and inherent to the human condition (Mintz 2022). Historically, the Western understanding of suffering has shifted significantly. Early Christian theology viewed it as an aspect of existence that required metaphysical explanation and even as desirable; it was through enduring suffering the human being could approach the divine. Later, in civil and secular contexts, suffering came to be interpreted as a practical problem primarily demanding scientific explanation (Delbanco 1995, Svendsen 2005, Neiman 2015) and thus understood as a rational intervention. After World War II, Europe education systems increasingly became oriented toward the good (Bergdahl & Langmann 2018), distancing pedagogy from life's darker dimensions. That means relatively little is known about suffering in pedagogical settings and the role it plays in them. Landahl (2006) shows, from the late 20^th century onward increasingly schools have positioned themselves as milieus of healing, safety and continuity, as opposed to crisis and tragedies. When suffering or pain is addresses, the focus has typically been on allowing students to ventilate emotions rather than engaging in deeper meaning-oriented conversations about it.

The question of suffering in pedagogy is arguably most challenging in early childhood education, given that young children are seen as vulnerable and their trust in the world and relationships must be nourished. This requires especially thoughtful and careful approaches to representing suffering in a way that can balance protection and at the same time give a meaningful understanding of the difficult and traumatic but fundamental existential realities (Author 2, 2025, Mollenhauer 2014).

In the paper we aim to examine suffering and representations of suffering in early childhood pedagogy. Specifically, it explores the possible pedagogical qualities, potential opportunities and risks that exist in representations of suffering for younger children. How can educators navigate the ethical responsibility of protecting children while also preparing them to understand and, more important, to create meaning from traumatic knowledge and experiences?

The paper is a philosophical inquiry divided into two parts, exploring the pedagogical qualities, potential opportunities, and risks involved in representing suffering to young children. The first part develops Mollenhauer’s work (2014), while the second draws on earlier work by Author 2 (2025). Together, these sections show that although teachers often hesitate to address suffering in practice, it remains essential not to overlook it. Instead, we argue that teachers can help children create meaning from traumatic knowledge and experiences. We begin by briefly outlining how suffering and its representation in early childhood education have been understood in previous research.

The idea that learning and knowledge can emerge from suffering has a long tradition in philosophy and philosophy of education. Mintz (2022) demonstrates how suffering is integral to learning and to understanding the human condition. “Socrates is an expert in pain,” writes Mintz (2022, p. 267), and explains how Socratic pedagogy is a painful but necessary process in which the teacher knows when to provoke and when to reveal suffering. (Mintz 2022, p. 267).

Within educational research on trauma and suffering scholars emphasize both value and risks of engaging with suffering. Zembylas (2013), Nussbaum (1996) and Bottery (1993) argue that cultivating sensitivity to suffering is essential for developing compassion, which Zembylas (2013) frames as a “pedagogy of compassion”. Zembylas (2013) argues that such pedagogy helps students recognize and resist suffering, while Nussbaum (1996, p. 58) stresses the importance of allowing students to become “tragic spectators” through narratives that portray suffering. For younger children, representations of atrocities in children’s literature may be pedagogically meaningful by presenting “potential trauma in a controlled context” (Nesfield & Smith 2023, s. 2), while suppressing collective trauma, such as the Holocaust,