The abandonment of reason: the decolonization of discourses on childhood and the family

Abstract

The article proposes to analyze the explanations of academic common sense about poor children who are usually represented as part of an "abandoned childhood" in the Brazilian context of the 1990s. In order to discuss such representations, concepts of family and childhood concepts are historicized and described, recovering classic authors from the field of social sciences and humanities, both of European and Latin American origin. Quantitative data on social indicators and inequality in the Brazilian context are also recovered. The abandonment of reason is related to the fact that the great concern shown worldwide for the value of the "child" is not always linked to objective observations, to correct evaluations of reality or to effective campaigns that result in real benefits for children or their families. There is, in certain situations, an inverse relationship between the volume of rhetoric and the effectiveness of policies. Fonseca elaborates the notion of "absolute childhood" to understand the images of childhood that prevail in the common sense, oriented by class values, which deny the social conditioning of childhood experiences, as well as the web of social relations that make it possible.