Abstract
As unintentional injuries continue to be the leading cause of hospitalization and death for toddlers between the ages of 1 and 4, the Centers for Disease Control has argued that child supervision is a key factor in reducing these injuries and fatalities. This article focuses on the affective relationships in the concept of supervision and practice of watching as an injury prevention method. Three parts frame our argument. First, we describe how watching is an ordinary affect. Second, as part of the ethos of caring, watching is embedded in a temporal frame of anticipation and gives rise to an affectsphere of watching and to a parents’ subjectivity as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ supervisors. Third, these affective relationships generate seemingly contradictory outcomes wherein children are expected to gain independence and experience injury. The affective qualities of watching provide a critique of the individualizing forces of supervision and an analysis of subjectivities generated by gender and class.
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Notes
Human subjects approval was received by the University of California, Riverside’s Human Research Review Committee #HS-06–065.
WIC is a federally funded program that assists families by providing financial and social support to supplement the purchasing of nutritional food, education and help in finding health care for their children.
The injury prevention field uses the terminology ‘unintentional injury’ rather than ‘accident’ because of the seemingly randomness that accidents evoke. Accidents just happen, cannot be predicted and rarely can anything be done about the event. Reframing the terminology to ‘unintentional injury’ allows researchers to count how many injuries occur, to note the type of injury, the cause of the injury, and develop interventions before the occurrence of the injury. It is argued that this switch in terminology has produced a more rigorous scientific field (IOM, 1999).
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Acknowledgements
We thank the mothers who participated in the study. The anonymous reviewers comments were insightful and helped us to develop a stronger argument. Chikako Takeshita, Sheila McMullin, Leo Chavez, Christina Schwenkel, Sang-Hee Lee and the SIP research team read earlier drafts and were instrumental in the development of this work. This research was supported by a grant from the National Institute for Child Health and Development R01HD050637–04.
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McMullin, J., Dao, A. Watching as an ordinary affect: Care and mothers’ preemption of injury in child supervision. Subjectivity 7, 171–189 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2014.2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2014.2