Alessandra Fasulo: The Apocalypse and the Children. A Mediatic Journey Around the Space/Time Crisis in Family Homes

It was 1946 when Roger Barker, the founder of Ecological Psychology, wrote his first grant application to start a project on children observation, denouncing psychology’s inexplicable lacuna about what children’s life is like. After the first years of the project, in which he followed the same children from morning to bedtime, he realised that place was the strongest factor in predicting children’s conduct. He coined the term ‘behavior setting’ and switched his observation design concentrating on all settings where children could be found, in the small Kansas town he had elected as the privileged observatory of American childhood. Cultural psychology and discourse-oriented research has since conquered space in the disciplinary territory and established observation posts in schools and homes, but the relevance of children’s environment keeps going out of focus. The lockdown imposed by the current pandemic has made home spaces become the central setting for most children’s activities, and has taken away from those in education the partition of time and activities provided by nursery or school. I will explore what has been happening in homes of children between 2 and 6 years of age, through a combination of interviews to caregivers and mediatic materials. The talk will describe how, as time/space spheres conflated in the home, caregivers and children together have, in the weeks since lockdown started, changed their relationship with the domestic spaces and quotidian time. Changes occurred partly, and especially at the beginning, as controlled, trial-and-error attempts of caregivers to carve out dedicated areas and maintain routines; however, a spontaneous reordering of the domestic organisation has also been taking place, as an effect of constant spatial proximity and melting of time blocks. I will also discuss some of the insights reported by parents concerning those recent experiences. 

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