High-Wire Dancers: Middle-Class Pakeha and Dutch Childhoods in New Zealand

Abstract

In contemporary New Zealand discourses the 1950s, 1960s and the early 1970s are seen as the era of the ‘Golden Weather’. This time came to an end when social change on an unprecedented scale took place from the end of the 1960s onwards. During the 1980s and 1990s the changes became very rapid due to transformations as part of the neoliberal reforms. Neoliberalism established new ways of governing the self through discourses of personal reflection, flexibility and choice as well notions of uncertainty, instability and risk. Risk discourses can be found at different junctures in New Zealand’s history, but contemporary discourses surrounding the self and childhood have shifted risk discourses in new ways. This has led to new regimes of rationality and practices of childhood and an increased governance of children and their families. This research documents the contexts and the interrelationships which influenced the new regimes of rationality and governance of childhoods in New Zealand. It also discusses the way a range of contradictory and conflictual cultural repertoires are negotiated and reproduced in the middle classes. In the last decades Pakeha and Dutch middle-class families in New Zealand have faced the prospect of declining fortunes. They have therefore adopted a cultural logic of childrearing which stresses the concerted cultivation of children. These regimes of concerted cultivation include risk discourses which affect everyday relationships and practices. This more global middle-class regime coexists with a local regime based on the New Zealand narrative of the time of the ‘Golden Weather’. Within this local repertoire a ‘typical’ New Zealand childhood is seen as safe and quite relaxed. This perceived childhood space is filled with beaches and other activities associated with nature which give children the opportunity and freedom to explore and develop a distinct Kiwi self. This local figuration is in contradiction with the often hectic pace of concerted cultivation and the anxieties surrounding risk discourses. Dutch middle-class parents in New Zealand also use concerted cultivation and they have adopted some of their host country’s figurations surrounding childhood and the outdoors. However, there is a difference in emphasis as Dutch parental narratives of self are more focussed on relationships with people rather than nature.