Foucault's contributions, direct and indirect, to the field of childhood studies were pointed out early on. Nevertheless, there is an issue that has not been dealt with and which I consider a powerful one: the establishment of the indisputability of children's needs, which is at the heart of the politics of protection of children's rights. While the category of necessity was not directly worked upon by Foucault, his conceptualization of power constituting, in a capillary fashion, domains and rituals of truth as well as those of resistance; his definition of discursive practices that produce both subjects and rhetoric; and his conception of technologies of government, that bring together forms of knowledge and the family locus as a privileged site of population regulation, has been recognized by authors such as Nancy Fraser and Nicholas Rose for problematizing the place of the discourse of needs and the psychological discourse in social politics in late capitalism. It is from there that we will explore the force of this rhetoric and its specific modes of articulation with the discourse of children's rights.
Childhood; scientific discourse (psychology); policies