Negotiation as discipline: the constitution of the early childhood subject in Thai digital households

Abstract

Within the cultural politics of digital childhood, much is now known about what young children do with screens and how much. Less attention has been paid to what kind of self the child is being given the conditions to become where parental authority operates through negotiation rather than prohibition. Drawing on Foucault’s technologies of the self and Rose’s account of governmentality, this study treats Thai early childhood households – where Buddhist-influenced norms of krengjai and extended-family caregiving sustain a long-standing repertoire of indirect, contingency-based parenting – as a revealing site for re-examining the cultural politics of negotiated authority in digital family life. In-depth interviews with five mothers and two early-childhood teachers, recruited through a single centre in north-eastern Thailand, were analysed alongside a reference corpus of publicly accessible YouTube and TikTok material that these adults named as the focal four- and five-year-old children’s most frequently watched content. The children were neither interviewed nor observed, and account-level recommendation histories were unavailable; the study is therefore an interpretive reading of adult accounts rather than a demonstration of effects. Within these bounds, a Foucauldian discourse analysis generated three interpretive claims: (a) screen access is governed through a negotiated economy whose ‘if–then’ logic schools children in a particular operation upon the self; (b) imitation is best read not as social learning but as self-practice, a rehearsal of platform-supplied subject positions and (c) the parent functions as a relay through whom platform rationalities are translated into the child’s emerging moral self-government.