Children, Neoliberalism, and Child Protection
Authors: Keddell Emily , Hyslop Ian 
Published: September 2023

Neoliberalism is a political and economic system that relies on the free market to provide the economic and social goods necessary for survival. Within neoliberal societies, the role of the state is to provide limited or no financial and economic regulation, minimal redistribution of wealth, and divest itself of assets into private ownership. This reduces the onus on the state to provide social protections for families, who are expected to generate their own economic wealth in order to provide and care for their members. The role of the state is a residual one only, providing (if anything) limited supports. Intervention is restricted to the removal of obstacles to private capital accumulation and deregulation of the labor market. Those who require supports are often demonized and moralized, viewed as inherently evil, weak, or irresponsible. When children are added to the picture, neoliberalism encounters a rupture, because young children cannot be held responsible for their own situation. This has several effects in the child protection systems of neoliberal countries. Parents are held entirely culpable for their social situation, despite marked economic inequities that impact on parenting. Consequent effects on personal wellbeing andand behavior that might be harmful to children are explained as individual deficit. Oppressive historical economic and social processes, such as colonization or slavery, and their impacts on whole communities are separated in discourse and policy, from the current situations of Indigenous or racialized minority groups. Neoliberal child protection systems are punitive and forensic, taking an investigatory, risk focused approach to child protection responses. Neoliberal systems can be bolstered by biologized accounts of human behavior and the reproduction of intergenerational deficits. These dovetail with individualistic behavioral approaches. Accordingly, methods of assessment and intervention that focus on individual and family shortfalls are privileged, obscuring social and economic determinants. Older children in the care system rapidly lose their “vulnerable” or deserving status also, and they are viewed as culpable, criminalized, and the “care to prison” pipeline channels these same children into the criminal justice system. The structure of child welfare services in neoliberal states foreground tertiary intervention after harm has occurred, relying on population surveillance and investigatory processes to do so. Public health prevention models that recognize the interconnections among structural conditions, provision of preventive support services, and provision of other supports to families (such as income protection, childcare, health service access) are neither provided nor considered relevant to child protection. Recognition of inequalities in system contact are also downplayed, as this research highlights a systematic relationship with disadvantage. Consequent interventions aimed at parents are individualized, their provision is often contracted out to third-party providers as per a market-based approach to service provision, and the quantity of preventive services is inadequate or piecemeal. Social workers are torn between risk management and their ethical commitments to social justice and relational, supportive approaches. Parents experience such interventions as surveillant, blaming, judgmental and not able to address the causes of their parenting difficulties. Children are viewed as individual rights holders in need of rescue and placement within families able to prepare them for future economic contributions to society. These rights discourses often intersect with notions of vulnerability and culpability that separate children’s needs, and vulnerability, from that of their families. Policy orientations tend to be protectionist or “child focused” in neoliberal societies, as these direct the focus of policy toward children as individuals, rather than recognition that their well-being relies on the well-being of wider social systems. Many countries have broadly neoliberal regimes, although the layered and complex nature of policy and economic ideologies over time make generalizations difficult. Despite this, the United States, United Kingdom, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, and Australia have all pursued neoliberal policies to a greater and lesser extent, as have various European and South American countries. Responses to neoliberalism in child protection includes perspectives based on public health, abolition, decolonization, family inclusion/advocacy, poverty-aware practice, progressive poverty policies, and socialist or Marxist political critique.