Children’s emotional wellbeing has gained political and pedagogical attention internationally (O’Toole & Simovska, 2022) and nationally in Denmark (Carlsson, 2022). The theories and practices of this attention and concern with wellbeing contains assumptions of which emotions and feelings are present when being well (Olsen & Vallgårda, 2022; Wright et al., 2022). It is these ideas and emotions I examine in political and pedagogical practices that is the scope of this paper. Whilst emotions that are conceived as positive are closely connected to wellbeing (ibid.), I’m interested in how these emotions are expected to be shown and directed and what the consequences of this might be. I examine this in a kindergarten class year group through an ethnographic fieldwork where rules and expectations become visible as the children become pupils and are being taught and evaluated according to school’s logics and norms (Weiland Willaa, 2023). I focus on the pedagogical practices handling children’s emotions in the classroom, at meetings, and in interviews.

This paper is guided by the following research question: How are pupil’s emotions understood and prioritized in kindergarten class’s wellbeing pedagogy and what effect does this have on pupils’ subjectification?

Drawing on poststructuralist (Butler, 1997) and feminist affect theory (Ahmed, 2010; Anderson, 2023), I understand emotions and feelings as imbedded in social and historical contexts. In these terms it is asked what emotions do and not what they are. Emotions are viewed as something that assigning meaning and is being assigned meaning in the social, historical, and political contexts they are being shown, evaluated, or encouraged (ibid.). Within these processes children are subjected and becoming pupils within the pedagogical objectification (Davies, 2006). It is these processes I examine within the pedagogical practices concerned with children’s emotional wellbeing in the school start. Practices I understand as the numerus ways schools and teachers try to influence and evaluate children’s emotions.

I am drawing attention to what ideas of a good life is embedded in the way children’s emotions are being valued and orientated. Sara Ahmed writes that: “I am interested in how happiness is associated with some life choices and not others, how happiness is imagined as being what follows being a certain kind of being.” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 2). I am interested in wellbeing in the same way as Ahmed is in happiness and I focus on which life situations and trajectories become possible and wanted in the focus on emotional wellbeing.

To understand the processes of these possible trajectories and orientations I am also drawing on the notion of scenes of attachment (Anderson, 2023). In this understanding attachments are seen as promissory and “[are] then, trajectories whereby some objects are detached from others and become significant and meaningful” (Anderson, 2023, p. 397). The pedagogical scenes of attachments are in this view situations where teachers emphasize certain objects or relationships of importance to the children.

Through empirical examples from the classroom and interviews with teachers, I show how families are produced and negotiated as an emotional object in the everyday pedagogical practices of the school start. I argue that family is produced as a happy object in pedagogical scenes of attachments orientating children towards their families as part of schooling (Anderson, 2023). These practices align with norms of the nuclear family whilst families not aligning with school’s ideals and purposes becomes ambivalent figures threatening the school class’s status as a community of feeling (Ahmed, 2010).

This paper is based on an ethnographic inspired fieldwork at one school during the first school year in three preschool classes. The material consists of 35 days observations in three classes, 7 meetings between preschool teachers, a parent’s meeting and 11 individual interviews with teachers, their leaders, and a wellbeing counselor. I conducted the empirical material from august 2023 and april 2024. The school is located in a suburb and is described as having a lot of social problems by a number of the employees. My decision to conduct my fieldwork in preschool is based on an assumption of school start being a time where rules and norms are being elucidated to children making them less taken for granted and therefore more visible, than in the higher grade levels (Weiland Willaa, 2023). This means that I see school start as a time where children become pupils with all expectations and logics that imply. Conducting my fieldwork at one school allowed me to shape a nuanced and variated insight into the everyday life of the school start, where it became possible to gain knowledge on the emerging negotiations and forming of attachments, communities and subjectivities over time. The design of the study is based on intersectional feminist (Davis, 2014; Lather, 2009) and affective ethnographic methodology (Chadwick, 2021; Knudsen & Stage, 2015; Zembylas, 2016). In the observations I focus on how emotions are being valued and explained to children in everyday life and how teachers evaluate and interpret emotional expressions and patterns in their meetings. During the observations I draw attention to situations where emotions become of pedagogical and social importance. This includes situations where the children are being told how to manage conflicts, friendships, or competitions but also scheduled activities aiming at social emotional themes. The interviews are focusing on organizational frames of how the preschool teachers and their leaders secure children’s wellbeing and reflections on when and how they assess wellbeing. The analysis is conducted by following emotions of empirical importance through alternating processes of theoretically informed coding in NVivo and highlighting nodes of wonder as what feels of analytical significance (Childers, 2014; MacLure, 2013). During the analytical processes, I have focused on the reiterative practices that constitutes the intelligible emotional subjects (Butler, 1997) as well as how discontinuities emerges throughout my material. In this paper I focus material emphasizing the orientation towards and promises of the children’s families.

The analysis shows how family is produces as a promissory object in the beginning of school. This happens in scenes of attachment where the children are asked to draw their family in a box with hearts on in and in a mental health week where the children are suggested to draw their family in the bottom of a so-called “triangle of happiness”. I argue that these situations can be seen as processes of orientating children towards their families. At the same time the children’s families are discussed and problematized as being too or wrongly attached at meetings and in interviews. I therefore describe the families as exclusive attachments that becomes ambivalent within the pedagogical practices and reasonings surrounding children’s wellbeing. This paper presents new knowledge on the role of the family in schooling. Where much focus has been on the school-home collaboration and the demands for families (Dannesboe et al., 2019), I show how the families also become important figures within the emotional orientation of the children. The paper also delivers insight in how the pedagogical attention to children’s wellbeing and emotions intertwines with ideals of happy balanced nuclear families. Overall, I point to that a pedagogical focus on emotions is not only a question of good or bad emotions but how this focus creates boundaries around the right families with the right emotional attachments.

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