“Não tem altura o silêncio das pedras”: a primeira infância no discurso do UNICEF
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Data
2025-07-10
Autores
Fonseca, Aline Elisa Maretto Lang
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Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo
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This thesis examines the discourses of the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) on early childhood, which, under the guise of equal rights, impose unequal treatment on children in different nations. We analyze the presence of early childhood on international agendas as a discursive and political strategy to end poverty adopted by UNICEF, demonstrating why it assumes different forms depending on the socioeconomic context. The study is based on historical-dialectical materialism and a qualitative approach. Its corpus brings together 104 UNICEF documents (1972-2023) subjected to thematic content analysis in three stages (pre-analysis, coding and inference) focused on key content, discursive strategy and silences. It was found that early childhood appears in the 1973 Annual Reports, linked to nutrition, drinking water and basic education. In 1978, driven by the Alma-Ata Conference and the GOBI package, early childhood became a permanent agenda, signaling the transition from specific survival actions to a structured global agenda. The agency’s perspective varies according to the economic scenario: in the 1980s, under the motto adjustment with a human face, comprehensive Primary Care was reduced to low-cost interventions; in the following decade, with the neoliberal turn, the grammar of rights emerged (1989 Convention) and, soon after, the paradigm of human capital and social investment. Between 2000 and 2015, this logic was repackaged by the (Millennium Development Goals) MDGs/SDGs, which combined cost effectiveness metrics with the promise of high economic returns. In the guidelines, central countries received recommendations for expanding universal services and gender equality, while peripheral countries were targeted with low-cost packages based on return on investment indicators. The rhetoric of efficiency, which assumes greater future returns, reinforces selectivity and peripheral dependence. Although it invokes the Convention on the Rights of the Child, UNICEF subordinates rights to productivity metrics and transfers responsibility for the success of interventions to families – especially women. The institutional lexicon changes according to the situation, but maintains the legitimacy of the social order: in the 1970s and 1980s, basic services/adjustment with a human face prevailed; in the 1990s and 2000s, human capital/social investment; after 2008, resilience emerged; since 2018, these statements converge in the Nurturing Care Framework, a reference for the SDGs and their five pillars (health, nutrition, responsive care, early learning, protection). This trajectory confirms the adaptive, persistent and strategically selective nature of the institutional lexicon. At all stages, neuroscientific arguments and cost-benefit analyses transform care and affection into market assets, deepening the financialization of social reproduction. It is concluded that UNICEF's universalist discourse operates as an ideological mechanism of capital: it legitimizes policies focused on peripheral countries, preserving hierarchies, while allowing narrow achievements in terms of social rights. By articulating early childhood and social investment under a critical eye, this research fills an academic gap and provides support for truly universal and socially just policies, repositioning childhood in development strategies.
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Primeira infância , Política Social , Desigualdade social , Pobreza , Direitos da criança