Diagnosis as Discipline: The Pathologisation of Childhood

Abstract: This paper argues that childhood diagnosis, particularly in educational and behavioural contexts, too often functions as a mechanism of control rather than care. Through a critical-ethical lens, it interrogates how diagnostic language frames noncompliance as disorder, refusal as dysfunction, and difference as deficit. Drawing from critical pedagogy, disability studies, and the sociology of childhood, the paper challenges the assumption that support must be earned through suffering and pathologisation. Rather than presenting new diagnostic models, the paper proposes an ethical reorientation: one that centres children’s relational, sensory, and dissenting expressions as forms of moral knowledge. It contends that diagnosis often shifts attention away from structural failure—masking adult discomfort, institutional inflexibility, and the systemic marginalisation of non-normative behaviour. Using a hybrid methodology that blends narrative analysis, philosophical inquiry, and policy critique, the paper ultimately calls for a diagnostic reversal: a turn from identifying broken children to diagnosing the systems that demand their conformity. In doing so, it offers a vision of support grounded not in deficit, but in dignity.