Changing parenting, changing childhood?

By Charlotte Faircloth

In her introduction to Parenting Out of Control the US sociologist Margaret Nelson describes how childrearing has changed in the last 40 years:

When I was raising my children in the 1970s, there were no baby monitors to help me hear them cry in the middle of the night, no cell phones to assist me in keeping track of their whereabouts at every moment, and no expectation that I would know any more about their educational success than they, or a quarterly report card, would tell me. Indeed, although I thought of myself as a relatively anxious parent, I trusted a girl in the third grade to accompany my five-year-old son to and from school, and when he was in first grade, I allowed him to walk that mile by himself … In retrospect, and from the vantage point of watching my younger friends and colleagues with their children today, my parenting style seems, if not neglectful, certainly a mite casual.

Nelson is far from alone in her observation that expectations around, and experiences of, how we raise our children have shifted in fairly fundamental ways over the last half-century. What I suggest in this blog post is that this process has been based on shifting ideas about children and childhood too.

What’s new about ‘parenting’?

One of the earliest – and still most influential – observers of changes in parenting culture was the US sociologist Sharon Hays. She coined the term ‘intensive motherhood’ to describe an ideology that urges mothers (because the language and practice of parenting is highly gendered) to ‘spend a tremendous amount of time, energy and money in raising their children.’ According to this ideology, ‘the methods of appropriate child rearing are construed as child-centred, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive, and financially expensive.’ Since then, a body of work known as ‘Parenting Culture Studies’, a field of interdisciplinary scholarship, has emerged from the observation that something ‘has changed’ in the way both being a parent and raising children is conceptualised, particularly in last 40 years. In particular, it draws attention to a casual relationship between the emergence of a developmental psychological paradigm and the understanding of ‘parenting’ as a much more complex task than it used to be in the past.

In the face of dominant assumptions that what happens in infancy has life-long implications, it is easy to see why parenting is now routinely understood as a ‘task’ requiring expert guidance and supervision, notably for those in ‘problem’ families. To this end, Parenting Culture Studies uses a social constructionist approach to understand the emergence of the ‘problem’ of parenting, understood at both micro and macro levels as the source of, and solution to, a wide range of social issues. In a time where child-rearing has become mediated by a cultural narrative that provides parents with rules albeit sometimes ambiguous ones about how to realise and develop their skills as parents, it is these ‘rules’ and the categorical assumption of adulthood and childhood on which they are based which might be said to constitute ‘parenting culture’.

What imaginary of ‘the child’ does this rest on?

A more ‘child-centred’ intensification of parenting does not emerge solely as a product of parental anxieties, but is itself founded on a fetishised view of children and childhood – one which constitutes children as foundationally vulnerable and ‘at risk’. At least part of the reason for this was the rapid growth (and cultural visibility) of developmental psychology in the 1970s. But it also chimes with work done by modernisation theorists on risk and risk-consciousness such that the early period of life is cast, and monetised, by experts as one which is subject to enormous risk. In a ‘neoliberal’ era, with its emphasis on self-management, ‘good’ parents (mothers) are child-centred, reflexive, informed consumers, able to ‘account’ for their parenting strategies to minimise any sort of risk to their children. Here, Parenting Culture Studies argues that the flipside of the ‘vulnerable child’ is the ‘risky parent’ with the developmental paradigm casting parents as a (or the) determining force in how their children turn out.

 The ‘intensive mother’ and the ‘vulnerable and at-risk child’ in need of protection are immediately recognisable tropes to scholars of childhood studies and parenting culture studies, as well as to scholars of the family more broadly. However, while ‘parenting culture’ and ‘childhood’ are now well-established fields of multidisciplinary scholarship, so far, the tensions and resonances between these two bodies of work have not been significantly explored, particularly in diverse, global contexts.

Fostering connections

Taking ‘adult-child relations’ as the locus of interaction between the two fields of study, a recent special issue (edited by myself and Rachel Rosen, and featuring a paper by this website’s Deniz Arzuk) brings together novel contributions from internationally based scholars who are interested in creating connections between them. There, the authors take up the challenge to explore the ways in which contemporary cultures of childhood intersect with parenting cultures, especially as they relate to notions of risk and responsibility which increasingly frame the lives of adults and children. In ‘risk societies’, dominated by constructions of the ‘at risk’ child, often from ‘risky’ parents or non-parental adults, questions of responsibility for causing and managing risk loom large. However, how risk and responsibility are understood, and to what extent they inflect social practices in diverse contexts, remain empirical questions (and certainly, an important one for Arzuk’s research).

These fundamental assumptions around both parenthood and childhood are now almost unremarkable in Euro-North American settings, and are travelling globally; international development projects spread Eurocentric notions of the child and national development. Indeed, we might argue that the presumption of children as, de facto, vulnerable and at risk is one of the most distinctive social constructions of childhood (and parenthood) today. Of course, discourses (public and academic) such as this are not a straightforward reflection of what goes on in family life. Nor are they simply taken on board, given that they come into contact with very different constructions of childhood. However, they have fundamentally re-shaped ideas of the parent-child relationship, with extensive implications for individual subjectivities, families and indeed societies.

One of the points we make is that this intensive, ‘child-centred’ approach to parenting is not necessarily ‘best’ for either adults or children. But when childhood experience (positive or negative) is framed in the language of competing risks, this presents little scope for discussions about the kind of world we envisage for ourselves (where ‘ourselves’ includes both children and adults), and how we might shape it. In staging a dialogue between parenting culture and childhood studies, the issue joins the growing efforts to interrogate such antagonistic framings by considering both what this produces and what it obscures, as well as opening up other ways to theorise adult-child, adult-adult and child-child relations along more ‘braided’ lines. We welcome dialogue with scholars interested in pursuing similar lines of enquiry.

References

Deniz Arzuk. “Accidents Waiting to Happen: News Coverage of Children’s Health and Safety in Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s,” Families, Relationships and Societies 9/1: 91-106, 2020.
Ulrich Beck. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage, 1992.
Joel Best. “Locating moral panics within the sociology of social problems,” in Sean Patrick Hier (ed.) Moral Panic and the Politics of Anxiety: 37-52, London: Routledge, 2011.
Jennie Bristow. “Who Cares for Children? The Problem of Intergenerational Contact,” in Ellie Lee, Jennie Bristow, Charlotte Faircloth and Jan Macvarish (eds), Parenting Culture Studies. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Erica Burman. Deconstructing Developmental Psychology. London: Routledge, 2017.
Esther Dermott. “‘Poverty’ versus ‘Parenting’: an Emergent Dichotomy,” Studies in the Maternal 4/2: 1–13, 2012.
Charlotte Faircloth. Militant Lactivism? Attachment Parenting and Intensive Motherhood in the UK and France. Oxford: Berghahn, 2013.
Charlotte Faircloth, Diane M. Hoffman and Linda Layne. Parenting in Global Perspective: Negotiating Ideologies of Kinship, Self and Politics. London and New York, Routledge, 2013.
Charlotte Faircloth and Rachel Rosen (guest editors). Special Issue: Childhood, Parenting Culture, and Adult-Child Relations in Global Perspectives. Families, Relationships and Societies 9/1, 2020.
Anthony Giddens. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity, 1991.
Val Gillies. “From Function to Competence: Engaging with the New Politics of Family,” Sociological Research Online 16/4: 109-119, 2011.
Sharon Hays. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven, Connecticut; London: Yale University Press, 1996.
Ellie Lee, Jennie Bristow, Charlotte Faircloth and Jan Macvarish. Parenting Culture Studies. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Jan Macvarish. Neuroparenting: The Expert Invasion of Family Life. London: Palgrave Pivot, 2016.
Margaret K. Nelson. Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times. New York and London: New York University Press, 2010.
Jan Newberry and Tanya Pace-Crosschild. “Braiding Sweetgrass Families: A Transmedia Project on Parenting in Blackfoot Territory,” Families, Relationships and Societies 9/1: 173-180, 2020.
Helen Penn. “Travelling policies and global buzzwords: How international non-governmental organizations and charities spread the word about early childhood in the global South,” Childhood 18/1: 94-113, 2011.
Rachel Rosen and Judith Suissa. “Children, Parents and Non-Parents: To Whom Does ‘the Future’ Belong?” Families, Relationships and Societies 9/1: 125-141, 2020.
Rachel Rosen and Katherine Twamley. Feminism and the Politics of Childhood: Friends or Foes? London: University College London Press, 2018.
Spyros Spyrou, Rachel Rosen, Daniel Thomas Cook (eds.) Reimagining Childhood Studies. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.
Joan B. Wolf. Is Breast Best? Taking on the Breastfeeding Experts and the New High Stakes of Motherhood. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

About the Author

Dr Charlotte Faircloth is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Science at UCL Institute of Education, and a Visiting Scholar and founding member of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent (CPCS). Her book ‘Militant Lactivism? Attachment parenting and intensive motherhood in the UK and France’ was shortlisted for the BSA’s Phillip Abrams Memorial Prize. As well as editing several journal special issues, she is co-author of ‘Parenting Culture Studies’, and co-editor of ‘Parenting in Global Perspective: Negotiating ideologies of kinship, self and politics‘ and ‘Feeding Children Inside and Outside the Home: Critical Perspectives.’

Cite this article as: Charlotte Faircloth, “Changing parenting, changing childhood?” in Changing Childhoods, 28 July 2020, https://changingchildhoods.com/changing-parenting-changing-childhood