Charlotte Faircloth

Ellie Lee

English

Research Papers in Economics

Introduction: 'Changing Parenting Culture'
by Charlotte Faircloth and Ellie Lee
University of Kent at Canterbury
Sociological Research Online, 15 (4) 1
<http://www.socresonline.org.uk/15/4/1.html> 
10.5153/sro.2249
Received: 19 Oct 2010     Accepted: 25 Oct 2010    Published: 30 Nov 2010
Introduction
The essays in this special section emerge from the 'Changing Parenting Culture' series of ESRC research
seminars, held between January 2009 and June 2011 at a range of UK universities. Run by the network of
scholars 'Parenting Culture Studies',[1] the seminars brought together academics working internationally in
a range of disciplines, as well as those in policy and practice to examine shifts in parenting culture. Topics
discussed included parenting culture and risk, gender and policy, and the extension of 'parenting' into the
pre-pregnancy phase.[2]
What is 'Parenting Culture'?
1.1 Over the last twenty years, 'parenting' has emerged as a concept in both the US and the UK, to
characterise the activity that parents do in raising children (Hoffman n.d.). According to Hoffman, 'parenting'
– the transformation of the noun 'parent' into a verb 'to parent' – is a relatively recent phenomenon that
became prominent in the 1950s in language used by psychologists, sociologists and self-help practitioners,
but that has subsequently spread into wider usage. Its popularity, in fact, can be seen in the extent to
which 'parenting' has become a buzz-word in policy circles – with the UK government unveiling its National
Academy of Parenting Practitioners in 2007, with a view to training 'parent trainers', who in turn would
instruct parents in optimal techniques.
1.2 Parenting, our network argues, is not just a new word for child rearing. Instead, it denotes a speciﬁc
skill-set: a certain level of expertise about children and their care, based on the latest research on child-
development, and an afﬁliation to a certain way of raising a child. Pre-emininent is an assertion that
parents should adopt a form of 'tough love' (Demos 2009[3]) or 'Positive' parenting (Sears 2001) – that is,
one that is 'authoritative', but not 'authoritarian'. Being well-educated is often a requirement for participation
in these choices, as is a certain access to economic resources which enable parents to consume the
material goods that in turn come to deﬁne the various methods of infant care. As Hoffman says, however:
Most of all [parenting] means being both discursively positioned by and actively contributing
to the networks of ideas, values, practices and social relations that have come to deﬁne a
particular form of the politics of parent-child relations within the domain of the contemporary
family (n.d.).
1.3 It is in this sense that we talk about 'parenting culture'. Other sociologists also argue that the
emergence of 'parenting' needs to be seen as part of a larger social commentary of the family 'at risk' or 'in
crisis.' The health and safety of children, for example, is increasingly seen to be compromised by a 'toxic'
social environment (Furedi 2008). An inﬂated sense of risk, Furedi argues, opens the door to increased
surveillance and policy 'advice'. Furthermore, the family is ever more located as the source of and solution
to a whole host of social ills, from poor educational outcome to recidivism (which brings us back to the
Parenting Practitioners, above). Indeed, 'parenting' has acquired a particular place in contemporary society,
in which the burden of managing risks is increasingly devolved onto individuals and families (Hoffman n.d.).
1.4 'Parenting' is, of course, heavily gendered. Even the word 'parenting' obscures the reality that 'mothers
are still the people who do most childrearing and have most responsibility for children, [and] any
examination of parenting has to take seriously this gender differentiation and the ways in which it is
underpinned by power relations' (Phoenix et al 1991: 5). Accordingly, in The Cultural Contradictions of
Motherhood, the sociologist Sharon Hays shows how it is mothers who are now encouraged to parent their
children 'intensively' (Hays 1996). Writing on the basis of research with working mothers in the United
States, she argues that 'intensive motherhood' is an emergent ideology that urges mothers to 'spend a
tremendous amount of time, energy and money in raising their children' (1996: x). Hays suggests that this
injunction remains culturally salient, despite an uneasy relationship with the logic of the work place, bothbecause it props up the capitalist infrastructure and because mothering is perceived as 'the last best
defence against what many people see as the impoverishment of social ties, communal obligations and
unremunerated commitments' (1996: xiii). This, in turn, has had a profound impact on the way mothers
experience parenthood (Douglas and Michaels 2004; Furedi 2008). Many of our participants have also
explored the ways in which intensive mothering is (or is not) being translated into the world of fathering
(Dermott 2008, Collier and Sheldon 2008, Featherstone 2009). Indeed, a number of scholars in our network
have remarked on the decline of 'Mothering' (which is increasingly being referred to as 'Parenting')
ostensibly as a means of avoiding the stigmatisation of mothers. Paradoxically, 'Fathering' is on the rise, a
term increasingly employed as part of a language of 'rights' (as opposed to responsibilities).
Introducing the papers
1.5 The papers presented here take a range of methodological approaches in their exploration of parenting
culture, from analyses of media and policy developments to participant observation and ethnographic
'story-telling'. A similarity they share, however, is that they all take a marginal example (whether statistical
or ideological) as a vantage point from which to view wider trends in 'parenting': the alcohol-consuming
pregnant woman, the (falsely accused) abusive teacher, the teenage mother and the long-term
breastfeeder. Here, we try to give not only an introduction to their empirical content, but to look at some of
their thematic and theoretical similarities.
1.6 Firstly, Ellie Lee and Pam Lowe look at how Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) has been
reported in British newspapers, as a means of exploring broader notions of contemporary motherhood.
Despite the fact FASD is itself a highly controversial grouping of symptoms under one 'disorder,' they show
how over time there has been a marked increase in discussions of it in the press, as a result of rising
concern about alcohol consumption in pregnancy more generally. Indeed, their argument is that despite a
lack of evidence (a theme to which we will return, below) around the effect of moderate alcohol
consumption on the developing fetus, stories about FASD intersect with injunctions around 'good
motherhood' to promote abstinence from alcohol for all mothers. To this extent, they provide a genealogy of
cultural anxiety, showing how clinical evidence has little bearing on public perceptions; being rather an
epidemiological question around how stereotypes assume a social velocity in private lives and public
discourses.
1.7 How and why such anxiety assumes such cultural salience forms the backdrop to our second paper.
Using an 'ethnographic, composite, ﬁctional, storied' methodology, Heather Piper and Pat Sikes focus on
another statistically marginal yet culturally powerful ﬁgure: the teacher accused of inappropriate touching of
children. Oscillating between the poles of trust and risk, they show how contact between children and
professionals 'in loco parentis' has become a heavily regulated domain, (their analysis therefore reﬂecting
the way in which other day-to-day parent-child relationships are increasingly subject to formal monitoring.)
Whilst monitoring itself implies a certain suspicion, or lack of trust of those with parental responsibilities, a
more sinister undertone to this article is that fear of paedophilia increasingly taints all adult-child
relationships. In the context of a risk society, the authors argue, anyone suspected of being a paedophile,
'regardless of how thin the evidence' is extremely vulnerable to 'negative public attention, harassment,
violence and even murder'. In line with wider parenting culture, the child in this scenario is considered
vulnerable, innocent and in need of protection; they are also assumed never to lie about abuse. To this
end, they document in harrowing detail the devastating personal and professional implications for a teacher
falsely accused of inappropriate contact with pupils and offer some recommendations to policy makers,
engaging very recent statements from Michael Gove MP, Secretary of State for Education about the issue
of no-touch policy in schools (BBC News,[4]). Their article concludes that whilst of course children are in
need of protection from abuse in institutional settings (and beyond) the balance has recently been tipped
too far in favour of children, which undermines the authority of teachers, and in turn jeopardises their
profession more widely.
1.8 To this extent, their account picks up a theme from our next paper: the blurring between the categories
of child and adult, whereby children are treated more and more like adults, and adults more and more like
children (Furedi 2009). The teenage mother – the third of our marginal case studies – has long been seen
as a paradoxical ﬁgure: neither adult nor child, she is yet both. Jan Macvarish uses this unique vantage
point from which to reﬂect on a wider trend towards what she calls the 'infantilisation' of parents. As Hays
notes, all parents today are infantilised to the extent that they are encouraged to seek expert guidance
over their parenting practices, which are seen to be too important to be left to chance. Yet the teenage
mother magniﬁes this injunction. Long considered an example of social decline, the teenage parent is now
reconﬁgured as a person in need of 'rescuing' – a 'victim' who has been let down and whose redemption lies
through the acceptance of 'support'. Yet as a range of academics have shown, this is a peculiar celebration
of the victim status, especially since many teenage mothers report that having a baby is a fundamentally
positive experience for them and their families (Duncan et al 2010). Similarly, as Macvarish notes, where
an ideology of 'intensive' parenting dictates 'good' motherhood to be full-time, emotional absorbing care of
children, who is more suited to fulﬁl these requirements – the teenager who has little else in the way of
public roles of ambitions to distract her, or the older, middle-class woman who has ambitions to maintain a
life beyond motherhood?
1.9 What this points to, of course, is the speciﬁc historical period in which our authors are writing. Hays is
well aware of the irony that, at a time when more and more women have entered the work-force, an
ideology of 'intensive' mothering should have such a hold over women, creating what she calls a 'cultural
contradiction' for the majority of mothers. But it is not the case for all mothers. Some – like the majority of
long-term breastfeeders that Faircloth works with – opt to invest their 'identity work' in one of these
spheres, often at the expense of the other.
1.10 Documenting what Hoffman refers to as 'parental tribalism', both Macvarish and Faircloth's papersshow the myriad ways in which different parental choices and behaviour have become a site for identity
formation. Indeed, the women in Faircloth's study who practice a philosophy of 'attachment' parenting
demonstrate the tribalism inherent to an intensive mothering ideology to a greater extent than most, in that
they self-identify through their chosen method of care. In explaining their long-term feeding (just one
element of this philosophy), these women rely on a range of strategies, but it is the scientiﬁc that Faircloth
focuses on here. (That is, that long-term breastfeeding is what 'science' says is best for mothers and
babies). Whilst there is no evidence that long-term breastfeeding is at all harmful, what we see – as in Lee
and Lowe's paper – is that actual clinical evidence in fact has little bearing on the 'scientiﬁc' claimsmaking
that goes on in its name; that is, there is little clinical evidence that long-term breastfeeding is beneﬁcial.
Nevertheless, advocates prefer to rely on the authority of science as a primary 'accountability strategy'
over and above other means of rationalisation (such as the affective). This paper is therefore an exploration
of the ways in which authority operates in contemporary parenting debates, how it intersects with individual
'identity work', and a salutary lesson in the need to detach description from prescription. Even if a certain
parenting practice is 'scientiﬁcally optimal', does this necessarily mean it is what parents should do? What
might be being eclipsed through this perspective? A future Parenting Culture Studies event plans to
discuss these themes in more depth.[5]
Conclusion
2.1 All of the papers here explore the kinds of evidence which are increasingly called upon to make what
might best be called moral arguments about the best way to raise children. Teenage motherhood is actually
in decline, excessive maternal drinking affects only a tiny proportion of live births, children are safer today
than they have ever been and evidence for differential outcomes with respect to feeding method are more
limited than the advocacy literature suggests (Wolf, in press). Why is it then, that parenting culture inspires
such moralisation, negative stereotyping and tribalism? Our network will continue to discuss just what it is
about parenting that 'matters' so much at both the micro- and macro-social level. We would like to thank
the editors of Sociological Research Online for the opportunity to publish this special section, and we
welcome readers of this piece to join us as we continue our deliberations by attending our events, looking
at our website or emailing us directly.
Notes
1See http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/parentingculturestudies/ for more information.
2See http://www.parentingculturestudies.org/seminar-series/index.html for further details.
3See: http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/parenting Accessed 7.10.10
4See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11458137 Accessed 7.10.10
5 http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/parentingculturestudies/current-research/in-progress/
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Introduction: 'Changing Parenting Culture'

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Introduction: 'Changing Parenting Culture'

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