Marginalised Mothers

Exploring Working Class Experiences of Parenting

Val Gillies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415376365
• eBook ISBN: 9781134223893
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery
• Index: Social Sciences

Successive moral panics have cast poor or socially excluded mothers - associated with social problems as diverse as crime, underachievement, unemployment and mental illness - as bad mothers. Their mothering practices are held up as the antithesis of good parenting and are associated with poor outcomes for children.

Marginalised Mothers provides a detailed and much-needed insight into the lived experience of mothers who are frequently the focus of public concern and intervention, yet all too often have their voices and experiences overlooked. The book explores how they make sense of their lives with their children and families, position themselves within a context of inequality and vulnerability, and resist, subvert and survive material and social marginalisation.

This controversial text uses qualitative data from a selection of working class mothers to highlight the opportunities and choices they face and to expose the middle class assumptions that ground much contemporary family policy. It will be of interest to students and researchers in sociology, social work and social policy, as well as social workers and policymakers.

Chapter 1
Marginalised mothers

Representations and research

The consequences of poor parenting are all around in a constituency like mine: parents who don’t value education as a route out of poverty, youngsters who learn and practise anti-social rather than social behaviour and, above all, the obvious and massive waste of unrealised human potential.

(Graham Allen, Labour Member of Parliament for Nottingham North, Guardian 2004)

Nicky has five children by five different men . . . Nicky lives with her dishevelled-looking brood in an equally unkempt four-bedroom council house in Knowsley, Merseyside – known as Single Mother Central. Twothirds of Knowsley is designated Green Belt, and not far away from the urban sprawl is glorious countryside dotted with wild flowers. Yet the number of single mothers grows ever higher. So what has gone wrong? Quite simply, when it comes to having children, Knowlsley exists in a moral vacuum. Tragically, it doesn’t even occur to women such as Nicky Schiller that what they are doing might be wrong.

(Natalie Clarke, Daily Mail 2001)

Over the last few decades, attention and concern has focused on a particular sort of mother. She is portrayed as irresponsible, immature, immoral, and a potential threat to the security and stability of society as a whole. While this type of mother is accused of bad parenting, it is her status as poor and marginalised that sees her located at the centre of society’s ills. From New Right to New Labour, tabloids to the broadsheets and daytime television to documentaries, working-class mothers who do not conform to standards grounded in middle-class privilege are vilified and blamed. While mothers have always been held responsible for behaviour and development, recent years have seen a cultural shift in the way parenting is conceptualised and targeted by policy-makers. Family relationships have traditionally been viewed as personal, private and immune from state intervention. This boundary is now regularly transgressed in an explicit and determined effort to mould and regulate individual subjectivity and citizenship at the level of the family. Parenting is no longer accepted as an interpersonal bond characterised by love and care. Instead it has been re-framed as a job requiring particular skills and expertise which must be taught by formally qualified professionals. Working class mothering practices are held up as the antithesis of good parenting, largely through their association with poor outcomes for children. This book takes a more situated look at family lives that are so often misrepresented, disrespected and scapegoated. It will examine the particular challenges of poverty and low social status and will highlight the values and strengths that are generated in response. Based on qualitative interview research, the book will explore how working-class mothers make sense of their lives with their children, how they position themselves within a context of inequality and vulnerability, and how they resist, subvert and survive material and social marginalisation. I begin this chapter with a critical discussion of wider academic and policy debates around parenting to highlight the way that childrearing practices have come to be held accountable for crime, deprivation and inequality. More specifically I will show how mothering, as an activity and an identity, is understood and evaluated in relation to shifting, politicised notions of childhood and ‘children’s needs’ (Lawler 2000; Phoenix and Woollett 1991). Drawing on research literature and policy documents, I argue that parenting prescriptions have become increasingly detached from the lives and experiences of those they are directed at. I will then describe the detailed qualitative studies that inform this book, outlining the approach and methods used and introducing the mothers whose stories feature throughout.

Parenting and the production of the subject

Family life has long been a political feeding ground. Fear of the social consequences of an emerging urban mass in the nineteenth century established a durable link between the wellbeing and rearing of children and the welfare of society as a whole. The perceived threat to the interests of the wealthy posed by those defined as ‘degenerate’, ‘feeble minded’ and ‘morally corrupt’ was associated with notions of nature and nurture, made popular by the early psychologist Francis Galton (Burman 1994). Products of poverty, such as crime, violence, vice and pauperism were medicalised and treated as defects of character to be controlled through a prophylactic inculcation of moral values (Rose 1989). The establishment of compulsory elementary schooling in the late 1800s reflected this concern to regulate children (Hendrick 1990). However, through the years the target of public intervention has largely shifted from children to mothers as guardians of their children’s normal development (Lawler 2000; Walkerdine and Lucey 1989; Burman 1994). The discipline of developmental psychology emerged as a language to voice concerns about childrearing, warranting a range of ideological values on the grounds of scientific objectivity (Rose 1989). Mothers are positioned in relation to these values, with notions of acceptable parenting resting on constructions of childhood and children’s needs that are conveyed through a developmental discourse.

As Erica Burman (1994) has argued, developmental psychology can be seen as an essentially political device, used to regulate both children and their parents. The notion of the ‘normal’ child exists as a production rather than a description, in that it is based on comparisons of scores and observations across age-graded populations. Although conceptions of normality are not based on real, existing children, they constitute the foundation for determining acceptable development and as such define notions of adequate parenting. For example, studies comparing children raised in non-traditional families to other children often begin by discussing the rise in family breakdown, emphasising how common it now is for children to be parented outside of a conventional nuclear family. Yet despite the increased incidence of non-traditional families, these children are still evaluated against a fixed notion of normality. Consequently, ‘normal development’, as constructed in developmental psychology texts, is a contradictory concept. While equated with naturalness or ordinary behaviour/ability, it is presented as a particularly fragile developmental achievement dependent on appropriate parenting. Nikolas Rose describes how the emergence of the child guidance clinic brought with it a new psychology which located social adjustment at a psychic level. He states:

If families produced normal children, this was itself an accomplishment, not a given; it was because they regulated their emotional economy correctly. The production of normality now appeared to be a process fraught with pitfalls. The line between safety and danger was a narrow one; it was all too easy for major problems to develop from minor upsets if they were not handled correctly. A constant scrutiny of the emotional interchanges of family life was required, in the name of the mental hygiene of the individual and society.

(Rose 1989: 155)

This regulation comprises far more than state intervention in the lives of poor or non-nuclear families. Childrearing practices which uphold the interests of the state have been increasingly and effectively operating through the subjective desires of parents wishing to optimise their children’s development. Many writers have sought to demonstrate how power operates through, rather than in resistance to subjectivity, in that individuals are shaped and managed by their own feelings and emotional investments (Rose 1989, 2002; Foucault 1979; Donzelot 1979). Although direct and threatened coercion exists as a bottom line, a majority of families are often forced to produce and regulate themselves through dominant, ideologically charged discourses.

As Steph Lawler (2000) points out, mothering, as an activity and an identity, is understood and evaluated in relation to specific notions of childhood and ‘children’s needs. This is despite evidence of the socially constructed nature of childhood as a concept (James et al. 1998; Woodhead 1997; Jenks 1996). As the work by the French historian Phillip Aries (1962) established, children beyond initial infant dependency were regarded as small adults until the separate status of childhood was developed between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The concept of ‘natural’ childhood has been constructed over several centuries as both an idea and a target, resulting in increasing state regulation and control of the young and their parents (Rose 1989, 2002). Over the years Western nations have evolved a set of highly complex measures to enforce conformity of development and thereby safeguard and reproduce existing power relations.

The contemporary politics of parenting

Good parenting in the home is more important than anything else to a child’s future.

(Margerate Hodge, Minister for Children, 2004)

I can’t raise people’s children for them, and I can’t personally go out on the street and make sure that everything is fine within the local community. What I can do, however, is give the police and the local authorities and those that need them the powers they need.

(Tony Blair, speech at the Meridian Community Centre in Watford 2005)

Heads call for ‘beacon’ parents
Tips on good parenting should be printed on the back of cereal packets and milk cartons, posted up on buses and shown on television, head teachers recommend. And the government should introduce ‘beacon’ parents, the naming and shaming of bad parents, parent achievement awards, a system of fines for parents who failed to meet their targets and child benefit bonuses for those who performed well. Heads say this may go some way to reducing the growing body of parents who consider it acceptable to abuse school staff.

(BBC News Online 2001)

The long history of state involvement in family life has reached new heights in recent decades. In the UK, parenting has been pushed to the centre stage of the policy curriculum in line with a neo-liberal emphasis on family, community and personal responsibility. Concerns about changes in the structure and status of family relationships in the 1960s and 1970s were viewed by many as an indication of a wider moral malaise needing urgent reform. However, it was during this time that more specific links were made between parenting and social dis-ease through the ‘cycle of deprivation’ theory. In the early 1970s, Secretary for State for Education in the UK conservative government, Keith Joseph, was a keen advocate of the theory, which suggested that poverty ran in families as a result of children inheriting values and lifestyles which lock them into permanent disadvantage (Joseph 1975). From the perspective of Joseph and other right-wing commentators, breaking this cycle of deprivation required a change in the attitudes and moral mindsets of poor parents. Although Joseph commissioned extensive research to prove that poverty was transmitted through families, he found the results to be disappointing. The theory lost credibility when his own study highlighted the significance of multiple structural factors as opposed to culture or attitude (Morris 1994).

Regardless of the evidence, the focus on the conduct of the deprived and disenfranchised was further developed in the 1980s by an emerging ‘New Right’ which sought to shift policy away from state assistance and towards moral regulation (Davies 1993; Dennis and Erdos 1992). In an echo of the Victorian concept of the ‘undeserving poor’, theorists such as Charles Murray proposed the existence of an ‘underclass’ populated by the feckless and workshy, and perpetuated through a ‘culture of dependency’ (Murray 1994). At the heart of the New Right critique was the challenge to patriarchal values embodied by changing family structures, which were seen as undermining the foundations of society. Women were portrayed as increasingly placing their own needs above those of their children and husbands, facilitated by the availability of welfare support enabling them to live independently. Women’s liberation and welfare benefits were also seen as undermining men’s incentive to work and provide for their families, encouraging them to abandon their domestic responsibilities.

From the perspective of the New Right, this lack of moral responsibility is inextricably linked to an economic decline associated with greater dependency on the welfare state and an unstable social order. Murray and many other proponents claimed that halting the growth of this emerging underclass was essential to prevent economic decline and suggested this could only be achieved through government policy which supports and enforces traditional family responsibility (Mead 1986; Murray 1994; Dennis and Erdos 1992; Davies 1993; Murray 1994). However, the family policy pursued by the UK Conservative government in the 1980s was contradictory and ambivalent, despite a preponderance of traditionalist, authoritarian rhetoric (Fox Harding 2000).

The Conservatives introduced the ‘no fault’ clause in divorce while they simultaneously demonised lone mothers as a threat to society. Policy measures focused largely on tightening social security entitlements and attempting to make absent fathers pay child support. The more intimate features of family life was seen as a distinct private sphere lying beyond the boundaries of legitimate state intervention by many conservatives. As J. Rodger (1995) has pointed out, the attempts to control and regulate behaviour of parents have always been at odds with the individualistic libertarian instincts of those positioned on the political right.

There was a renewed focus on the role of parents in the UK when the New Labour government in came to power in 1997. Drawing on a communitarian discourse as opposed to New Right rhetoric, the incoming government proclaimed its intention to prioritise families by placing them at the heart of the policy agenda (Wasoff and Hill 2002). While ostensibly distancing themselves from the more punitive aspects of conservative policy, New Labour developed a social democratic critique of individualism. The corroding influence of a ‘me first’ mentality was seen as undermining the co-operation and reciprocity necessary to sustain families and communities. Drawing on the work of Anthony Giddens (1991, 1998) and communitarian philosophers such as Amati Etzoni (1994), the New Labour government sought to address the perceived threat individualisation posed to family ties and social cohesion.

Their so called ‘third way’ approach aimed to balance individual rights with social responsibility through an emphasis on both moral tolerance and personal obligation. The wide-ranging and often conflicting policies that emerged were also heavily shaped by efforts to address general concerns about crime and public order (Gillies 2005a). Denoting a new focus on personal responsibility and the role of parenting in crime prevention, the prime minister to be, Tony Blair, campaigned for his leadership declaring ‘the break-up of family and community bonds is intimately linked to the breakdown in law and order’ (cited in Fairclough 2000: 42). This theme has been pursued over the years through regular moral panics about anti-social behaviour and the decline of ‘respect’, with poor parents depicted as uncaring, irresponsible and out of control.

An association between crime and upbringing is cited in a number of studies, implicating a variety of factors including ineffective discipline practices, lack of maternal support, low parental supervision and lack of attachment (Prior and Paris 2005; Farrington 1996; Graham and Bowling 1995). However, this research relies on simple linear models of causality, ignoring the complex range of factors that interact. As Cook (1997) notes, unemployment, low income and social deprivation remain the major risk factors precipitating an encounter with the criminal justice service. Attempts to determine other causal factors inevitably conflate the cause of crime with the features of those who have been defined as prime prone. Delinquency could easily be linked to any number of life variables, including gender, race, neighbourhood, unemployment etc., but a preoccupation with family relationships reflects a ‘commonsense’ view that deviancy is rooted in upbringing. As a result, policy-makers commission research to establish the family practices associated with crime but avoid seeking any detailed understanding of the behaviours in question (Gillies 2000).

While representations of poor parenting as a threat to society are longstanding, policy approaches in the UK have taken a new turn of late. More specifically, an emphasis on social justice is used to warrant intervention in the traditionally private sphere of the family on the basis that children who are parented well will have a better chance of upward social mobility. According to the British government, a range of factors are key in enabling children to break the ‘cycle of deprivation’ and overcome the effects of disadvantage (Home Office 2003b). These include strong relationships with parents, parental involvement with education, strong role models, feeling valued, and individual characteristics such as intelligence. Conspicuously absent from this list is any acknowledgement of material or financial capital as significant resources in evening-out life chances. In an apparent revival of the ‘cycle of deprivation theory’, the implication is that a quality upbringing is all that is needed to ensure equal opportunity (Gillies 2005b).

On the basis of this conviction, the government draws the conclusion that poor parents are failing to impart the necessary skills and traits that are needed to sustain a just society. They argue that in order to address inequality, childrearing must be repositioned as a public rather than a private concern, and the state must take responsibility for inculcating the practice of good parenting. It is reasoned that only the political right argues for childrearing to remain the private concern of families, while a more enlightened New Labour government recognises its moral duty to uphold social justice (Hodge 2004). For the sake of their children’s future, and for the stability and security of society as a whole, working-class parents must be taught how to raise children who are capable of becoming middle class. The significance accorded to parenting as a crucial determinant of children’s future life chances has been followed through with a range of policy initiatives designed to ‘support’ parents in their essential practice. For the most part this has been in the form of guidance and education, rather than practical or material help. The term ‘parenting support’ has become a common shorthand description for parenting classes, where mothers are sent to learn ‘childrearing skills’ (Gillies 2005a). As Frank Ferudi (2001) notes, this is part of a creeping professionalisation of family life based on the notion that parenting can be distilled into a series of detachable, universally applicable skills.

Caring for children is generally viewed as a classless activity (Duncan 2005), and as such parenting ‘support’ initiatives are presented as relevant resources for all families. The gender neutral term ‘parent’ also suggests the joint involvement of fathers as well as mothers. In practice, though, such initiatives are targeted at poor and disadvantaged mothers. For example, the British government’s flagship parenting support programme ‘Sure Start’, based on the American ‘Head Start’ scheme, is concentrated in areas of high deprivation and is described as a cornerstone of the government’s drive to tackle child poverty and social exclusion. Sure Start is a much praised community-based programme offering a range of services including health advice and parenting classes, with its publicly stated intention being:

to promote the physical, intellectual and social development of babies and young children – particularly those who are disadvantaged – so that they can flourish at home and when they get to school, and thereby break the cycle of disadvantage for the current generation of young children.

(http://www.surestart.gov.uk/aboutsurestart/)

From this perspective, disadvantage faced by poor families is a personal, developmental issue rather than a consequence of inequality (Gillies 2005b). With social and economic marginalisation explained at the level of the developing individual, working-class mothers can be blamed as too ignorant or plain lazy to pass on social betterment skills. The twin concern...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Chapter 1 Marginalised mothers
• Chapter 2 Re-framing class
• Chapter 3 Mothering and material struggle
• Chapter 4 Class, subjectivity and motherhood
• Chapter 5 Challenging from the margins
• Chapter 6 Working-class mothering
• Chapter 7 Situating understandings of mothering
• References