Parenting After the Century of the Child

Travelling Ideals, Institutional Negotiations and Individual Responses

Tatjana Thelen, Haldis Haukanes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317084129
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Bridging the gap between studies orientated around parenthood and those on the 'globalization' of childhood, Parenting After the Century of the Child provides a timely intervention to the scholarship. It explores in depth negotiations of travelling ideals on childhood, showing the power of institutional implementations that affect parenting practices. Drawing on the latest research conducted in Europe, North and South America, Africa, and South East Asia, this book examines ideas currently travelling across the globe within institutional settings, providing new insights into the dynamics and ambivalences involved in the simultaneous reframing of childhood and parenthood. This truly global volume will appeal to anthropologists and sociologists with interests in gender, childhood studies and the sociology of the family.

1 Parenting After the Century of the Child: Introduction

Tatjana Thelen and Haldis Haukanes

DOI: 10.4324/9781315599403-1

In 1900, Swedish reformer Ellen Key proclaimed the new century as the ‘Century of the Child’.¹ Her utopian vision called for radical changes to the perspectives on children and greater attention to their upbringing and welfare (see also Cunningham 1995: 171–2, Montgomery 2009: 1). In recent years in particular, her vision seems to have gradually materialized; child issues have become a magnet for global mass media and are widely debated in public. Discussions around cases of care transfer, international adoption, child labour, and child abuse demonstrate the grimness of economic inequalities and occasionally reveal the media's taste for the peculiar. However, this increased attention is also a sign of a renewed public interest in the well-being of children and children's rights. It reflects the tendency to see child upbringing as a public rather than a purely private concern, one that demands state and sometimes international intervention. Indeed, after a long period of ‘privatization’ of childhood and family life as described by social historians (Ariès 1962, De Mause 1976, Cunningham 1995), recent decades have witnessed a new shift towards the ‘deprivatization’ of childhood and parenthood.

¹ Her book of the same title was extremely well received. First published in Swedish in 1900, it was translated into German in 1902 and into English in 1909. The book is not a scientific undertaking but a mixture of utopian, socialist, feminist but also social Darwinian thinking, and includes racist and eugenic ideas frequently overlooked by her public reception (Key 1992 [1902]).

The fact that issues concerning childhood and child upbringing in both national and international settings are now progressively dealt with in legal terms is a manifestation of this development. The new global interest in childhood is one aspect of what has been coined the ‘globalization of childhood’, i.e., the expansion of specific Western concepts of what childhood is and what a ‘good’ and ‘proper’ childhood should be.² However, concentration on ‘proper childhood’ tends to overshadow notions of ‘proper parents’ and ‘proper parenthood’ inherent in these debates. One of the objectives of this book is to follow the parallel circulation of ideas on proper childhood and proper parenthood. We argue that if a ‘global childhood’ is in the process of development, it is paralleled by an emerging ‘global parenthood’, and both are simultaneously negotiated in the relevant institutional arenas.

² Although we do not claim here that this ‘really’ happens, it does represent a sweeping image of globalization. Recent research on globalization, including some of the contributions to this volume, has stressed mutual influences and entanglements (e.g., Randeria 2007).

Global trends in understandings of proper childhood and parenthood do not exist in a vacuum or travel on their own. Dominant ideas are translated through various channels, including the above-mentioned mass media, national legislation and educational or child protection policies, to name but a few. They are enacted, negotiated and transformed through social interaction in diverse institutional settings, such as the legal environment, classrooms and case-worker/client consultations. In order to contribute to a greater understanding of these processes, analysis in this volume focuses on the mediation of norms to specific parents/caretakers in specific institutional environments. Individual chapters concentrate on how conceptualizing proper childhood through institutions also transports notions of proper parenthood and ultimately affects parenting practices.

Changing ideas and public discourses on the subject of ‘proper’ childhood and parenthood are linked to changing scientific debates. The emergence of new theories and concepts is in turn related to political, economic, demographic and technological developments. The ‘discovery of childhood’, for example, has largely been seen as linked to universal processes of modernization, where declining infant mortality and fertility rates play a vital role in parent–child relations.³ The growing politicization of childhood more recently observed (Leira and Saraceno 2008) and the attendant intensification of institutional negotiations are also illuminating for wider social concerns and scientific discourses where childhood holds the stage. The development of childhood into a separate field of scientific inquiry has, however, contributed to a deflection of attention from its relation to concepts and practices of parenthood. On the whole, studies deal with either parenthood or childhood, with noticeably more publications on the latter in recent years (e.g., Nakano Glenn et al. 1994, Maclean and Eekelaar 1997, Scherper-Hughes and Sargent 1998, Kugelberg 1999, McCarthy et al. 2003, Montgomery et al. 2003, Brembeck et al. 2004, James and James 2004, Kehily 2004, Lancy 2008, Montgomery 2009).

³ Similar to notions of childhood and parenthood, grandparenthood also changed as a result of shifting demographic patterns and childcare norms in the 18th and 19th century. Increased longevity and decreasing fertility contributed to the emerging idea that, grandparents are intimate relatives with a specific family role to play (Uhlenberg and Kirby 1998, Attias Donfut and Segalen 2000, Hagestad 2007, Hoff and Tesch-Römer 2007, Keck and Saraceno 2008).

The key aim of our book is to fill part of the gap between childhood-and parenthood-oriented studies with an in-depth examination of the interrelation between the dominant models of childhood and ideas about proper parenting practices. In our theoretical introduction we highlight phases and domains of scientific interest that have contributed to a certain compartmentalization of debates that have lost sight of the interrelation between childhood and parenthood. Individual empirical contributions follow the global circulation of ideas, translated through their institutional settings and encounters. They explore individual responses to the growing primacy given to close biological relations at the expense of other bonds, both in national and international policies, and as a general and historically manifested global tendency. Several chapters focus on just a few cases or even a single case. This allows for in-depth analysis of the paradoxes and conflicts that arise at the interface between established practices of formal and informal child transference and the new demands that derive from a biology-oriented paradigm of attachment and childcare within a few, albeit stable, relations transmitted through institutions such as schools and child protection systems. Making these interactions the focal point of analysis allows for new insights into the dynamics and ambivalences involved in the simultaneous reframing of childhood and parenthood. Moreover, it gives us the opportunity to bridge artificial gaps in the perspectives that concentrate exclusively on either children, family/gender relations or institutions.

The Organization of the Volume

The book begins with a theoretical chapter by the editors Haldis Haukanes and Tatjana Thelen. We start with a section that highlights specific debates on childhood and parenthood. The second section concentrates on the parallel globalization of childhood and parenthood, with particular emphasis on legal issues and settings for the reframing of parenthood. We continue with an elaboration of some of the topics introduced in the first section: the biological attachment paradigm and child participation and child rights.

The subsequent empirical chapters are divided into three parts covering a wide range of themes that are both distinct and interrelated. The first is entitled Travelling Ideals of Relatedness and Parenting Obligations.⁴ It focuses on the history and effects of the global spread of ideals related to the primacy of close biological relations at the expense of other bonds, as well as on the various grounds for and understandings of the nuclear family ideal and its implied (gendered) parental roles. Contributions from three different continents show how multiple perceptions of parenthood and childhood persist, but also how this diversity has been challenged. They demonstrate that the travelling of ideals of proper parenting frequently has a long history with unexpected sources and that new institutional frameworks can be effective in challenging current parenting practices.

⁴ On travelling models, particularly in development, see Rottenburg 2009.

The first contribution, co-authored by Susan D. Holloway, Yoko Yamamoto and Sawako Suzuki, focuses on negotiating mothering practices in Japan. The authors give a brief historical overview of shifting discourses and state policies associated with the mothering role. Contrary to stereotypical images of ‘traditional’ Japanese women as shy but dedicated homemakers and mothers, they show this to be the result of Western, especially German, ideas about the harm caused to infants by the daily separation from their working mothers, as well as those of feminist thinkers who accepted women's domestic destiny but sought to expand the range of socially permissible activities for women. These ideas coincided with economic developments that led to a shift in state policy on female labour market participation from the need for women to devote their energies to the farm or the factory to exclusive maternal care as crucial to children during their early years.⁵ In the second part of the article, the authors draw from interviews with Japanese mothers and investigate how these images of good mothering are elaborated and communicated to women in the workplace and their families in contemporary Japan, and how they are intertwined with new conceptions of the child as a human being in need of intensive monitoring and cultivation. They also show how women's indirect and fragmented forms of resistance partially dilute the ability of intermediate institutions to convey a state-sponsored ideology of parenting.

⁵ A growing emphasis on motherhood was also found in East European countries during socialism. The socialist ideal of womanhood was the working mother, with emphasis on ‘working’ in the initial socialist phase. When the birth rate fell into rapid decline throughout the region in the 1970s, however, the emphasis rapidly shifted to the ‘mother’ aspect of womanhood (Liljestøm 1995, Rotkirch 2000, Haukanes 2001).

The second contribution in this section likewise adopts a socio-historical perspective but veers the attention towards the institutional setting of school. Erdmute Alber describes shifts in the fostering practices of the Batombu in northern Benin in relation to the introduction of modern mass schooling. Adoption in this region was the norm rather than the exception, and considered an important component of ‘proper’ childhood. In terms of parenthood this meant that foster parents were seen as the ‘proper’ parents. These practices and notions were challenged by the introduction of Euro-American legal norms around biological succession and the introduction of mass schooling. Although foster parents were previously seen as the better parents, this view is now being progressively contested as schooling creates a new imbalance between kin living in the rural areas and those in the urban centres. Schooling itself provides social mobility through education for those who live in cities, so that parents in urban settings would deprive their children of this opportunity if they were to send them to foster families in rural areas. As a result, fostering practices have taken another form rather than disappeared and led, among other things, to a new gender imbalance. Moreover, this chapter explores a case where schooling played a more decisive role in challenging parenting practices than the travelling model of biological relatedness and/or the idea that biological parents constitute the sole option when it comes to ‘proper’ parenting.

The last chapter in this section shifts the emphasis from concrete institutional innovations to the sources of inspiration for young people's desires and dreams about family and parenthood in the context of global mass culture. Co-authors Haldis Haukanes and Marit Tjomsland analyse changing ideals of family and parental roles as expressed in young people's narratives of their future lives in Tunisia and the Czech Republic. Youth from both countries seem to share the same family ideal, i.e., they dream of starting their own nuclear family. However, closer scrutiny reveals significant national differences, both in the perception of what a nuclear family is and does, and how gendered parenting roles are constituted within its frame. Divergence is also found in the amount of anxiety expressed by youth in relation to starting and supporting a family. The authors argue that while the consumption of global mass culture forms a substantial part of adolescent daily life, it does not appear to provide relevant models for their individual family-related life scripts.

The second part of the book is entitled Negotiating Responsibilities in Education and Child Welfare Institutions. The chapters in this section concentrate on the uneasy translations and transmissions of norms from ‘above’ in the local context. Conflict and resistance take place on several levels, even in the institutions themselves. The first chapter by Esben Leifsen and the subsequent chapter by Tiffany McComsey both focus on childcare transference/child removal in urban contexts. Both authors demonstrate the intense interplay between notions of childhood and of parenthood in situations where child welfare is at stake, but also the critical consequences of allowing one set of ideals to overrule another.

The first chapter by Esben Leifsen deals with these issues in the Latin American context of Quito in Ecuador. Leifsen examines in detail the interaction between a local mother and child welfare experts from an international NGO. Taking a situation where marginal mestizo women ar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Parenting After the Century of the Child: Introduction
• 2 Parenthood and Childhood: Debates within the Social Sciences
• Part I: Travelling Ideals About Relatedness, Family and Parenting Obligations
• Part II: Negotiating Responsibilities in Education and Child Welfare Institutions
• Part III: Translating International Legislation to Local Settings
• Index