Parenting in Global Perspective

Negotiating Ideologies of Kinship, Self and Politics

Charlotte Faircloth, Diane M. Hoffman, Linda L. Layne, Charlotte Faircloth, Diane M. Hoffman, Linda L. Layne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136246913
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology

Drawing on both sociological and anthropological perspectives, this volume explores cross-national trends and everyday experiences of 'parenting'.

Parenting in Global Perspective examines the significance of 'parenting' as a subject of professional expertise, and activity in which adults are increasingly expected to be emotionally absorbed and become personally fulfilled. By focusing the significance of parenting as a form of relationship and as mediated by family relationships across time and space, the book explores the points of accommodation and points of tension between parenting as defined by professionals, and those experienced by parents themselves. Specific themes include:

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• the ways in which the moral context for parenting is negotiated and sustained

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• the structural constraints to 'good' parenting (particularly in cases of immigration or reproductive technologies)

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• the relationship between intimate family life and broader cultural trends, parenting culture, policy making and nationhood

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• parenting and/as adult 'identity-work'.

Including contributions on parenting from a range of ethnographic locales – from Europe, Canada and the US, to non-Euro-American settings such as Turkey, Chile and Brazil, this volume presents a uniquely critical and international perspective, which positions parenting as a global ideology that intersects in a variety of ways with the political, social, cultural, and economic positions of parents and families.

Part I

The moral context for parenting

1 ‘Where are the parents?’

Changing parenting responsibilities between the 1960s and the 2010s

Rosalind Edwards and Val Gillies

Introduction

In 1947, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, British Pathé Pictorial produced a short film, a mass-distribution filler shown in cinemas, entitled ‘East and West’. It was built around the symbolic and long-standing confluence of space and class in London, with its affluent middle- and upper-class ‘West End’ and poor working class and immigrant ‘East End’. The film contrasted life for the pampered children and dogs of the West End, constantly cared for and watched over, and isolated, with the carefree children and dogs of the East End, allowed to roam and part of a (romanticized) strong community. Over clips of a gang of rather grimy and scruffy young boys playing cricket on rubblestrewn waste ground ‘down’ in the East End of London, without an adult in sight, followed by shots of individual or pairs of clean, well-dressed children accompanied by nanny, feeding ducks or driving small replica boats on a lake in a park ‘up’ in the West End, the commentator enunciates:

[The East End kids’] playground is all too often the place where the bomb dropped. He learns to take his pleasure where he can. What have [the West End children] got that the other fellow hasn't? Probably a nanny keeping an eye on them, a nanny who never lets them out of her sight, these children of the west who must dress up even to play in the park.¹

Later, he muses about both children and dogs: ‘Perhaps there is such a thing as too much kindness, too much care’.

It truly is difficult to envisage a film with such sentiments being made today and treated as uncontentious. Not only would the equation of children and dogs be unacceptable, the contemporary wisdom would have the film turned on its head. Rather than constructed as admirably carefree, the East End ‘kids’ would be posed both as being in danger and a danger to others. They would be regarded as potentially at risk from neglectful parents who allow them unsupervised play in hazardous conditions, and a risk to others with their anti-social behaviour. In turn the West End ‘children’ would be seen as well-cared for, supervised and safe, brought up to be the well-behaved neo-liberal citizens of the future as a result of contemporary intensive parenting practices (Hays 1996) that are the focus of this edited collection. Contemporary wisdom also seems to have rewritten Pathé’s perhaps overblown contrast of the time, posing the immediate postwar period as an undifferentiated model of parenting along the West End lines.

In this chapter, it is not our intention to endorse a particular view of the best conditions for children. We are not going to argue that the East End past was a golden age for both children and parents akin to ideas about ‘free range’ parenting (e.g. Skenazy 2009; see also Jiménez Sedano this volume) that ostensibly challenge overprotective intensity, or champion techniques of contemporary parental responsibilization, for example. Rather, our concern here is the way that the immediate post-war past has become mobilized in dominant ideas about the state of parenting and children's upbringing in contemporary Britain. In particular, we are concerned with a critique of the particular claim that the last fifty years or so have seen a deterioration in the transmission of parenting skills, no longer passed down from generation to generation because of the fracturing of traditional support systems with dire consequences for society. It is this claim that helps to undergird parental pedagogy television programmes such as ‘Supernanny’, discussed by Tracey Jensen in her chapter in this collection – which, returning to British Pathé Pictorial's conflation of children and dogs, have been likened to dog training programmes (Hendrick 2012).²

We outline and assess those claims through an exploratory analysis of parents bringing up children, drawing on in-depth data from community research studies carried out in the 1960s; the ‘classics’ of British sociology (Thompson and Corti 2004). In particular, we focus on a comparison of prevalent ideas about parents’ responsibilities in relation to knowing where their children are.

Contemporary ideas about parenting deficit

The construction of family as a problem is a long-standing, remarkably consistent feature of British public, political and academic debates (Rodger 1996; Welshman 2007). Part of this construction is the notion that the strength of the family and thus its ability to fulfil its true function lies in the past (see also Coontz, 2000, as well as contributions to this volume from Faircloth, Dow and Jiménez Sedano respectively, for discussions of nostalgia for the past of family life and parenting in different national contexts). Quite what the problem of family is has shifted over the years, according to the ideal that is being harked back to. Nonetheless, the story remains structured broadly around the calamitous moral consequences of social and economic transformations for family life. Most recently, concern has focused on childrearing. Contemporary family life is said to be characterized by a decline in values of duty and responsibility, undermining good parenting, placing great strain on the institution of the family, drastically undermining supports for good parenting and thereby damaging social cohesion more generally (Gillies 2005).

This theme has been ramped up and powerfully articulated as part of the ‘Broken Britain’ thesis of the Conservative-led coalition government (a coalition between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties). Under this thesis, poor parenting is held to account for a range of social ills, including poverty, crime, irresponsibility and selfishness. This blame reached a height in the aftermath of the English riots in the summer of 2011, with social commentators and politicians attributing youth disorder to a crisis in parenting skills and commitment. For example, the Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, commented that the rioters were the product of ‘neglect and immorality’, with parents not caring where their children are, let along what they are doing. In a speech given in the aftermath of the riots, he said:

The question people asked over and over again last week was ‘where are the parents? Why aren't they keeping the rioting kids indoors?’ Tragically that's been followed in some cases by judges rightly lamenting: ‘why don't the parents even turn up when their children are in court?’ Well, join the dots and you have a clear idea about why some of these young people were behaving so terribly. Either there was no one at home, they didn't much care or they'd lost control … So if we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where we've got to start.

(15 August 2011³)

This narrative of deterioration in parenting has a cross-party consensus, from the left as well as right of politics. It has featured prominently in policy reports, with an emphasis on early intervention as a cost-effective measure for tackling social problems. For example, in a report for the government on child poverty, the Labour Member of Parliament (MP) leading the review – Frank Field – recommended that, ‘a modern definition of poverty must take into account those children whose parents remain disengaged from their responsibilities’ (2010: 15). This focus on parenting is a ‘modern’ definition because in Field's view, disengaged parenting was not the issue in the past that it is now:

Since 1969 I have witnessed a growing indifference from some parents to meeting the most basic needs of children, and particularly younger children, those who are least able to fend for themselves. I have also observed how the home lives of a minority but, worryingly, a growing minority of children, fails to express an unconditional commitment to the successful nurturing of children.

(2010: 18)

Field's mention of 1969 is interesting. In Britain, it is the year of student protests forcing the closure of the London School of Economics, violent political and sectarian rioting in Northern Ireland, and sentencing of the notorious ‘East End’ gangland Kray twins for murder. This is hardly a picture of a wholly stable, ordered and respectful society. 1969 is also the year in which Frank Field became Director of the Child Poverty Action Group (serving for a decade), a voluntary organization set up in 1965 to raise awareness of family poverty and campaign for action to alleviate it.

Field's report resonates with long-standing interpretations by those on the political right, particularly in its invocation of a ‘golden age’ of parenting and family in the 1950s and 1960s. As we consider in this chapter, however, such claims have little basis in evidence of everyday parenting practices of the time. Furthermore, crucially, they fail to engage with the dramatic change in understandings of children's capacities and needs over the last half century. We will be discussing some insights from a research project, working with data from archived classic British community studies of the 1960s, that we undertook with the intention of exploring social change and continuity in family relationships and parenting support systems.

Assessing social change in parenting through working with archived data

In the main, theorists derive evidence of social change in family lives from large scale, longitudinal quantitative social surveys such as the UK Millennium Cohort and Understanding Society studies (Gillies and Edwards 2005; Savage 2007). This emphasis on macro, demographic change rarely is accompanied by a detailed exploration of those lives as they actually were lived in the past. Without such detail, however, it is difficult to assess the nature and extent of social shifts in community, family life and parenting (Charles et al. 2008; Crow 2008). Family forms may change but their content may well stay the same, or vice versa. What is deemed acceptable or unacceptable may shift but the distribution of liberal and conservative views may remain much the same. For example, Simon Duncan (2011) shows that the majority of people in both 1950 and the present day held/hold ‘pragmatic’ views about extra-marital sex and divorce, within the context of the debates prevalent at each time point. Further, cyclical patterns might be mistaken for linear change, as Liz Stanley (1992) notes in relation to family structures. And enduring concerns may be reframed in new language and understood as different, which Harry Goulbourne (2006) reveals in exploring the way that African-Caribbean families’ marginalization from mainstream society has been explained through assertions of, variously, their lack of ‘culture’ in the 1970s and their lack of integrative ‘social capital’ in the 2000s. These sorts of issues highlight the need for careful revisiting of past family relationships to better understand current experiences.

Given these pitfalls, we have been working with material from archived British classic community studies from the 1960s in an attempt to provide insights into the nature and extent of social change in parenting practices. Interestingly, in the light of contemporary assertions about social change, social research carried out in the 1960s also was often preoccupied with what were regarded as major shifts occurring in society. The current sense of seismic social and material transformations in family life and parenting that provided the context for our work, then, is a continuous political theme across the post-war period.

In what follows, we will be bringing insights from our analysis of some of these 1960s research studies into dialogue with the prevalent contemporary policy picture of a decline in parenting commitment. We will be drawing in particular on illustrative data from two of the archived collection of classic studies carried out by Dennis Marsden, which offer valuable insights into a range of experiences of family life and parenting at the time.⁴ The ‘Salford Slum and Re-housing’ study was carried out between 1962 and 1963⁵ and focused on the consequences of the rehousing programme for traditional working class communities. The extensive archive of fieldnotes and accounts of interviews contain material on family and community life, and employment. The ‘Mothers Alone’ study was carried out between 1965 and 1966⁶ and examined the lives of lone mothers drawing the National Assistance welfare support benefit. There are 116 accounts of in-depth interviews with the mothers, addressing living standards, poverty and support networks, notably relationships with fathers and wider family and friends.

It is important to note that the 1960s research materials bear little resemblance to the standard audio-recorded and verbatim transcribed data familiar to today's researchers. The material from Dennis Marsden's studies consist of a hand- and type-written mix of remembered quotes recorded after the event alongside descriptions, reflections and conjecture. Figure 1.1 provides an example. As Mike Savage (2010) points out, the 1960s was a period in which the qualitative social research interview about everyday life was emergent practice. Researchers did not distinguish between the narratives that they elicited from interviewees and their own observations, value judgments and moral evaluations as appropriate data. In order to analyse the material from his studies then, it was necessary to treat Dennis as a respondent in his own right rather than simply as a researcher (Gillies and Edwards 2012).

This issue is to the fore especially where investigators’ lives were deeply intertwined with those they were researching. For example, in the Salford study, Dennis Marsden, his then wife, Pat, and their two young children spent a year and a half living on a public housing estate alongside his research subjects. Dennis and Pat each kept diaries containing detailed descriptions of everyday life and the families they lived amongst, providing a powerful and vivid insight into their experiences and practices.

Their accounts of lives on the estate were inevitably founded on their assumptions, values and expectations, which are in themselves revelatory. Dennis and Pat clearly felt empathy for these disadvantaged families and had a strong commitment to social change. But, as with all researchers, their narrations often reflect their class trajectories and standards, and most likely the preoccupations of the day. For example, Pat keeps track of how many sweets the estate children are given to eat and how often they are sent to Mr Chippy (the van that came round the estate in the early evening selling chips) for their tea, while Dennis documents drinking habits, swearing in the presence of children and any hint of sexual impropriety among women.

From a current perspective, accounts of the research subjects in the original collections are often shockingly frank, consisting of unfiltered and highly personal descriptions of their appearance and perceived intelligence. Sexist and racist assumptions pervade the accounts, offending both present day moral sensibilities and conventions arou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The moral context for parenting
• Part II The structural constraints to ‘good’ parenting
• Part III Negotiating parenting culture
• Part IV Parenting and/as identity
• Afterword
• Index