Parenting Culture Studies

Ellie Lee, Jennie Bristow, Charlotte Faircloth, Jan Macvarish

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137304605
• eBook ISBN: 9781137304612
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

Why have the minutiae of how parents raise their children become routine sources of public debate and policy making? This book provides in-depth answers to these features drawing on a wide range of sources from sociology, history, anthropology andpsychology, covering developments in both Europe and North America.

Part I
Parenting Culture

1

Intensive Parenting and the Expansion of Parenting

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, 2010, p. 1)

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 (Furedi, 2002; Hays, 1996; Nelson, 2010). This chapter focuses on this development, the rise of what has been called ‘intensive parenting’, and looks at how childrearing (particularly in the US and the UK, but also beyond) has expanded in recent years to encompass a growing range of activities that were not previously seen as an obligatory dimension of the task. We argue that the extension of ‘parenting’ is not down to material changes in the health and safety of children (if anything, they are healthier and safer than ever before). Rather, we suggest that our perception of children themselves has shifted.

Children are today seen as more ‘vulnerable’ to risks impacting on physical and emotional development than ever before. As a corollary, parents are now understood – by policymakers, parenting experts, and parents themselves – as ‘God-like’, and wholly deterministic in an individual child’s development and future. This has inflated the social importance of the parent role, precipitating a range of ‘intensive’ styles of parenting (readily understood through such tags as ‘Gina Ford’, ‘Tiger Mothers’, ‘Attachment’, or ‘Helicopter parenting’). In turn, these parenting styles have themselves become a lens through which many adults (mothers in particular) derive their sense of identity, in a form of ‘identity-work’ akin to a vocation (Faircloth, 2013).

Intensive parenting

One of the earliest – and still most influential – observers of the changes in parenting culture was the US sociologist Sharon Hays, in her 1996 book The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. She noticed that many mothers she worked with were going to extreme lengths in the course of raising their children:

Why do so many professional class employed women find it necessary to take the kids to swimming and judo and dancing and tumbling classes, not to mention orthodontists and psychiatrists and attention-deficit specialists? Why is the human bonding that accompanies breast-feeding considered so important that elaborate contraptions are now manufactured to allow children to suckle on mothers who cannot produce milk? Why are there copious courses for babies, training sessions in infant massage, sibling-preparedness workshops, and designer fashions for two-year olds? Why must a ‘good’ mother be careful to ‘negotiate’ with her child, refraining from the demands for obedience to an absolute set of rules? (Hays, 1996, p. 6)

Hays recognizes that children need an extended period of physical care to make the transition from infancy to adulthood. But as she says, ‘modern American mothers do much more than simply feed, change and shelter the child until age six. It is that ‘more’ with which I am concerned’ (Hays, 1996, p. 5; emphasis in original). This ‘more’ involves devoting large amounts of time, energy, and material resources to the child. There is a belief that a child’s needs must be put first and that mothering should be child-centred. This ‘more’ is also almost always done by the mother – these messages about parenting are more strongly internalized by women, so that even where fathers are very ‘involved’, ultimately the buck stops with the mother, says Hays. And finally, the ‘more’ requires that a mother pay attention to what experts say about child development. It is not enough to ‘make do’ and do what seems easiest.

Hays coins the term ‘intensive motherhood’ to describe an ideology that urges mothers to ‘spend a tremendous amount of time, energy and money in raising their children’ (Hays, 1996, p. x). According to this ideology, ‘the methods of appropriate child rearing are construed as child-centred, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive, and financially expensive’ (Hays, 1996, p. 8). But as she says, ‘the ideas are certainly not followed in practice in by every mother, but they are, implicitly or explicitly, understood as the proper approach to the raising of a child by the majority of mothers’ (Hays, 1996, p. 9). So rather than being a uniform set of practices, intensive motherhood is best thought of as ‘the normative standard … by which mothering practices and arrangements are evaluated’ (Arendell, 2000, p. 1195).

Hays is particularly puzzled by the emergence of the ideology of intensive motherhood at a time when women (in the US at least) make up over 50 per cent of the workforce (Economist, 2009). One might expect that, as women work longer hours, motherhood becomes less time-consuming – yet this does not appear to be the case. In fact, according to time-use studies, in the case of two-parent families, today’s children are in fact spending substantially more time with their parents than in 1981 (Gauthier et al., 2004; see also Sayer, 2004). This is despite an increase in female participation in work, attendance at day care and preschool by children, and an increase in time spent with children by fathers.

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the mothers with whom Hays worked talked about being tired, overstretched, and ‘torn’, when the worlds of work and home have both become so demanding. Not only are parents spending more time with their children but also the quality of that time has become far more intense.

The ‘new momism’, total motherhood, and the ‘mommy wars’

Numerous scholars have picked up on Hays’ concept of ‘intensive motherhood’ to describe the contemporary experience of parenting in Euro-American settings (Arendell, 2000; Bell, 2004; Douglas and Michaels, 2004; Freely, 2000; Hochschild, 2003; Maher and Saugeres, 2007; Ramaekers and Suissa, 2012; Umansky, 1996; Warner, 2006) and elsewhere (Faircloth et al., 2013).

Douglas and Michaels focus in particular on the idealistic portrayal of motherhood in the US media, where motherhood is presented as ultimately fulfilling for women. They refer to this as the ‘new momism’;

[the] insistence that no woman is truly complete or fulfilled unless she has kids, that women remain the best primary caretakers of children, and that to be a remotely decent mother, a woman has to devote her entire physical, psychological, emotional, and intellectual being, 24/7, to her children. The new momism is a highly romanticized and yet demanding view of motherhood in which the standards for success are impossible to meet. (Douglas and Michaels, 2004, p. 4)

They take particular issue with ‘celebrity mom’ spreads in glossy magazines, where the mother in question expounds on the joy of intensive childrearing (whether that be natural birth, breastfeeding, or one-on-one time with their child) while magically still managing to appear on catwalks and in blockbuster movies (a combination for which an army of behind-the-scenes helpers is presumably required). These idealized images do not chime with the experience of most working mothers who are more likely to feel tired, harassed, and less than sleek. What their work demonstrates is how this ‘new momism’ acts as an idealistic standard, which – although recognized to be ridiculous (by them as much as by other mothers) – retains a powerful hold over women as they go about imagining their own identities in relation to motherhood. Indeed, they show how these representations can induce strong feelings of failure when mothers do not manage to live up to them.

These representations are often manifested as antagonistic portrayals of working mothers in conflict with stay-at-home mothers, in what has been termed the ‘mommy wars’ (Douglas and Michaels, 2004). Hays recognizes here that while not all mothers will be working mothers, the cultural contradiction between the worlds of work and home is one that affects all parents. She notes that there is an irony, in that we live in a society where childrearing is generally devalued, and the emphasis is on the world of work, while at the same time holding up motherhood as an almost sacred endeavour. This means that people have to undertake what she calls ‘ideological work’ to make their own positions liveable. (In fact, contends Hays, people are forced to make their decisions around childcare in circumstances that are often beyond their control – although this rather pragmatic recognition does not sell newspapers so well.)

What is clear, then, is that whether women work or not the day-to-day practices of motherhood have become the subject of public, even of political debate (Freely, 2000). What parents feed their children, how they discipline them, where they put them to bed, how they play with them: all of these have become politically, and morally, charged questions. As Lee et al. note: ‘What were once considered banal, relatively unimportant, private routines of everyday life for children and families … have become the subject of intensive debates about the effects of parental activities for the next generation and society as a whole’ (Lee et al., 2010, p. 294).

Wolf (2011), writing about motherhood in the US, links this public interest to a broader argument around risk-consciousness and an emergence of a ‘neo-liberal’ culture, where dangers are redefined as risk and individuals hold themselves ever more responsible for managing risk and ensuring the safety of themselves and of those who are dependent on them (Lupton and Tulloch, 2002; Nelson, 2008). Wolf therefore talks about ‘total’ motherhood to characterize the experience of contemporary mothers. She notes that mothers are expected to become experts on all aspects of childrearing – making sure that those meal times, stories, and playing are not only safe, but also optimal for infant development: ‘lay paediatricians, psychologists, consumer products safety inspectors, toxicologists, and educators. Mothers must not only protect their children from immediate threats but are also expected to predict and prevent any circumstance that might interfere with putatively normal development’ (Wolf, 2011, p. xv).

Echoing Hays and Furedi, Wolf draws attention to the way in which this focus on risk frames good motherhood as totally child-centred, with no cost considered too high for mothers to bear. Since children are vulnerable and unable to protect themselves, mothers are charged with reducing (or avoiding all together) any risks to their children’s health and well-being. This frames the mother–child relationship in an antagonistic way:

Total motherhood is a moral code in which mothers are exhorted to optimize every aspect of children’s lives, beginning in the womb. Its practice is frequently cast as a trade-off between what mothers might like and what babies and children must have … When mothers have ‘wants’ – such as a sense of bodily, emotional, and psychological autonomy – but children have ‘needs’ – such as an environment in which anything less than optimal is framed as perilous – good mothering is defined as behaviour that reduces even infinitesimal or poorly understood risks to offspring, regardless of the potential cost to the mother. The distinction disappears between what children need and what might enhance their physical, intellectual, and emotional development. Mothers are held responsible for matters well outside their control, and they are told in various ways that they must eliminate even minute, ultimately ineradicable, potential threats to their children’s well-being. (Wolf, 2011, p. xv)

Furedi draws attention to the ‘army of professionals’ who now colonize parenting, as it is increasingly understood to be too important a task to be left up to parents. Instead, the view of policymakers (in both the US and the UK) is that parents should be ‘enabled’ to parent well, on the basis of ‘research about the characteristics of effective parenting’ (Johnson, 2007). Edwards and Gillies (2013) back up this analysis. In their research on the differences between parenting in 1960s and 2010s Britain – what would have been considered standard parenting practice (leaving children unsupervised to play, letting them go out at night alone, or asking older children to supervise younger ones, for example) would be considered neglectful today. The expectation more latterly is that parents should be constantly present to monitor their children, and protect them from ‘risks’, both known and unknown. Organizations such as the British Medical Association (BMA) have even gone so far as to abandon the use of the term ‘accident’ in favour of ‘unintentional injury’ in order to emphasize that what were once seen as random and unavoidable exposures to adversity for children can in fact be monitored, predicted, and prevented (British Medical Association, 2001, in Jenkins, 2006, p. 379). These shifts in the perception around risk have literally changed the physical landscape children inhabit – from the style of playground now being built to daily commutes children take (Franklin and Cromby, 2009; Stearns, 2009).

Nelson (2010) therefore highlights the way in which technologies themselves (and specific brands thereof) now characterize the experience of contemporary parenthood. In their wish to be ever-present, constantly attuned parents (and who would risk the accusation of being otherwise, when so much is at stake?), parents have embraced technologies such as baby monitors and cell phones to adopt a state of ‘hyper-vigilence’. The irony is that not only are these technologies financially expensive (in line with Hays’ outline of intensive motherhood) but they also do little to alleviate anxiety, and if anything they extend and intensify it (Nelson, 2008, p. 524). Interestingly, Nelson shows that while this is particularly acute in infancy, this vigilance extends beyond childhood, even to the point of leaving home to go to college. Many of her undergraduate students report being in contact with their parents several times a day, with parents being heavily involved with their children’s academic life (in contact with tutors by phone, email, and in person). Nelson draws on Lareau’s term ‘concerted cultivation’ not only to describe the constant work of making sure children achieve their potential (Lareau, 2003), but also points towards some of the potential negative effects of this hyper-vigilant involved parenting culture – recounting the example of parents who stay in their children’s room during the first week of college for fear that they cannot cope without them. This phenomenon has been termed ‘helicopter parenting’, and we discuss it further in our essay in Part II of this book.

What each of the scholars cited above point to is that within this new style of ‘parenting’, a specific skill-set is denoted: 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 and a particular educational strategy. There are, of course, many ways of caring for children ‘intensively’ (such as with methods that advocate the strict timetabling of feeding, sleeping, and so on, as well as the more ‘attachment’-based parenting models that I explore in my essay in Part II). But whichever way one does it, it is clear that there is a broader cultural logic around intensive parenting, which holds that parents are wholly responsible for their children’s outcomes.

This has interesting implication for the subjectivity of parents. Being well-educated is a requirement for participation in these choices between parenting models, 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. But this is also about adopting a certain sort of identity:

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. (Faircloth et al., 2013, p. 2)

Different performances of the cultural script

The ideology of intensive parenting described above does not, of course, affect all parents equally, and certainly not all parents today in the US (or the UK) are ‘intensive parents’. However, it remains an important ‘cultural script’ or ‘ide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword by Frank Furedi
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• Part I Parenting Culture
• Part II Essays on Parental Determinism
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index