Parenting Culture Studies 3031441559, 9783031441554

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Parenting Culture Studies Second Edition Ellie Lee Jennie Bristow Charlotte Faircloth Jan Macvarish

Parenting Culture Studies

Ellie Lee • Jennie Bristow Charlotte Faircloth • Jan Macvarish

Parenting Culture Studies 2nd ed. 2023

Ellie Lee Centre for Parenting Culture Studies University of Kent Canterbury, UK

Jennie Bristow Sociology Canterbury Christ Church University Canterbury, UK

Charlotte Faircloth Social Research Institute University College London London, UK

Jan Macvarish Centre for Parenting Culture Studies University of Kent Canterbury, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-44155-4    ISBN 978-3-031-44156-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44156-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2014, 2023, corrected publication 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Mel Yates / DigitalVision / gettyimages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

The original version of the book has been revised. A correction to this book can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44156-1_15

In memory of our greatly missed colleagues and friends, Helen Reece (1968–2016) and Helene Guldberg (1965–2022); two of the brightest minds we had the privilege to benefit from, whose contributions we continue to draw on, and who are forever in our thoughts.

Foreword

The 2nd Edition of Parenting Culture Studies is published at a time when the relationship between mothers and fathers and their children has turned into a permanent subject of controversy. There is a constant proliferation of parenting styles, leading to unhelpful competition between them. Therapeutic parenting is vying with traditional parenting, while gentle parenting contrasts itself with attachment parenting. A growing obsession with parenting identity has led to the emergence of a confusing taxonomy of parenting styles such as High Achievement, Disciplined, Free-Range, Child-Led, Helicopter, New Age, strict, and so on. The unprecedented significance attached to parental styles and identity is fuelled by the growing tendency to politicize child-rearing. Western culture attaches such significance to parenting because it is represented as the source of virtually every social problem that afflicts our communities. Poor parenting, or the absence of so-called parenting skills, is held responsible for the cultivation of dysfunctional children who in turn become maladjusted grown-ups. From this fatalistic perspective, the ‘parenting deficit’ is blamed for children’s mental health problems, educational difficulties, anti-social behaviour, and poor coping skills, and the destructive consequences of bad parenting last throughout a person’s life. According to the wisdom that prevails amongst policymakers and experts, everything from crime and drug addiction to teenage pregnancy and self-harm can be traced back to the way that mothers and fathers brought up their children.

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Alarmist accounts of parental failure leading to the radicalization of youngsters and an outburst of anti-social behaviour have become a regular theme promoted in popular culture, and not just in popular culture. When France descended into a state of violent riots and civil conflict in June 2023, President Emmanuel Macron reminded the nation’s mothers and fathers that it is ‘the responsibility of parents to keep them at home’. He added that ‘it’s not the state’s job to act in their place’ (The Local, 2023). As it happens, public authorities continually query the ability of parents to act responsibly without their assistance. From the standpoint of public policy, parenting has mutated into a skill, which is best learned through the medium of training and expertise. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)’s campaign titled ‘Parenting Is Also Learned’ offers a paradigm where mothers and fathers are expected to follow the wisdom of professional parenting expertise (UNICEF, 2018). Typically, these campaigns are in the business of raising the awareness of parents. In the relation between the awareness raisers and their target audience, the parents are reduced to the role of social inferiors. Expert authority justifies its intervention in the field of child-rearing on the grounds that it provides the intellectual and moral resources for the exercise of responsible parenting. Like Macron, it believes that irresponsible or illiterate parenting is the source of many of society’s ills. UNICEF and numerous awareness-raising campaigns insist that it is never too early to rely on expert wisdom to influence the life of a child. They believe that unless from birth children are reared in accordance with expert advice, there is a risk that their development will be compromised. This outlook— best characterized as parental determinism—constitutes the dominant theme of professional expert advice. Though communicated in the language of scientific expertise, parental determinism resembles a quasi-religious discourse. The belief that the child will be punished for the sins of the parents has its origins in biblical times. Exodus 20:5 warns people that the Lord is a ‘jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children’. However, in today’s secular world, the term ‘sin’ has been de-moralized and transformed into a deficit. Divine intervention is not necessary where children are seen to be punished by the mere act of bad parenting. The pathologizing of parenting should not be construed as merely the secular variant of a very old religious theme. God’s warning was addressed to those fathers and mothers who actually committed a sin. In present times, it is not just a small group of irresponsible mothers and fathers who

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are seen to constitute a problem, but all parents. In its pure form, the condemnation of the parent as a problem was first crystallized in the writing of eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau’s belief that people had to be saved from the detrimental effects of customs and traditions underlay his hostility to the authority of the father and the mother, for ‘parents are the agents who transmit false traditions and habits from one generation to the next’ (Shklar, 1987, p. 170). The theme of curbing the influence that mothers and fathers exercise over their children has recurred periodically throughout modern times. However, it is only since the 1970s that parenting has come to be seen as one of the central issues facing policymakers and their experts. The remarkable expansion of public interest in child-rearing is underpinned by the assumption that there is a direct causal link between the quality of parenting and social outcomes. This proposition has been particularly welcomed by policymakers, who find intervention in the sphere of parenting far more straightforward than engaging with wider social issues. Over recent decades, the tendency to link social problems to child-­ rearing practices has led to its elaboration as a causal relationship. The idea of a one-dimensional, causal relationship between parenting and socioeconomic outcomes tends to be conveyed through discrete and specific claims, such as the allegation that a lack of proper nurturing has a significant influence on the development of children’s brains. The transformation of parenting into a self-contained cause of childhood dysfunction has led to its politicization. However, parenting is not simply politicized; it is also transformed into a cultural accomplishment that can be cultivated to produce positive outcomes. So, parents supposedly have the power either to damage their child or to improve their life chances, through the exercise of such everyday practices as how one reads to one’s child, or the form of discipline that is used. With so much at stake, it is not surprising that parenting is more and more regarded as a subject that requires the constant attention of policymakers and experts. As the contributors to this book indicate, parenting is no longer an issue that confines itself to the relationship between mothers and fathers and their children. Parental determinism has its focus not only on the child but also on society as a whole. Like the economic determinism or the biological determinism of the past, parental determinism is alleged to explain a bewildering variety of behaviours. When leading politicians on both sides of the Atlantic can argue that bad parenting harms more children

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than poverty, then it becomes evident that parental determinism has become the mirror image of economic determinism. The chapters in this book provide an innovative approach towards the conceptualization of what is distinctive about contemporary parenting culture. Their arguments suggest that this issue is too important to be monopolized by one academic discipline. Since the publication of the 1st Edition of Parenting Culture Studies, the approach outlined in these essays has had a significant impact on scholarly literature on child-rearing. Readers will see that the chapters published in this edition take forward the insights of this exciting field of scholarship. Professor Emeritus University of Kent 

Frank Furedi

References

The Local. (2023, June 30). Macron calls on parents to help and blames video games for riots. The Local Fr. https://www.thelocal.fr/20230630/ macron-­calls-­on-­parents-­to-­help-­and-­blames-­video-­games-­for-­riots Shklar, J. N. (1987). Men and citizens: A study of Rousseau’s social theory. Cambridge University Press. UNICEF Press Release. (2018, November 5). “Parenting is also learned” campaign launched to help parents raise happy, healthy and smart children. Retrieved June 30, 2023, from https://www.unicef.org/northmacedonia/ press-­releases/parenting-­also-­learned-­campaign-­launched-­help-­parents-­raise-­ happy-­healthy-­and-­smart

Contents

Part I Parenting Culture   1 1 Introduction  3 Ellie Lee 2 Intensive  Parenting and the Expansion of Parenting 33 Charlotte Faircloth 3 Experts  and Parenting Culture 69 Ellie Lee 4 The  Politics of Parenting 99 Jan Macvarish 5 Who  Cares for Children? The Problem of Intergenerational Contact131 Jennie Bristow Part II Case Studies in Parental Determinism 163 6 Policing  Pregnancy: The Pregnant Woman Who Drinks165 Ellie Lee

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7 The  Problem of ‘Attachment’: The ‘Detached’ Parent189 Charlotte Faircloth 8 Babies’  Brains and Parenting Policy: The Insensitive Mother215 Jan Macvarish 9 Intensive  Fatherhood? The (Un)involved Dad241 Charlotte Faircloth 10 The  Double Bind of Parenting Culture: Helicopter Parents and Cotton Wool Kids267 Jennie Bristow Part III Parenting and the Pandemic 291 11 ‘Parenting’  After Covid-19: When the Quantity of ‘Quality Time’ Becomes Untenable293 Charlotte Faircloth, Katherine Twamley, and Humera Iqbal 12 From  Safeguarding to Childism? Covid-19 and the School Closures Debate317 Jennie Bristow 13 Pregnancy  and Vaccination: The Precautionary Principle and Parenting Culture in Covid Times341 Ellie Lee 14 Conclusion367 Ellie Lee, Jennie Bristow, Charlotte Faircloth, and Jan Macvarish

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 Correction to: Parenting Culture StudiesC1 Ellie Lee, Jennie Bristow, Charlotte Faircloth, and Jan Macvarish Appendix: Data Set for Media Analysis (Chapter 13)373 Index379

About the Authors

Jennie  Bristow  is a Reader in Sociology at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. Charlotte Faircloth  is an associate professor in the UCL Social Research Institute. From sociological and anthropological perspectives, her work has focused on parenting, gender, and reproduction. Her monographs include Militant Lactivism? and Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood (Palgrave), and she is co-editor of Parenting in Global Perspective, Feeding Children and Conceiving Contemporary Parenthood. Ellie Lee  is Professor of Family and Parenting Research and the director of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent, where she has worked for two decades. Jan  Macvarish  is a visiting researcher with the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies and is the author of Neuroparenting, The Expert Invasion of Family Life, published by Palgrave.

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 8.1

Books about parenting, 1900–2019. (Note: Graph generated by Google Books Ngram viewer) Front cover of the official report, Early Intervention: Smart Investment, Massive Savings (Allen, 2011b)

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PART I

Parenting Culture

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Ellie Lee

The origins of this second edition of Parenting Culture Studies go back to the mid-2000s when Charlotte Faircloth and I became involved in research projects about a very necessary but ostensibly mundane aspect of being a parent: feeding babies. Back then, we both spent time interviewing and talking with mothers, and reading and reviewing existing research from disciplines including sociology, political science, anthropology, philosophy, and history. We wrote up and published our work (Faircloth, 2010, 2013; Lee, 2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2011; Lee & Bristow, 2009) and developed an active dialogue with colleagues doing similar research to our own (Blum, 1999; Knaak, 2005, 2006, 2010; Murphy, 1999, 2000, 2003, 2004; Wall, 2001; Wolf, 2007, 2011). We also discussed our research in many non-academic forums, with healthcare providers, advocacy groups, in newspapers, and in TV and radio debates. These were typical comments sent to us, in response to observations we made: Let me get it out there—I am a non-breastfeeding mum. I breastfed my daughter for six long weeks. Long for me and long for her. It’s simple. Breast milk did not agree with her. But, here I am, yet again, finding myself explaining why I did not breastfeed for the recommended six months. It’s like I have to give an excuse, a plausible one at that, as to why I failed my daughter. And failure it is considered. (Emily)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Lee et al., Parenting Culture Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44156-1_1

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I am a mother of a seven-month-old and I have chosen to formula feed. I have been amazed at the amount of pressure placed on women to breastfeed. In the early days following my daughter’s birth, I felt under a huge amount of pressure to attempt breastfeeding at a time when I was too tired and emotionally vulnerable to protest. (Sabina)

Historical studies indicate that how babies are fed has long been construed a matter of public debate and public interest. Yet, as the accounts from Sabina and Emily showed us, mothers in the twenty-first century can experience feeling a remarkable level of pressure around how they feed their babies, and in turn report a strong sense of having to ‘explain’ or ‘account’ for their decisions and actions. Sabina found there was manifest ‘pressure to breastfeed’ and Emily found herself needing to ‘account’ repeatedly for what she ended up doing, when she found breastfeeding did not work out. Both these women indicated they experienced not breastfeeding as a measure of failure; indeed, Emily stated she had to ‘give an excuse … as to why I failed my daughter’. The socio-cultural environment in which babies are cared for, this suggests, is one in which the relation between maternal success, failure, and how a baby is fed is deemed to be a direct one. These women’s accounts also show public surveillance and monitoring of maternal decisions has not receded in the twenty-first century, regardless of drastic declines in infant mortality and morbidity associated with very early childhood in the past. This monitoring strongly influences the formation of their experience and identity. As we indicate in other parts of this book, feeding babies has also become connected to an ever-widening set of claims about children’s ‘success’ or ‘failure’, which make what parents do determinant for ‘outcomes’. For example, the biological core of a person—their brain—has come to be viewed as profoundly and directly impacted by the way that person was fed as a baby (O’Connor & Joffe, 2013). Since the first edition of this book was published a decade ago, the feeding of young babies has subsequently become absorbed in the UK as one component of a politically dominant and largely unchallenged framework for parenting termed ‘1001 Critical Days’. According to this framework, it has been proven by science that the 1001 days from conception to a child’s second birthday are ‘critical’ for future mental and physical health, and so the prevention of social problems. This means, ‘Two is Too Late!’ (Leadsom, 2021, p. 5). Members of the British monarchy led by the Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton, have, through The Royal Foundation, increasingly taken on a leadership role in

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this area. The Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood was launched in 2021 to ‘drive awareness of and action on the extraordinary impact of the early years, in order to transform society for the future’ (Royal Foundation, n.d.). ‘Big Change Starts Small, We’re on a Mission to Transform Society Through Early Childhood’ declares the homepage of the Centre (Centre for Early Childhood, n.d.). As Jan Macvarish has argued, key to this mission of ‘raising awareness’ is addressing the perceived deficit in parental recognition that what happens in the early years is more important than anything else. As she indicates, however, despite its cheery presentation, this mission constitutes a rejection of parents’ sense that ‘the quality of schools, opportunities for employment, the housing market, bad luck, and many, many other factors shape our lives far more than how many nursery rhymes we were sung at six months’ and, inevitably, ‘rather than offering parents respite from external judgement… [encourages] more of it’ (Macvarish, 2020). Research also shows, however, that even ostensibly ‘doing the right thing’ as an ‘aware parent’ does not necessarily offer protection from the monitoring and surveillance associated with this powerful emphasis on the causality of parenting in the development in individual and social dysfunction. The accounts from women who did not breastfeed, above, bring to light something of the way the mantra that characterizes official views— that ‘breast is best’—works itself out. Yet breastfeeding (especially if a mother decides to carry on giving her baby milk this way for a lengthy time) can also be viewed as a matter of concern for others (Faircloth, 2013). Far from being an ‘expert-free cultural space’, this way of feeding a baby is medicalized and professionalized (Avishai, 2007, p. 27). A professional sector, that of the ‘lactation specialist’, emerged over the late twentieth century with its own publications, ‘academic’ journals, and claims to be heard by both policymakers and parents, on the grounds that there is such a thing as breastfeeding expertise. The conclusions we drew from our research experiences two decades ago informed the central propositions of this book as it first appeared in 2014, and continue to, in this second edition. These can be summarized as follows: • Parental action and behaviour, in everyday, ordinary life, is considered to have a determining, causal impact on a child’s future happiness, healthiness, and success; in the twenty-first century, ­ ‘parental determinism’ is very strong.

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• We live at a time when parents will inevitably be informed, more or less explicitly, that they need to understand that what they do as parents is far more complicated than they might imagine, and they need to be made more aware, educated, and trained to understand this. • The dominant message communicated to mothers and fathers is that the health, welfare, and success (or lack of it) of their children can be directly attributed to the decisions they make about matters like feeding their children; ‘parenting’, parents are told, is both the hardest and most important job in the world. Tomorrow depends on it. • The formation of parental identity is strongly influenced by parental determinism, with important, negative, effects for the conduct of the vitally important task of raising new generations. This book has four main authors, each of whom has researched different, but related, aspects of parenting culture, now for many years. Our aim in writing the book together was, and remains, to explain why the everyday and routine matters of being a parent, typified by the example of feeding babies, have become the ‘big issues’ they now appear to be, and explore effects of this development, discussed here and elsewhere, as ‘intensive parenting’. Centrally, we highlight the main feature of what we term parenting culture which, as indicated above, is the growth and influence of ‘parental determinism’ (Furedi, 2002/2008). This is a form of deterministic thinking that construes the everyday activities of parents as directly and causally associated with ‘failing’ or harming children, and so the wider society. The project of Parenting Culture Studies 1 is grounded in an attempt to understand better the roots and trajectory of parental determinism, and overall, this project is informed by two central propositions. First, in common with the tradition of Family Studies (Ribbens-­ McCarthy & Edwards, 2011), a genuinely interdisciplinary approach is of most value, starting less with discipline-based concerns than with an interest in bringing together insights from any scholarship that can help shed light on the development and contours of this form of determinism. As such, Parenting Culture Studies seeks to draw upon scholarship that is attentive to the need to try and answer the question of how and why the task that should properly be shared by all adults—that of shaping and developing the next generation—has come to be thought of and fetishized as ‘parenting’. While the approach taken by this book’s authors is primarily sociological, we have pursued the development of Parenting Culture

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Studies by engaging and debating with academics from other disciplines, such as the philosophy of education, anthropology, psychology, law, and history, and from countries other than England. We hope that is reflected in what you read here. Second, a key challenge is to develop the best understanding we can of the relationship between continuity and change. The proposition that the sociocultural context in which parents raise their children has changed in recent decades seems, to us, to be strongly supported by the evidence. For example, as we discuss below, a distinct and specific terminology is now used to discuss (and make problematic) what parents do, and this is most clear in the way that raising children is now called ‘parenting’. The verb ‘to parent’ is itself relatively new, and Fig. 1.1 below shows how interest in this new practice of ‘parenting’ escalated from around 1970. A useful starting point is to ask questions about the new language for describing the task of raising children and explore what appears to be new. However, as Frank Furedi suggests in his Foreword, and the chapters that follow make clear, important continuities with the past also emerge. For example, for many centuries there have been ‘child experts’ or self-­ proclaimed ‘authorities’ who set out their views on the mistakes they think parents make. The relation between past and present is thus posed as a key question for the study of parenting culture, leading to the matter of the future, that is, how might our parenting culture develop and change for the better? How might the concept of parental determinism best be interrogated and challenged? We return to these questions at the end of the book.

Fig. 1.1  Books about parenting, 1900–2019. (Note: Graph generated by Google Books Ngram viewer)

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Here, we make a few further preliminary comments about our general approach. Two written works in particular have inspired our efforts to develop the study of parenting culture; these are Sharon Hays’ 1996 work, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood and Frank Furedi’s Paranoid Parenting. (This was published first in 2001. A revised edition with new introduction appeared in 2008, and an American version was published in 2002. We make it clear in the text to which of these versions we refer.) Both Hays’ and Furedi’s texts stand as influential works, each having been cited many hundreds of times. The terms developed in these books to capture contemporary experience—‘intensive motherhood’ in the former and ‘paranoid parenting’ in the latter—have become reference points within and beyond the world of scholarship. This book, and the wider project of Parenting Culture Studies, aims to take forward an ongoing conversation about these two terms and explore what they capture about the emphasis now placed on ‘parenting’. There are three related ideas that, in the view of the authors of this book, emerge from The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood and Paranoid Parenting as especially important, and the chapters that follow engage with them in different ways. One is the historical specificity of contemporary parenting culture; ‘intensive motherhood’ or ‘paranoid parenting’ are contemporary phenomena. While their history can be traced, and their roots and antecedents identified, they constitute a novel cultural development. The second is the usefulness of the concept risk consciousness for understanding the development of parental determinism. The third idea is the emphasis that Hays and Furedi place on viewing ‘parenting’ (in its ‘intensive’ or ‘paranoid’ form) as socially constructed. Later chapters explore these ideas. This new edition includes a new set of chapters, in which we report our research and discuss our observations on the workings of parenting culture in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the rest of this Introduction, we offer some preliminary comments to highlight the core themes of the book.

‘Parenting’: What’s New? It becomes quickly apparent to those who start to research the way any routine aspect of bringing up children is now talked about that a particular language is used to describe these activities. Central to this language is the term ‘parenting’. There are ‘parenting manuals’, ‘parenting guides’, ‘parenting classes’, and ‘parenting education’ that all purport to be able to

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improve matters in this area of the everyday life of parents (Beck & Beck-­ Gernsheim, 1995; Furedi, 2008). The same is true for every aspect of raising a child. Feeding children, talking to them, sleeping with (or separate from) them, and even playing with children have become areas of action subsumed under the overall umbrella term ‘parenting’, and there is ‘parenting advice’ relating to all of them. If one looks, for example, at the question of how to discipline children, it will become clear this is rarely discussed as a community task or the responsibility of adult society as a whole, whereby adults in general need to take on the demanding responsibility of working out what the role of discipline might be, as part of what it means to ‘grow up’. Rather, discipline is discussed as a ‘parenting strategy’ in which parents develop ‘skills’ often expressed in the advocacy of the techniques of ‘positive parenting’ as the ideal ‘parenting style’ (Daly, 2013; Reece, 2013). A central source of scholarship for Parenting Cultures Studies is that which has made efforts to understand the development of the terminology ‘parenting’, and so make better sense of the intense preoccupation with causality, and the perceived problem of parental behaviour and the need to change it. In the first instance Paranoid Parenting provides us with this account: Child-rearing is not the same as parenting. In most human societies there is no distinct activity that today we associate with the term parenting. In agricultural societies, children are expected to participate in the work and routine of the community and are not regarded as requiring special parenting attention or care … The belief that children require special care and attention evolved alongside the conviction that what adults did mattered to their development. These sentiments gained strength and began to influence public opinion in the nineteenth century. The work of mothering and fathering was now endowed with profound importance. It became defined as a distinct skill that could assure the development of character traits necessary for a successful life … Once children are seen as the responsibility of a mother and father rather than of a larger community the modern view of parenting acquires salience. (Furedi, 2002, p. 106)

From this point of view, a trajectory towards placing particular significance on the role and contribution of the parent, using their ‘skills’ to ensure a child’s ‘successful life’, has a long history. It is at least as old as industrialization and, as Hays (1996) details, it may be considered that the basis for contemporary parenting culture lies in the working through of

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the separation of ‘the family’ from the wider economy and society. However, despite its long history, it is also recognized that ‘parenting’ has acquired specific connotations more recently. ‘Whoever invented the term parenting was not primarily interested in the lives of children’, notes Furedi. ‘Until recently, the term to parent referred exclusively to the act of begetting a child. Today it is deployed to describe the behaviour of mothers and fathers’ (Furedi, 2002, p. 197). It is this more recent turn towards an explicit focus on the parent and their behaviour that emerges as the general, distinctive attribute of the contemporary term ‘parenting’ and the determinism it brings with it. In the two decades since the initial publication of Paranoid Parenting, research efforts have grown that look into the meaning of the words that are now used so commonly to refer to (and make problematic) what parents do (Ramaekers & Suissa, 2012; McDermott, 2020). The history of the term has been explored; Faircloth (2013) suggest that ‘parenting’ as a term became widely used first in specific fields—for example, by psychologists and self-help practitioners—from the 1950s. It would seem, however, as we indicated above, that its popularization into more everyday language (for example, in titles of mass-market books) took place a little later. McDermott, in her account of the development of ‘Parenting’ in the USA, suggests it was in the 1970s that the use of the word first became common, and entered the everyday life of parents. Her research found it was a Dr Fitzhugh Dodson ‘who coined the verb “to parent” in his childrearing manual How to Parent’ (2020, p. 3). An interesting contribution from Smith, whose research focus is explicitly on ‘changes in language’, concurred that ‘[t]o “parent” as a verb and the idea of parenting are relatively recent arrivals’, with ‘an explosion’ in use from the ‘early and mid-1970s’ (Smith, 2010, p. 360). Smith also comments on the changing meaning of the term. Much older uses of the term ‘parenting’, he contends, came to give way by the last quarter of the twentieth century to a view that ‘parenting’ is a ‘technical’ matter which can therefore be generalized (rather than a personal relationship, by definition not appropriately subjected to technical criteria). Additionally, notes Smith, ‘parenting does not tend to depict the relationship with one’s child as an easy or comfortable one’ (2010, p.  360, emphasis in original). This suggests that from the outset, the term ‘parenting’, when used widely, has been associated with the view that parent–child relationships are problematic or deficient. It is, notes Smith, conceived of, ‘as a dour business, and in which experts … have a proper role’ (2010, p. 360).

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By looking at the language of ‘parenting’, a picture emerges of a growing momentum from the 1970s onwards towards the targeting of parental behaviour as deficient and also ‘parenting’ as something of a joyless task or ‘job’, to be conducted under the watchful gaze of experts. As well as being inherently bound up with the idea of a deficit in parental behaviour that must be addressed if children are to succeed, studies of ‘parenting’ also thus indicate this term is inherently bound up with the idea that people other than parents have special insights that can and should be brought to bear. Indeed, one of the dominant observations from studies is that ‘parenting’ is now viewed as an activity that cannot be effectively carried out ‘naturally’. ‘(Good) parenting’ is, in contrast, considered to be a form of learned interaction, widely discussed as a ‘skill set’. In their contribution exploring what it means to view parents as ‘educators’ of their children, Ramaekers and Suissa thus persuasively identified the way that ‘parents are expected … to do things with their children that are in a very specific sense goal-­ oriented’ (2011, p. 198). In this sense, the parent today is not a person who, in their informal, everyday interaction with their child, teaches and guides the child about the world, on the basis of their own experience. Rather, the idea of ‘education’ associated with ‘parenting’ is a far more formal one, coming from the outside; indeed, argue these authors, it has become ‘something that parents can (and should) do on the basis of scientific research’ (2011, p. 199). Scholarship about ‘parenting’ that analyses developments in the realm of policymaking has developed considerably in the twenty-first century, with research exploring various ways that policymakers have organized what they do around the assumption of direct, causal connections between how children are ‘parented’ and problems of social concern. Bristow, looking at political commentary about the riots that occurred in Britain in 2011 highlighted, for example, the uniformity of the view among policymakers that ‘parenting’ was in some way to blame (2013). Some have drawn attention to just how distinctive was this turn towards a new politics of parenting in the UK (Edwards & Gillies, 2011; Gillies, 2008, 2011). As Edwards and Gillies explain: There has been a remarkably explicit and sustained focus on the minutiae of everyday parenting practices as linked to the good of society as a whole. (Edwards & Gillies, 2011, p. 141)

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As we noted earlier, ‘positive parenting’ is the approach validated by parenting experts and policy makers as the means to address perceived deficits, and its advocates are focused primarily on changing parental attitudes and behaviour. For some, this project of behaviour change to ensure parents become skilled-up, ‘positive’ ones, includes advocacy of use of the criminal law against parents, impelled by an especially strong version of parental determinism. Indicative of this shift, new laws have been introduced in Scotland and Wales since the first edition of this book was published, with the police now expected to bring criminal charges against parents in these countries found to have smacked (spanked) a child. Such laws are predicated on the idea that any smacking should be considered antithetical to ‘positive parenting’ and as a form of intolerable violence. Very strong opinion is expressed on the allegedly causal relation between smacking and future mental illness and other serious pathologies and disadvantages. In this aspect of parenting culture there is, however, a noteworthy absence of discussion among those advocating for criminalizing parents about the views of the architect of the concept ‘parenting style’ in the first place. This was the American psychologist Diana Baumrind who developed the widely cited typology of ‘permissive’, ‘authoritative’, and ‘authoritarian’ to capture significant components of parent–child interaction. Baumrind was intently concerned with the discipline as part of her efforts to capture and express a humanistic view about effect child-rearing. She wrote a series of contributions about ‘aversive discipline’, including smacking /spanking, during her lengthy career, as part of her exploration of ‘parenting styles’. In contrast to those who express such strong certainty about classifying all smacking as violence, and about the deterministic relation between this form of discipline and serious harm to health and welfare, Baumrind was far more circumspect. While she was no advocate of smacking, she was concerned about the veracity of claims made against it, and in turn for the use of State power to discipline parents. Central to Baumrind’s approach was a strong emphasis on recognizing complexity in factors that shape ‘outcomes’ for children. She argued that any form of punishment ‘is intended to be aversive’, ‘will have costs and benefits’ (2001, p. 13), but if it is accepted that adult responsibility for children encompasses discipline, then physical punishment may be part of it, for some parents, in some contexts. Given this, there must be ‘Necessary Distinctions’ (1997) made in any reasonable discussion about punishment, for example, between beating, kicking, and punching as abusive physical punishment, and controlled, calm use of a smack, in a context of

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cultural norms shared between adults and children. She explained that, ‘A Blanket Injunction Against Disciplinary Use of Spanking Is Not Warranted by the Data’ (1996). Perhaps most importantly of all, she continually emphasized the need for careful thinking about the relation between the State, law, and parents, arguing: Parents in a democratic society rear their offspring with different values and perspectives that ensure desirable diversity in childrearing goals and outcomes. The state has significant interests in the well-being of its youth, but in the absence of compelling evidence that socially approved practices have harmful effects, it promotes children’s welfare by respecting family privacy and parental autonomy in childrearing decisions. (2001, p. 12)

Policy makers, and advocates of use of criminal sanctions against parents, continue to make use of the concept ‘parenting styles’. Yet they simultaneously disregard and relegate this argument central to it, about the significance for the welfare of children of ‘family privacy’ and ‘parental autonomy’. It is not necessary to advocate for or against specific disciplinary practices to acknowledge the troubling strength of parental determinism over policy making circles this reflects and worry about the impact on child-rearing, including for children, when parental authority is so easily set aside. The key proposition to emerge from this preliminary assessment is that we can be sure that ‘parenting’ is not a neutral term to describe what parents do as they raise their children. Rather, the transformation of the noun ‘parent’ into the verb ‘parenting’ has taken place through a sociocultural process centring on the belief that ‘parenting’ is a highly problematic sphere of social life; indeed, ‘parenting’ is almost always discussed as a social problem and in some way blamed for social ills. In turn, ‘parenting culture’ can be summarized to mean the more or less formalized rules and codes of conduct that have emerged over recent years which reflect this deterministic view of parents and define expectations about how a parent should raise their child.

Risk Culture and Risk Consciousness The emergence of ‘parenting’ as described above has thus become a growing focus for scholarship. The chapters in Part I of this book detail further what emerges from research about central aspects of this process. Questions frequently asked by students about the insights of this scholarship are:

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How did this happen? Why has the work of bringing up and raising children come to be redefined as ‘parenting’? Before moving on, we now offer some general answers to these questions to situate what comes next. A feature of some of the work that analyses parental determinism is its use of ‘risk’ as a core concept to understand the rise of this way of thinking. ‘Risk’ is an underlying concept in Paranoid Parenting (a book that forms one of a series of studies by Furedi about the workings of risk culture; see Furedi, 1997, 2005, 2007, 2014). The concept of risk is also central to books about specific topics that have been influential to our thinking. These include, for example, Armstrong’s study of the regulation of alcohol consumption in pregnancy (2003), Lupton’s work on the monitoring of pregnant women (1999a, 2013a, 2013b), and Wolf’s critique of the ‘breast is best’ discourse (2011). Scholarship about ‘risk’ has noted, however, that this is a concept that is understood and conceptualized in the vast literature that uses the term in different and contradictory ways (Denney, 2005; Lupton, 1999b). The approach that informs the arguments set out in this book draws on a perspective that is concerned primarily with a consciousness of risk, and we now summarize briefly what ‘risk consciousness’ means. We set out four features of this way of understanding ‘risk’ and then return to them through the book, through our arguments about contemporary parenting culture, and also about parenting culture and the pandemic. Risk as Untoward Possibility not Probability Analysis of risk consciousness begins with the observation that there is an important difference between what ‘risk’ has meant at previous points in history and what it comes to mean in the present. Fox outlines the shift as follows: Before the era of modernity, risk was a neutral term, concerned merely with probabilities, with losses and gains. A gamble and/or endeavor that was associated with high risk meant simply that there was great potential for significant loss or significant reward. However, in the modern period, risk has been co-opted as a term reserved for a negative or undesirable outcome, and as such, is synonymous with the terms danger or hazard. (Fox, 1999, p. 12, emphasis in original)

The meaning ascribed to the term ‘risk’ today, then, is different to the past. Where it once meant ‘probability’ understood via calculation to

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generate a balanced assessment, it now connotes the possibility of an unwanted or dangerous outcome. Risk consciousness, from this perspective, is a way of thinking about the future in which possibilities that are untoward are taken into account more than probabilities. This outlook, Furedi explains, ‘invites speculation about what can possibly go wrong’ and ‘frequently what can possibility go wrong is equated with what is likely to happen’ (2009, p. 205). This redefinition of risk as possible danger suggests, in turn, the development of a particular view of uncertainty (that is, outcomes about which we cannot be sure at the outset). Rather than uncertainty being perceived as something which can be confronted rationally, or which can open up possibilities as well as pitfalls, the ‘unknown’ is viewed with anxiety. Indeed, ‘[o]ne of the defining features of our times is that anxiety about the unknown appears to have a greater significance than the fear of known threats’, notes Furedi (2011, p. 97). This sort of ‘possibilistic’ risk-thinking has been assessed as having wide influence. Famously it was associated by the former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with the conduct of war; there are, he explained with reference to ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq, ‘unknown unknowns— the ones we know we don’t know’, and it is these that should form the focus for strategic decisions (Furedi, 2009, p. 199). As Furedi notes, however, although Rumsfeld was ridiculed for his ‘unknown unknowns’ comment, the possibility that there are speculative threats has become the organizing principle for action and policymaking in many instances. The focus on speculative threats—the ‘what ifs’ of everyday life—has had a significant impact on the way that children, and also fetuses, are now perceived. Both children and ‘pre children’ are, we suggest through this book, more and more defined as de facto ‘at risk’, but what exactly the ‘risk’ is, is often admitted as being uncertain or unknown. It is a ‘worst case scenario’, a possibility rather than a probability. Yet ‘risks’ of these kinds exert powerful influence over all discussions about childhood and children, from pregnancy behaviour to children’s play, to the interaction between adults and children within local communities, and of course in influencing responses to Covid-19. This perception of risk as applied to children also forms a key underpinning of the redefinition of the parent as determinant of the future well-being of the child; indeed what arises from it is the construction of the parent as a manager of risk, who has in their power the ability to decide the fate of the child according to how well they perform this task (an idea that we dwell upon throughout this text).

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Risk as Free-Floating Anxiety The second important observation about risk consciousness is that this way of looking at the world finds as its focus not collective concerns about specified dangers faced by groups, so much as individualized fears about uncalibrated risks. The recognition that this sort of anxiety has become the typical way of thinking about children is fairly widely noted. Stearns, for example, wrote in 2009 that in America ‘at some point in the past four decades’, a view has taken hold that children, ‘operate amid significant dangers about which they need to be warned and from which they need to be protected’. This outlook, he suggested, is distinguishable from longer standing ideas about ‘vulnerability’ in that in the past the idea of risk bound up with the notion of vulnerability ‘did not, initially, assume that the larger social context itself had to be viewed in terms of danger’ (Stearns, 2009, p. 48, our emphasis). More recently, in contrast, it is precisely this context, society itself, which has come to be viewed as risky for children (or ‘toxic’, as we discuss further in Part II). Thus, what the child is ‘vulnerable to’ becomes far less specific; ‘unsanitary conditions’ or ‘accidents’, for example, are replaced by a generalized sense that ‘society’ places children ‘at risk’. This, argues Stearns, means that the child ‘must be surrounded by a host of precautions and constraints previously unnecessary … A culture already installed was greatly intensified towards new levels of monitoring and regulation’ (Stearns, 2009, p. 48). As we go on to discuss, this primacy of regulation and monitoring as the key locus of relations between adults and children became apparent during the pandemic in new and concerning ways. As Furedi has pointed out, this unfocused, generalized sense of anxiety has fundamental importance for the definition of ‘parenting’: Traditionally, good parenting has been associated with nurturing, stimulating and socializing children. Today it is associated with monitoring their activities. An inflated sense of risk prevails, demanding that children should never be left on their own … Permitting youngsters to be home on their own after school is presented as an act of parental irresponsibility. (Furedi, 2002, p. 5)

As we detail further in Chap. 2, the meaning of parenthood is reworked through the re-redefinition of the child as ‘at risk’ in this generalized way; ‘Parenting’, with its deterministic connotations, is the outcome of this inflation of risk.

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Risk Consciousness and Morality Risk consciousness has become more pervasive, but why has this happened? A third feature of the relevant literature is the answer it provides to this question. Understanding the growth of risk consciousness, it has been suggested, lies in grasping the relation between an outlook that elevates fear of the unknown and conditions where ‘cultural authority is weak’ (Furedi, 2011, p.  92). A powerful preoccupation with the untoward effects of ‘not knowing’ develops, grows, and becomes institutionalized, in conditions where authoritative value systems that provide meaning and clarity and give a sense of future-oriented action, are more attenuated. Since the first edition of this book was published, it has been argued that this vacuum in systems of authority and morality has become sufficiently strong to generate a pervasive identity crisis (Furedi, 2021). Adult society is less and less able to give meaning to adulthood or to the taking of responsibility, and the socialization of the young has in turn become less and less other-directed. Encouragement of the development of identities based on looking inward to find the self has gained considerable ground in the past decade. As a result as sense of being ‘at risk’ has come to define identity formation. Overall, risk consciousness understood this way reflects ‘the difficulty that society has in bringing meaning to uncertainty’ (Furedi, 2021, p. 92) and this problem has now deepened because of a growing rejection of the possibility of finding meaning through connection to traditions, national histories, or the wisdom of elders. The term ‘presentism’ has been used to capture this development (Furedi, 2021), recognizing that an absence of cultural validation of meaningful roots makes it much more possible for uncertainty to connect with fear and a sensibility of being at risk. The insight that risk consciousness expands and gains traction in conditions where value systems are weak is one of the most important for understanding parenting culture. This point is elaborated as follows: The estrangement of contemporary western culture from a grammar of morality means that threats and dangers are unlikely to be conveyed in an explicit moral form. Moral regulation has an amorphous form and is often promoted indirectly through the language of health, science and risk. (Furedi, 2011, p. 96)

In a similar vein, Hunt explained:

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[I]ncreasingly morality has come to function through proxies, not in its own voice, but in and through other discursive forms, the two most important and closely related being the discourses of ‘risk’ and ‘harm’. (Hunt, 2003, p. 166)

The contention is thus that responses to problems of concern are now rarely conceptualized in terms relating to general systems of values or beliefs. Rather, perceived problems are most likely to be represented as such because they ‘increase the risk of harm’, that is, they are somehow threatening to the ‘well-being’ of the individual. This way of thinking inevitably means that the bodies we (and our children) inhabit, and the minds inside each one of our heads, individually become the focus for attention. For Furedi, as noted above, a key outcome of this situation is a crisis of identity, driven by the inability of adult society to give consistent meaning to experience (Furedi, 2021). The solution to this individualized problem of being ‘at risk’ is perceived to rest instead in ‘risk management strategies’, which inevitably circumvent the attempt to generate organic, inter-generational solutions or answers. Reducing and managing risk emerges as the temporary stand-in for a crisis of meaning and morality, and in this way a particular form of morality—risk management, which has ‘keeping us safe’ as its prime value—attains dominance. This development can be readily identified when it comes to children; it is now entirely routine for parents to be warned about a wide variety of risks and dangers which threaten the health and well-being of their children, particularly those for which they are responsible (for example, feeding a baby formula milk, disciplining a child ‘the wrong way’, letting them watch too much television, or use screens too much). Hunt, however, also makes the following very important observation about this development: The point that needs emphasis in explicating the thesis that moral discourses function through proxies is that the moral dimension is not excluded, rather it becomes subsumed within discourses whose characteristics have a utilitarian guise … The most striking feature of the hybridization of morals and risk is the creation of an apparently benign form of moralization in which the boundary between objective hazards and normative judgements becomes blurred. (Hunt, 2003, p. 167)

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For Hunt, then, the development of a way of looking at the world in which problems are identified as risks instead of moral challenges does not mean this interpretation lacks moralizing power. On the contrary, it acts to generate powerful codes of conduct for behaviour but in a way which places the focus squarely on the individual and their way of life measure through the lens of risk. For example, to return again to the topic of feeding babies, this is an activity with pronounced moralized connotations. What mothers do is surrounded (and influenced) by precepts and ideas about what they should do. However, the ‘should’ is very rarely articulated in conventional moral terms (for example, making explicit reference to the alleged sacredness of the child at the breast). Rather, the message ‘mothers should breastfeed’ is routinely justified on the grounds that ‘medical evidence shows’ and that ‘experts know’ as if there is no other way of thinking or speaking about what counts when it comes to feeding a baby that might be relevant, other than specialist knowledge. The abandonment of a ‘grammar of morality’ is, in this light, a development with very significant implications. The possibility of opening up for debate the question ‘how might we as adults best approach the task of raising the next generation?’ is closed down. Only one sort of answer becomes possible; we go by what ‘the evidence’ says about how the individual parent should ‘parent’ their child, and debate the issues in these terms. Demoralization and Policing The fourth key area that scholarship about risk consciousness highlights is the effect of this attention on individual behaviour for formal systems of regulation—that is, policing. With reference to the work of American sociologist Howard Becker, Furedi notes that the link between moralization and policing has been long recognized; this is, for example, central to the exploration of ‘moral panics’ and is true also of the widespread use of term ‘pregnancy police’ associated with the moral regulation of pregnant women. Furedi notes, however, that while the terms now used to describe risk and what we should fear are rarely explicitly moral, they have a powerful effect for the policing of behaviour:

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[R]isk society appeals are oriented towards regulating personal behaviour and are no less prescriptive than traditional moral crusades. Indeed, fear entrepreneurs often self-consciously assert the moral authority of their enterprise. (Furedi, 2011, p. 99)

Hunt (2003), following a similar line of thought, notes in a comment very relevant for our interests here, that harm is ‘medicalized’ in advice given to people—and in particular, pregnant women—about drinking alcohol. As we detail further in Part II of this book, the warning from officialdom is that ‘drinking when pregnant may harm your unborn baby’, but this is backed up more or less explicitly by policing. In the US this can mean legal sanction (Armstrong, 2003; Golden, 2005) and in Britain admonition by health professionals if a pregnant woman admits she has breached the ‘no drinking’ rule. The implications of this development can be thought about at the level of the individual. How does one experience life as a parent when one’s everyday behaviour is placed under scrutiny in this way? It can also be thought about more widely, at a social and cultural level. What are the costs for the wider public life when an answer to the question ‘what is right and what is wrong?’ is increasingly sought only at the level of individual behaviour? The movement to risk consciousness feeds off, and encourages, the demise of thinking that can pose questions of right and wrong in a more generalized, social sense. For this reason it also constitutes the basis for the turn to viewing ‘parenting’ as the cause of, and solution to, social problems. In conditions where ideas about how to effect wider social change are elusive, change is envisaged only where it seems possible to enact it, for example, in the management of the small-scale relations between individuals, especially those between parent and child. As noted above, with reference to Stearns’ (2009) analysis of American culture, risk consciousness appears to have grown since the 1970s. The precursor—the idea of the child as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘precious’—is thought to have been in existence for at least a century (Stearns, 2009), and earlier precedents can no doubt be found. However, a range of studies about a variety of issues detect that during the 1970s there was an important shift in emphasis, towards focusing on ‘risks’ to the child (Armstrong, 2003; Best, 1993a), and that since then, risk consciousness associated with children has expanded and spread at a remarkable pace (Guldberg, 2009;

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Furedi, 2021). In this light, the other area of scholarship about how risk consciousness emerges and develops is also important. For this reason, our work, drawing on that of others referred to above, is strongly influenced by a constructionist perspective.

‘Parenting’ as a Social Construct Risk provides a major form in which many aspects of life are problematized … The identification of risks provides one form in which problems are experienced, grasped and articulated. Risk problematization brings into play a discursive formation that provides a way through which the future is framed and which connects some anxiety-inducing feature of the present to the fear of future harm. (Hunt, 2003, p. 173)

In this extract, Hunt indicates that risk talk (a ‘discursive formation’) provides a way of ‘grasping’ or ‘framing’ aspects of life through which they are given meaning; they are ‘problematized’ in a particular form. He also makes the very important point that this way of constructing the present, in which events or experiences are connected to the possibility of danger, leads to a distinctive view of the future, one which is influenced by ‘fear of future harm’. A projection forwards, predicated on a sensibility of possible harm, plays back into a way of living and organizing life in the present, which maximizes safety as its central objective. The question this raises, however, is ‘how has this ‘discursive formation’ arisen and come to exert such a high degree of influence?’ This is a question that we seek to address in a range of ways through the chapters that follow, but we offer a few preliminary comments here. Our general orientation is towards an analysis that understands ‘problematization’ as a process of social construction (Best, 1993a, 1993b, 1995, 2001; Figert, 1996; Loseke, 1999). This way of thinking about social problems has been summarized by Best: Constructionists intentionally define social problems broadly, as a general process: according to the best known definition, social problems are ‘the activities of individuals or groups making assertions of grievances and claims with respect to some putative conditions’. (Best, 2011, p. 44)

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The merits of this approach have been indicated by work that has proved valuable in trying to think through puzzles posed by contemporary culture and society. One such puzzle is how best to understand and explain a situation where there is a manifest disparity between the incidence of a phenomenon and expressed concern about it. Examples of this kind include: • Teenage pregnancy and motherhood, which became from the 1970s onwards an ever-increasing focus for expressed concern and policymaking in Britain and the US, when pregnancy and early motherhood rates were stable or declining (Arai, 2009; Luker, 1996). • Child abduction, which is statistically very rare, but which has been a consistent feature of discussions about threats to children in recent decades (Best, 1993a). • Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, a rarely occurring and complex birth defect, which has come to be represented as a general threat to all children (Armstrong, 2003). We agree with Best’s (2011) proposition that phenomena like these are not captured well by the concept ‘moral panic’. This is because, first, there is less a ‘panic’ about them that comes and goes, than a consistent, expansive discussion and concern. Secondly, the form in which concern is expressed is, as we noted above, often something other than ‘moral’, at least in the sense in which this term is conventionally understood. In this light, our preference is to think about the development of risk consciousness and its relation to the way we think about children, parents, and the wider society, as a process that involves the accumulation and expansion of sets of claims. These claims draw our attention to risks and dangers, and seek to persuade people (especially policymakers) that they should take a putative threat seriously. These sets of claims may sometimes compete and enjoy relatively greater or lesser success. This is a process that, as Best indicated, has come to be viewed as wide in scope involving a diverse range of social actors: As the constructionist literature has evolved, analysts have come to appreciate that claims making is a multifaceted process, that while its domain certainly includes activists demonstrating to draw attention to troubling conditions, it also encompasses scientists and physicians making claims about conditions, news and entertainment coverage of such claims and conditions, policymakers seeking to devise formal methods of addressing such

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conditions, the various workers who must implement those policies and all of those who evaluate or criticize policies in operation. (Best, 2011, p. 44)

The questions this raises include: Who is it that develops a particular language or way of representing a problem in a particular way? On what existing cultural resources do they trade? What is the response of others to the claim, and how does it fare as wider endorsement is sought? At what point and how does a claim come to be taken seriously by institutions including the media and government departments? In the essays in Part II we discuss in detail some particular examples of parental determinism and try and provide some insights in response to these questions. This type of approach has been criticized on the grounds that it suggests a relativistic orientation to social problems (Best, 1993b). The sense in which problems are understood as ‘constructs’ has been taken to mean that social constructionists believe there to be no ‘reality’ or ‘underlying cause’ that can explain why phenomena come to be so strongly viewed as something to be anxious about and act against. In response we would first suggest that in many instances (at least those that we have researched) the gulf between a consciousness of risk attached to a phenomenon and the sense in which it could plausibly be deemed ‘risky’ by merit of what could properly be called evidence is what demands the most critical attention. For example, we would suggest this to be true of feeding a baby with formula milk in industrialized countries or drinking alcohol at low levels in pregnancy. The real issue to explain is why formula feeding, or drinking when pregnant, has become so strongly associated with danger when babies born to women who do these things thrive. On this matter, we also accord with Hunt’s analysis that risk-based claims can achieve a high degree of success by default, rather than by the merit or logic of the case presented. Risk consciousness can become institutionalized, he suggests, in conditions where there is no alternative focus regarding action and activity in institutions, and particularly in policymaking circles: A proliferation of single-issue movements have developed their own expertise through which they dispute traditional forms of state and professional expertise and act as what may be usefully referred to as ‘risk-promotion’ movements. Such movements not infrequently succeed in effecting ‘regulatory capture’ of expert systems, in that it is often easier for them to ‘go along with’ the risk entrepreneurs of such risk-promotion movements than to fight them. (Hunt, 2003, p. 170)

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Conditions can prevail (and we would suggest they now markedly do) in which ‘risk entrepreneurs’ can gain an unprecedented degree of success for their claims because there is no focus or will to ‘fight them’. We discuss this in the second part of this book in relation to claims about ‘neurons’ and ‘synapses’ now routinely made by risk entrepreneurs warning of the harm done to children’s brains by ‘poor parenting’ (Macvarish, 2016; Wall, 2004; Wastell & White, 2012; Wilson, 2002). Despite the unscientific nature of these claims, they have attained a remarkable level of ‘regulatory capture’. The general proposition, then, is that risk consciousness grows and develops, finding new foci in circumstances where there is very little to act as a countervailing force. It becomes orthodoxy more by default than by merit. The reasons why children can be both ‘at risk’ but also ‘a risk’ in the conditions of Covid-19 is the subject of Jennie Bristow’s chapter in Part III. While there is a ‘newness’ about risk consciousness focusing on children that needs to be brought to the fore, there is also a much longer standing cultural precept of which it has come to feed. This is a presumption of parental incompetence, which long predates the 1970s. Indeed, the questioning of parental authority has a very long history. This is engagingly discussed by Hays (1996) with regard to ideas about American mothers, and central to her case regarding the ‘intensification of motherhood’ is the observation that expert questioning of maternal capabilities has been built into modern American society from the outset. Similarly, Furedi shows how the ‘targeting’ of parental authority is a core theme in discussions of ‘the problem of family’ from at least the nineteenth century. However, this pre-given insistence on the ‘problem of parents’ intensifies and becomes more strongly stated in the context of risk consciousness. A pre-existing cultural context that views parents as inadequate in the face of the task of ‘building tomorrow’ develops into parental determinism as a consciousness of risk is expansively applied to children. The recognition that some adults may harm children has become transposed, in the form of society-wide regulatory projects regulating inter-generational contact. The disorganization of generational responsibility that has historically underpinned childrearing is a theme that runs through the book, highlighted in the contribution by Jennie Bristow.

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A Note on the Structure of This Book In this new edition, we have held onto the original structure of Parenting Culture Studies but have added a new Part III comprising three chapters about parenting culture and the pandemic. Our commentary about the experience of the pandemic inevitably has the character of a snapshot; it reflects the data available to us at a particular point over 2021. It is also UK-focused, on the basis that there is no possibility of being able to capture and discuss the nuances of variations between countries in a book of this length. We have aimed, however, to raise thoughts on how the pre-­ existing parenting culture influenced responses to this global crisis, the tensions provoked, and highlight observations to dwell on, ongoing. We hope that, despite the focus on a single country, these thoughts will have wider resonance. All the essays in Parts I and II appeared in the first edition of this book, but have been updated and revised, taking account particularly of the work of others that has made use of what we wrote initially. Overall, the chapters are built out of reviewing and offering a commentary on what we consider to be the most interesting and helpful literature for the study of parenting culture. As we have already indicated, work by Sharon Hays and Frank Furedi is foundational, but we have drawn upon a large literature from across the disciplines to write what follows. As much as anything else, we intend all of the chapters in the book to provide a guide to reading, for those interested in teaching about or writing about the issues and problems this book addresses. For this reason we have also provided a note about ‘key readings’ at the end of each chapter. Four people have written this book together, and in this sense it is very much a joint project. As the text indicates, however, particular chapters are the work of an individual. Charlotte Faircloth has written the opening chapter to Part I, which discusses the core contention of both Hays and Furedi, that parenthood has become increasingly ‘intensive’. Hays’ term ‘intensive motherhood’ has inspired and influenced a whole body of scholarship globally about the contemporary experience of motherhood, some of which Faircloth discusses here. Furedi’s term is ‘parenting on demand’, suggesting that fathers are not excluded from recent developments, but in common with Hays he draws attention to the way that what parents do, and are expected to do, has become both more demanding of time (despite increased participation of mothers in employment) but also of emotion. This aspect of parenting culture—preoccupation with the emotional connectedness of

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parents and their children—is the area Faircloth examines further in Part II through her discussion of the problematization of ‘detachment’ and the rise of ‘attachment’ and ‘bonding’ as social problems. In Part II, Faircloth also contributes a chapter on what research suggests about the ‘intensification’ of fatherhood, addressing the relation between ‘parenting’ and gender (Shirani et al., 2012) including the preoccupation with the need for fathers to become more ‘attached’ to their children. As she notes, although relatively less scholarly attention has been paid to the problem of ‘fathering’ and its history than to the alleged deficiencies of ‘mothering’, it is clear that ‘fathering’ has certainly been considered problematic by experts and opinion formers from at least the nineteenth century onwards (Lupton & Barclay, 1997). ‘Parenting’, however, is manifestly a gender-neutral term purporting to include both mothers and fathers (Sunderland, 2006) and those concerned about ‘parenting’ suggest that today’s fathers, just like today’s mothers, need to ‘acquire skills’ through ‘expert help’, in order to play their critical role as a parent adequately. For this reason, it has been observed that policymakers’ efforts to ‘engage fathers’ form an important part of parental determinism (Gillies, 2009). The goal of ‘gender neutral’ parenting as normative in families is one outcome of this dimension of parenting culture (McDermott, 2020) and Faircloth discusses her research about couples’ transitions to parenthood to explore some aspects of the tensions associated with it. Her chapter in Part III of the book reports on research she conducted with colleagues about the experience of what might be considered the ‘hyper-­ intensification’ of parenting in the Covid-19 pandemic, driven by the dramatic expansion of the demands created by order to ‘stay at home’. The preoccupation of experts with childhood in modernity, and the ramifications of this for parents and the family, is the subject of Ellie Lee’s contribution in Part I. In Part II, Lee continues her assessment of the relation between ‘expert’ definitions of risk and parental determinism through an exploration of pregnancy, focusing on drinking in pregnancy. How risk perception in relation to pregnancy operated as part provision of vaccination against Covid-19 is her focus in Part III. Contextualized through a review of research about vaccination and parenting culture, she discusses how precautionary thinking operated in influencing the offer of vaccination to pregnant women, and the public debate that surrounded it. The relation between expert-generated ‘codes of conduct’ for parenting and policymaking is the subject matter of the Chapter in Part I by Jan

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Macvarish. The development since the late 1990s of a distinct and historically unprecedented preoccupation by policymakers with ‘parenting’ is, as Furedi indicated in Paranoid Parenting, especially marked in Great Britain. The themes of policy, however, are global, especially the case for ‘early intervention’, and indeed as the literature suggests, have their origins in the US. Macvarish’s contribution explores how a particular construction of both the child (as exquisitely vulnerable in the face of what parents do) and the project of policymaking (to intervene in the relation between parent and child in the early years to prevent harm) have characterized policy thinking in the UK.  She summarizes what emerges from research conducted following the initial publication of this book, about the diffusion of this policy approach especially in Europe. Macvarish’s essay in Part II draws attention to the importance of ‘brain based’ claims-making for the further development of this policy approach. One of the most important ideas we have taken from The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood and Paranoid Parenting is that contemporary parenting culture drives the privatization and individuation of parenting. Parents, as Furedi notes, raise children in a context where solidarity between them, other parents, and other adults is undermined. The relation between parents and the wider community of adults, and the questions of adult responsibility and solidarity, is the subject of Jennie Bristow’s contributions. In Part I, she explores the way that the intensification of parenting has proceeded through a process of distancing adults in general from the task of relating to new generations. Her essay in Part II considers this issue further through the specific example of the so-called ‘cotton wool kid’ and ‘helicopter’ parent, and in Part III she turns to generations and the pandemic. Overall, this book can be thought of as a guide to Parenting Culture Studies. The rationale for writing it arises not simply from the isolated research interests of the authors; rather it comes from our experience of finding a large, growing, and eager audience of students and colleagues in universities (and many thinking people outside the university) who want to understand better why ‘parenting’ has become such a moralized, politicized, and contentious topic. The need the volume seeks to satisfy is thus educational in its broadest sense. In our conclusion, we set out some thoughts on the development of the study of parenting culture, and hope this book continues to encourage others to take forward this area of scholarship.

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Note 1. The authors of this book have worked together since 2010 through the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies (CPCS), based in the School of Social Policy, Sociology, and Social Research at the University of Kent. Our website is: http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/parentingculturestudies/.

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Gillies, V. (2011). From function to competence: Engaging with the new politics of family. Sociological Research Online, 16(4), 11. http://www.socresonline. org.uk/16/4/11.html Golden, J. (2005). Message in a bottle: The making of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Harvard University Press. Guldberg, H. (2009). Reclaiming childhood: Freedom and play in an age of fear. Routledge. Hays, S. (1996). The cultural contradictions of motherhood. Yale University Press. Hunt, A. (2003). Risk and moralization in everyday life. In R.  V. Erickson & A. Doyle (Eds.), Risk and morality. University of Toronto Press. Knaak, S. (2005). Breast-feeding, bottle-feeding and Dr Spock: The shifting context of choice. Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 42(2), 197–216. Knaak, S. (2006). The problem with breastfeeding discourse. The Canadian Journal of Public Health, 97(5), 412–414. Knaak, S. (2010). Contextualising risk, constructing choice: Breastfeeding and good mothering in risk society. Heath, Risk and Society, 12(4), 345–356. Leadsom, A. (2021). Chairman’s introduction, the best start for life, a vision for the 1,001 critical days, HM Government, London. Retrieved January 8, 2023, from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/ uploads/attachment_data/file/973112/The_best_start_for_life_a_vision_ for_the_1_001_critical_days.pdf Lee, E. (2007a). Health, morality, and infant feeding: British mothers’ experiences of formula milk use in the early weeks. Sociology of Health and Illness, 29(7), 1075–1090. Lee, E. (2007b). Infant feeding in risk society. Health, Risk and Society, 9(3), 295–309. Lee, E. (2008). Living with risk in the age of “intensive motherhood”: Maternal identity and infant feeding. Health, Risk and Society, 10(5), 467–447. Lee, E. (2011). Breast-feeding advocacy, risk society and health moralism: A decade’s scholarship. Sociology Compass, 5(12), 1058–1069. Lee, E., & Bristow, J. (2009). Rules for feeding babies. In S.  Day-Sclater, F. Ebtehaj, E. Jackson, & M. Richards (Eds.), Regulating autonomy, sex, reproduction and the family (pp. 73–91). Hart Publishing. Loseke, D. R. (1999). Thinking about social problems: An introduction to constructionist perspectives. Aldine de Gruyter. Luker, K. (1996). Dubious conceptions: The politics of teenage pregnancy. Harvard University Press. Lupton, D. (1999a). Risk and the ontology of pregnant embodiment. In D. Lupton (Ed.), Risk and sociocultural theory: New directions and perspectives. Cambridge University Press). Lupton, D. (1999b). Introduction. In D.  Lupton (Ed.), Risk and sociocultural theory, new directions and perspectives. Cambridge University Press.

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Wall, G. (2001). Moral constructions of motherhood in breastfeeding discourse. Gender and Society, 15(4), 590–608. Wall, G. (2004). Is your child’s brain potential maximized? Mothering in an age of new brain research. Atlantis, 28(2), 41–50. Wastell, D., & White, S. (2012). Blinded by neuroscience: Social policy, the family and the infant brain. Families, Relationships and Societies, 1(3), 397–414. Wilson, H. (2002). Brain science, early intervention and “at risk” families: Implications for parents, professionals and social policy. Social Policy and Society, 1(3), 191–202. Wolf, J. (2007). Is breast really best? Risk and total motherhood in the National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign. Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, 32(4), 595–636. Wolf, J. (2011). Is breast best? Taking on the breastfeeding experts and the new high stakes of motherhood. New York University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Intensive Parenting and the Expansion of Parenting Charlotte Faircloth

Introduction In her introduction to Parenting Out of Control the US sociologist Margaret Nelson describes how childrearing has changed in the last 50 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 fundamental ways over the last half-century (Furedi, 2002; Hays, 1996). Scholarship highlights how children today are seen as more ‘vulnerable’ to risks © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Lee et al., Parenting Culture Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44156-1_2

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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 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, exacerbated by a growth in social media, 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; Scheibling & Milkie, 2023). This chapter focuses on these developments, summarized as the rise of ‘intensive parenting’. It 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 has shifted.

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 while 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)

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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 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) have made up over 50% of the workforce for some time (Economist, 2009). One might expect that, as women work longer hours, motherhood would become 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, children are in fact spending substantially more time with their parents than in 1981 (Gauthier et al., 2004; see also Sayer, 2004, Gershuny & Sullivan, 2017). 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

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parents spending more time with their children but also the quality of that time has become far more intense. Numerous scholars have subsequently picked up on Hays’ concept of ‘intensive motherhood’ to describe the contemporary experience of parenting in Euro-American settings (Arendell, 2000; Douglas & Michaels, 2004; Freely, 2000; Hochschild, 2003; Maher & Saugeres, 2007; Nomaguchi & Milkie, 2020; Ramaekers & Suissa, 2012; Umansky, 1996; Warner, 2006) and elsewhere (Faircloth et  al., 2013, Faircloth & Rosen, 2020; see discussion below). We now summarize key points from scholarship that has contributed important insights about motherhood in these contemporary conditions.

The ‘New Momism’ and the ‘Mommy Wars’, Total Motherhood, Concerted Cultivation Douglas and Michaels made an important contribution to assessments of modern motherhood as they focused their analysis on the idealistic portrayal of motherhood in the US media, where motherhood is presented as ultimately fulfilling for women, referring 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 & Michaels, 2004, p. 4)

They took 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

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representations can induce strong feelings of failure when mothers do not manage to live up to them. More recent work has highlighted the role of social media in magnifying these messages (Scheibling & Milkie, 2023), noting that the ubiquity of this form of media is particularly insidious for contemporary parents. 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 & 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 produce ‘content’ that can be monetized 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 (Faircloth, 2013; Freely, 2000; Göransson, 2023). 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 (for example, Harman et  al.’s, 2018 volume explores this in relation to feeding children, a ‘hot topic’ in public discourse as well as private lives). 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 a 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 & Tulloch, 2002; Nelson, 2008; Rosen & Faircloth, 2020). Wolf therefore talks about ‘total’ motherhood to characterize the experience of contemporary mothers. She notes that mothers are expected to become experts

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on all aspects of childrearing—making sure that those mealtimes, stories, and play 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). As Ellie Lee develops in her essay on pregnancy (Chap. 6) this optimization drive is already well established in ‘pre-conception’ care too. 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)

In his work, Furedi drew attention to the ‘army of professionals’ who have colonized 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) has been for some time that parents should be ‘enabled’ to parent well, on the basis of ‘research about the characteristics of effective parenting’ (Johnson, 2007; more recently see the Royal Foundation’s initiatives around ‘educating parents’ about the importance of this evidence, IPSOS MORI/Royal Foundation, 2021). In their work, Edwards and Gillies (2013) back up the idea that parenting is now too

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complex to be left to parents to muddle through. 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 (see my Chapter in Part III for how Covid-19 complicated this kind of risk-assessment). 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 should 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 & 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 ‘hypervigilance’. One recent example might be the increasingly popular ‘smart socks’ worn by newborn babies in combination with video monitoring to alert parents to babies’ changing heart rates, oxygen levels and sleep patterns, transmitted via an app direct to their phones. 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). However, interestingly, whilst 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 reported 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, as many of us working in Higher Education can attest). Nelson draws on Lareau’s term ‘concerted cultivation’ not only to describe the constant work of making sure children achieve their

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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; 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, there is a broader cultural logic around intensive parenting, which holds that it is parents who are (arguably, wholly) responsible for their children’s outcomes. This has interesting implications 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 ‘ideal’ to which parents respond in negotiating their own practices. Particular lenses that have been used to explore the ideology of intensive mothering include ‘work-life balance’ (Johnston & Swanson, 2006; Milkie et al., 2004); gender differences in mothering and fathering

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(Dermott, 2008; Pinho et al., 2021; Scheibling & Milkie, 2023; Shirani et al., 2012; Wall & Arnold, 2007); risk and toxicity (Lamoreaux, 2023; Lee et  al., 2010); health, including mental health (Lupton, 2012; Nomaguchi & Milkie, 2020; Rizzo et  al., 2013); class (Gillies, 2006; Parsons Leigh et al., 2012; Walper & Kreyenfeld, 2022); teenage parenting (Duncan et  al., 2003); infant and child feeding (Avishai, 2007; Faircloth, 2013; Harman et  al., 2018; Knaak, 2006; Kukla, 2006; Lee, 2007a, 2007b, 2008; Murphy, 2000, 2003; Patico, 2020; Wolf, 2011); consumption patterns and performativity (Clarke, 2007; Pugh, 2005); disability (Landsman, 1998); attitudes towards childcare (Riggs, 2005; Vincent & Ball, 2006); non-traditional families (Layne, 2013); global fluctuations in parenting culture (Faircloth et  al., 2013, Faircloth & Rosen, 2020); migration (Bach & Christensen, 2021; Bendixsen & Danielsen, 2019; Gilliam, 2023); generational shifts around parenting (Armstrong, 2017; Harman et al., 2022; Sivak, 2018); and family leisure (Shaw, 2008). We look at three of these themes, as a means of signposting issues for further discussion. Gender As Hays observed, perhaps the most obvious difference in response to this ideology is in terms of gender. While much research has shown how men increasingly see ‘good fathering’ as about being ‘involved’ with and emotionally present for their children (Dermott, 2008), mirroring the ‘intensive’ mothering model to some extent. Other research has shown that they also continue to hold on to more traditional ideas about fathering. Shirani et al. (2012), for example, show that men (in the UK) are more likely to question expert advice about parenting, reject the need for hyper-­vigilance, and limit material consumption as a means of contesting the competitive aspect of contemporary parenting culture. Similarly, Shaw’s (2008) work on family leisure draws on work with parents in North America, to explore gender differences in response to this ideology. In an era of ‘intensive’ parenting there has been a shift in family leisure patterns towards maximizing children’s health and well-­ being, she observes (rather than on adult-oriented activities, for example). Parents are expected to act as pseudo-teachers, optimizing their children’s intelligence through a range of extra-curricular activities. Shaw notes that it is women who act on these discourses, both self-consciously and in more invisible ways. Much of the work of enabling a child-centred approach to

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family time (the scheduling and planning) falls to women, says Shaw, echoing Dermott’s (2008) observations on the gendered split between ‘caring about’ and ‘caring for’ children, or what Lupton (2012, p.  13) refers to as the ‘invisible mental labour’ of mothering. This is echoed by more recent research by Clark and Dumas (2020) who note the connection between ‘good mothering’ and the organization of children’s free time in ‘wholesome’ activities like outdoor play (which is often actually carried out by fathers). Much research has shown the toll of this additional ‘mental load’ on mothers in terms of their health and wellbeing. Rizzo et al. (2013) point to the negative mental health implications of what they call the ‘parenting paradox’ (the idea that having children will make one happier when in fact it can often lead to decreased well-being, particularly correlating with a more ‘intensive’ approach to mothering). This is echoed by Nomaguchi and Milkie (2020) who note that rising economic insecurities and inequalities and a diffusion of intensive parenting ideology were the major social contexts of parenting in the 2010s. As they put it ‘Scholarship linking parenting contexts and parental well-being illuminated how stressors related to providing and caring for children could unjustly burden some parents, especially mothers, those with fewer socioeconomic resources, and those with marginalized statuses’ (2020, p. 198). Class Thus, a holistic approach to how these discourses affect particular groups is key, with socio-economic inequalities one of the most pressing. Nelson’s work in particular draws attention to the classed differences in the internalization of the ‘intensive’ parenting ideology (2010; see also Gillies, 2009; Lareau, 2003). For the professional middle-class parents with whom she worked, who demonstrated the ‘intensive’ parenting style, she sees a desire to extend and protect childhood. For the working-class parents, the impetus to do this was constrained by material, financial necessity that children earn their own living as quickly as possible. Thus: ‘within what I have called the professional middle class, parents do, indeed, adopt a style of parenting that has as its key features constant oversight, belief in children’s boundless potential, intimacy with children, claims of trust and delayed launching’ (Nelson, 2010, pp.  174–175). By contrast, in ‘the working class and middle class … parenting styles draw on concerns about concrete dangers, an awareness of youthful indiscretions, and a desire to

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see children mature sooner, rather than later’ (Nelson, 2010, p. 175). In short, material necessity has a direct impact on one’s cultural orientation towards parenting. This is echoed in work with (some) migrant communities who may share characteristics with the ‘working class’ parents Nelson discusses. For example, Gilliam (2023) who worked with second generation minority Danish parents notes how they ‘avert, step-up or shield’ their children in strategic ways as they navigate the educational system. Cultural Variation Cultural variation is clearly also important, particularly where parents must navigate multiple or competing ‘parenting cultures’. In one collection I edited with colleagues, we (Faircloth et al., 2013) collated a series of chapters to explore the spread of ‘intensive’ parenting in a cross-cultural perspective (see also Faircloth & Gurtin, 2017; Faircloth & Murray, 2014; Faircloth & Rosen, 2020). Several of the contributions looked at the experience of immigrant parents, who are forced to ‘straddle’ two competing cultures of parenting (that of their home and their host cultures). Jaysane-Darr (2013) for example, looks at South Sudanese refugee responses to the US intensive parenting discourses, and particularly at the ‘culture of expertise’ that defines contemporary American parenting. She shows how a local non-profit organization’s parenting workshops try to structure South Sudanese parent–child relationships in a way that replicates a middle-class American way of understanding infancy, childhood, and the individual person, even as they ignore the socio-economic and racial realities that structure diasporic life (thus chiming with Nelson’s comments on ‘Class’, above). Through analyses of conversations and interactions with volunteers from the non-profit organization, as well as childrearing practices in the home, she shows how South Sudanese seek to glean knowledge about how to raise their children in American society, at the same time as they strive to reshape the parenting sessions according to South Sudanese ideals of sociocentricity, hospitality, and respect. Thus, responses to this cultural script are far from stable—something that the global dissemination of ‘parenting expertise’ (via, for example, the UN or WHO) would do well to bear in mind (Scheidecker et al., 2023; see discussion in my essay on ‘Attachment’). Indeed, one interesting point to emerge from this body of work (and that is highlighted by groups who traverse states) is the relationship between the state and parenting culture itself. Of course, the perception of

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what is a ‘good parent’ (or ‘good child’) is culturally, historically, and ideologically rooted, and affects individuals in different ways according to a range of intersectional factors, such as class or ethnicity, as noted. Nevertheless, the traction of a more individualized and competitive approach to parenting is intimately linked to wider cultural norms as well as to state infrastructures, which differ dramatically in terms of welfare and resources for education and care (for example, competition for college places in the US, which puts extra pressure on parents to ‘go the extra mile’ (Lareau, 2003; Nelson, 2010). Whilst there has been much interesting work around parenting culture as an extension of a more ‘neo-liberal’ lens on social reproduction (the collection I edited with Rosen—see Rosen and Faircloth (2020)—includes an article by Chiong (2020) discussing the optimization of children as human capital in Singapore, for example) some of the most interesting work on parenting culture has come from colleagues in Scandinavia where one might assume that parenting culture would be less intensive (due to high levels of state investment in social reproduction). However, as work by Juhl and Westerling (2024), Dannesboe (2016) and Sparrman et al. (2016) in Denmark shows, this is not necessarily the case. Instead, the ‘creep’ of this more intensive parenting culture, particularly concerns about the impact of early infant experience on long-term outcomes, is reshaping ideas about what the state should provide (prompting, for example, concerns about childcare being too available to parents). Similarly, we need to stay attuned to the fact that despite the presence of progressive policy around social reproduction, this does not always translate into greater ‘equality’ or ‘wellbeing’ in practice. (In their work on infant feeding in Iceland, Símonardóttir and Gíslason (2018) note that the pressure many women are under to breastfeed, with the auspices of optimizing infant health, is at odds with the country being declared ‘the most equal in the world’.)

Parenting Out of Control? A common theme of the observations above is that this intense anxiety and uncertainty around childrearing is not only negative for adults but is also negative for the next generation. With examples like those from Nelson’s undergraduate students, some critics have even declared that we are breeding a ‘nation of wimps’ (Marano, 2008). The American author Judith Warner (2006) has written about her experience of motherhood in

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Paris (as has, more recently, Druckerman, 2012). On her return to her native country, Warner noticed how distorted the culture around mothering had become. Whereas in France, women were encouraged to lead a ‘balanced’ life to avoid falling into ‘excessive child-centredness’ (Warner, 2006, pp. 10–11), in the States, she saw mothers who had ‘turned into a generation of perfectionist control freaks, more concerned with creating the perfect playgroup or tracking down the last gram of trans fat in their kids’ crackers than in running or changing, or even participating in, the larger world’ (Warner, 2006, p. 4), with negative consequences for children too. Warner diagnoses this as a problem of control, echoing work on risk-­ consciousness, discussed in the introduction to this book, that positions women as ultimately responsible for harm to their children. Yet as she puts it, ‘It’s about how that feeling of being out of control drives them to parent in ways that are contrary to their better instincts, their deepest values and the best interests of their children’ (Warner, 2006, p. 7). That is, while mothers perhaps recognize that this overscheduling, hyper-vigilant culture is not necessarily ideal for children, there is a sense of motherhood as a ‘winner takes all’ game. With the expansion of college education, places in good schools have become ever more competitive, meaning that you do not want to be the one not to put your child in music or swimming class, for fear of jeopardizing their chances of getting into that school, college, job, and so on. This in turn brings us back to Lareau’s idea of concerted cultivation. There has, however, been some backlash to the manifestations of intensive parenting culture. Skenazy (2009), for example, recognizes that parents have lost all perspective on safety and danger, over-analyse the significance of everyday decisions, and ultimately do more harm than good by neither teaching nor modelling good judgement for their children. Instead, she endorses what she calls ‘free-range’ parenting. Others have implied more explicitly that it is parents themselves who are at fault for raising a generation of ‘cotton wool kids’; Jennie Bristow discusses this further in the later chapter on ‘The Double-Bind of Parenting Culture: Helicopter Parents and Cotton Wool Kids’. It is worth examining the proposed solution to the excesses of intensive parenting. This most often takes the form of instructing parents to ‘relax’—though usually with the help of expert-led training (Layard & Dunn, 2009). But this is to miss the point. As Lee et al. (2010) argue, these measures would have little impact on a broader cultural script, in

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which parents are cast as deterministic in the outcomes of their children. Even models of parenting which apparently advocate building children’s resilience (by encouraging them to take risks, for example) share in the principles of intensive, involved mothering: [T]hrough her exploration of the themes in parenting advice about fostering resilience, Hoffman argues it can be understood as not an alternative to what has come before, but rather ‘yet another approach to parenting that encourages intensive parental investment and involvement in children’s lives’. (Lee et al., 2010, p. 296)

Ramaekers and Suissa (2012) concur that telling parents to ‘relax’ will not solve anything, although they recognize that the genie is out of the bottle to the extent that there is now an appetite for support and information on the part of parents. A different solution to the problem comes from feminist academics, such as Hochschild, who see that the answer lies in getting fathers and partners more involved in childcare, thereby easing the intensive burden that women largely shoulder alone, and certainly across Europe there is a large policy drive around the importance of men taking ‘leave alone’ in a bid to extend gender equality (O’Brien & Wall, 2017): Why has the cultural revolution that matches women’s economic revolution stalled? When rapid industrialization took men out of the home and placed them in the factory, shop or office, a corresponding ideological revolution encouraged women (middle-class white women, especially) to want to tend the home and care for the children. Hochschild argues that we now need a new ideological revolution encouraging men to want to cook, clean and nurture children, and encouraging employers and the state to want to provide for child care, job sharing and parental leave. (Hays, 1996, p. 5)

Hays, by contrast, remains unconvinced that ‘involving’ fathers further would be a solution to a much broader social contradiction between the worlds of work and home. Rather, she proposes that we radically rethink the way we see children: [W]hat Hochschild suggests—that we shift the focus from intensive mothering to intensive parenting—is only a partial solution to the contradiction between the demands of home and work, and one that does not begin to address the larger cultural contradictions. If men and women shared the

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burden that Rachel [one of her interviewees] now bears primarily, the larger social paradox would continue to haunt both of them and would grow even stronger for men. Given the power of the ideology of the marketplace, a more logical (and cynical solution) would be an ideological revolution that makes tending home and children a purely commercial, rationalized enterprise, one in which neither mother nor father need be highly involved. Why don’t we convince ourselves that children need neither a quantity of time nor ‘quality time’ with the mothers or their fathers? (Hays, 1996, p. 5)

As Lee et  al. (2010) indicate, the strategies outlined above, which encourage individual parents to find ways of resisting the excesses of intensive parenting through relaxing, building resilience in children, or reorganizing gender roles so that fathers can take more of the burden of childcare, all implicitly endorse the core message of intensive parenting culture: that parental actions should be organized around what is presumed to be best for the individual child, in isolation from wider family or social considerations. By a similar token, these strategies endorse the conceptualization of childrearing as a highly privatized, rather than a generational, responsibility. Chapter 5 of this book discusses the extent to which contemporary culture encourages the privatization of childrearing through exacerbating parental anxieties about the dangers that may be posed to their children by other adults. It argues that the disruption of the idea that childrearing is a generational responsibility, which needs to be shared by adults in general, brings with it the growing regulation and surveillance of the activities of both adults and children. These developments can be understood as implying the emergence of a historically distinct way of thinking about children and childhood. Today, a growing distance has been placed between children and the adult world; children, by and large, have less to do than they used to with ordinary adults in communities. Yet this distance by no means leads to children being left to ‘do their own thing’. Children are not freer or more autonomous beings by merit of their increased estrangement from adults. On the contrary they are, as we have indicated, both more overseen in their activities by their parents, and the subject of more intervention and social control in other ways too. As the sociologists of childhood Allison James, Chris Jenks, and Alan Prout have commented: Children are arguably now more hemmed in by surveillance and social regulation than ever before … parents increasingly identify the world outside the

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home as one from which their children must be shielded and in relation to which they must devise strategies of risk reduction … On the other hand, both public and private spaces are increasingly monitored by closed circuit television to contain the threat that unsupervised groups of children and young people are thought to potentially pose. Even the boundaries of the family are held to be at risk of penetration by insidious technologies like video and the Internet which could pose serious moral threats to our children’s childhoods. (James et al., 1998, p. 7)

The emergence of this sort of childhood—its distinct social construction—can be considered the underpinning of contemporary parenting culture. Centring on the definition of children as ‘at risk’, it is this way of thinking about children, what they need, and the problems of how adults relate to them, that makes ‘paranoid parenting’ possible. We therefore now discuss briefly, first, what it means to think of childhood as a ‘social construct’. There is a very large literature—indeed a subfield of sociology—relevant to this area and we cannot do justice to it here. Rather, our aim is to highlight the central points of this way of thinking about childhood that are relevant for our discussion. We then comment on the present social construction of childhood with its emphasis on vulnerability and being ‘at risk’, before returning to explore in more detail the relation between this and ‘parenting’ (see Faircloth & Rosen, 2020 which gives an overview of the fields of childhood and intersections with parenting culture studies and see Dupont et al., 2022 on the ‘Cult of the Child’ specifically).

A Social History of ‘Childhood’ Childhood has always been as much about the imagination and actions of adults as it is about physical children. Hendrick’s (1997) history of childhood in English society draws on Prout and James (1990, p. 8) to note that ‘childhood’: ‘[A]s distinct from biological immaturity, is neither a natural nor universal feature of human groups but appears as a specific structural and cultural component of many societies’ … In other words, though biological immaturity may be natural and universal, what particular societies make of such immaturity differs throughout time and between different cultures. So we say that it is socially constructed. (Hendrick, 1997, pp. 9–10)

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Certainly, across space and time, societies have had different ideas about children, which in turn shapes how parents are expected to behave towards them. If children are considered inherently good, for example, society is assumed to need to change to enable this ‘natural’ purity to unfold; whereas if they are assumed to be inherently bad, it is children who must be shaped by society (Gittins, 1993, p. 22). For the historian Philippe Ariès (1968 [1962]), author of Centuries of Childhood, one of the seminal and most widely debated studies of this area, the idea of childhood did not even exist in medieval times. However: [T]his is not to suggest that children were neglected, forsaken or despised. The idea of childhood is not to be confused with affection for children: it corresponds to an awareness of the particular nature of childhood, that particular nature which distinguishes the child from the adult … In mediaeval society, this awareness was lacking … as soon as the child could live without the constant solicitude of his mother, his nanny or his cradle-rocker, he belonged to adult society. (Ariès, 1968 [1962], p.  125  in Gittins, 1993, p. 27)

What Ariès sees is much less differentiation between children and adults; children were seen simply as small adults and came to ‘belong’ to adult society at a very young age. Many historians demonstrate this by giving the example of children put to death for crimes such as theft, according to the general law of the time. Ariès also believed that children were treated with emotional indifference because parents could not afford to invest in them too highly, due to high rates of infant mortality. Other historians disagree—arguing that there was good evidence that parents were interested and invested in children. Cunningham, for example, sees ‘anguish and a struggle to make sense of their loss’ (Cunningham, 2006, p. 70) in the writings by parents about their deceased children at the time. That said, he agrees with Ariès that youth was seen as an unenviable life-stage, rather than as something to be ‘cherished’, more common today. Indeed, the idea of ‘childhood’ demarcated by its own clothes, toys, games, literature, or education would have seemed utterly foreign to the average medieval parent (Guldberg, 2009, p. 48). This picture started to change around the eighteenth century. Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood (1994) argued that this shift owed much to the birth of the printing press, for in a literate society, ‘adulthood has to

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be earned. It became a symbolic, not a biological achievement’ (Postman, 1994, p.  36). Children became seen not as mini-adults, but ‘unformed adults’ (Postman, 1994, p. 41) who must be educated into maturity. This different conceptualization of children was intimately related to wider changes of the period: The Enlightenment brought about a radically new conception of human beings: the idea that individuals are autonomous and rational, should have rights and responsibilities, and are capable of participating in political life, came to fruition during this time. It was this conception of human beings that brought about the distinction between adults and children. (Guldberg, 2009, pp. 49–50)

This emergent separation of adults and children was a new and very significant development. What it meant was that adulthood must also come to be redefined, with the questions posed of how adults should socialize, educate, and relate to children, through the distinct period of childhood. The posing of questions about adults and their relation to children is reflected in the writing of the philosophers John Locke (1632–1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), who held very different views of children. For Locke, children arrived in the world as a tabula rasa, or ‘blank slate’ needing to be ‘filled up’ with knowledge via education, and generally civilized by the adult world. Rousseau, by contrast, held a more romantic vision of children—highlighting their charm, purity, and need for protection, as outlined in his seminal text Émile (1762). Prioritizing the child’s needs, Rousseau argued that maternal practices should ‘follow from the development of a child’s inner nature, rather than from adult interests, and that children should be cherished, treated with love and affection, and protected from the corruption of the larger society’ (Rousseau [1762], in Hays, 1996, p. 26). This represented a novel challenge to traditional parental authority. As Frank Furedi indicates in the Foreword, Rousseau was sceptical about parents’ ability to meet the needs of the child so defined. Indeed, Rousseau was particularly scathing about the selfishness of mothers who used wet nurses to feed their babies, interpreting this as a clear example of the failure to recognize the child’s needs and ‘inner nature’. Guldberg writes, although the Lockean and Rousseauian views are often presented as being in contradiction, what is important is ‘that both present an image of children as different from adults’ (Guldberg, 2009,

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p. 50). Most historians agree, however, that this intellectual shift towards differentiating or ‘constructing’ childhood did not translate into a time in life that could be called ‘childhood’ for all children in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries—many people ‘had little choice but to treat children as little adults’, writes Guldberg (2009, p. 51). It was not until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the basic definitional features of ‘childhood’ as we might think of it today began to emerge for the mass of children. In part, the shift was a product of fertility decline which itself was a product of wider economic changes. As life expectancy generally started to improve, families started having fewer children, meaning they could invest more highly in each child, and—for middle and upper-class families at least—those children would not need to work to help support such a large family unit. These shifts influenced (and were influenced by) changing conceptions of both childhood and work; as Wise puts it: ‘The term child labor is a paradox, for where labor begins the child ceases to be’ (Wise, in Zelizer, 1994, p. 55). Indeed, central to the construction of childhood in its modern sense is the physical removal of children from ‘labour’, and the development, instead, of schooling as the socially recognized and legitimated occupation for all children. This, more than anything else, acts to make real the distinction between childhood and adulthood. In England, an important moment in this development came in 1833, when the government passed the Factories Act, which prevented children under nine years of age from working, with limits on the number of hours for children under 18. It also provided for two hours a day of schooling. Towards the end of the century the state took on responsibility for the education of all children between 5 and 12  years of age through the Education Act (1870). As Cunningham (2006) observes, however, another factor was critical in this emergence of ‘childhood’—not directly linked to education or work, but to the experience of childhood as an end in itself. Zelizer (1994) argues that as children ceased to be economically valuable, as they came to play less and less of a part in earning money for the family, they became ‘emotionally priceless’, or ‘sacralized’. As she explains it, discussing the United States: Between the 1870s and 1930s, the value of American children was transformed. The twentieth-century economically useless but emotionally

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­ riceless child displaced the nineteenth-century useful child. To be sure the p most dramatic changes took place among the working class; by the turn of the [twentieth] century middle-class children were already experienced ‘loafers’. But the sentimentalization of childhood intensified regardless of social class. The new sacred child occupied a special and separate world, regulated by affection and education, not work or profit. (Zelizer, 1994, p. 209)

Childhood in Crisis? If modern ‘childhood’ was invented, and ‘sacralized’, in this way it has more recently come to be seen as a period of life under threat. Postman (whose book The Disappearance of Childhood was first published more than 40 years ago) is one of several critics expressing concerns that childhood is no longer distinguishable from adulthood. Just as literacy meant that adulthood could be achieved by ‘children’ in the past, today, that literacy is being replaced by media which (he argues) requires no skills to master, so childhood as a category is disappearing. Postman claims that there is evidence that children are no longer playing games, eating food, or wearing clothes specifically designed for them, and contends they lack respect for their elders, and also lack a sense of shame (discussed in Cunningham, 1995, p. 179). His concerns have long been echoed in academic and media discourse: On 13 September 2006 a national newspaper in the UK, the Daily Telegraph, launched a campaign to halt the death of childhood. Warming up Postman’s (1982) [1994]) lament on the ‘disappearance’ of childhood 24 years earlier, ‘Hold on to Childhood’ was supported by 110 academics, writers and medical experts, collectively calling for a public examination of children’s lives. Their much-publicized letter in the Telegraph asserted that children have been ‘tainted’ by over-exposure to electronic media, lack of space to play and an over-emphasis on academic testing in schools. A recent Unicef report (2007) on the well-being of children and young people in 21 industrialized countries ranked the UK at the bottom of the table in their assessment of child well-being and the US second from bottom. The report focused on six areas: material well-being; health and safety; educational well-being; family and peer relationships; behaviours and risks; and young people’s own perceptions of well-being. (Kehily, 2010, pp. 173–174)

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Indeed, the claims that childhood is ‘at an end’, ‘under threat’, ‘in crisis’ and now made ‘toxic’ are frequently made and very visible. This notion that adult culture and society today is forcing children to grow up too fast, treating them too much like adults, and robbing them of their childhood, is considered further in Part II, and in Part III in light of the Covid-19 crisis. Whatever assessment is made of the demands today’s culture places on children, it seems clear, however, that there is no simple process of the ‘disappearance’ of childhood, through which children simply become again like their medieval predecessors; treated just like adults. While it is now the (disturbing) case that signs can easily be found of the erosion of boundaries between adulthood and childhood, for example, children being charged with adult criminal offences (Furedi, 2013; Keating, 2007), it is also clear that there has been an expansion of childhood. This takes a number of forms, from the extension of the time that most children spend in secondary education to the increased parental supervision of their grown-up children in higher education and employment (a point discussed in Jennie Bristow’s essay on ‘Helicopter Parents’ in Part II; see also You & Nesteruk, 2022, who discuss extended parenthood and delayed ‘child-launching’ in the US). The sociologist of childhood Alan Prout also identifies this paradox or contradiction in the way childhood is presently socially constructed: On the one hand, there is an increasing tendency to see children as individuals with a capacity for self-realisation and, within the limits of social interdependency, autonomous action; on the other, there are practices directed at a greater surveillance, control and regulation of children. (Prout, 2000, p. 304)

Cunningham (2006) concurs, observing that at no other time in history have we been quite so concerned about children and their safety. He says that children are more monitored today than ever before, because they are viewed as endangered by engagement with the adult world (a point explored in Chapter 5). There has been an evacuation of public spaces formerly seen as the domain of children, such as local parks; and a turn towards new forms of child entertainment (indoors and online, which are then subject to the anxieties, Postman voices). In sum, Cunningham suggests that childhood in Western societies today has four overriding characteristics:

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. The child is set apart as different from adults (see also Elias, 1998); 1 2. The child is said to have a special nature and be associated with nature; 3. The child is innocent, but corruptible; 4. Today, the child is vulnerable and ‘at risk’. In relation to the last of these points, Stearns (2009), writing about American childhood over the course of the twentieth century, notes that our current ideas about children as ‘at risk’ and emotionally fragile are prefigured by cultural representations from the 1920s. During this period, he writes, using examples from the burgeoning area of childrearing literature, there was already a growing emphasis on children’s vulnerability: The new breed of childrearing manuals began speaking more frequently of the ‘problems of childhood’ with the child him- or herself seen as a ‘delicate organism’. ‘Helplessness’ was another term frequently used, and soon whole books, such as those authored by Renz (1935) gained titles like ‘Big Problems on Little Shoulders’.… the dominant mood, particularly among popularizers, promoted a tone of growing concern about the many difficulties children almost inevitably encountered, if left to their own devices. (Stearns, 2009, pp. 39–40)

There was an assertion that children were emotionally vulnerable— both to their parents and to themselves. A new language emerged to express this fear: ‘“Festering” was a term applied to the potential damage children suffered from emotions that were almost inevitable, yet which could not be managed by children on their own’ (Stearns, 2009, p. 40). The responsibilities of a good parent became magnified as mothers were tasked with recognizing this incapacity on the part of their children and protecting them from any factors which might exacerbate it. For Stearns, the basic cultural logic that emerged in the 1920s has largely persisted, as ‘[d]ominant cultural symbols still emphasize the preciousness of children but also their vulnerability and lack of capacity’ (Stearns, 2009, p. 45). Certainly, soon after the 1920s, expert studies in this field built on, and cemented, the concern with psychological vulnerability during infancy. It was during the post-World War II period that psychological and cognitive child development theorists also came into an ascendency, with Furedi (1997), Erikson (1959), and Piaget (1955) publishing their studies of childhood, associating childhood experience with adult development.

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These studies were united by the assumption of the absolute necessity of a mother’s loving nurture. ‘Attachment theory’, which is discussed in the essay on ‘The Problem of “Attachment”’ in Part II of this book, claimed that the constant presence of a loving and responsive attachment figure—typically the mother—was the foundation for lifelong mental health. Based on his research with children in institutional settings, the psychiatrist John Bowlby wrote: What is believed to be essential for mental health is that the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate and continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother-substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment … A state of affairs in which the child does not have this relationship is termed ‘maternal deprivation’. (Bowlby, 1995 [1952], p. 11)

It was along the same lines that the wealth of experts we know today (Dr Benjamin Spock, Penelope Leach, and Thomas Berry Brazelton, to name three of the most popular experts to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century) produced the first editions of their books designed to help parents to ‘parent’. The chapter which follows explores further how the underlying paradigm developed by parenting experts, that experience in early infancy has lifelong implications and that this period of life is one entailing enormous risk, is now so taken for granted as to be unremarkable in contemporary parenting culture (Hays, 1996).

The Inflation of the Parenting Role As we indicated in the Introduction, and emphasize throughout this book, it is the presumption of children as, de facto, vulnerable, and at risk, which is the most distinct and important aspect of the social construction of childhood today. This has profound implications for the definition of the mothering and fathering roles. Risky Parents As Lee et al. (2010) note, it is hard to overestimate how far the concept of the ‘at risk’ child has expanded when applied to the area of parenting. Children are cast as particularly vulnerable in today’s culture, with their health and safety seen as compromised by a ‘toxic’ social environment.

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Because of this, parents are, in effect, seen as risk-managers, tasked with optimizing their children’s outcomes in conjunction with expert advice (Lee et  al., 2010). The corollary of this is that parents who themselves indulge in ‘risky’ behaviour are increasingly framed as a danger to their children: Attention has been drawn to the distinctiveness of a culture that now routinely represents ‘parenting’ as the single most important cause of impaired life chances, outstripping any other factor … the idea that parents themselves constitute an important, and according to some perhaps the most significant, risk factor in children’s lives. (Lee et al., 2010, p. 295)

This logic applies to the ‘obvious’ candidates for the label of ‘risky parents’—the father who smacks (BBC, 2012), the woman who drinks or smokes during pregnancy (Hinton et  al., 2013; Lowe & Lee, 2010a, 2010b) or the mother who formula feeds (Knaak, 2010; Lee, 2007a, 2007b; Murphy, 2004), for example. But what is more interesting, perhaps, is the way it now appears to apply to all parents: It has also been noted that the risk parents present to children is not only considered significant when parents are considered to be ‘bad’. Parenting is also problematized where parents are construed to be ‘unaware’ or ‘out of touch’. This happens for example in discussions about the alleged threat represented to children by technologies parents do not understand (such as the internet), or in the debate about parental ‘lack of awareness’ of how much exercise their children take or of the calorie content of the food they feed their children. (Lee et al., 2010, p. 295)

The developmental paradigm, now so firmly established as fact, is one of the key reasons parents are seen as a determining force in how their children turn out. The flipside to the ‘vulnerable child’ is the risky parent: or, as Furedi puts it, ‘Omnipotent parenting is the other side of the coin of child vulnerability’ (Furedi, 2002, p. 58). For Furedi, these two important ‘myths’ result in a highly skewed understanding of adult–child relationships: The interlocking myths of infant determinism, that is, the assumption that infant experience determines the course of future development, and parental

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determinism, the notion that parental intervention determines the future fate of a youngster, have come to have a major influence on relations between children and their parents. By grossly underestimating the resilience of children, they intensify parental anxiety and encourage excessive interference in children’s lives; by grossly exaggerating the degree of parental intervention required to ensure normal development, they make the task of parenting impossibly burdensome. (Furedi, 2002, p. 45)

The idea that children are at risk from their parents has an established history. As Christina Hardyment’s (2007) historical study of childcare advice ‘from John Locke to Gina Ford’ explains, from the Enlightenment onwards, ‘scientific’ approaches to childrearing have continually put traditional parental authority into question, setting it against whichever ‘modern’ method is in vogue. Today, however, the strength of assumptions about parental determinism and the need for parenting ‘expertise’ means that ‘now almost every parenting act, even the most routine, is analyzed in minute detail, correlated with a negative or positive outcome, and endowed with far-reaching implications for child development’ (Furedi, 2002, p. 65). With experts long stressing the importance of the early (and as noted, even pre-conception) environment for infant development (see, for example, Gerhardt’s (2004) book Why Love Matters), providing children with the right kind of environment turns normal activities of parenting into a series of tasks to be achieved. Touching, talking, and feeding are no longer ends in themselves, but tools mothers are required to perfect to ensure optimal development. Lee et al. (2010) give the example that playing with a child is no longer simply an enjoyable activity for adult and child; it is perceived as an instrumental way of ensuring positive ‘long-term outcomes’ (see also Göransson, 2023 who makes a similar point about play in Singapore). Rose has even argued that ‘love’ can be used to promote a certain type of self-understanding in children, and is duly emphasized for mothers: increasing confidence, helpfulness, dependability at the same time as averting fear, cruelty, or any other deviation from the desired norm (Rose, 1999, p. 160). The conversion of ‘love’ from a spontaneous sentiment manifested in warm affection into a parental function or skill is one of the key reasons why mothers are now routinely told to ‘enjoy their baby’, with almost magical powers ascribed to ‘unconditional love’ (and disastrous consequences to its absence) (Furedi, 2002, p. 79).

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Intensive Parenting and Adult Identity This inflation of the role of the parent has meant that parenting has become an increasingly important part of adult identity. As Furedi says, ‘Adults do not simply live their lives through children, but in part, develop their identity through them … parents are also inventing themselves’ (Furedi, 2002, p. 107). This point became clear in my own research (Faircloth, 2013), where an affiliation to an ‘attachment’ parenting philosophy emerged as central to some mothers’ sense of identity. I worked with networks of mothers in London and Paris who breastfed their children ‘to full term’. This means that a mother (ideally) breastfeeds until her child outgrows the perceived need to do so—which can be at any point between a year and eight years old, though is typically between two and four years. In line with the ‘attachment’ philosophy, which values long-term maternal-infant proximity as a means of optimizing child development, other typical practices include breastfeeding ‘on cue’, ‘bed-sharing’, and ‘baby-wearing’. As I explore further in the later chapter on ‘The Problem of “Attachment”’, these women practise a form of infant feeding that is unusual but validated by wider policy directives emphasizing the risks associated with formula milk use. However, their ‘identity work’ (their narrative processes of self-­ making and accountability, now so familiar to contemporary parenting culture) is less straightforward than may be expected. The widespread moralization of infant feeding practices, and parenting more generally, appears to have amplified tensions between various ‘tribes’ of mothers, who often feel the need to defend themselves in vociferous and highly judgmental terms. In terms of risk consciousness and total motherhood, the mothers in these networks are in a double bind: on the one hand, their marginal position is affirmed through recourse to risk reduction, while on the other, their non-conventional practices are left open to the charge of ‘riskiness’ with respect to the social and emotional development of their children. They are therefore in the position of having to carry out the ‘ideological work’ as described by Hays about the benefits of their chosen style of mothering. The same logic could equally be applied to other ‘deviant’ parents (such as the formula feeder who insists that a less stressed mother is better for a baby). This is echoed in work by Villalobos (2009), which extends Hays’ assertion that mothering these days is ‘child-centred’, to highlight that it might, in fact, be better described as ‘mother–child centred’. Indeed, on the basis of her research with mothers from a range of demographics in the

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US, Villalobos positions her research at the apex of the trend towards intensive motherhood (Hays, 1996), and the emergence of a ‘culture of fear’ (Furedi, 1997) to show how mothers often focus on micro/everyday practices of mothering as a way of counteracting broader social/macro insecurities (such as under- or un-employment or greater fluidity in relationships). Mothering is then both about protecting and immunizing children from an insecure world and a source of meaning for many women: they attach themselves ‘vehemently’ to the mother–child relationship to counter their own psychic insecurity (Villalobos, 2009, p. 7). One explanation Furedi offers for this investment in particular parental ‘tribes’ is linked to the ‘emptying out’ of adult identity more broadly: The moral significance of the child today is directly linked to the emptying out of adult identity. When the desire for recognition lacks an obvious outlet, the validation of the sense of self through one’s child acquires a new importance. When in previous eras adults lived through their children, they did so as members of at least outwardly relatively stable families and communities. The child was used as a means of self-realization and sometimes as an instrument of family advancement. Today, the child has been transformed into a far more formidable medium for the validation of the adult self. At a time when very few human relations can be taken for granted, the child appears as a unique emotional partner. (Furedi, 2002, p. 120)

Similarly, Layne’s (2013) work with ‘Single Mothers by Choice’ (SMC) in the US has explored the contradiction between child-centred approaches to parenting, where children are seen as the ‘unique emotional partner’ and the parental couple-relationship. Using the case study of Carmen, a well-educated, middle-class mother of three children conceived using In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) via donor sperm, Layne highlights how an ‘intensive’ commitment to one’s children is arguably more feasible when one does not have a partner to contend with. While recognizing the lack of material and structural support most single mothers face, for Carmen, who has resources to draw upon, a husband would be an unnecessary distraction from the business of raising her children in the ‘Tiger Mom’ fashion for which she has opted. This obviously points to some interesting observations around the primacy of the mother–child ‘dyad’ in an intensive parenting ideology, and the pressure this puts both on that relationship and other family dynamics. A related point is made by Harman et al. in their work on ‘intensive grandparenting’ and the potential of a more expertise-based culture to fracture generational forms of solidarity (2022).

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Conclusions This chapter has shown that even though there are important differences of class, gender, and ethnicity, a particular parenting style has emerged in Euro-American contexts that is widely considered ‘ideal’. It is broadly one that is child-centred, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labour intensive, and financially expensive (Hays, 1996, p. x). What we suggest is that this has not emerged ‘from below’ or spontaneously from parents themselves, but rather as a product of cultural developments and influences at the levels of expertise, policy, and intergenerational transmission. These points are explored in the next three chapters, beginning next with discussion of the role and place of experts in the intensification of parenting.

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CHAPTER 3

Experts and Parenting Culture Ellie Lee

Introduction A vast industry of childcare advice has arisen. Bookshop shelves groan under the weight of warring theories about the best way to bring up baby, guides for fathers, grandmothers and even aunts … Parents spill out intimate details of conflict in the kitchen and crises in the bedroom in magazine columns, blogs and internet forums. Information overload is turning parenthood into a nightmare of anxiety and stress. (Hardyment, 2007, p. 283)

The above comment appears at the start of the final section of Dream Babies, Christina Hardyment’s influential history of childcare advice in Britain and North America, published earlier this century. Her account begins in 1750, indicating that the issuing of ‘childcare advice’ is certainly not new. However, the present seems different to the past, she observes. The volume and scope of childcare advice today is remarkable, as is the extent to which ‘intimate’ matters which were previously not the subject of public discussion have ‘spilled out’. Hardyment gave the final chapter of her book, which examines the years from 1981 to 2001, the title ‘Spotlight on Parents’, suggesting that it was the parent that had become the target of advice in a distinct way. In turn we have, today, the figure of the self-described ‘parenting expert’, and the overall aim of this chapter is to situate this form of so-­ called expertise. To do so, we set out an account of what is specific about © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Lee et al., Parenting Culture Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44156-1_3

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advice to parents in the present, in the context of a long history of child experts and advice. Our aim is not to provide a comprehensive history of experts and their messages. Some of our favourite works that provide excellent historical accounts are discussed throughout the chapter. Rather, we compare what emerges from a comparison of three points in time; the late nineteenth century, the mid-twentieth century, and the present, with the aim of throwing into relief what is distinct about today. Our commentary is informed by two general insights from the literature. The first is that what experts have had to say in both the past and the present can be understood as a reflection of the wider cultural context in which childhood is constructed, rather than a presentation of accepted facts. The psychologist William Kessen has made this point as follows: [T]he child is essentially and eternally a cultural invention and … the variety of the child’s definition is not the removable error of an incomplete science … not only are American children shaped and marked by the larger cultural forces of political maneuverings, practical economics, and implicit ideological commitments … child psychology is itself a peculiar cultural invention that moves with the tidal sweeps of the larger culture. (Kessen, 1979, p. 615, emphasis in original)

Not only are children influenced in their experience by ‘larger cultural forces’, explained Kessen, but so are theories and schools of thought which set out claims about what children are and what they need. In Kessen’s example, child psychology can thus be thought of less as an enterprise that emerged and has developed in reflection of ever-better scientific knowledge, than as an ‘invention’ reflecting the ‘tidal sweeps of the larger culture’. This is not to dispute that genuine, important insights have emerged from, for example, developmental psychology, paediatrics, and other specialisms concerned with child development and child health. They surely have, and such insights have contributed to improving the health and welfare of children. Rather, it is to show how theories about children change, and to recognize their relation to the wider society and culture in which they are found. A second related point raised by Kessen concerns boundaries; where the line is drawn between disinterested, scientific investigation of the child, and efforts to address perceived social problems through changing how parents relate to their children. Throughout history, this line between the ‘is’ of the child, and the ‘ought’ of the parent, between descriptions of

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children and prescription of parental action and attitude, has proved porous. As Kessen suggests, however, the general trajectory has been towards the ‘ought’: [T]he implication in all theories of the child is that lay folk, particularly parents, are in need of expert guidance. Critical examination and study of parental practices and child behavior almost inevitably slipped subtly over to advice about parental practices and child behavior. The scientific statement became an ethical imperative, the descriptive account became normative … whatever procedures were held to be proper science at the time, were given inordinate weight against poor old defenceless folk knowledge. (Kessen, 1979, p. 818, emphasis in original)

The delegitimation of ‘folk’ or ‘tacit’ knowledge informing adults on how to understand and relate to children is common to the different points in time explored in this chapter. However, there are shifts in the balance between the imperative to prescribe on the one hand (the ‘ought’), and the upholding and validation of ‘folk’, or what could also be termed ‘instinctual’, understanding on the other. Thus, while it is true to say that, from the late nineteenth century onwards, there is a distinct turn towards calling into question ‘folk’ knowledge, this tendency co-existed until fairly recently with some validation of ‘instinct’ as a guide which is as good as any other. One conclusion to emerge from the discussion that follows is that perhaps the single most distinctive feature of expert commentaries and statements about today’s parents is the tendency to reposition ‘instinct’ (and the parental authority arising from it) as either mythical or problematic. The transformation in expert discourse of the relationship between a parent and a child into a set of skills that has to be learned and acquired, and for which instinct provides no satisfactory guide, stands out as a defining feature of today.

The Rise of the Child Expert in the Nineteenth Century: The Search for Order Most investigations of the history of parenting experts and parent education point to the importance of the nineteenth century; notably, literature exploring England, the United States, and other countries including Canada and Australia identifies similar themes and developments. Centrally, these studies highlight the relation between the activities of

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‘child experts’ of various kinds and the socio-cultural construction of childhood during this period. As noted in the previous chapter, while ideas about childhood predate this period by a considerable stretch, the relation between urbanization and industrialization, the problem of social order, and efforts to delineate the world of the adult from that of the child (for example, through restrictions on child labour and mandatory education for all children) characterize this time. Hence, although most studies of ‘modern’ parenting experts begin in the 1700s, the 1800s are identified as the most important starting point in understanding the pre-history of the present. Explorations of the nineteenth century highlight a process whereby the authority of the mother, specifically, is unseated. Hays thus points to a shift in expert discourse in the US away from a positive validation of the special attributes and contribution of the mother, towards calling into question quite where her instincts might lead if left ‘uneducated’. The overall context, she suggests, was the growing fissure in society between the public world of commerce, economy, and politics, and the private world of ‘the home’. In the early 1800s, this gave rise to claims about ‘moral motherhood’; at this time, she explains, ‘a mother’s role in child rearing began to take on new importance’, and mothers emerged ‘as the keepers of morality’, within a portrait of ‘moral mothers raising virtuous children’ (Hays, 1996, p. 30). The expansion in the number of childrearing manuals at the time signalled the development of an interest in influencing parent–child relations. However, Hays explains, the overall tone of the commentary in them was of the sacralization and glorification of the home, and of motherhood. The domestic sphere was thus the ‘empire’ of the mother. ‘To rule this empire, a woman’s “passion” had to be repressed, but her “affections” were now understood as a positive and crucial force for the good of all’, summarizes Hays, as the key message of the time (1996, p.  30). This meant that ‘[a]lthough the father was still the ultimate authority, the mother had a much larger and valued role to play in shaping the child’ (1996, p. 32). While in expert messages, ‘the fear of maternal indulgence persisted, and notions of women as lacking in reason lurked in the background’ (1996, p. 34), there was a distinct message of reverence for the mother and the family home she created. However, argues Hays:

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Toward the end of the nineteenth century middle-class child-rearing ideologies took a somewhat curious turn. A mother’s instincts, virtue and affection were no longer considered sufficient to ensure proper child-rearing. She now had to be ‘scientifically’ trained … mothers’ status as valorised, naturally adept child nurturers was diminished at the same time that affection and sentimentality lost favour … The prominent child experts of this era … were all interested in making child rearing a scientific enterprise; none thought it should be left to untrained mothers. (Hays, 1996, p. 39)

This turn away from the validation of ‘a mother’s instincts, virtue and affection’ towards childrearing as a ‘scientific enterprise’ is widely discussed as central to the roots of modern parenting culture (Apple, 1995; Stearns, 2003). Stearns thus suggests that there was a ‘huge contrast’ between the nineteenth-century manuals and those that came later. The former were short and confined to discussion of a small number of topics, for example, piety and obedience, authored by ‘proponents of moral common sense’ (usually clergymen or their wives or daughters). By contrast the latter, written by men of medicine or psychology, ‘encompassed a huge range of topics, now usually phrased as problems’, which suggested that ‘[p]arental obligations could be met, but imposed major demands’ (Stearns, 2003, p. 19). Similar perceptions and messages also characterized Victorian England. As Hardyment puts it, with reference to the arguments of the influential early twentieth-century child expert Ellen Key: The confident early-nineteenth-century years, where mothers had enjoyed the responsibility of motherhood, were past … the hallmark of motherhood was now anxiety, an anxiety produced in large part by the systematic demoralization of mothers concerning the quality, or even the existence, of their maternal instinct in the face of the united front presented by the state, by doctors and by manual writers, on their inadequacies. (Hardyment, 2007, p. 116)

In this way, the relation between the parent (primarily the mother) and the child, as it appears in accounts from experts, moved from expressions of optimism regarding a mother’s contribution to the future given by her love and commitment to her child, towards, by the late nineteenth century, far greater scepticism about her instinctive childrearing capacities. This period showed more marked efforts by experts to educate and influence the mother and make her ‘instinct’ secondary to their ‘science’. We

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can see this shift as a reflection of the sense in which social elites, by the late nineteenth century, were more and more preoccupied with how to address problems of order and social disintegration and looked to ‘science’, and the apparent certainty it offered, to find a resolution to this problem. As Hays explains: Two related social phenomena … may in part explain the shift in ideas about appropriate mothering. On the one hand there was increasing concern with the effect on the nation of the exponential rise in the number of new immigrants, the growing ranks of the urban poor, and the striking increase in labor unrest. On the other there was a new belief in the possibility of discovering scientific, technical, expert-guided, and state-enforced solutions to such social ills. (Hays, 1996, p. 41)

Others make a similar case, explaining the orientation to scientific solutions within the context of a perceived problem of order and instability. It has been argued that the rise in the US and England of ‘Social Darwinism’ crystallized this development, by drawing direct parallels with the Darwinian theory of evolution in nature and the organic development of society, positioning the development of the child as the microcosm of this process. In their seminal study of ‘experts’ advice to women’, Ehrenreich and English thus depict the rapid decline of rural pre-industrial society in the context of economic change, where: It was as if the late Victorian imagination, still unsettled by Darwin’s apes, suddenly looked down and discovered, right at knee-level, the evolutionary missing link … in the child lay the key to the control of human evolution. (Ehrenreich & English, 1979, p. 168)

The child undergoing the process of development towards adulthood came to be seen, they suggest, as the link from the past to a new industrial future: ‘This child is conceived as a kind of evolutionary protoplasm, a mean of control over society’s not-so-distant future’ (Ehrenreich & English, 1979, p. 172). Kessen called Charles Darwin ‘the father of child psychology’, with his ideas about human evolution initiating ‘a long and continuing line that has preached from animal analogues, has called attention to the biological in the child’ (Kessen, 1979, p. 816). The idea was thus that the child and their development could be fully understood through the application of science, with their development both

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analogous to that found in the animal world, and also capturing, in microcosm, evolution from past to future. Understanding the child and controlling and ordering their development would, for this reason, provide a key to the problem of social order as a whole. To leave the child to the vagaries of maternal instinct, from this perspective, was tantamount to leaving the future to fate; far better to take control over social evolution through the exertion of scientific knowledge and influence. The problem that needed to be addressed, according to the renowned American paediatrician Luther Emmett Holt, author of the 1894 manual The Care and Feeding of Children, was that, ‘instinct and maternal love are too often assumed to be a sufficient guide for the mother’ (Ehrenreich & English, 1979, p. 181). This required, necessarily, that parents would come to be represented in a new way by those proclaiming their leadership of the new ‘study of the child’. Parents had ‘new evolutionary responsibilities’ necessitating that they would rear their children under the guidance of scientific insight, rather than folk or everyday custom (Ehrenreich & English, 1979, p. 171). The idea of the child as the key to the future in this way brought with it a clear message: ‘To say that the child alone held the key to social change was to say that the present generation of adults did not’ (Ehrenreich & English, 1979, p.  170). Notably, Holt was also a proponent of eugenics, arguing in his 1913 address to the American Association for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality (AASPIM): ‘We must eliminate the unfit by birth, not by death. The race is to be most effectively improved by preventing marriage and reproduction by the unfit, among whom we would class the diseased, the degenerate, the defective, and the criminal’ (Holt, 1913). The burgeoning enterprise of ‘child study’ that developed in America from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth century was one influential outcome of this shift towards an agenda of child-focused change (Hulbert, 2004; Lupton & Barclay, 1997). Historian Janet Golden notably titled her thoughtful and engaging study of advice about babies in the US Babies Made Us Modern arguing that ‘babies joined ordinary Americans to the modern revolutions of the 20th century’ (2018, p. 1). Ellen Key is known for designating the twentieth century in England as ‘The Century of the Child’ at its outset, advocating the need for the generalization of what she considered to be scientifically based ideas about children, to shape their rearing, and so build a better future. Some historians have noted, also, a change in assumptions about the behaviour and role of fathers in this context. Efforts to encourage mothers to follow the agenda

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of science did not mean that ‘the father role’ was immune to concern. Lupton and Barclay suggest, by contrast, that the new science of the child included expressions of concern about the ‘over-feminisation of boys’, and the ‘development by experts of a model of ideal fatherhood’ (Lupton & Barclay, 1997, p. 40). American commentaries indicate that the de-authorization of the parent as part of this growing emphasis on the child as the key to the future was most marked in immigrant working-class families, who were considered to be the most distanced from the new urbanized world (Ehrenreich & English, 1979; Hays, 1996). Investigations indicate significant similarities between the US and England in this regard, in that the strongest preoccupation in England, too, was with the childrearing practices of the urban poor (Hendrick, 1997). The range and differing perspectives of the social actors involved are wide (including social purity campaigners and child savers, public health officials, eugenicists, imperialists, law enforcers, and educationalists). Overall, however, it is clear that the explosion of concern with the ‘health, welfare and rearing of children’ was ‘linked to the destiny of the nation and the responsibilities of the state’ (Hendrick, 1997, p. 39). To ‘save’ the child was to make secure the future of the nation. Interpretations of the perceptions of working-class mothers are more or less critical of the arguments of those who sought to ‘save children’ by making the working-class family more ‘hygienic’ and less ‘neglectful’ (Hendrick, 1997; Lewis, 1980; Ross, 1993). There is a common recognition, however, that mothering practices were considered deficient, leading to, for example, mothercraft education and the promotion of mothering skills through health and welfare systems, and legislative change through maternity and child welfare laws. The relevant research detects important ambiguities in this period, however. First, it is argued that the developments of this time involved more than oppression. According to Hays, for example, they also ‘demonstrated a profound belief in the importance of mothers and children’: who, after all, were presented as the key to the future (Hays, 1996, p.  43). Thus, ‘[m]iddle class women also stood to gain from this new cultural model: it did after all promise to elevate their child-rearing and domestic duties to the status of a scientific profession’ (Hays, 1996, p. 43). Ehrenreich and English (1979) and Hulbert (2004) also emphasize on how this period gave rise to a new middle-class ‘mothers’ movement’; women who ‘refused to see child raising as something instinctive’

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(Ehrenreich & English, 1979, p. 185) and who enthusiastically embraced the idea of becoming educated in the science of childrearing, working together with child experts. A second important aspect of the reorganization of authority in favour of those knowledgeable in the ‘science of the child’ was its ambiguous relationship to ‘the family’—for the Victorians, the most sanctified institution of all. Hence, architects of the child study movement and authors of childcare advice manuals held the view that ‘[t]he vagaries of casual stories about children, the eccentricities of folk knowledge, and the superstitions of grandmothers were all to be cleansed by the mighty brush of scientific method’ (Kessen, 1979, p.  817). Yet there was a tension between this openly critical approach to ‘folk knowledge’, and the sacralization of motherhood and family. As Kessen puts it, talking of the past at least: ‘Strangely at odds with the theme of rational scientific enquiry has been the persistence of the commitment to home and mother’ (1979, p. 818). An important feature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, then, is the coexistence of the questioning of the efficacy and acceptability of certain parental practices, with the upholding of home, family life, and ‘the mother’ in a particular form. For this reason, intervention by experts, campaigners, and the state into working-class and immigrant communities and families took place in the context of the sanctification of the middle-­ class family as a private institution.

Post World War II: Attaching Children to Their Mothers and the Need for ‘Child-Centredness’ On the surface, what experts had to say in the 1950s and 1960s seems very different to the late nineteenth century. In the earlier period, literature on childrearing [W]as directed at the inculcation of self-discipline and self-control in children, qualities that became increasingly important in the wake of industrialization and what was considered to be a subsequent breakdown in the regulation of individuals by the family and community. (Lupton & Barclay, 1997, p. 39)

By contrast, the economic depression of the 1930s followed by the catastrophe of the World War II, gave rise to a different emphasis:

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It was … during this period that the categories of psychological and cognitive child development that had first come into vogue in the Progressive Era were elaborated … These theories in turn were popularized in child-rearing literature. (Hays, 1996, p. 47)

It was the ‘inner world’ of the child’s mind that became the focus of growing interest. Emphasis shifted from advising on how to develop attitudes that were considered most in line with the needs of early twentieth-­ century society, to ensuring that childhood anxieties did not lead to abnormal development. Drawing on ideas about ‘stages’ of child development (following Freud and also Piaget) the message became that: [G]ood parents, like good educators, recognize and build upon these stages … Taken together the popularized versions of these theories suggested that parents needed to guard against a wide variety of childhood fears and anxieties by carefully fostering a basic sense of trust between parent and child, that infancy and early childhood were the stages most critical to the child’s overall development, and that good parents would ‘naturally’ want to acquire further knowledge of cognitive and emotional development. (Hays, 1996, p. 47)

Despite this important shift in emphasis, however, continuity remained in the ambiguity between the privileging of expert authority and knowledge (now about the inner world of the child) and the upholding of the importance of motherhood and of family values. This was apparent in the arguments made by the figure most closely associated with this period, the British psychiatrist John Bowlby, and the growing preoccupation with the problem of ‘attachment’ (Riley, 1983; Urwin & Sharland, 1992; see also Part II of this book). In 1951, Bowlby provided a report for the World Health Organization (WHO), which had as its context widespread concerns about ‘the effects of institutionalization on children’ in the light of the experience and aftermath of the World War II (Richardson, 1993, p. 43). The experience of parents and children in this war is now difficult to comprehend. Vast numbers of British children were orphaned by the war or separated from one or more parents for long periods of time, because of their evacuation from cities to the countryside and, in some cases, overseas. Evacuation policies, which began in September 1939, with the official declaration of war by

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the British Government in response to the threat of the aerial bombing of large cities in the end involved over 3.5 million people. In the first three days of evacuation over 800,000 school-age children and over 500,000 mothers with children under five were moved. At the end of the war there was, understandably, concern about those children left without one or both parents and made homeless. In the book Child Care and the Growth of Love which resulted from his report, Bowlby set out his argument that ‘the early attachments, or bonds, a child forms are crucial to her future mental health’, and that ‘in order that the process of maternal bonding could take place … the child needed to experience a warm, intimate and continuous relationship with the mother, in which both found satisfaction and enjoyment’ (Richardson, 1993, p. 43). By merit of this emphasis on the need of the young child for nurture and intimacy as a precondition for normal psychological development, Bowlby is widely seen as one of the founding figures in the turn to ‘child centredness’. The ambiguity of this new version of ‘child science’ has been commented on, with a tension identified between an emphasis on what is ‘natural’ and ‘instinctual’ and the place of the expert or professional. Richardson (1993) thus draws attention to the centrality of ‘instinct’ for Bowlby, noting that in his approach, ‘[b]eing a good mother meant adopting a positive and loving attitude towards one’s infant. All a mother had to do to achieve this was just to act naturally’. She emphasizes the way Bowlby assessed the problem of ‘maternal deprivation’ in infancy, resulting from institutionalization: ‘[I]n discussing children who have been severely deprived of “normal maternal love and care during infancy”, Bowlby states that, “… it is exactly the kind of care which a mother gives without thinking that is the care which they have lacked”’ (Bowlby, in Richardson, 1993, p. 18). Similarly, Lupton and Barclay explain: Bowlby insisted upon the importance of the attachment between mother and child in promoting caring behaviour from the mother, protecting the infant from harm and ensuring the development of the child … he took an evolutionary approach seeing infants as possessing innate signals such as crying and smiling responses such as sucking which elicited appropriate genetically programmed responses from the mother ensuring physical closeness. (Lupton & Barclay, 1997, p. 42. See also Chap. 7 for further discussion of this point.)

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The logic, then, was that anything that impaired ‘bonding’ was problematic, but that bonding is ‘instinctual’. Additionally, as Hendrick (1997) discusses, the effect of focusing attention on the detrimental effects of the separation of the child from her mother was also to create an argument that the World War II showed the need for ‘the family’ to be placed at the heart of welfare, and far more should be done to guard against the breakdown and disruption of the family as a unit. Richardson (1993) also emphasized the influence of the arguments of Bowlby’s contemporary, the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who coined the term ‘the good-enough mother’ to encapsulate the message that, ‘A woman becomes an ordinary devoted mother just by being herself’ (Richardson, 1993, p.  45). Notably, in his 1964 work, The Child, the Family and the Outside World, Winnicott also warned explicitly against the disruptive and destructive effects of professional intervention in families. According to Richardson, the idea that mothers need to be educated about ‘what is best for their children’ is, in this way, contested by the much more ambiguous message that, ‘Mothers did know best, although it seemed they still needed experts to tell them about “what it all meant”’. The best known of all post-war parenting experts, Dr Benjamin Spock, also set out a version of this approach (Knaak, 2005). Famously, he opened his bestselling parenting manual Baby and Child Care with the line, ‘Trust yourself, you know more than you think you do’, suggesting that mothers will know ‘what is best’ through instinct (so long as experts draw this fact to their attention). The literature exploring the claims of experts in this period detects at least two contradictions in what is said about ‘instinct’. Hays draws attention to the coexistence in the 1950s and 1960s in the US of claims regarding both the absolute necessity of mother-love and nurture, and a perceived problem of maternal overprotection (a contradiction between maternal instinct and overprotectiveness that Stearns (2003) suggests first emerges in expert discourse in the 1920s). Hays suggests that John Bowlby’s theory of maternal deprivation and the critical significance of bonding between mother and baby was the exemplar of the former way of thinking, but it was accompanied by expert-communicated fears about mothers who ‘love too much’: ‘[T]hese theorists of maternal attachment and maternal hostility seemed to say that while maternal affection was absolutely necessary … It could easily slide into dangerously unwholesome forms’ (Hays, 1996, p.  48). Mental illness and social disruption could allegedly result from either under- or over-nurture, posing the need for the

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expert or parent-educator, as the mediator between the ‘instinct’ of the parent and the ‘needs of the child’, in the process of childrearing. As we argue elsewhere, this concern with both under- and over-attentiveness is now reproduced as the ‘double-bind’ of parenting culture notably expressed in criticism of the ‘helicopter parent’ (Lee and Macvarish (2020), and see Chap. 10). Secondly, the precept that ‘mother knows best’ was called into question through the working of ‘child centredness’. Hays points to this development as follows: Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the explicit goals of child rearing were centred on the good of the family and the good of the nation; the emphasis was on imprinting adult sensibilities on children from the moment of birth; and it was the making of a proper adult that was understood as the basis for the training of the child. By contrast, the most striking feature of permissive-era advice is the idea that the natural development of the child and the fulfilment of children’s desires are ends in themselves and should be the fundamental basis of child-rearing practices … The child (whose needs are interpreted by experts) is now to train the parent. (Hays, 1996, p. 45, our emphasis)

Thus, while it was held to be the case that the mother may ‘instinctually’ meet the child’s needs in some respects, it was also held that she may lack the insight and knowledge to comprehend fully what the child’s needs are. Expert interpretations of the ‘needs’ of the child, in particular with the realm of emotion, led to a reconstruction of the role of the expert. In the late nineteenth century, an expert desire to mould the child into a model citizen led to the displacement of folk knowledge by scientific insight. In the second half of the twentieth century, the expert view held that the future society should be moulded around the (presumed) physical and, especially, emotional needs of the child, with parents trained to participate in this task. In the age of intensive parenting, the insistence that parental instinct cannot be relied upon and that parents need to be trained to identify and fulfil the basic criteria of rearing children, has become especially marked. We now turn to this explicit focus on the parent and their perceived deficiencies and the associated normalization of an assumption of the need for shared authority as part of ‘parenting’. We end with a look at the findings of some research about parental experience of expert-guided parenting.

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Parenting Experts in the Twenty-First Century: Targeting Parents to Learn Skills Hardyment suggested one feature of the twenty-first century scene is the expansion and diversification of parenting advice: ‘No one great thinker’s name dominates’ she observed back in 2007 (p. 286). She also noted then that an interesting development was the emergence of the parent-­parenting expert; that is, parents (often celebrities) who present their ‘journey’ to becoming a parenting expert as one that began with their own experience and led them to ‘share’ what they had come to understand to help others, who in turn use advice to develop their own parenting style or approach. More generally, the self-presentation by the twenty-first century parenting expert as ‘someone just like you’ by merit of being a parent is commonplace. For example, the British parenting expert Sue Atkins describes herself this way: I have over 15 years experience [sic] as a parenting coach and teacher, and I have raised two children of my own, so I truly understand the challenges you are going through. As the Parenting Expert for ITV’s ‘This Morning’, BBC Radio, Disney Junior, Good Morning Britain and India’s Education and Parenting World, I’ve helped thousands of parents like you to overcome your challenges and develop your own balanced, down to earth parenting approach that creates happy, positive children, and relaxed confident parents. (Atkins, n.d., emphasis in the original)

The experts of this sort present themselves as ‘truly understanding’ other parents by merit of their own experience as a parent, and able to help because of this. They also notably seek to appeal to not only addressing the emotional problems of children, but also those of parents; Atkins claims to provide a bespoke solution to the ‘challenges’ of parenting that creates parental happiness and confidence. The emergence, in this way, of the self-styled ‘parenting expert’ (or alternatively ‘trainer’, ‘coach’, or ‘educator’), individuals who self-­ consciously use these terms to describe and promote themselves on this basis but for whom the grounding of their claims to be ‘expert’ can at first appear unclear, is thus a notable development of the past two decades. ‘Parenting expertise’ in this form has, since the early twenty-first century, become a marketable commodity, sold by a particular type of person, both to parents individually and also to the media (many ‘parenting experts’

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advertise themselves as available for media appearances and comment). Indeed, the daily appearance of ‘parenting experts’ debating a range of issues and parenting practices based around relationships between parents and children—from the very beginning in babyhood onwards, across the digital and print media—speaks to the development of context different to that of the past. Through her study of pregnant women, focusing on their experiences of addressing their anxieties about how to disclose the fact of, and manage the reality of, pregnancy in the workplace, Gatrell (2011) also draws attention to this feature of parenting advice and expertise today. Her study examined responses and advice given to women online in internet chatrooms and via websites, and detected the fluid and expansive nature of what now constitutes ‘expertise’. ‘Expert opinion’, in her study, thus included examples like the website ‘Verybestbaby.com’ and the ‘What to Expect’ website. It also comprised other opinions emanating from mothers who have restyled themselves as advisers and experts. Overall, this innovative look at how pregnant women go about and experience finding advice about a perceived problem begs the question: What is the foundation or basis for the expertise purportedly on offer? While it is not always made explicit by parenting experts, the scholarly literature which has examined ‘parenting expertise’ suggests there is, however, a pervasive influence of psychology in a particular form at work. It is true that ‘psychologist’ emerges as a common status-invoking term used to underpin the claim to be a ‘parenting expert’ or ‘expert on parenting matters’. The rise of interest from this quarter in ‘parenting’ was discussed some time ago by Lupton and Barclay, and following Erica Burman’s critique of developmental psychology, it was observed: At the end of the twentieth century, the focus of developmental psychology has shifted from the actions and behaviour of the child to the mother and more lately the father … The child has remained the primary subject of developmental psychology, in terms of interest directed at its physical, intellectual and moral development, needs and welfare, but the gaze of researchers has moved from investigating the child to investigating the parent. (Lupton & Barclay, 1997, p. 42, our emphasis)

The purpose of research, this suggests, has become less about illuminating aspects of child development than emphasizing the influence and contribution of parental reactions and responses, and centrally the emotions

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of the parent, to ‘healthy child development’. In turn experts concern themselves with the parent and particularly their emotions. Kanieski identified a shift in the emphasis of psychologists who research attachment, from ‘the identification and treatment of attachment disorders in children’ in the 1930s and 1940s, to ‘greater emphasis on the parents, particularly mothers, monitoring themselves in the promotion of secure attachment in their children’ (2010, p. 335, our emphasis). It is in this area that a break with the past becomes apparent. It is the parent, what they do but also how they feel, who has become the direct subject of expert concern. Two researchers who examined the advice given to parents on internet sites about how to talk to children about terrorism, following the terrorist attacks back in 9/11, 2001, identified this shift in the following way: A causal link is established between the advice and psychological outcomes for the child, with parents discouraged from relying on their own intuition and experience. (Dolev & Zeedyk, 2006, p. 468)

Although ostensibly many parenting experts present themselves as encouraging a relaxed approach natural to the particular parent, there is a belief at the same time that relying on instinct and experience will lead to emotionally fragile parents and damaged children. The project of the ‘parenting expert’ is not simply to alert parents to what ‘expert opinion’ considers to be the most up-to-date insights from science about what a child needs. Rather, it promotes the need for the therapeutic management of parental action and emotion. Helen Reece’s analysis of official parenting advice in Britain provides an excellent assessment of the most dominant model experts uphold as enabling the creating of happy parents and well-developed children; ‘Positive Parenting’. As she notes, it contains, ‘three inter-related components’ which are ‘the absence of punishment’, and ‘the expansion of both positive reinforcement and leading by example’ (2013, p. 42). These she observes, while appearing to be innocuous and uncontentious, are in contrast arguably ‘arduous if not impossible’ for parents to achieve, ‘thereby setting parents up to fail’ (2013, p. 42). This is because what is contained within them is the assumption that to ensure the best development of children, the parent needs to not simply do (or not do) certain things but

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rather ‘adopt an entire identity or approach’ (2013, p. 47). In other words, being a positive parent is about no longer being the person you were preparenthood, but rather striving endlessly to be a very particular type of person, a ‘positive one’, who continually acts and feels in the prescribed way, as they relate to their child. Becoming a parent is not therefore about you developing a relationship with your child based on what you are already. Rather it is about adopting a particular identity and acting in line with it. Reece emphasizes the need for far greater attention to the pitfalls of this approach, in which schemas and prescriptions for being ‘positive’ impair (and indeed more or less explicitly de-value) what she calls the ‘spontaneity of the parent-child relationship’ (2013, p. 42); what might otherwise be described as acting on instinct. The conceptualization of the development of the relationship between a parent and their child as a process that should happen through acquiring and implementing a skill set through the influence of a third party suggests the presence of a decisive break away from looking to instinct, intuition, and experience as a desirable basis for the development of this relationship. A distinct difference with past, then, is that the previous ambivalence about the extent to which parents should be encouraged to look to expert advice, rather than instinct or intuition, has shifted decisively, in the direction of the presumption that all parents should always look to the experts for guidance about how to raise their children, especially in a therapeutic form. As Furedi puts it, comparing the present moment with previous eras: Although experts [in the past] believed that there were limits to what parents could do, they assumed that with sound advice most problems could be solved. Today’s experts take a radically different approach. They assume not only that parents haven’t a clue but also that they are unlikely to be able to cope on their own. Informing parents that they can’t cope alone and that therefore they should seek support is a central theme of contemporary child-­ rearing literature. (Furedi, 2008, p. 177)

We turn now to discuss the construction of ‘support’ as an essential prerequisite for ‘parenting’. We indicate that the claim that parents need support co-exists with claims about need for ‘greater awareness’ (predicated upon the assumption that ‘parents haven’t a clue’), and that these two sets of claims together comprise the main planks justifying the need for expert, rather than informal, tacit knowledge about childrearing today.

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Warnings to Parents, ‘Support’ for Parenting, and the Problem of Shared Authority Stranger danger online: don’t leave children to their own devices. (Roux, 2023) Babies need humans, not screens; Find out why, and how, too much screen time can harm your child. (Nelson, n.d.) Some parents “spend more quality time with their devices than with their children”. (ITV News, 2020) Get off your phone if you want to be a good parent! Too much screen time can make you nag and yell more, researchers say. (Norton, 2020)

Parents today are rarely informed they are doing a fine job of rearing their children and can worry less about it. Rather, the world of parenting is filled with warnings about what have come to be routinely called the toxic effects of society, and how sometimes terrible outcomes are becoming more and more usual because of parental inability to manage risks to children (Furedi, 2002/2008; Guldberg, 2009). Fear about children playing or interacting outdoors free from adult oversight has pervaded constructions of risk for several decades (Best, 1993; Furedi, 2018). These have been added to and arguably built on and overtaken by those about the online world with extensive effects for parental experience, as Livingstone and Blum-Ross have documented so comprehensively (2020). Headlines like those above, warning parents about their children’s use of technology and about the the harm they do as parents through their own use of it, are ubiquitous. A detailed look at this aspect of parenting culture is outside the scope of this chapter; we simply emphasize here how claims about threats to children and parental inadequacy are commonplace. Two notable features of these claims about parenting are first, that the typification of the ‘problem parent’ is not restricted to those claiming welfare benefits—parents in general are subject to warnings about the harms of their behaviour; and second, the claim that parents are focusing too little time and attention on children stands out. The paradoxical aspects of this discourse sitting alongside claims about ‘over parenting’ and ‘helicopter parenting’ are discussed by Jennie Bristow in Chap. 10, but the notion that parents are too disinterested in their own children pervades, despite all the evidence about the expansion of parenting time. An important feature of expert claims today is that they draw attention, in this way, to

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purported threats to children emanating from parental deficiencies in the management of risk. In most circumstances, however, warnings to parents about risks to children do not only issue a direct instruction to parents to change their behaviour, rather, parents are often admonished in a way that presents itself as non-prescriptive and above all ‘supportive’. ‘Modern-day experts insist that they are not in the business of judging parents and prescribing formulas’, noted Furedi. ‘Their advice is often conveyed in a nondirective, nonprescriptive form … Parenting programmes are deliberately packaged to come across as non-authoritarian’. Indeed, Furedi observed that expert messages about the problems parents allegedly need to take on board are best understood as a project of ‘creating demand for support’ (2008, p. 176). Hence, what is presented to parents as ‘information’ or ‘evidence’ about how to manage risk is better understood as a claim or argument that parents need parenting professionals and advisors. The other important aspect of claims about parents’ ‘need for support’ is, as noted already, the emphasis placed on parental feelings. The rationale for support is not only that this will lead to ‘better outcomes’ for a child, but also that it has a therapeutic value for the parent themselves, and they need this if they are to ‘parent’ better. As Lupton and Barclay observed, now 25  years ago, the arguments made by professionals about modern fatherhood: [T]ypically portray fatherhood as an overwhelmingly problematic experience, thus requiring the close attention and help of professionals … Such terms as ‘stress’, ‘strain’, ‘role transition’ and ‘psychological disruption’ are frequently used in the literature. (Lupton & Barclay, 1997, p. 48)

They noted that as part of this emphasis on fathers’ vulnerability, ‘pre-­ parenthood’ as well as parenthood itself comes to be represented as a time when men require ‘support’: Men are positioned as requiring much in the way of expert help in terms of preparing themselves for fatherhood, getting through pregnancy and birth unscathed … the primary intention of such literature is to ensure that men conform to the expectations of ‘appropriate’ fatherhood as they are designated by experts. The focus on the need to counsel men … is typical of the contemporary importance placed in self-expression and therapeutic practice. (Lupton & Barclay, 1997, p. 50)

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If this was the case back then, fatherhood in the twenty-first century has come to be presented as definitionally a risk to paternal mental health and fatherhood as needing to be ‘supported’; advice for fathers is titled ‘Looking After Fathers’ Mental Health’ (Best Beginnings, 2021) and fathers are told, ‘Dads’ Mental Health is Often Overlooked—This Needs to Change’ (Fleming, 2022). As I have discussed elsewhere, the rise of Male Post Natal Depression (PND) is inseparable from the claim that is necessary for me to seek support in order to cope with fatherhood (Lee, 2010). Warnings and instructions on one hand and the case for support on the other can seem contradictory, with the former appearing manifestly bossy and authoritarian and the latter self-consciously non-authoritarian. However, both share a common starting point. This is the belief in the profound significance for the child of parental action linked to parental emotion, and a presumption that the parent is inadequate in the face of this responsibility. Whether this is expressed through an attempt to appeal to parents on the basis of fear (parents’ own perception that if they get parenting ‘wrong’ it will have devastating consequences), or an appeal to feelings of inadequacy, unpreparedness, and the need to ‘talk through’ how best to be a parent, the underlying claim is the same. It is that there is a direct link between parenting style and ‘outcomes’ for the child, and that for this reason, the parent cannot be left to their own devices to ‘parent’. The crystallization of a belief that what parents do leads directly to measurable ‘health’ or ‘wellbeing’ ‘outcomes’ in the child—the parental determinism that we described in the introductory chapter—is at the centre of the world view of contemporary parenting experts. Indeed, this idea of the ‘parent as God’ emerges from Furedi’s analysis as the flipside of the dominant construction of the ‘vulnerable child’. The most distinct feature of ‘parenthood’ as it is now constructed, then, is of a role defined by both its profound significance for the future of individual children and also society as a whole. However, the parent-God is a deity of a particular kind; he or she is a God who, as well as being all-powerful, is inadequate in the face of the task for which he or she is responsible. He or she has power but should only use it under the tutelage of the expert. It is to this feature of parenting culture, termed by Furedi ‘shared authority’, that we now turn. As the discussion earlier in this chapter indicated, commentaries about children, their development, and what they need, can be viewed as metaphorical statements about how the relationship between the present and the future is perceived and understood. In previous eras, the particular

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ways in which the nature of ‘a good childhood’ and ‘good childrearing’ was imagined reflected perceptions of the present and future in more general terms. The present preoccupation with ‘parent training’ can be similarly understood as reflective of a wider sensibility about tomorrow and its relation to today. Furedi described this sensibility this way: The future is seen as a terrain which bears little relationship to the geography of the present. Since the process of change appears unresponsive to human management, its future direction becomes more and more incomprehensible. (Furedi, 1997, p. 61)

The context for the rise of expert oversight of ‘parenting’, from this perspective, is uncertainty about our ‘future direction’. How change can be brought about is presently viewed as ‘incomprehensible’, with ‘human management’ considered unlikely to be an effective way to bring about change. As a result, the minutiae of parent–child relations, and heightened preoccupation with confusion and emotional strain, become a far greater preoccupation. Limiting risk becomes the dominant substitute for efforts to bring about purposeful change, and exerting control over the area of life where it seems most possible to do so—‘parenting’—arguably attains far greater attraction than in the past. In an era where wider society offers little possibility for action and intervention, a relatively easier project seems to be that of ‘intervening early’ in the development of the child through influencing the parent to behave in a particular way. The individuation of the process of change in this way—what has been termed ‘the politics of behaviour’ (Furedi, 2005)—is not restricted to parent–child relations but finds a potent expression in this area of life. According to Furedi, a central problem for parents generated by this development is that it contributes to making bringing up children an ‘intensely unsettling and trying task’. His diagnosis is that this experience results from the fact that authority in childrearing has become both more and more contested and increasingly understood as best ‘shared’. He made this point as follows: Effective child rearing relies on authoritative parenting … That is why the prerequisite of effective parenting is self-confidence and belief in their role. Without this confidence, the exercise of parental authority is fraught with problems … The literature on childrearing is surprisingly silent on the potential problems caused by the sharing of parental authority … It is not possible to share some of this authority hitherto accorded to the parent

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without weakening this authority overall … Those who are uncertain about their authority are likely to find child rearing an intensely unsettling and trying task. (Furedi, 2008, p. 182)

Following this line of analysis, the way parents now experience their role as often confusing and burdensome is directly connected to this sharing of authority. In response, suggests Furedi, it becomes necessary to ask more searching questions about what is meant by the term ‘expert’ and on what basis the claim to authority can legitimately be made; as he put it: [I]t is worth asking from what the experts involved in these projects derive their expertise … Parenting expertise is one of those mysterious arts seldom asked to account for itself. (Furedi, 2008, p. 175)

Most clearly of all, the notion that the relationship, as it develops over years, between parents and their children can be grasped and helpfully influenced through the learning of ‘skills’ from an ‘expert’ is, he suggests, an unwarranted and illegitimate expansion of the meaning of expertise. This point is explored through the following defence of experiential, as opposed to formal, expert-generated learning: The issue is not whether parenting needs to be learned but whether it can be taught. Everyday experience suggests that not everything that has to be learned can be taught … in the end, people learn through their interactions with the other party in the relationship … Parents learn what is right for their children through interacting with them … They certainly don’t gain such understanding through books and parenting classes. Until they have a child, even basic parenting questions remained unfocused and unspecific. (Furedi, 2008, p. 193)

In this light, the case emerges for insisting on a clear boundary to define where expertise or professionals do, and do not, have a useful role to play. In other words, it is to define and specify in what circumstances the exercise of professional authority is legitimate and when it is not. Furedi explains the distinction between genuine expertise and the authority it rightly commands, compared to that of the ‘parenting expert’ this way: In these encounters [with genuine experts], most sensible adults do not presume a relationship of equality. They seek out experts precisely because they trust their knowledge and authority … Matters are different when it

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comes to the relationship between a parent and a parenting professional. This relationship involves a direct conflict of authority about who knows what’s in the best interests of a particular child. (Furedi, 2008, p. 181)

Some researchers have turned their attention to consideration of how encountering and engaging with parenting experts shapes parental experience and identity. We end this chapter with a look at the insights gained into the workings of shared authority, highlighting especially recent work about the problems of being a ‘positive parent’ Lin et  al., 2021) and ‘negotiating the paradox of expertise’ (Cucchiara & Steinbugler, 2021). Living with Shared Authority: Parental Experience of Parenting Experts Arnup’s widely cited work from back in the mid-1990s took as its starting point the questions she asked herself when she first became a mother. As she emerged from ‘the fog of new motherhood’, she explains, she was, ‘shocked by the degree to which expert advice had taken hold of my life. I scarcely took a move without consulting a manual’. Gradually, however, ‘I began to ask questions. Where has all this advice come from? How did these experts know they were right?’ (Arnup, 1994, p. xii). One insight to emerge from Arnup’s search for answers to these questions is that parenting is defined by its professionalized character, with a given assumption about the need for commentary on what parents ought to do disseminated by ‘officials in various levels of government and members of the medical, nursing, and psychological professions’ (1994, p. 6). An important development discussed further in the following chapter is the expansion and institutionalization of the influence of the parenting expert, often termed ‘parenting professional’, through official parent-training programmes. In Britain, for example, the government has through this century established what it initially called a ‘parenting workforce’, made up of ‘parenting experts and practitioners’. In one document about this new sector of so-called professionals, the British Department for Education (DfE) stated that: Parenting Experts and Practitioners are responsible for the delivery of evidence-­based parenting programmes to parents of children considered to be at risk of poor outcomes … Parenting Experts and Practitioners specifically target the parents of children and young people whom local agencies … agree are at risk of poor outcomes. (DfE, 2010)

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In this account, certain features of contemporary parenting culture are clear. First, while Arup asked, ‘how do they know they are right?’ Governments (and experts) claim that there is a reliable base in ‘parenting science’ underpinning their work; second, that the utilization of that evidence by the ‘experts’ who understand it can improve ‘outcomes’ for children; and third, that government agencies can, and should, ‘target’ certain parents and their children whom they assess to be ‘at risk’. The increasingly intense official focus on targeting certain groups of parents (usually those with low incomes) is common to many countries (see, for example, Romagnoli & Wall, 2012) and its effect for the redefinition of social problems and for the experience of those parents subject to such interventions is discussed later in this book. This articulation of the work of the ‘parenting expert’ is clearly bound up especially with perceptions of particular parents held by policymakers (those whose children are deemed to be ‘at risk’ of ‘poor outcomes’). The ideas underpinning it, however—that ‘parenting’ is decisive in ‘outcomes’ for children and that there is a body of knowledge about parenting understood by particular ‘experts’—are framed as being generally relevant for all parents. Research has generated important insights about the effects for parental experience (particularly maternal experience) of living in a culture where being a parent and expert influence has become so connected in general. We noted above that probably the most dominant form of parenting endorsed by parenting experts and professionals is ‘positive parenting’ and that some, for example Reece (2013) described it as burdensome because of requirement to set aside spontaneity in favour of following a parenting script. Parents living in Australia interviewed by Smyth and Craig (2017), as part of their wider look at the experience of conforming to the ideals of intensive parenting, found parents discussed the process of disciplining children in accordance with the message of positive parenting. Central to this was recognition of a shift away from assumptions of children’s obedience to parental authority, exemplified by the abandonment of smacking a method of discipline in favour of ‘positive’ methods. As the authors note, parents communicated ambivalence about the effects with some feeling it had ‘unintended consequences’ (2017, p. 117). The continual effort to model good behaviour to children, discuss everything, and praise never punish, led a parent to suggest that ‘Maybe there’s too much talking’, with others suggesting children were losing out because of an absence of boundaries and an expectation of never being called to account (2017, pp. 117–118).

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Research by Lin et al. (2021) directly addresses the burdens of positive parenting, termed by their study ‘parenting with a smile’, and provides an innovative look at its impacts on parents. They drew on ideas about emotional labour developed by the American sociologist Arlie Hochschild and used them to develop an online survey completed in the end by 347 parents (mostly mothers) living in various European countries. The overall purpose was to assess the level of effort required to comply with the ‘emotional display rules’ that constitute parenting in a positive way and ‘regulatory effort’ needed when parents adopt the identity of the positive parent. The results strongly confirmed the description by Furedi of parenting as an ‘ordeal’ and the paradoxical outcome of an increased focus on the management of parental emotion leading to an increase in emotional strain reported by parents. Positive parenting, ‘comes at a cost for parents’, conclude these researchers, and they suggest that the ultimate benefits for children as well as parents should be questioned: [I]t may be ironic that positive parenting might ultimately negatively affect those it seeks to protect. The present study constitutes a call for researchers in parenting to find a way of reconciling the interests of parents with the well-being of children. (2021, p. 2715)

Paradox is at the centre of the findings of research by Cucchiara and Steinbugler (2021). They did interviews (formal and informal) and observational research at a centre providing parenting classes attended by what the researchers describe as ‘middle- and upper-middle class’ mothers. They predicated this research in recognition of the significance of the intensification of motherhood, the long history of relationship between middle-class mothers and experts, but also the development of parenting expertise that, we noted above, ‘has become less prescriptive, pressing mothers to individualize strategies by taking account of specialized knowledge of their child’ (2021, p. 4). Against this backdrop they observed, ‘the promises and burdens associated with acquisition of expert advice have not been sufficiently explored’ (2021, p.  3); the study they conducted provide well observed insights into the experience of making sense of the contemporary parenting expert. Overall, what they found is that there was no absence of effort on the part of mothers to acquire and make use of expert knowledge; indeed, they observe how these mothers have a strong belief ‘that they should devote extraordinary time and energy to raising their children and that the

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choices they make in that realm should be informed and intentional’ (2021, p. 7). What they found, however, was a reality of what they term the ‘expertise paradox’ which they describe as ‘the tendency for more knowledge to create less certainty and more anxiety’ (2021, p.  7). The promise, which is very apparent in the marketing work of parenting experts generally, of greater confidence, more happiness bred of feeling more certain, and of better relationships, did not match with reality. To the contrary, advice turned out to be often contradictory, and experience in many areas of actually looking after babies did not conform to expected ‘outcomes’. These researchers conclude that parenting expertise turned out to be ‘an empty promise’ and they argue, ‘This is the paradox of expertise— more knowledge often does not produce more certainty’ (2021, p. 18). One interpretation is that shared authority leads to a depreciation of confidence and limits genuine learning.

Conclusions This chapter has situated today’s parenting experts in context. It has indicated that there is continuity in the ways that experts’ concerns with children, and parents, express an effort to shape the future, though modifying this relation. It has also shown there is little consistency to the content of these concerns; to the contrary, more noticeable is the contradictions within expert opinion at different points in history. The chapter has then highlighted some distinctive features of today’s parenting experts. It has shown that no one ‘big name’ dominates, but that a therapeutic dimension to expert messages is distinctive which targets parental emotion and seeks to change the self-perception of the parent. It has also emphasized the importance of scholarship pointing to the ‘paradox of expertise’, and the detrimental effects of third party oversight for relations between parents and their children. We now turn to consider the arena of policymaking in which the courting of the parenting expert and the encouragement of shared authority is very apparent. The next chapter thus considers how the influence of parenting expertise has been encouraged and facilitated by policymakers and the emergence of a new definition of family policy. This new politics of the family, we suggest, has given considerable weight to the development of contested and unclear authority, with the attendant problems described above.

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CHAPTER 4

The Politics of Parenting Jan Macvarish

Introduction The family has been the object of political attention for many decades. However, the form that this attention has taken—in particular, the relation presumed to exist between the family and the state—has undergone important changes and the degree to which parents themselves have been the object of child-centred politics has varied over time and place. This chapter primarily examines the relation between the family and the state that has developed in the present era, in the context of the wider historical and political trends discussed so far and emphasizes an intensification of the ‘politicization of parenting’. Discussion in this chapter concentrates mainly on policy and political developments in the UK, focuses on the late 1990s through the first decade of the twenty-first century (1997–2010), and endorses the idea of a shift to an ‘explicit’ form of family policy, focused on ‘parenting’. As Daly argued, since 1997, ‘England could be said to be in some ways an archetype in that it has put in place the most elaborate architecture anywhere for parenting support’ (Daly, 2013, p.  164). We show how this reveals a particularly rapid shift over this period of time in political attention towards early childhood, with an attendant focus on what parents do and what parents ought to do, forming an increasingly coherent and relatively uncontested, ideological framework.

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This particularly intensive period of policy development, however, drew much of its inspiration and authority from prior developments in the US over a longer historical period, and the international transmission of policy thinking from the US to England (and then to other countries) is a theme running throughout this chapter. The process that sociologists have described as the ‘diffusion of social problems’ (Best, 2001) helps to explain the dominance, across Anglo-American culture, of certain ideas about family policy. This concept is also useful in indicating how policy developments in England can illuminate processes that begin, or occur concurrently, in the US and elsewhere in Europe, despite the apparently large differences in the relationship between state and society in these countries. Daly (2013) explored the emergent trend across most of Europe towards the provision of ‘parenting support’ as a discrete area of policy ‘offering services to parents around the way that they parent’ (Daly, 2013, p. 163), and we elaborate this observation in the final section. The chapter highlights, in conclusion, that concerns have been raised about whether these attempts to strengthen families may in fact serve to undermine the intimate bonds underpinning family life.

From ‘Implicit’ to ‘Explicit’ Family Policy From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, and particularly since the emergence of the welfare state in post-war Western societies, the modern state has increasingly taken responsibility for the well-being of children (Richter & Andresen, 2012). As Smeyers pointed out: The State has always intervened in this realm, whether through general legislation concerning human and children’s rights or in more specific ways through tax regimes and all sorts of regulations concerning schools. (Smeyers, 2010, p. 265)

Others have described how, over a similar period, the child was politically significant in a symbolic sense. For example, Kessen argued that from the late nineteenth century in the US, ‘[t]he child became the carrier of political progressivism and the optimism of reformers. From agitation for child labor reform in the 1890s to Head Start, American children have been saviours of the nation’ (1979, p. 818). According to Davis, for the past 200 years, ‘the earliest years of children’s lives’ have been associated with ‘peculiar prestige and aura’ (2010, p. 285), meaning that:

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Infancy is then vouchsafed within this symbolism as a state in which all of society’s hopes and ideals for the young might somehow be enthusiastically invested, regardless of the complications that can be anticipated in the later, more ambivalent years of childhood and adolescence. (Davis, 2010, p. 286)

Supporting this account of a growing political interest in children in the late nineteenth and into the twentieth century, Hays suggested that the US state sought to resolve the tensions of race and class manifest in issues relating to immigration and labour force unrest, through an increased involvement in the project to improve American citizens in their infancy (Hays, 1996, p. 67). British sociologist Nikolas Rose described how, because childhood is linked to the ‘destiny of the nation and the responsibilities of the state’, it became ‘the most intensively governed sector of personal existence’ (Rose, 1999, p. 121). Rose pointed out that because, by and large, the young are cared for within families, political attempts to ‘conserve and shape children’ require the ‘petty details of the domestic, conjugal and sexual lives of their parents’ to be brought into public view, scrutinized, and evaluated (Rose, 1999, p.  123). Although the state, childhood, and family have been in this way recognized as intertwined for decades, the literature highlights distinct aspects and developments. Moving forward to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Parton’s case is that greater moral and existential uncertainty led to children becoming a ‘prime site for trying to control the future’ because they are ‘unfinished’ (Parton, 2006, p. 173). One way of understanding what Parton describes as the increasing ‘intensity of the government of childhood’ (Parton, 2006, p. 187) since the late twentieth century is to conceptualize policy as moving at this point from an ‘implicit’ to an ‘explicit’ way of operating (Clarke, 2006; Lewis, 2011; Wasoff & Dey, 2000). Seeking to understand US family policy, Bogenschneider (2000) restates and expands upon Kamerman & Kahn’s (2001) distinction between implicit policies, which are ‘not specifically or primarily intended to affect families but having indirect consequences on them’, and explicit policies, which are ‘designed to achieve specific goals regarding families’ (Bogenschneider, 2000, p. 1137). It is this trajectory, towards an increasingly explicit form of policy, which it is argued emerged from the late twentieth century.

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Daly traces a distinctive trajectory in family policy in the UK, in contrast with more statist European nations, arguing that historically, the UK lacked ‘institutional or sui generis family policy’: Hence, while financial and service supports were in place for families and Child Benefits were universally paid for all children, policies oriented to the protection and support of family as a social institution (such as existed in France or Germany, for example) never developed in the UK. (Daly, 2010, p. 433)

Daly attributes the prior absence of explicit family policy to a ‘strong liberal heritage’ which determined that ‘the prevailing ideology was that the family works best when the state and other institutions intervene only in cases of need or crisis’ (Daly, 2010, p. 433). This liberal heritage necessitated the negotiation of a delicate balance between efforts to improve the well-being of children and to rescue children in dire conditions of abuse or neglect, and the equally strong imperative, noted in Chap. 2, to preserve or ‘sanctify’ the middle-class family as a private place where parental autonomy and intimate relationships could be sustained. However, many authors have observed that in political rhetoric and policy practice, the balance definitively tipped from the late 1990s in the direction of increasing state intervention, with policy makers, as Daly put it, having ‘discovered something of a new policy domain in early childhood education and care’, leading to a ‘major restructuring’ in policy, with the result that ‘the UK has more family in its policy portfolio than ever before’ (2010, pp.  433–434). This concurs with Lewis’ assessment of developments in family policy, suggesting that, since the late 1990s, implicit policy underwent a transformation: Family policy became more explicit under successive New Labour governments and increasingly included a focus on family relationships and on programmes that addressed parenting, in addition to family arrangements such as childcare. (Lewis, 2011, p. 107)

Lewis has argued that this development was not arrested by the end of the New Labour administration and the election of a Conservative/ Liberal-Democrat coalition government in 2010, noting that, ‘Members of the Coalition government also signalled their interest in “early intervention”, which includes parenting programmes, both before their

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election in May 2010 and since’ (Lewis, 2011, p. 107). The novelty of policy developments since the first New Labour administration in 1997 have, in this way, been highlighted and explored at length by many scholars of social policy. All identify the period from 1997 onwards as marking a significant turning point in policy thinking and implementation, which put children and parents at the centre of the agenda to address inequality, now reconceptualized as social exclusion (Gillies, 2005; Levitas, 1998). The first ever National Childcare Strategy was issued in May 1998 in the Green Paper ‘Meeting the Childcare Challenge’ (DfEE, 1998). The innovative character of this development was acknowledged by policymakers themselves in the government consultation document Supporting Families (1998). It was, according to the then Home Secretary Jack Straw (who was also Chairman of the Ministerial Group on the Family), ‘the first time any government’ had ‘published a consultation paper on the family’, and as such was ‘long overdue’ (Home Office, 1998, p. 3). In Paranoid Parenting, Frank Furedi described this set of proposals as representing ‘so far, the most ambitious project designed to politicise parenting’ (2001, p. 179). Looking back at the report, Supporting Families can be said to have established a policy agenda in Britain that has remained essentially unchanged since. Henricson identified this ‘preoccupation with the governance of parenting, its support and control’ as a ‘distinctive feature of the New Labour project which has taken root, manifested in something of a national consensus across the political spectrum’ (Henricson, 2008, p. 150). However, the development of a political consensus around the notion that parenting is of legitimate government interest is evident beyond, and prior to, New Labour. Bogenschneider (2000) argues that in the US, there was growing policy interest in the family from the 1970s, culminating in the 1980 White House Conference on Families, which was ‘instrumental in putting families on the political agenda’ (Bogenschneider, 2000, p. 1136). Despite this, however, there was generally low political interest in children and families, in part because discussions of the family ‘proved so politically contentious’ that federal policy developments were ‘stymied’ for almost a decade (Bogenschneider, 2000, p. 1136). It was not until the Clinton administration of the 1990s, with its ‘Third Way’ approach (later to be adopted by New Labour in England) that family policy was able to transcend oppositional party politics, ceasing to be ‘Republican, or Democrat, conservative or liberal’, allowing concern with the family to be seen as a vote-winner in a less ideological political landscape (Bogenschneider, 2000, p. 1138).

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While the efficacy of policy solutions to reduce poverty in the form of ‘early intervention’ to ‘break the cycle of disadvantage’ has, in this way, been argued over in the US since the mid-1960s, they only really took off in a UK context since the late 1990s. As Furedi (2001) and Welshman (2008, 2010) noted, prior to the 1990s, ideas emphasizing ‘cycles of poverty’, ‘dysfunctional’ communities or family cultures, or failed individual behaviour gained little political traction in the context of political contestation over structural conceptualizations of economic problems and social inequality. Welshman describes how in 1972, when British civil servants were invited by the President of the Ford Foundation to observe the Head Start early intervention programme (which targeted the education, health, and parenting of children in low-income families), they returned to Britain unconvinced that ‘cycle of poverty’ explanations deserved a prominent place in social policy because of their emphasis on ‘individual traits and behavioural deficiencies’ (Welshman, 2010, p. 92). As Clarke points out, however, initiatives by the New Labour government from 1997 onwards ‘drew on a number of programmes in the US which had been established in the 1960s’ as part of President Johnson’s ‘war on poverty’ (Clarke, 2006, p. 706). Clarke draws particular attention to the influence of the US Head Start programme and the HighScope Perry study: The latter claimed to show that preschool interventions prevented crime, violence, and educational underachievement over a 40-year period, thereby saving public money in the long term. Head Start was directly imitated in Sure Start, Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair’s flagship preschool early intervention initiative, indicating that ‘cycle’ ideas had become entrenched across the political spectrum: What seems to have had the greatest impact on policy at the birth of Sure Start was the research into childhood disadvantage and intergenerational transmissions of economic status, which was quickly adopted in Treasury documents and the annual poverty reports. (Welshman, 2008, p. 82)

In the European context, such developments have also become increasingly evident. In 2007, the Council of Europe published recommendations concerning ‘positive parenting’ which addressed ‘the core issues related to positive parenting and non-violent upbringing, with particular emphasis on parents’ entitlement to support from the state in parenting’ (Council of Europe, 2007). ‘Positive Parenting’, as Reece (2013) has explained, and as the previous chapter discussed, is a strategy that parents

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are increasingly advised by official sources to use in disciplining their children, which relies on the use of ‘positive reinforcement’ in place of punishment. While the cross-border promotion of such orthodoxies as ‘positive parenting’ suggests a universalizing of concern to support and direct parents in the intimate choices they make with their children, other examples demonstrate considerable national variation in approach. For example, whereas Henricson (2008) pointed out that the New Labour government sought to avoid an explicit statement of parental responsibilities and attendant rights, Ramaekers and Suissa give the example of Flanders in Belgium, which introduced a pledge of commitment by parents, explicitly to compensate for the decline of civil marriage (Ramaekers & Suissa, 2011, p. 202). We now discuss three features of this explicit form of family policy before commenting further on parenting policy in some other countries.

From ‘the Family’ to ‘Families’: De-Moralized Family Policy Sociologists have noted a shift in British politics at the end of the twentieth century, moving ‘beyond left and right’ towards the formulation of a post-ideological ‘Third Way’, referred to above in the context of the US (Furedi, 2005; Giddens, 1991, 1994). This shift allowed ‘the family’ to move away from being an inevitable site for contestation over traditional versus progressive values of family type or sexual behaviour (Goldson & Jamieson, 2002; Jensen, 2010). This was in marked contrast to the polarizing family politics of the 1990s, most notably the failed ‘Back to Basics’ campaign launched by the Conservative Prime Minister John Major. ‘Back to Basics’ attempted to ‘turn back the clock’ on sexual politics and family change, notoriously by attacking single mothers and homosexuality, but instead it provoked a campaign of ridicule and hostility by the press, who took it upon themselves to expose the peccadilloes and hypocrisies evident in the personal lives of certain government ministers and other politicians (Duncan, 2007; Fox Harding, 2000). A new approach to politicizing the family was evident in the choice of words in the title of New Labour’s first family policy consultation document, referred to above. The fact that the document was called Supporting Families rather than Supporting the Family suggested from the outset a greater acceptance of diverse family forms. The report self-consciously states that, ‘There never was a golden age of the family. Family life has continually changed—and changed for good reasons as well as bad’. The

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report argues that changes such as divorce and single parenthood were to be accepted rather than railed against, because ‘Government could not turn the clock back even if it wanted to do so’ (Home Office, 1998, p. 2). However, as Gillies notes, the apparently relaxed approach to family form and the ‘diversification of families’ coexisted with a ‘greater anxiety about the quality and management of relationships and family practices’ (Gillies, 2011, para 9.1). It was clear in the new proposals that the family was conceived of as being in greater need of assistance than ever before and that this assistance was of a new kind to that offered in the past. A recurring theme in policy literature since Supporting Families has been that there are new and increasing pressures on family life: both parents are now holding down jobs outside the home; parents are often caring simultaneously for children and elderly parents; new technology introduces new risks to childhood and relationships become harder to sustain. The family is cast as fragile and as bearing the brunt of the fast-­ moving modern age. Vansieleghem describes this outlook as widespread: The notion that we are living in a complex and permanently changing society pervades the prevailing discourse in academic contexts as well as in the popular media and contemporary politics. (Vansieleghem, 2010, p. 341)

She argues that this discourse of disorienting change and the idea that we have broken the possibility of historical continuity in family practices legitimize greater recourse to expertise and the expansion of measures to manage the inner life of families. This demoralizing of intergenerational relationships determines that: Upbringing is thus no longer understood in terms of a general transfer of norms and values from one generation to another; rather, it appears to be a process of skilfully generating solutions to (self-actualization) problems produced by our so-called permanently changing society. (Vansieleghem, 2010, p. 344)

It was against this backdrop of concern about the vulnerability of families to the pressures of modern life, and the assumption that families, in all their forms, needed to be helped to become ‘competent’ (Gillies, 2011) in the project of raising citizens for the twenty-first century, that the New Labour government developed its rhetoric of ‘supporting families’.

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The government’s reluctance to criticize unmarried, divorced, or single parents, and its desire to embrace a number of diverse family forms, went hand in hand with developing new ways to ‘evaluate the internal quality of the relationships between the individuals within the family’ (Gillies, 2011, para 9.1); this is what has become central to the project of parenting policy, with the outcome of making parents and ‘parenting’ the direct object of policy. There are distinctive, linked features of this type of policy. As the chapter now discusses, one is demoralized policy justifications based on claims around ‘what research shows’ about both the determining influence of parenting for appropriate child development, and the need for parenting support. Another is a new resonance for the idea of ‘cycles’ and the need to break them to address ‘poor outcomes’ for children, together with the idea that parenting, definitionally, requires professional support, regardless of socio-economic status.

The Increasing Certainty of Policy: ‘Research Shows’ In the early days of the UK’s explicit family policy, it was claimed that good parenting was a protective factor against social disadvantage, but over time, the claims have become more strongly deterministic, arguing that ‘poor’ parenting actively, if unintentionally, causes disadvantage. A 2006 document produced by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) claimed, for example, that, ‘We know that parents are the major influence on a child’s life. Parenting in the home has a far more significant impact on children’s achievement than parents’ social class or level of education’ (DfES, 2006, p. 4, our emphasis). In this formulation, it is claimed that there is no uncertainty left about what is determining, when it comes to ‘children’s achievement’. In 2010, the report The Foundation Years: Preventing poor children becoming poor adults, produced for the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government by Labour Member of Parliament Frank Field and the Independent Review on Poverty and Life Chances, further strengthened the parental determinism claim and revealed its cross-­ party appeal: A healthy pregnancy, positive but authoritative parenting, high quality childcare, a positive approach to learning at home and an improvement in parents’ qualifications together, can transform children’s life chances, and trump class background and parental income. (Field, 2010, p. 16)

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Alongside the increasingly forceful argument that evidence tells us good parenting prevents social disadvantage while poor parenting causes it, as articulated above, run evermore certain claims that what constitutes ‘good parenting’ can now be scientifically known. By 2006, a report by the DfES states that ‘We know the key principles of effective parenting’ (DfES, 2006, our emphasis). As Gillies points out: The notion that there could and should be consensus over what counts as good parenting is increasingly justified through reference to scientific research. Emphasis is placed on assessing the evidence base for particular interventions to ensure successful programmes are reproduced, with little discussion of how ‘success’ might be defined across diverse cultures and values. (Gillies, 2011, para 6.2)

The most recent way in which claims to certainty are made has been through the appropriation of ‘brain science’ by early intervention advocates: a phenomenon that we discuss in detail in Part II of this book. Although ‘brain claims’ began to enter England’s social policy from 2006, it has been widely noticed that such arguments for early intervention became a defining feature of family policy since the election of the Coalition government in 2010. Picking up on the prior development of this trend in the US, Furedi anticipated the priority given to the infant brain by the popularization of parental determinism back in 2002. Wastell and White (2012) set out an important critique of what they see as the re-moralization of family life, albeit in the ‘softened and medicalized’ language of neuroscience (Wastell & White, 2012, p. 408). They describe how ‘The mythological version of the infant brain is fast becoming part of the policy and practice of child welfare, easily invoked to profound rhetorical and material effect’ (Wastell & White, 2012, p. 409); this is discussed in more detail in a later chapter.

Parenting the Parents: ‘Breaking the Cycle’ and Parenting Support for All In his 1999 ‘Beveridge’ lecture, named in honour of William Beveridge, the social reformer and economist credited with the creation of the British welfare state, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke of his government’s commitment to eradicating child poverty within a generation and to the breaking of what he called the ‘the cycle of disadvantage’, ‘so that

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the children born into poverty are not condemned to social exclusion and deprivation’ (Blair, 1999, p.  16). This indicated that the language of ‘cycles’, with its connotations of cultural and behavioural rather than structural explanations for poverty, was judged to have found a new resonance in British politics. A prominent theme in the social policy literature discussing this development is that problems that would once have been conceived of as structural in origin, such as poverty, inequality, poor educational progress, or the ill health associated with social deprivation, have now come to be attributed to parental behaviour (Churchill & Clarke, 2009; Gillies, 2011; Jensen, 2010). The targeting of parental behaviour as the key to unlocking children’s potential was central to the reframing of inequality as ‘social exclusion’. As Clarke explains: The idea of social exclusion as a trans-generational phenomenon has repeatedly found practical expression in interventions that aim to change parenting practices in poor families and to provide poor children with high quality early education, in order to counteract the effects of their poor social and physical environment and produce a better future generation of adults. (Clarke, 2006, p. 701)

After 1997, the presumption gained strength that parents in straitened circumstances will inevitably find it harder to deliver the kind of parenting children need. It has become commonsense to suggest that without additional support, economically poor parents must be capable only of ‘poor parenting’. Supporting Families set out a vision for the governance of the post-traditional family which included considerable policy innovation and institutional change in this direction (Daly, 2010): for example, a new National Family and Parenting Institute was established to bring together research and expertise in ‘parenting’ best practice. The most discussed, and arguably most popular, parenting initiative launched by New Labour was Sure Start, which we discuss next, before turning to comment on Every Child Matters, the Family Nurse Partnership, and finally, the promotion of universal parenting support. Sure Start Announced in 1998 as the central element in New Labour’s strategy to counter social exclusion, £540 million was allocated to build Sure Start

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centres in areas of high social deprivation and to train a new ‘early years’ workforce. But besides delivering resources for playing and learning directly to children and providing low-cost childcare to parents, Sure Start centres and the professionals trained to work in them were also charged with changing parental behaviour. Targets were set for reducing smoking and raising breastfeeding levels amongst new mothers and fathers; ‘healthy eating’ was promoted in shopping and cookery lessons; and parents were taught how to relate to their children in particular ways by receiving supervised guidance in playing with their babies, being encouraged to talk, sing, and read to them, and by adopting ‘positive parenting’ approaches to discipline (Churchill & Clarke, 2009, p. 43). This approach was not without its critics, even from within the world of policymaking. In a later assessment of Sure Start, the eminent psychologist and government adviser Professor Michael Rutter expressed his continued resistance to attempts to deal with poverty at the level of individual behaviour: To see this as a way of dealing with child poverty was naive… It’s the structural effects that are much more important in relation to poverty and we have a real dilemma in how best to deal with that. (Rutter, 2011, p. 6)

However, despite the presence of such doubts and inconclusive findings of efficacy in the first Sure Start evaluation (Belsky et al., 2007), there was, from 2006, a renewed push on tackling social exclusion through targeting the parenting of young children and strengthening the claim that the arguments for early intervention were ‘backed up by evidence and academic research’ (Welshman, 2008, p. 83). Over the same period, alongside the reorganization of services to families around the presumption of a universal need for support and guidance, were more overtly disciplinary features, developed in conjunction with the justice service. Although blaming some parents for delinquency was not new, Goldson and Jamieson observe a shift from ‘finger pointing to explicit finger-wagging’ in policies designed to hold parents responsible for their children’s behaviour (2002, p. 88). Back in 1996, the Labour Party discussion paper, Tackling the Causes of Crime, had linked parenting with antisocial behaviour (Furedi, 2001, p.  179); and once elected, New Labour brought in measures to discipline the parents of disorderly children as part of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998.

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These developments were expanded in the Anti-Social Behaviour Act (2003) and Criminal Justice Act (2003). Parenting orders were introduced, which usually consist of two requirements that can last up to 12 months: that the parent(s) attend a parenting programme and that they demonstrably change their child’s behaviour, for example, by ensuring that the youngster observes a curfew or attends school (Lucas, 2011, p.  189). If the parent(s) fail to bring about the prescribed change of behaviour in the child, they can be fined up to £1000. Parents can even be rehoused, with their children, in heavily monitored accommodation, until their parenting is judged to have improved. Welshman (2008) and Clarke (2006) demonstrate, on this basis, how the argument that antisocial behaviour, in parallel with social exclusion, is caused by ‘poor’ parenting, has recast poverty and inequality as a problem of social order and social integration rather than a problem of social justice. Although Furedi noted back in 2001 that ‘[a]t present, the authoritarian impulse in public policy is focused on a small group of “irresponsible parents”’ (2001, p. 183), by the mid-2000s, policy attention was directed at a broader range of parents—and children. The increasing emphasis on early intervention has meant that ever-younger children have been drawn into policy purview (Lewis, 2011, p. 109). New Labour’s initial Sure Start strategy was to focus services on the under-eights, but this was rapidly modified to focus on younger children because it was felt that this was where the biggest gap in service provision was located and because, it was argued, there was stronger evidence for more successful outcomes if interventions happened at the age of four and under (Clarke, 2006). As Clarke observed, the move to concern with younger children: Represents an important shift of resources to a section of the population, children under four, whose needs had previously been seen as almost entirely the private responsibility of their parents, and, in practice, primarily their mothers. (Clarke, 2006, p. 716)

The reach of policy thus both increased, by including a wider age range of children, and transformed, by extending to preschool children accessed in the home, at specialist centres alongside their parents, or by separating infants from their parents in formal early education settings. Parents and the intimate world of family relationships have therefore become more explicitly located as ‘the problem’.

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Every Child Matters (ECM) The ECM report was produced in response to the Laming Inquiry into the horrifying abuse and eventual death of eight-year-old Victoria Climbié at the hands of her guardians (her great-aunt and great-aunt’s partner) and marked an intensified policy emphasis on ‘prevention’, characterized by a strong emphasis on risk, monitoring, and surveillance (Parton, 2006, p. 176). The overall approach was on ‘shifting the focus from dealing with the consequences of difficulties in children’s lives to preventing things from going wrong in the first place’ (DfES, 2004, p. 2). As such, it sought to increase collaboration between child protection services, health services, and the police, to prevent a recurrence of what had happened to Victoria Climbié. ECM also set out an approach which seemed to have relatively little to do with preventing such extreme and rare cases of child abuse. As Parton notes, while the ECM Green Paper ‘was presented as a direct response to the public inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié’, in fact it ‘was much more than this’, encapsulating a far wider set of ideas about sub-optimal parenting (Parton, 2006, p. 139). Enforced by the Children Act 2004, the ECM recommendations targeted the well-being of all children from birth and set out five key outcomes it hoped the services would help children attain: ‘being healthy, staying safe, enjoying and achieving, making a positive contribution to society, and achieving economic wellbeing’. Parton explains the expansive scope of ECM as follows: It aimed to take forward many ideas about intervening at a much earlier stage in order to prevent a range of problems later in life, namely those related to educational attainment, unemployment and crime, particularly for children seen as ‘in need’ or ‘at risk’. In this respect it aimed to build on much of the research and thinking [developed after 1997] and the policies introduced by New Labour in relation to childhood, where child ­development was seen as key and children were conceptualised primarily as future citizens. (Parton, 2006, p. 139)

Others have noted, along similar lines, that a significant feature of policy since the late 1990s has been the attempt to join up different areas of policymaking. According to Smith, ‘a radical and qualitative shift is taking place in the UK with regard to direct state intervention in parenting’, which is evident in the increased joining up of services to children and families:

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We should note that the title of Department for Children, Schools and Families, which partly replaces departments of state in whose title the simple word ‘education’ used to figure, itself indicates the preparedness of the state to intervene in the lives of parents more widely than simply by ensuring educational provision for their children, and indicates too the importance now attached to ‘joining up’ the various agencies whose job it is to care and intervene. (Smith, 2010, p. 358)

Approaches which look at family policy through the lens of risk culture, as described in the introductory chapter to this book, offer insights into the expansion of policy concern and the drive to create comprehensive strategies of prevention typified by ECM. The preventive and predictive focus of risk culture does not just create an imperative to prevent the most extreme incidences of harm but also leads to a redefinition of what harm means. Parton exemplifies this by tracing the changing terminology and expanding scope of child protection, arguing that, ‘In the late 1960s the object of intervention was “the battered baby syndrome”, in the 1970s “non-accidental injury”, in the 1980s “child abuse”, and by the late 1990s the child’s “safety and welfare”’ (Parton, 2006, p. 173). The categories of ‘abuse’ and ‘neglect’ now include behaviour which would once have been regarded as within a normal range of family experiences, such as children becoming overweight or parents getting angry and using moderate physical chastisement. The development of the category ‘emotional abuse’ means that evidence of abuse or neglect cannot just be ‘read off’ from bruises, broken limbs, or poor health in the child’s body, but must either be interpreted from the child’s behaviour or predicted based on the way in which the parent is judged to relate to the child. Parenting professionals are now instructed to record and measure the relationship between new mothers and their babies for evidence of ‘attachment’, ‘attunement’, ‘sensitivity’, ‘positive parenting’ or for maternal depression (Department of Health, 2009). Wrennall goes as far as to suggest: The term ‘Child at risk’ used to mean, at risk of abuse or neglect, but it has now been redefined to mean, a child at risk of not meeting the government’s objectives for children. (Wrennall, 2010, p. 310)

Dodds (2009), Macvarish (2010a, 2010b), and Parton (2006) have pointed to the ways in which the policy remit expanded and came to

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identify not just children that are being, or have been harmed, but those who are at risk of future harm or disadvantage. Smeyers (2008, p. 729) and others have commented on the significance, in this respect, of cases where the parents of overweight children have been accused of neglect and in some cases, the children have been taken into state care, based on a projection of the risks to the child in their future health as adults. The Family Nurse Partnership The Family Nurse Partnership is an early intervention programme which, like Sure Start, originated in the US (where it is called the Nurse Family Partnership programme). The scheme relies on intensive, health-led home visiting during pregnancy and the first two years of life, and claims to improve outcomes for both mother and child, particularly in those families categorized as most ‘at risk’. This programme, which in the US, concentrates on poor, first-time parents, but in the UK targets teenage parents, engages pre-emptively with parents-to-be identified as vulnerable. However, the programmes are not designed to prevent abuse, rather they aim to train parents, identified as possessing certain ‘risk factors’ (such as being aged under 20), in recommended ways of parenting. Parents are ‘supported’ in achieving ‘healthy behaviour’ during pregnancy, in establishing ‘positive’ relationships with their partners and families, and in engaging with their baby in ways that are deemed appropriate. This extremely high degree of state involvement in the intimate relationships of a targeted group has been legitimized by a prior consensus formed around the presumptions that, by virtue of their age alone, teenage parents are inherently ‘vulnerable’, that their children are inherently ‘at risk’ of inherited deprivation, and that ‘good parenting’ is capable both of being taught and of solving social problems. The amplification of teenage parenthood as a social problem, despite evidence of fewer teenage pregnancies than in the past, has been explored most thoroughly by Arai (2009) and Duncan et  al. (2010). As these authors make clear, in 1997 New Labour moved teenage pregnancy to a central position as part of its agenda to tackle ‘social exclusion’, not only raising its profile as a marker of continued inequality but targeting it as a cause of poverty and deprivation (Arai, 2009; Carabine, 2007; Dodds, 2009; Duncan et al., 2010; SEU, 1999). The ‘teenage mother’ became the exemplar of ‘poor parenting’ and, with the popularization of the idea that teenage mothers beget future teenage mothers, of the idea of the

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‘intergenerational transmission’ of poverty through deficient parenting (Macvarish, 2010a, 2010b; Macvarish & Billings, 2010). Prioritising teenage pregnancy as a social problem susceptible to political mobilization had proved itself to be a consensus issue in the US, and commentators on the earlier US discussion offer many valuable insights (see, for example, Furstenberg, 1991; Geronimus, 1997; Luker, 1996; Vinovskis, 1988). While President Clinton, in his January 1996 ‘State of the Nation’ speech, spoke of the need to continue lowering the rate of teenage pregnancy in order to ‘restore the family’, a notable feature of the later discourse was that it was less overtly moralistic in traditional terms (Macvarish, 2010a, 2010b; Macvarish & Billings, 2010). In the social exclusion framing, it was the mother’s age, not her unmarried status, that was emphasized, and her sexual behaviour was framed as negatively affecting her and her baby’s health and life chances, rather than as threatening the moral standards of the nation. The children of teenage mothers were cast as socially and biologically ‘vulnerable’: a relationship was drawn between young maternal age and low birth weight babies, higher rates of infant mortality, a higher likelihood of being exposed to ‘risky’ antenatal behaviour such as unhealthy diets, smoking, and lower rates of breastfeeding. It was claimed that low birth weight (in fact only associated with the very youngest mothers) is associated with low IQ.  Young mothers were also claimed to be more prone to post-natal depression, which was said to undermine maternal bonding and which in turn was claimed to affect the baby’s neurological and emotional development. Thus, both the body and the brain of the baby were constructed as being ‘at risk’ from the mother’s age (Macvarish, 2010b). Parent Training for All The expansion of the category of problematic parental behaviour that underlies the policy programmes discussed above, was anticipated by Furedi in 2002: In the past, politicians were only interested in indicting the so-called problem parent. The main concern was with the problem posed by a small group of marginalized poor families. Later, the weakening of the institution of marriage and the apparent decline of the family led some politicians to represent single mothers as the symbol of moral decay. During the 1990s, the deadbeat dad became the subject of moral concern. Gradually, with the

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intensification of moral uncertainties, other parents were brought into the frame. The yuppie parent who was more concerned about career than family life soon joined the working mother. Today, political scrutiny is no longer fixed on a specific group of mothers and fathers. All potential parents face the attention of policy makers. (Furedi, 2002, p. 192)

If deficient parenting is perceived to be the problem, then it is not surprising that explicit attempts to ‘retrain’ parents have since become a feature of family policy as we have indicated, in particular as part of measures claiming to address social inequalities (Churchill & Clarke, 2009). As Lucas notes, ‘In the UK instruction of parents became a key plank in policy responses to social exclusion through parenting orders (POs), parenting early intervention pilots, parent support advisors, respect parenting practitioners, and the role of parenting experts in local authorities’ (Lucas, 2011, p. 182). As Lewis describes, however, services have in fact expanded from problem families to universal provision: Initially such programmes were provided for parents whose children’s bad behaviour had already come to the attention of the authorities (usually social workers or the courts). However, parenting programmes have become part of a much wider package of ‘parenting support’—a term that gives expression to the state’s desire to work ‘in partnership’ with parents—and from the mid-2000s they have taken their place alongside a range of services such as ‘stay-and-plays’, drop-in centres, health visiting and (in some local authorities) family nurses, and home/school programmes that are funded by central government and offered by local authorities … Thus, parenting programmes have been made available both for group work with referred and self-referred parents, and for intensive, preventative work on a ­one-to-­one basis with children deemed to be at risk of offending and socially excluded families. By 2010, access to parenting programmes on a voluntary basis had become universal, while parents of children whose behaviour had come to the notice of the authorities could be ordered to attend such programmes. (Lewis, 2011, p. 107)

Gillies (2011), Lucas (2011), and Lewis (2011) have all placed parenting reeducation programmes within the long history of childcare advice, but all concur that the twenty-first century has seen a massive expansion in the scale and reach of such programmes. Gillies has discussed ‘the

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emergence of a whole new industry and matching workforce with the aim of promoting “good parenting” across the state and the third sector’ (Gillies, 2011, para 6.2). In 2011, a scheme was announced by the British Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government, entitling 50,000 parents to £100-worth of parent-training sessions (DfE, 2013). Called ‘CANparent’ (Classes and Advice Network), the scheme was partly rationalized as a way of destigmatizing help-seeking—vouchers were to be distributed through a commercial pharmacy chain, were likened to antenatal classes (which have a wide take-up), and it was mooted that employers might incorporate parenting classes into employee benefits packages (suggesting that respectable, working families require training like anybody else). While this could be seen as a tactic to avoid stigmatizing ‘problem’ families and thereby discouraging those often labelled ‘hard to reach’ from seeking help, there is a genuine belief in policy circles that all families need support at some time and that parenting requires a set of skills which all parents can enhance. Parenting programmes aimed at parents in general in the UK include Triple P (Positive Parenting Programme), which originates in the University of Queensland, Australia, but is now a global enterprise operating in 25 countries; the Incredible Years programme, originating from Carolyn Webster-Stratton in the US; and FAST (Families and Schools Together), again originating in the US, but brought to the UK by Professor Lynn MacDonald of Middlesex University. Developments in UK policy from the late 1990s through the first decade of the twenty-first century, as this chapter has discussed, constitute a distinctive shift. The literature rightly points to the evolution of a new sort of explicit policy, with ‘parenting’ at its centre. While it is true that some parenting is construed by policy makers as in greatest need of support through intervention as early as possible, this policy trajectory has been underpinned by an increasingly consensual assumption that all parents benefit from parent training and parenting support. A later chapter details how this assumption has developed specifically since the early years of the twenty-first century into ‘neuroparenting’ which has come to be expressed in the dominant policy framework of ‘1001 First Days’. This chapter now turns, however, to consider the continued process of diffusion of the politics of parenting, with comment parenting policy in Europe.

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Parenting Policy in Europe As this chapter has emphasized so far, the literature discusses policy makers in UK countries as pioneers of politicized parenting policy; as Jennie Bristow discusses in the following chapter, twenty-first century Scottish policy makers can be considered especially enthusiastic proponents of the professionalization of parenting and of state oversight of parent–child relations. Over the last decade, some of the most interesting research and writing about parenting policy has focused on developments in parenting policy in other countries, however. Much of this research takes the background in UK countries as its point of departure and sets out similarities and differences elsewhere. Claude Martin, for example, has written extensively on ‘the invention’ of a French politics and policy of parenting (Martin, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017) observing that the equivalent word for ‘parenting’ appeared from the late 1950s within anthropology and psychoanalysis and became part of public debate in the late 1990s. Sihvonen’s research shows that the Finnish newspapers’ use of the word ‘vanhemmuus’ (parenting) tripled between 1999 and 2014 (Macvarish & Martin, 2021), and overall, assessments across a range of countries point to, ‘the emergence of new words to describe family relations and the raising of children, and the adoption of these words by policy makers’ (Macvarish & Martin, 2021, p. 436) suggesting that there is a global generalization of a distinctive understanding of how families have come to be understood. Within this, it has also been observed that, against a backdrop of contrasting contexts and policy histories, what is described as support for parents based on ‘neuro’ claims about the early brain and its development, has disseminated from its starting point in the US and the UK to many countries (Macvarish & Martin, 2021). Some important distinctions in the development of both the presentation of the case for parenting support, and the workings of programmes, have emerged, however. One area of investigation is the account of expertise, with research looking at what it claims to constitute, and the case made for what parents might gain from interacting with it. Ella Sihvonen’s research about Finland is especially insightful in this regard (2018a, 2018b). She notes the extensive allocation of resourcing to parenting support, signalling the import placed on it by the Finnish Government, but how in some projects:

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Parents are positioned as experts whose parenting responsibilities and competence are strengthened within peer-parent relationships and shared with the surrounding community. (2018b, p. 443)

The message to parents from support programmes of this sort is that the purpose is ‘empowerment’ and the rationale for support is to draw out existing capacities for parenting, with an objective for the state of avoiding dependence. Another area of discussion is the extent to which parenting programmes operate around explicit projections of parental deficits and parent/ parenting-­shaming, or go to lengths to avoid this model. Research on some countries (France, Sweden, Belgium, and Hungary) indicates that parenting programmes go to lengths to avoid a ‘deficit model’ of parenting. This expresses itself in programmes being organized around peer-­ support, and in placing emphasis on the eschewal of hierarchy regarding who is best-placed to give good advice. It has been argued that variation in the ways in which external authority and expertise are represented and incorporated into parenting programmes is contextual. This includes ‘the salience of religious institutions and different types of expertise (medical or psychotherapeutic)’ in different countries (Macvarish & Martin, 2021, p. 446). Variation in the development of politicized parenting policy, and the way parental experience is shaped and influenced, is an important area for research ongoing. However, despite the differences, one central dimension to parenting policies that emerges as significant overall is in the understanding of, and approach to privacy. We now expand on this observation, before concluding by emphasizing arguments that indicate why the reordering and destabilization of privacy is considered a problem for parents, children and society in general.

Politicized Parenting as a Reordering of Privacy Policy advocates associated with the ‘parenting’ project have argued that the conventional boundary which upholds the privacy and autonomy of the family acts as a barrier to social improvement. (Macvarish & Martin, 2021, p. 444)

As the observation above suggests, it has been identified that an important shift towards the de-validation of ‘the privacy of the family’ has taken

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place through the ascent of explicit family policy. Broadhurst et al. point out that the increasingly ‘child-centric’ focus of family policy has intensified the tension between the ‘sanctity of the birth family and the need for intervention to protect children’ (2010, p. 1050). According to Smeyers, the balance has tipped in favour of statutory involvement, driven in part by demand provoked by the high profile of family cruelty and neglect causes célèbres such as the Fritzl case in Austria 2008, the case of Marc Dutroux in Belgium 1996, and the death of ‘Baby P’ in England in 2007 (Smeyers, 2010, p. 265). Gillies describes how up until the late 1990s, ‘conceptions of “the family” were characterized by a strongly bounded notion of privacy’—but the advent of New Labour marked a significant shift in this balance, and a ‘remarkably aggressive attempt to reposition family life as a public rather than a private concern’: Previous legislation and sensibilities which placed everyday personal and family life as largely outside the remit of state intervention have been explicitly challenged through a moral focus on children as the most important constituents of family life. (Gillies, 2011, para 5.1)

The view that privacy is problematic and should be dispensed with became overt in less than two decades. Back in 1996, Labour MPs Jack Straw and Janet Anderson authored a Labour Party discussion paper on parenting. Straw, then Shadow Home Secretary, wrote in the foreword what has now become a familiar refrain when he described parenting as the ‘most important task any of us ever undertake’ (Straw & Anderson, 1996). Less familiar today is the need felt by Straw to justify even raising the issue of parenting, describing how, when he first did so in 1994, he ‘did so initially with great trepidation’. Setting the scene for one of the arguments in Supporting Families (1998), Straw stated, ‘No one wants to be preached at—particularly by politicians’ but says that ‘almost everyone I have spoken with wants to break the taboo on public discussion of parenting’ (Straw & Anderson, 1996). In Supporting Families (1998), there is similarly an explicit recognition that government intervention into the family is contentious, although the wording suggests the primary concern is with avoiding the appearance of moralizing: … governments have to be wary about intervening in areas of private life and intimate emotion. We in Government need to approach family policy

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with a strong dose of humility. We must not preach and we must not give the impression that members of the Government are any better than the rest of the population in meeting the challenge of family life. They are not. (Home Office, 1998, p. 5)

By 2005, however, it was clear matters had changed. The then Prime Minister Tony Blair made a speech ‘on improving parenting’ in which he acknowledged the shift in sensibility from a cautious approach to family intervention to a far less apologetic case for earlier and harsher measures: You know a few years ago probably the talk about sort of parenting orders and parenting classes and support for people as parents, it would have either seemed somewhat bizarre or dangerous, and indeed there are still people who see this, is this an aspect of the nanny state, or are we interfering with the rights of the individual? And I think the point is this, we need to give people that support, and we need to do that particularly in circumstances where if we don’t give people that support, and also put pressure on them to face up to their responsibilities as a parent, they end up having an impact on the whole of their local community. So it is not something we can just say well that is just up to you as to whether you do this properly or don’t do it properly, because unfortunately the way that you do it makes a difference to the lives of other people. (Blair, 2005)

Here we can see that the change in language employed by politicians reveals a significant shift in ideas about the relationship between the family and the state. In a few short years, politicians went from talking hesitantly about the need to ‘break the taboo’ on treating everyday matters of family life as legitimate arenas for public policy, to making the case stridently for intervention in the family as an expected part of the policy agenda. Part of this rhetorical shift, of course, may be seen to indicate a concern with impression management rather than an acknowledgement that there may be legitimate arguments for limiting intervention in order to preserve the privacy of the family. However, the speed at which policymakers discarded even their rhetorical commitment to ‘approach[ing] family policy with a strong dose of humility’ reveals that the qualitative shift from implicit to explicit family policy was complete in England by the early years of the twenty-first century. Ramaekers and Suissa note that this shift is not specific to the UK, commenting on an ‘unprecedented burgeoning of policy initiatives in the area of families and parents’ (2012, p. viii). They identify this as representing

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not just ‘a simple increase in the level of public intervention into the realm of the family’ but a ‘subtle but significant shift in the way in which parents are conceptualized and talked about in policy and popular discourse on “parenting”’ (Ramaekers & Suissa, 2011, p. 201). This qualitative change in family policy was also identified by Hays (1996), in her description of a shift, from the 1970s in the US, towards a concern with certain emotions as the basis for social order. According to Hays, this development led childcare experts to teach people how to relate to the child with love and empathy and to pay attention to children’s emotional and cognitive development as the solution to social problems. One important theme in the literature is the identification that this shift to the construing of the detail and content of parent–child relations as a policy concern entails what has been called a ‘therapeutic turn’. This is a dynamic by which the inner world of the individual is increasingly opened up to public scrutiny and governance (Furedi, 2004; Illouz, 2007; Lasch, 1977; Nolan, 1998; Rose, 1999) and, as Jensen explains, social action increasingly becomes orientated towards ‘cultural and intimate conduct’ (Jensen, 2010, p. 11). Gillies describes how the ‘contemporary attentiveness to the personal’ has produced a ‘huge surge in the significance attributed to feelings and introspective analysis as a means of understanding and addressing long standing social issues and problems’ (2011, para 2.3). However, according to Furedi, this apparent validation of the private and the desire to make it more central to public life is actually driven by a profound mistrust of what might go on ‘behind closed doors’. In his book on this trend, Therapy Culture, Furedi argued that ‘By the 1970s, the private sphere, particularly family life, had acquired overtly negative connotations’ (Furedi, 2004, p. 70). Furedi explained: The revision of social attitudes towards the private sphere has gone hand in hand with the emergence of a new consensus that regarded family life as the source of individual emotional distress. This shift in attitudes represents probably the single most important alteration to the value system of western societies in the past two decades. (Furedi, 2004, p. 70)

This jaundiced view of private life was articulated by Clem Henricson, a policy analyst within the Family and Parenting Institute, when she wrote that, ‘Too much of what is the underbelly of humanity goes on behind net curtains even in the twenty-first century’ (Henricson, 2008, p. 153). What

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seems to be apparent in family policy is that parents’ abilities to provide love and emotional support to their children have become the object of considerable concern, fuelled by an anxiety that the emotional development of individuals underpins social and even economic formations. Justifying increased intervention in the intimate domain of emotional life requires the renegotiation of an important tenet of liberal democracies— the privacy and autonomy of the family home and of interpersonal relationships. Jacques Donzelot’s classic (1979) study The Policing of Families indicates the extent to which the boundary between the principle of parental autonomy and the obligation to protect children from harm at the hands of their parents has generated much philosophical discussion and requires rigorous legal procedures to override it. Ramaekers and Suissa identify the sensitive nature of the balance between the state and parents’ rights and obligations towards children: A great deal of literature in philosophy of the family, political philosophy and philosophy of education on parents and children has been concerned with precisely this question of the limits and justification of parents’ freedom to bring up their children as they wish, and the relationship between this freedom and, on the one hand, the rights of children and, on the other, the rights and obligations of the (liberal) state vis-à-vis children. (Ramaekers and Suissa, 2012, p. 100)

Parton (2012), along similar lines, tells us that social work has always played ‘a key role in “governing the family” in advanced Western societies’, but that a balance had to be struck between protecting the child from ‘significant harm’ while at the same time recognizing that ‘it is also important that the privacy of the family is not seen as being undermined’ (Parton, 2012, p.  87). Some have raised concerns about the potential that this wider and deeper intervention, with its effects on privacy, has in causing ‘collateral damage’ to the custom, conduct, and quality of family life. We conclude on this point.

Conclusions: The ‘Collateral Damage’ of Broader and Deeper Intervention By legitimizing the professionalization of parenting, public policy can have the unintended consequence of disempowering parents further. It is evident that one of the main causes of parental paranoia is the way in which intimate

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family relations have become subject to public scrutiny. Such pressure, whether in the form of helpful advice, periodic health warnings, or the intervention of professionals or of politicians, continually erodes parental confidence. (Furedi, 2001, p. 181)

Furedi warned of the unintendedly detrimental effects of the professionalization of parenting and the reordering of privacy in Paranoid Parenting, focusing on the disempowerment of parents. This, he said, erodes parents’ confidence, to the detriment of children. Smeyers also suggests that intervention risks endangering ‘benign forms of interaction customary in the private sphere of the family’ (2010, pp. 265–266). A call for a more cautious approach to intervention is founded on the concern that by generalizing the supervisory gaze to incorporate all families, policy risks diverting resources from those children and families who really need help. Discussing early intervention programmes such as Nurse Family Partnership and Head Start in the US, Chaffin comments: The possibility needs to be considered that prevention programs may expend effort inefficiently by targeting far too many parents who will never maltreat their children anyway, while failing to provide sufficient focus and intensity for those who are truly at-risk. (Chaffin, 2004, p. 583)

Smeyers also asks if attention to extreme cases of child abuse displaces resources from other social problems. Beyond that, he questions whether the cases of extreme cruelty and neglect which tend to dominate media discourse and create demands for more intervention are even susceptible to effective intervention at all: ‘It is clear that cases such as these present us with real problems, but it is important to ask whether state remedies will ever be able to prevent these sorts of abuses from taking place’ (Smeyers, 2010, p. 265). Furedi suggests that the generic tensions and problems of family life are too delicate to be improved by state intervention. ‘State policy is too crude an instrument to deal with the management of the intimate emotional relationship between parent and child’, he explains. ‘Parental anxieties and the complex relations between adults and children are not problems that are susceptible to public policy solutions. Why? Because the problems of human relationships are too specific and too personal to be tackled by policies, which are by definition general in character’ (Furedi, 2001, pp. 180–181).

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Others have fleshed out the possible consequences of the application of external, public criteria to the internal, private world of the family. In the late 1970s, the American social theorist Christopher Lasch (1977) warned that the market and public institutions were invading the family, with the values of instrumentalism and individualism undermining familial bonds: a point later developed by Hays (1996). This chapter suggests that the move away from a concern with family form has opened up family life to external scrutiny of its inner workings. A new conformity is thus required, not to traditional morality, but to a new morality of appropriate practices and attitudes. For Vansieleghem, the danger lies in the fact that these new norms are free floating, bureaucratized, and technologized rather than moral: Just as traditional norms have in the past, parental services are now normalizing individual behaviour; only these parental services technologies and monitoring systems are not related to an existing order … By codifying and prioritizing behaviours in terms of potential risk, these monitoring systems and services bypass actual parental behaviour as a source of immediate information and create new standards for legitimating or normalizing intervention into parenting practice. Through parental services, norms and rules are established in the very act of judgement itself. (Vansieleghem, 2010, p. 354)

These commentators are raising the issue that the interpersonal world of the family is transformed by the demand that it submit itself to a new system of evaluation and scrutiny. What Smeyers (2010, p. 266) describes as the idea that standard practice can be identified, justified, and enforced means that, as Clarke explains, the child’s home is reduced to ‘its role in producing a particular outcome in the child’s scores on a variety of scales’ (Clarke, 2006, pp. 709–710). In a special issue of the journal Educational Theory (2010), edited by Paul Smeyers, a number of contributors raised concerns with these developments. They discussed the impact of de-moralizing parental decision-­ making and the subsequent impoverishment of intimate life. The editorial suggested that ‘the diversity that could enrich parents’ choices in dealing with their children’ is replaced by ‘narrow outcomes, recommended pathways’ (Smeyers, 2010, p. 266), and that by ‘removing practical judgement from parenting’, the task of raising children is turned ‘into a skill’. This in turn risks ‘bureaucratizing childrearing’, opening it up to ‘the laws of the market’ which leads to the erosion of the ‘practices of the community’ (Smeyers, 2010, p. 266).

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Similar concerns about the development of a dehumanizing dynamic within social work have been raised by Broadhurst et al. (2010), who suggest that there is ‘professional discontent with the formalisation of practice through systems of risk management and audit’ (2010, p. 1047), whereas ‘[a]t the heart of the humane project of social work are a range of informal, moral rationalities concerning care, trust, kindness and respect’ (Broadhurst et al., 2010, p. 1047). They argue that in parallel with the family, ‘the terrain of child welfare practice’ inherently carries ‘moral, social and emotional concerns’ (Broadhurst et  al., 2010, p.  1047), but that these are driven out by ‘[i]nstrumental risk assessment tools’ which ‘seek to render either coherent or extrinsic the moral aspects of child welfare practice’ (Broadhurst et al., 2010, p. 1050). Within the family, Clarke claimed back in 2006 that the emphasis on targets and outcomes reconstructs parents as ‘simply another environmental influence’, meaning that ‘[g]ood parenting then comes to be regarded as a question of technique instead of being fundamentally about quality of relationships’ (Clarke, 2006, p.  708). It is not that these authors have sought to signal opposition to any kind of intervention to assist parents in raising children or to the necessity of systems of child protection for particularly vulnerable children. Rather, they encouraged us to be concerned that the drive towards broader and deeper interventions threatens to undermine the very thing which policy seeks to preserve: the strength of the family. The next chapter discusses how this unintended consequence of the ever-widening scope of intervention has worked to undermine not only relationships between parents and children, but also those in communities more generally. As we indicate, the pressing question this poses for all of us is, ‘Who cares for children?’

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Illouz, E. (2007). Cold intimacies: The making of emotional capitalism. Polity Press. Jensen, T. (2010). Warmth and wealth: Re-imagining social class in taxonomies of good parenting’. Studies in the Maternal, 2(1), 1–13. https://doi. org/10.16995/sim.86 Kamerman, S. B., & Kahn, A. J. (2001). Child and family policies in the United States at the opening of the twentyfirst century. Social Policy and Administration, 35(1), 69–84. Kessen, W. (1979). The American child and other cultural inventions. American Psychologist, 34(10), 815–820. Lasch, C. (1977). Haven in a heartless world: The family besieged. Basic Books. Levitas, R. (1998). The inclusive society: Social exclusion and new labour. Macmillan. Lewis, J. (2011). Parenting programmes in England: Policy development and implementation issues, 2005–2010. Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, 33(2), 107–121. Lucas, P. J. (2011). Some reflections on the rhetoric of parenting programmes: Evidence, theory, and social policy. Journal of Family Therapy, 33, 181–198. Luker, K. (1996). Dubious conceptions: The politics of teenage pregnancy. Harvard University Press. Macvarish, J. (2010a). Understanding the significance of the teenage mother in contemporary culture. Sociological Research Online, 15(4), 3. http://www. socresonline.org.uk/15/4/3.html Macvarish, J. (2010b). The effect of “risk-thinking” on the contemporary construction of teenage motherhood. Health, Risk and Society, 12(4), 313–322. Macvarish, J., & Billings, J. (2010). Challenging the irrational, amoral and antisocial construction of the “teenage mother”. In S.  Duncan, R.  Edwards, & C.  Alexander (Eds.), Teenage Parenting  – What’s the problem? (pp.  47–68). Tufnell Press. Macvarish, J., & Martin, C. (2021). Towards a ‘Parenting Regime’: Globalising tendencies and localised variation. In A.-M. Castrén et al. (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of family sociology in Europe (pp. 435–451). Palgrave. Martin, C. (2013). The invention of a parenting policy in the French context: Elements for a policy tracing. In J.  Garcès & I.  Monsonis Paya (Eds.), Sustainability and transformation in European social policy (pp.  179–197). Peter Lang Publishing. Martin, C. (2014). Le soutien à la parentalité: une nouvelle politique en Europe. Politiques sociales et familiales, 118, 9–22. Martin, C. (2015). Parenting support in France: Policy in an ideological battlefield. Social Policy and Society, 14(4), 609–620. Martin, C. (2017). Parenting as a public problem in a neoliberal era. Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 48(3), 303–314. Nolan, J. (1998). The therapeutic state: Justifying government at century’s end. New York University Press. Parton, N. (2006). Safeguarding Childhood: Early intervention and surveillance in a late modern society. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Parton, N. (2012). Reflections on “governing the family”: The close relationship between child protection and social work in advanced Western societies – The example of England. Families, Relationships and Societies, 1(1), 87–101. Ramaekers, S., & Suissa, J. (2011). Parents as “educators”: Languages of education, pedagogy and “parenting”. Ethics and Education, 6(2), 197–212. Ramaekers, S., & Suissa, J. (2012). The Claims of Parenting: Reasons, responsibility and society. Springer. Reece, H. (2013). The pitfalls of positive parenting. Ethics and Education, 8(1), 42–54. Richter, M., & Andresen, S. (Eds.). (2012). The politicization of parenthood: Shifting private and public responsibilities in education and child rearing (children’s well-being: indicators and research). Springer. Rose, N. (1999). Governing the soul: The shaping of the private self. Free Association Books. Rutter, M. (2011). Interviewed for BBC Radio 4 Analysis episode, ‘Unsure about Sure Start’. Retrieved June 15, 2023 from https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012fc5q SEU (Social Exclusion Unit). (1999). Teenage pregnancy: Report by the social exclusion unit. Stationery Office. Retrieved June 12, 2023, from https://wellcomecollection.org/works/nfyxxux5 Sihvonen, E. (2018a). Early interventionist parenting support: The case study of Finland. Families, Relationships and Societies, 7(1), 123–139. Sihvonen, E. (2018b). Parenting support policy in Finland: Responsibility and competence as key attributes of good parenting in parenting support projects. Social Policy and Society, 17(3), 443–456. Smeyers, P. (2008). Child-rearing: On government intervention and the discourse of experts. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 40(6), 719–738. Smeyers, P. (2010). State intervention and the technologization and regulation of parenting. Educational Theory, 60(3), 265–270. Smith, R. (2010). Total parenting. Educational Theory, 60(3), 357–369. Straw, J., & Anderson, J. (1996). Parenting: A discussion paper. The Labour Party. Vansieleghem, N. (2010). The residual parent to come: On the need for parental expertise and advice. Educational Theory, 6(3), 341–355. Vinovskis, M.  A. (1988). An ‘Epidemic’ of adolescent pregnancy? Some historical and policy considerations. Oxford University Press. Wasoff, F., & Dey, I. (2000). Family policy. Routledge. Wastell, D., & White, S. (2012). Blinded by neuroscience: Social policy, the family and the infant brain. Families, Relationships and Societies, 1(3), 397–414. Welshman, J. (2008). The cycle of deprivation: Myths and misconceptions. Children and Society, 22, 75–85. Welshman, J. (2010). From Head Start to Sure Start: Reflections on policy transfer. Children and Society, 24, 89–99. Wrennall, L. (2010). Surveillance and child protection: De-mystifying the Trojan Horse. Surveillance and Society, 7(3/4), 304–324.

CHAPTER 5

Who Cares for Children? The Problem of Intergenerational Contact Jennie Bristow

Introduction Our analysis of parenting culture leads us to reject the claim that expert-­ driven parent training improves life for parents. This does not mean, however, that ‘parenting’ should be viewed as a task that should simply be left to parents in nucleated families. ‘Parents do need support’, argues Furedi, and this includes access to childcare and child-friendly communities—but ‘[m]ost important of all, they need to know that the decisions they make about the future of their children will be supported and not undermined by the rest of society’ (Furedi, 2008, p. 171). We suggest that a more supportive parenting culture than the one we have presently would make two matters central. The first is reinforcement of parental authority and judgement. The second is community ‘friendliness’ towards children, acknowledging general adult responsibility in everyday life for the care and socialization of children. This chapter reviews the way that cultural and regulatory developments undermine informal mechanisms of adult solidarity and support. Our book so far has described and discussed the emergence of a culture of ‘intensive parenting’, which emphasizes the role ascribed to parents in managing the myriad risks that are seen to beset children in the twenty-­ first century. This culture contains an isolating dynamic, where the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Lee et al., Parenting Culture Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44156-1_5

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individual parent’s personal ‘parenting strategies’ are seen to directly determine the health, safety, and well-being of his or her child. In this way, intensive parenting culture works against the idea that childrearing should be conceptualized as a generational responsibility, whereby all adults can and should play a positive role in shaping the next generation. Historically, it has been understood that children are introduced into the rules of the adult world by a combination of social institutions and informal practices. The imperative of expert-driven parent training, which casts ‘parenting’ as a set of distinct skills that parents practice upon their own children, weakens the tacit understanding that informal interaction between children and adults within their communities is beneficial. Furthermore, the contemporary preoccupation with risk encourages parents to view other adults, less as a source of protection for their children, than as a source of potential danger. This is exemplified by the rise in awareness of ‘stranger danger’, where parents and children alike have become sensitized to the notion that all adults unknown to them may pose a threat. Writing in The Times (London) back in 2008, the journalist Helen Rumbelow captured the effect of ‘stranger danger’ sensibility, in her report on a television documentary that featured an ‘educational chat’ between a mother and her nine-year-­ old daughter during a visit to the supermarket: Where others might have pointed out the nice clouds, this woman pointed out an innocent pedestrian. ‘See that man?’ she said to her daughter, barely suppressing the terror in her voice. ‘He’s a stranger isn’t he?’ Yes, her daughter dutifully replied, he was a stranger. That meant, her mother continued, her voice rising to screeching pitch, that there was a good chance he was a killer, paedophile or kidnapper. (Rumbelow, 2008)

This chapter explores the problem of ‘intergenerational contact’ exemplified by the preoccupation with ‘stranger danger’, and the fear that all ‘other adults’ pose a potential danger to children. First, we focus on two far-reaching regulatory schemes—Megan’s Law in the US and the Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS) in the UK—introduced around the turn of the twenty-first century. Both these schemes were intended to prevent children from having unsupervised contact with ‘convicted sex offenders’: that is, adults within their local communities who have in the past been convicted of committing sexual offences and have now served the terms of their sentence. The VBS was subsequently institutionalized as the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS), with ‘DBS checks’ of criminal

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records routinely demanded of people working or volunteering with children or vulnerable adults (DBS, 2022). Megan’s Law and the VBS could be viewed as attempts to both improve children’s safety and ameliorate adults’ anxiety about children’s safety, through weeding out ‘dangerous’ adults and thus demarcating a group of adults whom parents can trust. However, as Liberman (1999) notes, ‘in trying to solve one problem’ such regulatory projects ‘can create others’. The suggestion in this chapter is that such projects institutionalize parental fears that other adults are potential paedophiles who may harm their children. Further examples of the way that mistrust between the generations is becoming formalized are provided by the proliferation of ‘no-­ touch’ policies in childcare settings, again on both sides of the Atlantic; and official attempts to monitor and regulate the interaction between parents and their own children, via elements of the ‘Every Child Matters’ framework in the UK, and the proposed ‘Named Persons’ scheme in Scotland. After briefly reviewing such policies and their impact, the chapter draws together the isolating features of the expert-led parenting culture discussed in Chaps. 2 and 3, with what Furedi has described as ‘the breakdown of adult collaboration’. ‘Parental cooperation helps to minimize the effects of isolation’, he writes. ‘But it is also the most effective alternative to the disempowerment brought about by professionalized parenting’ (Furedi, 2008, p. 196). The rapid development and acceptance of official projects that regulate relations between the generations within local communities is, our book suggests, testament to the extent of parents’ disempowerment within a risk-averse, isolated, and expert-led parenting culture.

Megan’s Law Rhode Island’s first foray into community notification is a textbook case of everything Megan’s Law is not supposed to do: it is not meant to provoke public hysteria; it is not meant to encourage vigilantism; it is not supposed to drive the sex offender underground … Yet, Rhode Island’s bumpy inaugural run illustrates how Megan’s Law, in trying to solve one problem, can create others. (Liberman, 1999)

Accounts of the development of Megan’s Law generally begin with the story of the legislation’s namesake, Megan Kanka, situating this as a legislative response to a personal tragedy. On July 29, 1994, seven-year-old

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Megan Kanka was raped and strangled by her neighbour, Jesse Timmendequas, who had two prior sexual convictions for sex offences against children. The outcry provoked by this case led to the establishment of ‘community notification’ laws, whereby the public is informed when a convicted sex offender is living within their community. Daniel Filler’s study of the ‘legislative rhetoric’ used in making the case for Megan’s Law provides a succinct account of the way in which the tragic murder of this young girl led to the establishment of new laws across the US: The story of this crime, which occurred in a small central New Jersey community, received national attention. Within days of Megan’s death, Megan’s parents, Richard and Maureen Kanka, began a campaign to pressure the New Jersey legislature to adopt a sex-offender community-notification law in her memory … The state legislature responded quickly and on October 31, 1994, New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman signed Megan’s Law. The call for new sex offender registration and community-notification laws spread across the nation, motivated by the constant recitation of Megan’s tragic demise. Although many states adopted these provisions of their own accord, in 1994 the U.S. Congress passed legislation effectively requiring every state to establish a system for registering certain offenders. In 1996 Congress raised its demands, requiring every state to provide for community notification as well. Under pressure from both Congress and public opinion, every state has now adopted some version of Megan’s Law. (Filler, 2001, pp. 315–16)

On one level, Megan’s Law could be viewed as a practical response to a real and established danger. The force of the argument posed by Megan’s parents lies in the idea that if only they had known that their neighbour was a convicted paedophile, they could have taken precautionary measures to protect their daughter; thus, the impassioned campaign for a law that would notify other parents about dangerous neighbours was premised on the idea that future tragedies could be prevented. Maureen Kanka’s proclamation that ‘[t]his was God’s way of using Megan as a tool to make sure this never happens again’ reveals the conviction that precautionary legislation of this kind can prevent future abhorrences (cited in Filler, 2001, p.  315). The emotive character of the crime itself, combined with the moral weight carried by Megan’s bereaved parents as advocates for a new law, gave the arguments in favour of Megan’s Law a common-sense character, and it received ‘overwhelming’ support within both Congress and the state legislatures (Filler, 2001, p. 316).

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However, Megan’s Law has had several destabilizing consequences for communities, which challenge the claim that community notification laws should be considered as merely practical, common-sense responses that will increase public safety. Filler summarizes some of the reasons why Megan’s Law has attracted some disquiet: Megan’s Law is controversial legislation because it targets a narrow segment of the criminal-offender population, sex offenders, subjecting them to public shame and, potentially, vigilante violence. Offenders’ names and faces are distributed throughout the community. Schools send notices home with the children, police mail grainy pictures to anxious neighbors, and an entire nation peruses sex offender photos on state-operated Web sites. Legislators openly acknowledged that the provisions’ benefits came at significant cost to offenders’ privacy and security. (Filler, 2001, p. 318)

Questions have been raised about whether such laws will work as intended. Liberman (1999) notes that ‘for all of its emotional and political appeal, there is little proof that community notification reduces the chances that a sex offender will commit future crimes’, and indeed ‘some experts who have studied or worked closely with those men and women argue that Megan’s Law makes it more likely that sex offenders will victimize others again’. Another noted area of concern has been the way that notification laws can provoke vigilante attacks. Liberman (1999) reviews the ‘explosions’ of vigilantism that have taken place within communities as a result of notification laws, including arson and gun attacks on offenders, although the most common consequence has been ‘the sting of community disapproval in verbal harassment and threats’. A further ‘unintended consequence’ of community-notification laws is that rather than making communities feel safer against the threat of child molesters, such policies appear to increase presentiments of danger. They do so through the mobilization of rhetoric, imagery, and regulation that continually promotes the message that children are at risk. Best’s (1993) analysis of the rhetorical claims made about ‘threatened children’ over the 1980s reveals how the campaign to draw attention to, and implement policies around, the problems of child abduction and abuse continually inflated the scale of the threat. A later contribution, by Jenkins (1998), situates the development and implementation of Megan’s Law within a wider context of a politically endorsed ‘moral panic’ about paedophiles, an ‘eruption of fear’ that gathered momentum over the late 1980s and early

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1990s (Jenkins, 1998, pp. 189–210). He contends that the environment in which Megan’s Law developed contained both themes familiar from previous ‘panics’, and features novel to the present era: This eruption of fear, which led to new federal legislation in 1995–96, is notable testimony to the protean quality of the child abuse idea and its ability to adapt to changing political and technological environments. Today’s sex crime panic is as fierce as that of the late 1940s, and it has given the predator a role in the national demonology that is quite as pronounced as that of his psychopathic predecessor. (Jenkins, 1998, pp. 189–190)

Best and Jenkins thus make a similar, and crucial, point. Regulatory schemes that are justified on the grounds of keeping children safe rely, in the first place, on wider cultural fears and inflated claims about the extent to which children are in danger, rather than on the actual prevalence of tragedies such as that of Megan Kanka, which have such an impact precisely because they are comparatively rare. New policies that are conceived as a result of these fears tend, in turn, to contribute to the notion that children are at risk. Thus, regarding Megan’s Law, ‘one of the most ambitious and perhaps alarming aspects of the get-tough attitude’ is, according to Jenkins, that it ‘involved public participation in the supervision of sex offenders’ (Jenkins, 1998, p. 199). Such ‘public participation’—where people are incited, effectively, to police their neighbours—necessarily involves a shift in the dynamic of community life. Community notification laws, and the processes by which they operate, involve a process of active re-education of the public, away from the assumption that neighbours can be trusted and towards an acceptance of suspicion and surveillance as the norm. This point was well illustrated by Seattle police detective Robert Shilling, who ‘trained numerous departments in the United States and Canada on how to introduce a neighborhood to a sex offender’ (Liberman, 1999). Shilling suggested that the problem of public vigilantism provoked by community notification laws can be contained by educating the public in the idea that sexual crimes are in fact a feature of everyday life: Key to community notification is dispelling the common myths surrounding sexual crimes. The stranger in the bushes everyone fears is a rare creature, he said. Kids are far more likely to be assaulted by someone they know and trust. Once people understand the dynamics of sexual crimes and how com-

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mon they are, ‘they realize as a community that they have a vested interest in having this person succeed,’ Shilling said. ‘In cases where you are just handing out fliers and not following up, you might as well be smoking a cigarette in a pool of gasoline’. (Liberman, 1999)

In summary, since the introduction of Megan’s Law, there has been some sensitivity at a policy level to the ‘hysteria’ (Liberman, 1999) that can follow a local community’s knowledge that a convicted sex offender lives within their midst, and that an unintended consequence of this can be actions that destabilize communities and make them feel less safe—for example, by provoking vigilante attacks on offenders. However, the response to this problem is to attempt to normalize the idea that other adults may be sexual criminals—that, as Shilling would have it, ‘[k]ids are far more likely to be assaulted by someone they know and trust’ than by a stranger. This speaks to a wider trend in child protection, where the desire to ensure that children are protected from any possibility of contact with a paedophile has led to an a priori assumption that all adults should be ‘vetted’ in advance. We explore this point further, through the example of the UK’s Vetting and Barring Scheme.

The Vetting and Barring Scheme In Chap. 4, we noted that policies developed in the US often shape, via the process of ‘diffusion’ (Best, 2001), subsequent policy developments in the UK. This is the case with community notification laws. The Child Sex Offender Disclosure Scheme, under which parents can ask the police if someone with access to their son or daughter has been convicted or suspected of child abuse, is commonly called ‘Sarah’s Law’, in reference to the murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne in West Sussex in 2000, by a convicted sex offender (Home Office, 2023). Sarah’s mother, Sara Payne, was a prominent advocate of this new law, and many of the features of the law’s rhetoric and practice bear striking similarities to Megan’s Law. In contrast to the US situation, however, Sarah’s Law attracted relatively little controversy. This may be because it was introduced in a piecemeal fashion: first as a pilot scheme in 2008, involving just four police forces, and then gradually being extended to the rest of the country. The relative lack of controversy may also be explained because notification is provided

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in a more limited and discreet way than in some US states (Filler, 2001; Home Office, 2023). A related scheme, which has proved far more controversial in the UK, is the Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS). The VBS was introduced following the Soham murders of 2002, in which two 10-year-old girls, Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells, were abducted and murdered by Ian Huntley, a school caretaker who knew the girls through his partner, a teaching assistant in the girls’ school. Before the murders, Huntley had been suspected of offences in other areas of the country, but never convicted; thus, the system that existed to prevent previously convicted sex offenders from working in schools was seen to be inadequate. These horrific murders resulted in the New Labour government of 1997–2010 commissioning an official inquiry, chaired by Sir Michael Bichard, that went far beyond the case itself, to examine the broader issue of how individuals who had previously been suspected of misdemeanours in relation to children could be prevented from having unsupervised access to children in the future. One of the Bichard Inquiry’s recommendations ‘proposed requiring the registration of those who wish to work with children or vulnerable adults’, and the 2006 Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act was introduced ‘specifically’ in response to this recommendation (DCSF, HO, DH, 2007, p. 1). The VBS, which was introduced under the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act, brought about extensive surveillance arrangements of any adults who wanted to work or volunteer with children or other designated ‘vulnerable groups’. This was done via a newly-established Independent Safeguarding Authority, with criminal records checks conducted by the Criminal Records Bureau. These new arrangements meant that any adult who wished to have frequent contact with children, through their job or their involvement in community voluntary groups such as the Scouts or youth football, was required to undergo a check of their police records before they were permitted to take up their position. For many positions, ‘enhanced’ disclosures were required, which revealed not only convictions for offences against children, but also allegations, cautions, and what was termed ‘soft’ information held by the police (Manifesto Club, 2006; see also DfE, DH, HO, 2011). While the VBS received few objections at the time of the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act becoming law, controversy subsequently emerged in relation to both the principle and the practicalities of this scheme. As with Megan’s Law, some objections rested on concerns about civil

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liberties: amplified, in the case of the VBS, because it was seen to threaten the civil liberties not only of convicted sex offenders, but also of anyone who wanted to work or volunteer with children, and who would be required under this scheme to have information about them disclosed. This was seen to be particularly problematic in regard to information being provided that was factually wrong; the persistence of ‘false’ allegations on individuals’ police records; information being lost or disseminated more widely than to its intended target; and the phasing in of the requirement that those who wished to work or volunteer with children would have to register on ‘an intrusive database containing the details of 9.3m people’ (DfE, DH, HO, 2011, p.  2; see also Furedi & Bristow, 2010; McAlinden, 2010). The larger problem with the VBS was perceived as its impact upon community life: in particular, the extent to which it was seen to discourage people from engaging in voluntary work, and indeed interacting with other people’s children. In 2008, Frank Furedi and I published Licensed to Hug, a critique of the impact of the VBS upon local communities (a second edition was published in 2010). We found that the requirement to subject volunteers to criminal records checks had a rapid and significant effect at the practical level of placing formal ‘barriers to involvement’ in the way of people who wished to engage in ad hoc help with children’s voluntary groups. More significantly, the institutionalization of vetting had the effect of casting doubt upon the traditional assumption that adults could be trusted to care for children: The implementation of a national vetting scheme directly challenges positive assumptions about the relationship between adults and children that until recently were taken for granted. The demand that adults be licensed before they can engage with children signals the sentiment that it should no longer presumed that adults will have a positive, protective influence upon children. The very act of vetting makes the prior negative assumption that an adult’s motivation for helping children could be malign, which further weakens the necessary bonds between generations in our communities. (Furedi & Bristow, 2010, p. 26)

Many of the problems noted above were addressed by an official review of the VBS that began in 2010, by the newly elected Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government. Noting that ‘[m]any thought the VBS, while well intentioned, was a disproportionate response to the risk posed

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by a small minority of people who wished to commit harm to vulnerable people’, the government halted the planned implementation of the VBS while its review was conducted (DfE, DH, HO, 2011, p. 2). Upon publication, the review proposed a more ‘convenient and proportionate’ system, encompassing a smaller range of people; discarded the idea of a database; and reiterated some of the wider problems that had been raised about the impact of the VBS on civil liberties, professional practice, and community life. This included the statement: ‘People should not be viewed as suspect simply because they wish to work with children or vulnerable adults’ (DfE, DH, HO, 2011, p. 3). However, despite the Coalition government’s recognition of the negative consequences provoked by the VBS, it did not propose abolishing the scheme. Rather, it affirmed its intention to ‘retain the best features of the VBS’ and to ‘scale it back to common sense levels’ (DfE, DH, HO, 2011, p. 2). In December 2012, the Criminal Records Bureau and Independent Safeguarding Authority were merged, to become the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS), ‘an executive non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Home Office’ (Home Office, 2012, DBS, 2023). A review of the DBS regime carried out by Simon Bailey CBE, QPM, and published in April 2023, concluded that it was ‘delivering its mission of helping employers and organisations to make safer employment decisions’ and made a series of recommendations for further expanding the reach of the scheme (DBS & HO, 2023). These developments indicate two important aspects of the dynamic behind the VBS specifically and the regulation of intergenerational contact in general. First, such policies do not set out to damage relations of trust between adults and children: indeed, policymakers often appear to be horrified when this is their effect. Second, even when confronted with the destructive impact of such policies, there seems to be little appetite—either on an official or public level—to discard them completely. The assumption is that regulation is necessary, and that policymakers merely need to find more effective ways of doing it. We dwell on these points a little more, below. Like the episodes of violent vigilantism provoked in some US communities by Megan’s Law, the fragmentation of communities provoked by the VBS should be seen primarily as an unintended consequence of this policy. Indeed, the VBS had been in operation for only three years before Sir Roger Singleton, chair of the Independent Safeguarding Authority,

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was forced to review the scope of the scheme in the light of the problems caused by its implementation. In a speech, he stated: We need to calm down and consider carefully and rationally what this scheme is and is not about. It is not about interfering with the sensible arrangements which parents make with each other to take their children to schools and clubs. It is not about subjecting a quarter of the population to intensive scrutiny of their personal lives. And it is not about creating mistrust between adults and children or discouraging volunteering. (Cited in Daily Telegraph, 2009)

This quote indicates that the VBS was not intended to fragment communities or to set parents against other adults. The dynamic behind policy that promotes expert-led parenting is, as we described in Chap. 3, implicitly destructive of informal relations, spontaneous actions, and lay knowledge. However, such policy is generally developed as a response to the perceived instability of traditional community and family bonds. The policy’s intention is not to weaken these bonds further—yet this is its inexorable effect. Both the original rationale behind the VBS and the official review of the scheme in 2011 provide a good example of how this process works. The Bichard Inquiry, and the statutory measures that followed, assumed that effective methods of child protection needed to come from a more systematic form of state regulation. No longer could workplaces and voluntary organizations be relied upon to use their judgement about which adults might be unsuitable to work with children. The 2011 review of the VBS accepted that this approach had proved problematic and counterproductive, stating that: ‘Blanket’ approaches such as the VBS have the potential to place the emphasis for safeguarding in the wrong place—on the State rather than on employers and individuals. (DfE, DH, HO, 2011, p. 2)

However, while this statement speaks to a desire for a less bureaucratic approach to regulation, it formulates a call for every individual to take on board a policing role, based on a heightened awareness of risk. ‘It is the effective management of risk rather than aversion of risk which is most likely to protect vulnerable people’, claims the review, concluding its Executive Summary with the statement:

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[E]veryone needs to be vigilant in order to keep children and vulnerable adults safe. (DfE, DH, HO, 2011, p. 2)

Here, the language of the British VBS echoes that of the American ‘community-notification’ laws, by emphasizing that adults who pose a danger to children are a feature of everyday life, and that it is every individual’s responsibility to be ‘vigilant’ and to manage this risk. This imperative has far-reaching consequences for intergenerational contact. As Furedi and I noted in Licensed to Hug, the impact of normalizing the assumption that those who participate in voluntary activities with children may have ulterior motives for doing so would, necessarily, be to encourage a sentiment of mistrust between parents and other adults in the community: Although proponents of the scheme contend that it is designed to prevent ‘worst case scenarios’, the very institutionalisation of the scheme encourages ‘worst case scenario’ assumptions to become the norm. (Furedi & Bristow, 2010, p. 26)

Furthermore, this sentiment of distrust does not apply only to adults who engage in voluntary activities but fuels a wider sense of ‘intergenerational unease’, in which ‘adults feel increasingly nervous around children, unwilling and unable to exercise their authority and play a positive role in children’s lives’ (Furedi & Bristow, 2010, p. 27). It is to this problem that we now turn.

Risk, Regulation, and ‘No-Touch’ Policies As we discussed in Chap. 1 of this book, a key feature of today’s parenting culture is its orientation towards the management of risk, and in particular the risks posed by ‘unknown unknowns’: the dangers that have not yet manifested themselves. We can see both Megan’s Law and the VBS as models of the kind of social regulation that arises from such a conceptualization of risk. Hunt’s (2003) analysis of ‘risk and moralization in everyday life’ indicates that the moralization of risk does not merely affect the personal strategies adopted by individuals, but also the strategies employed by society at large in its attempt to manage danger. Thus, an overbearing preoccupation with risk ‘gives rise not only to a specific conduct (driving children to all their activities), but also leads to the launching of regulatory projects (imposing post detention restrictions on sex offenders)’ (Hunt, 2003, p. 174).

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Like the individualized responses that parents adopt to the fear of danger—driving their children to activities because they worry about their children being hit by a car or abducted, or hovering over their toddlers at the playground because they fear the child will fall and break a bone— Megan’s Law and the VBS respond to an uncertainty about the motivations and behaviours of other adults within the community by attempting to pre-empt a problem from arising. These schemes tap into the parental ‘worst nightmare’ that his or her child will fall prey to a paedophile by attempting to ensure that paedophiles and children are kept physically separate, wherever possible. As with the attempts to pre-empt dangers to a child’s safety arising from accidents (falling out of a tree, or being hit by a car), it is never possible entirely to eliminate the risk that a child will, like Megan Kanka, Sarah Payne, or Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells, become the victim of a sex offender (Guldberg, 2009; Skenazy, 2009). In this context, a society preoccupied with managing risk has two options: either to accept that child sex offences will occasionally happen or to extend the practice of surveillance and regulation to ‘make sure this never happens again’. This latter perspective informs Megan’s Law and the VBS, and it is this that accounts for the ‘expansionary logic’ of the schemes, whereby adults are presumed to pose a risk to children unless it can be proven otherwise. McAlindon’s critique of the statutory regulations that have been introduced in the UK to prevent ‘unsuitable individuals’ from working with children draws out this point. Citing Zedner (2009, p. 47), she notes that ‘the category of “unknown unknowns”’—‘those sex offenders “we don’t know we don’t know about”’—forms a significant problem for regulatory schemes such as the VBS to deal with, and leads the state to dispense with measures designed to assess the risk posed by particular individuals in favour of ‘undifferentiated strategies’ that treat everyone as a potential suspect (McAlinden, 2010, p. 41). This undifferentiated strategy has significant consequences at a community level: This blanket approach to risk, instilled in the recent expansive measures on vetting, merely perpetuates public fears and anxieties concerning the pervasiveness of sexual offending against children in particular. The resulting feelings of insecurity, suspicion and mistrust which attach to all who come into contact with our children undermines our ability to make discerning judgements about the likelihood of harm. This may ultimately help to further mask ‘unknown risks’ until they manifest themselves in the form of actual harm to children or the vulnerable. (McAlinden, 2010, p. 41)

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Here, McAlindon draws attention to two distinct, but related, outcomes of regulatory projects that attempt to manage a community’s fear of child sex offenders by treating all members of the community as potential suspects. Firstly, such schemes have the consequence of actively increasing a sentiment of insecurity: they become ‘exceptionally uncertain and unsafe policies’, where members of the community are incited to scepticism about the ability of the state ‘to deliver on its self-imposed regulatory mandate to effectively manage risk’ (McAlinden, 2010, p. 25). Second, by encouraging adults to distance themselves from children within their communities for fear that they might be suspected of having improper motives, such policies undermine adults’ ability to act as adults, in the sense of making judgements for themselves about the actions they need to take to protect and nurture the children around them. In this regard, McAlindon develops the point emphasized by Licensed to Hug that ‘[t]he formalization of intergenerational contact contributes to the deskilling of adulthood’ (Furedi & Bristow, 2010, p. xxxii). Furedi and I explained that the VBS ‘has crystallised the assumption that adults who take responsibility for children should be somehow qualified to do so: that holding the status of an adult is not enough’; and that clearance by the VBS has ‘come to be seen in similar terms to having a First Aid certificate or teaching qualification—as though being officially cleared of child abuse gives these adults some particular knowledge of, and skill with, children, whilst the rest of the adult population is effectively blacklisted and cautioned to keep its distance’ (Furedi & Bristow, 2010, p. xxiii). The ‘deskilling’ of adulthood is a phenomenon that has been widely researched in the context of ‘no-touch’ policies and child protection regulations in daycare centres and schools. Such policies do not seek to keep adults and children physically separate, as with the laws examined above; rather they regulate the manner of contact between adults and the children in their care. Like Megan’s Law and the VBS, policies that explicitly regulate interaction between adults and children in early years settings have their roots in the 1980s and 1990s, when concern about ‘extra-­ familial’ abuse, in the form of the paedophile, gathered momentum (Jenkins, 1998; Parton, 2006, p. 117). Formal child protection regulations have become ubiquitous in Anglo-American societies, attracting some critical attention from scholars. It has been argued, first, that their primary aim is to provide the impression that risk is being managed, rather than protecting children from concrete and evident dangers; and second, that such policies have had harmful consequences, in that they actively fuel

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insecurity amongst parents and other adults about intergenerational interaction. We briefly review some of this literature below. For example, Jones’s (2004) study uses ‘a series of booklets written during the 1990s as a case study of the entry of official anxiety about sexual abuse in early childhood centres in New Zealand’. Her research found that the consequent policy development ‘reflects risk anxiety rather than a proper, informed appraisal of any real dangers to children’ in these settings. The consequence of this development has been to ‘legitimate unprecedented ongoing (self)regulation of teachers’ practices, regulation about which critical questions cannot be asked without being understood as a “denial” of abuse’, leading to a context in which ‘risk of abuse’ has been produced as ‘a normal aspect of contemporary childhood education’ (Jones, 2004, p. 321). In the US, Murray (2001) writes that, over the four years she spent conducting participant-observation research at two childcare centers, ‘I found child care workers “doing child caregiving” within a climate of suspicion. This climate, moreover, was punctuated by periodic accusations lodged against workers suspected of some kind of “inappropriate” behaviour with a child’ (Murray, 2001, p. 513). Murray goes on to observe that many of the childcare workers whom she talked to ‘spoke about experiences where, in the course of doing their jobs, they or someone they knew, had been falsely accused of some form of child abuse’; and that this sensitivity to the possibility of ‘accusations of abuse and the “panics” that followed, shifted the way they thought about their jobs, the parents of the children they cared for, and in some cases, the children themselves’ (Murray, 2001, p. 513). In the UK, Heather Piper and colleagues reviewed some of the literature and current practice related to ‘the touching of children by professionals in social and educational settings’ (Piper et al., 2006, p. 152). They begin by noting the paradox, that ‘[m]any child-related settings are becoming “no touch zones” as adults become increasingly fearful of accusations that may ensue if any touch is misunderstood or misinterpreted’, yet that ‘touching is nevertheless still regarded as vital to children’s emotional and physical development’ (p. 152). In reviewing how this paradox worked its way out in practice, these authors claim that ‘[c]urrent practice is more dependent on fears of accusation and litigation than any concern for the child’—and that ‘most child care workers “know” this on the one hand, but nevertheless still attempt to justify their actions as sensible decision making’ (Piper et al., 2006, p. 151).

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Piper and Stronach’s (2008) book, Don’t Touch! The educational story of a panic, is based on the results of a qualitative and case-based research project into ‘the problematics of touching between professionals and children in their care’, which addressed children and young people ‘of all ages and across a range of educational settings’ in Britain (Piper & Stronach, 2008, p. viii). Here, the authors examine the ways that those working with children are trained to conduct themselves in particular, and peculiar, ways in order to avoid allegations of misconduct. From the practice of wearing gloves to changing a baby’s nappy in a nursery to teachers in secondary schools taking care not to be alone with a pupil at any time, their research indicates that everyday interaction between children and their carers or teachers is now conducted with a high level of deliberation. The starting point for their investigation of this topic was: [T]he impression that the touching of children in professional settings had increasingly stopped being relaxed, or instinctive, or primarily concerned with responding to the needs of the child. It was becoming a self-conscious negative act, requiring a mind-body split for both children and adults, the latter being controlled more by fear than a commitment to caring. (Piper & Stronach, 2008, p. viii)

A 2019 study by Buch Leander and colleagues on the impact of guidelines for preventing child sexual abuse and wrongful allegations against staff at Danish childcare facilities revealed a host of guidelines that regulated the precise manner in which adults were to touch—or not touch— the children in their care. The two most frequently mentioned types were kissing and sitting on laps. Some of these guidelines contained an extraordinary level of detail ‘for sitting on laps, or simply noted that teachers, especially male, were to be aware of the way children sat on the lap’: Several institutions required children to sit with their legs together to one side, and not astride, whereas other institutions stated that children could sit on a lap only briefly, or only if they were upset. At several institutions, children had to sit facing away from the teacher, and at one institution, the guideline’s wording specified that male workers were to remove children who sat on their penises. (Buch Leander et al., 2019, p. 7)

A number of other forms of touch were mandated, including restrictions on helping with toileting or providing medical care:

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A few institutions refused to apply medications for infections or irritations in the anogenital area, a few institutions forbade onesies, to avoid touching the crotch area, and a few institutions had teachers wear plastic gloves when toileting. Two institutions had children stand while being diapered. At one kindergarten, teachers did not wipe girls after urination, and in another institution, teachers did not diaper when they were alone in the institution. At several institutions, guidelines for visibility, not being alone with a child, or touch, applied particularly or exclusively to substitutes, new employees, or students. (Buch Leander et al., 2019, p. 7)

All the above studies speak to a situation in which the view that childcare workers are potential abusers of children has become institutionalized. Policies that regulate interactions between adults and the children for whom they are caring assume that, if such interactions are left unregulated, adults might either behave inappropriately or be seen to behave appropriately. As the studies above suggest, in practice it seems to be the latter problem—how behaviour might be perceived—that forms the main justification for ‘no-touch’ policies, and the odd, self-conscious behaviours adopted by childcare workers as a result, such as the ‘sideways hug’, leaving classroom doors open, and refusing to help apply sun cream. As Buch Leander et al. summarized the findings of their Danish study, the ‘principal goal’ of guidelines for preventing child sexual abuse ‘was protecting staff from wrongful allegations’, and such guidelines ‘significantly influence daily practices and teacher–child relationships’, with ‘unintended, adverse consequences for children and staff, particularly male staff’ (Buch Leander et al., 2019, p. 2). One such consequence was the implicit sexualization of care relationships between adults and children: ‘paradoxically, the continuous attempt to not be mistaken for a pedophile kept pedophilia present in the childcare workers’ minds’. As one male director of a before-and-after-school club stated: ‘It is regrettable to have to focus on something that I have no intention of doing.’ (Buch Leander et al., 2019, pp. 12–3)

The Paradox of No-Touch Policies For the scholars cited above, the extent to which the daily practices of teachers and childcare workers now appear to be dictated less by the needs of the child than by the imperative of avoiding allegations of inappropriate behaviour has had a negative effect on professional practice. The problem

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that they identify is that the state of ‘risk anxiety’ (Jones, 2004) that currently frames adult–child interactions, and the resulting ‘climate of suspicion’ or ‘culture of fear’ (Murray, 2001; Piper et al., 2006), makes early years education or daycare a difficult or unpleasant working environment, although this criticism is implicit. Rather, the central criticism is the way that risk-averse childcare practices actively undermine adults’ ability to provide children with the right kind of care. Two key ways in which this argument is articulated is through the need for touch and the particular problems facing male teachers and childcare workers. As we noted above, the observations of Piper et al. (2006) on the contradiction between the transformation of child-related settings into ‘“no touch” zones’ on one hand, and the continued insistence on the importance of touching to children’s emotional and physical development on the other (Piper et al., 2006, p. 152). Indeed, the basic practicalities of caring for young children mean that it would be impossible, in practice, to have a ‘no-touch’ environment. For babies, diapers and clothes need to be changed on a frequent basis, and they need to be held to be fed and winded. Toddlers and young children need to be picked up when they fall down, physically separated when they fight with one another, and helped to go to the toilet. Beyond these practical matters, babies and young children look to adults to provide them with physical comfort when they are hurt, unhappy, or otherwise distressed. This fusion of physical and emotional care is summed up in the standard treatment for minor injuries at British nurseries: ‘cold compress and cuddle’. One aspect of the paradox of no-touch policies is, therefore, that parents, childcare workers, and official bodies alike recognize that any humane form of childcare involves adults touching children, and that if ‘risk anxiety’ were to be taken to its logical consequence, there would be no possibility of providing professional childcare. Another aspect of this paradox, however, is that modern parenting culture arguably overemphasizes the importance of touch. In Part II of this book, a chapter on ‘The Problem of “Attachment”’ discusses how the imperative of ‘attachment’ has become a significant feature of ‘good’ parenting in the twenty-first century. This orthodoxy emphasizes the need for both physical proximity and emotional sensitivity on the part of the parent toward the (presumed) needs of the infant or young child, even where this conflicts with other practical pressures upon parents: such as having more than one child or returning to work and needing to use paid-for daycare. There are several problems with the

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discourse of attachment, and this should be understood as a socially constructed model of a particular kind of parenting rather than a statement about what parenting is. Nonetheless, the influence of this discourse in Anglo-American society should be considered in terms of how it conflicts with ‘no-touch’ policies and risk-averse, defensive forms of childcare practice. When the concept of attachment was first developed in the 1950s by the psychiatrist John Bowlby, it was widely interpreted as an argument as to why mothers should remain at home with their infant children. The phrase ‘Bowlbyism’ came into existence to denote pseudo-scientific arguments as to why maternal employment should be considered problematic (Riley, 1983). In the twenty-first century, maternal employment has become normalized; daycare is far more widely available, and its use is far less stigmatized than in the immediate post-war period. One consequence of this has been that the concept of attachment has evolved to frame, not only the activities of the primary caregiver (mother), but also the activities of childcare workers. Thus, in Britain, children are assigned ‘key workers’ to facilitate continuity of caregiving, and the number of children whom childcare workers are allowed to care for at any time is strictly controlled on the assumption that care will be ‘hands on’. The orientation of professional daycare around the need for proximity and touch between adults and children indicates the extent to which no-­ touch policies and similar regulations are designed not to prevent intergenerational interaction, but to regulate it. This is consistent with the contemporary ‘cult of expertise’ discussed in Chap. 3 of this book. Today’s parenting culture recognizes the need for adults to raise children—indeed, the imperative of ‘intensive parenting’ overstates as deterministic the importance of the adult’s influence over the developing child. But spontaneous, instinctual contact is highlighted as problematic: the adult’s influence has to be continually monitored and upgraded to meet the standards set by the ‘evidence’ of the present time. This leads to a situation where aspects of childrearing that were once taken for granted—such as the need for touch—become reframed as instrumental techniques, to be employed consciously and with care. A similar paradox is apparent in relation to the question of male childcare workers. On the one hand, it is noted that in early childhood settings ‘particularly men … are at risk of being accused of abusing children in their care’ (Jones, 2004, p. 321); indeed, ‘certainly in the Anglo-American literature, a recurring theme is the representation of men early childhood

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workers as a source of suspicion’ (Cameron, 2001, p. 430). This focus on men as a source of suspicion, it is suggested, has less to do with the actual threat that male childcare workers pose to children, than with the association of childcare as ‘women’s work’. As Murray explains, this creates a loop of suspicion, whereby the peculiarity of men choosing to work as carers of young children leads to an assumption that all men who do this work must have peculiar motives for doing so: When men choose to do childcare work, they become suspect. This suspicion manifests in restriction of men’s access to children in child care centres. Restricted access of men workers to children (compared with the access of women workers to children) implies men’s desire for access to children is pathological. In these and other ways, the organization of child care and the accountability of persons to sex category systematically push men away from nurturing responsibilities and bind these responsibilities to women workers. (Murray, 1996, p. 368)

Buch Leander et al. (2019) drew attention to the existence of ‘special guidelines for men’ at some Danish childcare institutions—and, at others, generally assumed norms that male workers would not ‘do toileting’. They observed that ‘the four most pervasive guidelines that applied to male workers were: 1) Men may not do diapering or toileting. At some institutions, this guideline was absolute. At other institutions, male workers either had to be accompanied by a female colleague or had to keep the bathroom door open while diapering and toileting. One institution had men wear plastic gloves while diapering or toileting. 2) Men may not be alone with children. Again, at some institutions, this guideline was absolute, whereas at others, it applied to specific situations, mainly diapering and toileting, opening and closing the institution, going to the basement or on a trip, especially to the beach or the swimming hall. 3) Men must keep physically distant from children. At some institutions, men were required to be physically distant from children, at others, men had to avoid specific situations, such as having a child on the lap or applying sunscreen. 4) Men may not put children down for their nap. At some institutions, the special guidelines for male staff applied only with regard

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to the girls at the institutions. At several BASCs [before-and-afterschool clubs], male workers were told to be alert to the risk of older girls getting crushes on them. (Buch Leander et al., 2019, p. 8) Yet while early years childcare remains female-dominated and culturally hostile to male workers, there is also a turn towards seeing male involvement in childcare as something to be positively encouraged. Cameron’s (2001) review of the literature noted that three main arguments are put forward to encourage men to work in early childhood services. The first such argument relates to a concern about ‘disappearing fathers’ and the rise of lone parenthood and suggests that ‘the presence of male teachers and childcare workers could go some way towards providing stable, positive male role models for what is missed at home’ (Cameron, 2001, p. 435). The second is that ‘men can provide role models for the children, particularly boys’: showing all children that caring is something that men do too, and giving boys ‘someone to identify with and to help them develop their interests’ (Cameron, 2001, p. 436). The third argument is a broader one, which revolves around ‘social policy moves to achieve greater equality or “balance” between the sexes, both in workforces and for children attending services’ (Cameron, 2001, pp. 436–437). As Cameron’s review suggests, these three arguments contain contradictions and flaws. However, the fact that they are posed in this way indicates the extent to which cultural expectations about men’s attitudes to childcare have changed. Chapter 9 of this book explores the way that, in policy discourse about fatherhood, it is assumed that men should become more directly ‘involved’ in the day-to-day care of their children (Collier & Sheldon, 2008); and at a wider cultural level, the father who refuses to change diapers or push a pushchair is very much perceived as a relic of past eras. Yet when it comes to working with children who are not their own, men are perceived as ‘either homosexuals, pedophiles, or principals in training’ (King, 1998, p. 3, cited in Sumsion, 2000, p. 130); and they are ‘subject to different unwritten rules regarding their physical access to children. Specifically, in many centers, men are more restricted in their freedom to touch, cuddle, nap, and change diapers for children’ (Murray, 1996, p. 378). Murray suggests that women childcare workers are perceived as mothers and men as fathers, thereby reifying traditional gender roles. However, she implicitly recognizes that the degree of suspicion surrounding male childcare workers actually differs significantly from the tactile behaviour

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that would be expected of a modern father towards his own children: male childcare workers are ‘fathers who cannot cuddle, kiss or comfort’ (Murray, 1996, p. 383). Indeed, even for fathers, the climate of suspicion surrounding men who have physical contact with children extends to fathers who, in other respects, appear to be exhibiting model ‘involved fathering’ behaviour. In Licensed to Hug, Furedi and I cited a series of anecdotes posted to a discussion thread on the British social networking site Netmums, from mothers recounting their partners’ experiences. One wrote: He’s taking our 2 year old son out swimming at the moment and called me whilst waiting for the pool to open. It seems that the mothers if the cafe he was waiting in were giving him filthy looks (apparently when he walked in it was like a scene from a Western when the room goes silent and tumbleweed blows across the foreground). This happens whenever he goes out with our son on his own, especially if he takes him into a joint changing/feeding room. Now, there is nothing strange looking about him, he’s a perfectly normal guy, so I was just wondering if any other dads out there have the same experience? He’s considering stapling his police check to his forehead every time he goes out! (Furedi & Bristow, 2010, p. 55)

The ingrained suspicion that today’s society seems to exhibit towards fathers of young children, particularly in situations involving nudity, like public swimming pools or even bathtime, formed the backdrop to Gabb’s (2013) study ‘Embodying risk: managing father–child intimacy and display of nudity in families’. Here, Gabb presented to parents a series of six photographs, three of which ‘depicted scenarios that would be ordinarily experienced in family life’, and three of which were ‘designed to be more provocative’. In the latter set, one picture showed a man sharing a bath with a young child, and another showed ‘a “family group” in which a man and a woman (who appear to be naked) are playing with a child on a double bed’ (Gabb, 2013, p. 641). Gabb’s study yielded a number of interesting findings about the role played by new technology in shifting boundaries between the public and private, and also revealed a particular sensibility of risk with regard to ‘[i]mages depicting child nudity or father–child intimacy’ (Gabb, 2013, p. 13). However ‘innocently conceived’ these images were, writes Gabb, they ‘were identified by parents as potentially risky’:

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They could be appropriated and consumed in unforeseen ways by others (anonymous male adults) and their content was at risk of being misunderstood and therein lay bare the family and the father in particular. (Gabb, 2013, p. 651)

Here again, we see how a heightened suspicion of adult males as potential abusers coexists with a heightened sensibility of the dangers that practices will be ‘misinterpreted’ as abuse: both of which lead to an impulse for self-regulation. That all men who have close contact with children are now automatically a potential target for suspicion indicates that the impetus for ‘no-­ touch’ policies in early years settings does not arise from a specific problem of male nursery workers abusing children, but from a more generalized climate of anxiety surrounding adult–child relations (see discussion in Furedi, 2013). The extension of regulatory schemes, such as Megan’s Law and the VBS, to entire communities—rather than specific institutions such as schools and nurseries—confirms this point. In this book, we contend that this climate of anxiety is driven primarily by a cultural unease about interaction between adults and children, rather than actual incidences of harm: but it is no less powerful for that. As Best explained, in relation to the rhetoric of ‘threatened children’: [T]he portrait of the adult who constantly runs the risk of doing more harm than good has implications of its own. Deviants who menace children merely extend the role of harmful adult to its logical conclusion. In short, the notion that children are precious, that they need protection from a harmful adult world, is basic to contemporary understandings of childhood. (Best, 1993, pp. 181–182)

What gives rise to the suspicious surveillance and regulation of adult– child relations in the present day can best be understood as a wider cultural process of fragmentation and fear, which takes its most tangible form in formal no-touch policies, but is expressed in less tangible ways as well. In the final sections of this chapter, we look further at the implications of a sensibility that the danger facing children is, in fact, ‘a harmful adult world’ (Best, 1993, p. 182).

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Defensive Practice and the Erosion of Adult Solidarity The erosion of adult solidarity transforms parenting into an intensely lonely affair. A climate of suspicion serves to distance mothers and fathers from the world of adults. In turn, this predicament invites parents to be anxious and over-react—not just to the danger they see posed by strangers, but to every problem to do with their youngsters’ development. (Furedi, 2001, p. 23)

The literature reviewed above indicates that when adults are neither expected nor permitted to interact with children within their local communities in accordance with their own judgement, care for children comes to be conceptualized as a particular skill exercised by a distinct set of ‘suitable’ adults, rather than an assumed aspect of adult identity and social life. This divisive regulation formalizes the pre-existing sense of isolation and anxiety that parents already experience in a risk-averse parenting culture. It leads to the practice of ‘defensive parenting’, where ‘good’ childrearing becomes less about responding to the child’s needs according to the adult’s own priorities and more about self-consciously performing responsible behaviour by seeking to be aware of potential hazards and dangers. Defensive parenting takes a number of related forms. In relation to the policies discussed above, the predominant form is one of normalized suspicion of other adults, whereby the imperative to conduct police checks on all adults who wish to spend time working or volunteering with children incites parents to seek reassurance that adults have been thus checked. One example of this was provided by the British New Labour government in 2010, when it was compelled to respond to the confusion and problems caused by the VBS. The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) produced a ‘myth-buster’ about the scope of the vetting scheme, which clarified that ‘personal and family’ arrangements were exempt from the VBS: So, for example, ‘a parent who takes part in a rota with other parents to take each other’s children to school once a week’, or ‘a parent arranging, with the parents of her child’s friends, for the friends to stay at her home for a sleepover’, did not need to be formally vetted (DCSF, 2010). The fact that a national government should need to reassure parents that they are permitted to organize lift-shares and sleepovers with other people’s children is indicative of the level of insecurity about informal intergenerational contact that now prevails in communities.

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As Furedi’s quote above suggests, another form of defensive parenting is the competitive way in which relations between parents are often conceptualized and experienced. Parents anxious about their children’s happiness, health, achievements, or personal development are encouraged by today’s risk-averse parenting culture to see other parents (and their children) as a threat as well as a potential source of solidarity. The defensive competitiveness exhibited by mothers in relation to such everyday matters as the kind of food they feed their children or the type of activities they encourage them to do has become a familiar feature in the popular news media, along with novels, TV shows, and films. The academic literature, as Chap. 2 explores, has discussed this phenomenon in relation to the ‘Mommy Wars’ and the ‘new momism’, the ‘tribalism’ of parental behaviour, and the divisive strategies involved with projects of ‘concerted cultivation’ (Bristow, 2009; Douglas & Michaels, 2004; Hays, 1996; Lareau, 2003; Warner, 2006). The existence of this critical literature indicates that while intensive parenting has become the dominant cultural script according to which ‘good’ childrearing is defined, responses to this script are far from stable. The imperatives inherent in a risk-averse, highly individuated parenting strategy are continually contradicted both in principle (the lives that people want for themselves and their children) and in practice (the impossibility of keeping a child, or children, safe from every possible danger and at the same time engaging in activities and experiences that will help them get ahead in life). Thus, parents are torn between the desire that their children should engage in soccer practice or music tuition (‘concerted cultivation’); the anxiety that these activities will pose the risk of injury, or abuse at the hands of other adults; and the practical impossibility of being able to take two or three children to two or three different ‘improving’ activities at the same time. In addition, as Part II of this book indicates, parents are very aware that risk-averse parenting strategies can also be conceptualized as harmful to their children, and that a ‘good’ parent ought to be instilling in their child the qualities of independence and resilience. The chapter on the phenomenon of ‘helicopter parenting’ in Part II examines the way in which critiques of risk-averse parenting are now becoming reframed as a new form of parent-blaming, leading to an impossibly contradictory demand: that parents actively seek to protect their children from being over-protected. The dangers of defensive practice are not limited to restricting interactions between one’s own children and those of ‘other adults’. As Chap. 4

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discusses, the expanding reach of safeguarding into the domain of the everyday parenting practices, via such policy frameworks as ‘Every Child Matters’, implicitly presume that family relationships constitute a considerable risk factor to the welfare and wellbeing of children, and seek to place those intimate and private relationships under increasingly high levels of official scrutiny: pushing parents to behave in ways that ‘appear right’ to a third party observer such as a school, doctor, social worker, or health visitor. The logical consequence of this interventionist approach was encapsulated in the proposal, in Scotland, to appoint a ‘Named Person’—such as a teacher or social worker—as a point of contact for each child from birth to the age of 18. It was intended that this Named Person would have access to data about all services or difficulties that a child has, where there are ‘concerns’ about the ‘well-being’ of a child; in the hope that the Named Person would be ‘in a position to intervene early to prevent difficulties escalating’ (Scottish Parliament, 2014, pp. 16–17, cited in Waiton, 2016, p. 4) In his discussion of the Named Persons scheme, and his own work with the No to Named Persons (NO2NP) coalition of campaign groups, Waiton (2016) draws attention to concerns about violations of privacy and confidentiality, and the undermining of families’ values and practices. As Waiton observes: Many of the trends discussed by critics of parenting policies, early intervention, and risk management approaches to families, are evident in the Named Person. Indeed in many respects, the Named Person is the ‘high point’ of this approach to families. Here, there is a high expectation that support will be needed by parents and provided by professionals, where needs and risks are interchangeable and perhaps most importantly, where the category of well-being replaces that of welfare, thus incorporating the anxiety about the (universal) ‘vulnerable child’ with an ever increasing concern about the minutiae of everyday life. (Waiton, 2016, p. 9)

The Named Persons scheme was scrapped in September 2019, three years after its introduction had been scheduled (BBC News Online, 2019). Following a legal challenge launched by the NO2NP coalition, the scheme was deemed to breach the right to privacy and a family life under the European Convention on Human Rights, and an expert panel tasked with writing a workable code of practice on information sharing was unable to do so.

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As such, the failure of the Named Persons scheme followed the axing of a previous mass information-sharing scheme in England: the ContactPoint database set up following the 2003 Laming Inquiry into the murder of Victoria Climbié, discussed in Chap. 4. ContactPoint was decommissioned in 2010, following the election of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government, due to concerns about proportionality and civil liberties (Gheera, 2011, p.  5). Tim Loughton, the then Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Children and Families, explained that, although the Government recognized the needs of professionals to have a quick and reliable method of accessing information on a child: It has always been our view that it was disproportionate and unjustifiable to hold records on every child in the country, making them accessible to large numbers of people. (Gheera, 2011, pp. 5–6)

It is worth noting that another source of concern with ContactPoint, and other generalized safeguarding schemes such as the Vetting and Barring Scheme, was raised by experts in child protection. These included Eileen Munro, Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics, who had warned about the potential for such schemes to distract social workers and other frontline professionals from being able to identify and act upon demonstrable cases of child abuse and neglect. It should be possible, Munro said back in 2007, to make a simple screening check to ensure that people working with children are not serial paedophiles; but the Vetting and Barring Scheme was something different: a ‘fantasy precaution’, which represented the dangerous combination of ‘a risk-averse society plus the fantasy that we can avoid risk completely’ (interview with author, cited in Furedi & Bristow, 2010, p. 8). Following the decommissioning of ContactPoint, Munro was tasked by the Coalition government to conduct a review into child protection (Gheera, 2011; Munro, 2011). In a progress report published the following year, Munro again emphasized the dangers of defensive practice amongst child protection professionals: One fundamental change that is needed is for all to have realistic expectations of how well professionals can protect children and young people. The work involves uncertainty: we cannot know for sure what is going on in the privacy of family life, nor can we predict with certainty what will happen. Too often, expectations have become unrealistic, demanding that profes-

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sionals ‘ensure’ children’s safety, strengthening a belief that if something bad happens ‘some professional must be to blame’. This has contributed to the development of a defensive culture that focuses on compliance with targets and rules instead of whether services are providing effective help. (Munro, 2012, p. 3)

The characteristics of the regulatory schemes designed to protect children considered in this chapter reveal some important tensions and contradictions. Such schemes tend to have as their focus a particular target—the ‘hidden’ paedophile, or the abusive parent—but their scope is drawn much wider, fuelling suspicion of all adults engaged in the project of rearing children. The ‘childcare professional’ is not immune from this suspicion—indeed, teachers, nursery workers, and social workers also find themselves framed as a potential source of danger. One consequence is that the uncontroversial imperative that children should be protected from serious harm becomes increasingly difficult to act upon in practice, as adults find themselves distracted by the daily demands of impression management. This gives the question of ‘who cares for children?’ a strangely disembodied quality, as the performance of caring appears to contradict the actual practice of providing care. A further consequence is the diminishing of solidarity between different elements of adult society—parents, professionals, and communities—as all are incited to view each other with a defensive wariness.

Conclusions The contradictions of intensive parenting culture lead to a situation in which parental anxiety is both moderated and exacerbated by ‘real world’ experience. For example, on one hand, children’s continual engagement with other adults means that anxiety about potential paedophiles is ever present; on the other, it provides reassurance that most other adults are not paedophiles. Nonetheless, this experience is underwritten by a sentiment of deep uncertainty. What has been lost is the cultural sentiment that engaging with, and relying upon, other adults should be taken for granted as a good and necessary part of everyday life. As noted above, the dynamic behind an expert-led parenting culture and regulatory projects such as the VBS is to transform the presumed role of adults, in socializing and protecting children, into a defined skillset that can only be exercised by a particular group of checked or qualified adults.

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Waiton and Knight (2007) make this observation in a paper describing the phenomenon of ‘paedophobia’, or ‘fear of children’, whereby adults appear to be increasingly wary of engaging with children in their local communities, either to help them or to confront bad behaviour. They cite as an example the way that adults are encouraged to telephone the authorities with reports of low-level bad behaviour, rather than talking to the young people themselves: ‘Adults intervening when young people behave is, quite frankly, no longer “the done thing”—a message promoted by politicians, housing officers, ASBOs [Antisocial Behaviour Orders], and implied by the “pick up the phone” advice from Strathclyde Police’ (Waiton & Knight, 2007, p. 92). Part of this is to do with adults’ fear that they may be accused of inappropriate behaviour: Waiton and Knight quote a male academic saying that ‘he wouldn’t go near a young child today because of “what people might think”. Nor will he meet with a female student at his university unless his office door is open’. But it speaks primarily to the ‘disconnection between adults and children’ that informs the current expert-led parenting culture; the idea that ‘relating to other people’s children is not the business of other adults but of experts’ (Waiton & Knight, 2007, p. 93). The trend towards the deskilling of adulthood has a practical impact on the experience of community life, parents’ engagement with childcare professionals, and families’ engagement with their neighbours and other families. While this impact is limited to some extent, by the combination of practical pressures and pragmatic common sense, the cumulative effect of the hyper-regulation of intergenerational contact should not be underestimated. We return to this theme in Chap. 12, where we explore the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic in exposing the impotence of the official safeguarding logic in the context of a social crisis in which children’s welfare is visibly compromised.

References BBC News Online. (2019, September 19). Named person scheme scrapped by Scottish government. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-­scotland-­scotland-­ politics-­49753980 Best, J. (1993). Threatened children: Rhetoric and concern about child-victims. University of Chicago Press. Best, J. (Ed.). (2001). How claims spread: Cross-national diffusion of social problems. Aldine de Gruyter.

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Bristow, J. (2009). Standing up to supernanny. Imprint Academic. Buch Leander, E.  M., Pallesgaard Munk, K., & Lindsø Larsen, P. (2019). Guidelines for preventing child sexual abuse and wrongful allegations against staff at Danish childcare facilities. Societies, 9(2), 1–24. Cameron, C. (2001). Promise or problem? A review of the literature on men working in early childcare services. Gender, Work and Organization, 8(4), 430–453. Collier, R., & Sheldon, S. (2008). Fragmenting Fatherhood: A socio-legal study. Hart. Daily Telegraph. (2009, September 14). Parent drivers ‘shouldn’t over-react to vetting moves’. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/6184668/Parent-­ drivers-­shouldnt-­over-­react-­to-­vetting-­moves.html Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF). (2010, February 8). ‘Vetting and Barring Facts’. Department for Children, Schools and Families, Home Office, Department of Health (DCSF, HO, DH). (2007). SVG Act 2006: ISA Scheme Consultation Document. Department for Education, Department of Health, Home Office (DfE, DH, HO). (2011). Vetting and barring scheme remodelling review – Report and recommendations. Retrieved June 6, 2023, from https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/97748/vbs-­report.pdf Disclosure and Barring Service & Home Office. ‘Independent Review of the Disclosure and Barring Regime: Report and recommendations of the independent review’, published April 18 2023, updated May 26 2023. Retrieved June 6, 2023, from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/ system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1151040/6.8338_HO_Independent_ review_of_the_disclosure_and_barring_regime_FINAL_WEB_v05_1_.pdf Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS). (2022). ‘DBS guidance leaflets’, published September 14 2018, updated July 14 2022. Retrieved June 6, 2023, from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dbs-­guidance-­leaflets Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS). (2023). Retrieved June 6, 2023, from https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/disclosure-­and-­barring-­ service; https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/disclosure-­and-­ barring-­service/about Douglas, S., & Michaels, M. (2004). The Mommy Myth: The idealization of motherhood and how it has undermined all women. Free Press. Filler, D. M. (2001). Making the case for Megan’s Law: a study in legislative rhetoric. Indiana Law Journal, 76(2, Article 2), 314–365. Furedi, F. (2001). Paranoid Parenting: Abandon your anxieties and be a good parent. Allen Lane. Furedi, F. (2008). Paranoid Parenting: Why ignoring the experts may be best for your child (2nd ed.). Continuum.

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Furedi, F. (2013). Moral crusades in an age of mistrust: The Jimmy Savile Scandal. Palgrave. Furedi, F., & Bristow, J. (2010). Licensed to Hug: How child protection policies are poisoning the relationship between the generations and damaging the voluntary sector (2nd ed.). Civitas. https://civitas.org.uk/pdf/LicensedToHug2nd Ed18Aug10.pdf Gabb, J. (2013). Embodying risk: Managing father–child intimacy and the display of nudity in families’. Sociology, 47(4), 639–654. Gheera, M. (2011, March 25). The ContactPoint database. Standard Note: SN/ SP/5171, House of Commons Library. Retrieved June 6, 2023, from https:// researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN05171/SN05171.pdf Guldberg, H. (2009). Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and play in an age of fear. Routledge. Hays, S. (1996). The cultural contradictions of motherhood. Yale University Press. Home Office. (2012). The disclosure and barring service is created. Published, December 1, 2012. Retrieved June 6, 2023, from https://www.gov.uk/government/news/the-­disclosure-­and-­barring-­service-­is-­created Home Office. (2023). Child sex offender disclosure scheme guidance: Guidance and tools for the implementation of the child sex offender disclosure scheme, also known as Sarah’s Law. Published October 29, 2010, updated April 3 2023. Retrieved June 6, 2023, from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/child-­sex-­offender-­disclosure-­scheme-­guidance Hunt, A. (2003). Risk and moralization in everyday life. In R.  V. Erickson & A. Doyle (Eds.), Risk and morality. University of Toronto Press. Jenkins, P. (1998). Moral panic: Changing concepts of the child molester in modern America. Yale University Press. Jones, A. (2004). Risk anxiety, policy, and the spectre of sexual abuse in early childhood education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 25(3), 321–334. King, J. R. (1998). Uncommon caring: Learning from men who teach young children. Teachers College Press). Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life. University of California Press. Liberman, E. (1999, October 17). Megan’s Law’s unintended result: Hysteria. Providence Journal-Bulletin (Rhode Island). Manifesto Club. (2006). The case against vetting: How the child protection industry is poisoning adult-child relations. http://www.manifestoclub.com/files/ THE%20%20CASE%20AGAINST%20VETTING.pdf McAlinden, A. (2010). Vetting sexual offenders: State over-extension, the punishment deficit and the failure to manage risk. Social Legal Studies, 19(1), 25–48. Munro, E. (2011, May 10). Munro review of child protection: A child-centred system. Department for Education. Retrieved June 6, 2023, from https://assets.

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PART II

Case Studies in Parental Determinism

CHAPTER 6

Policing Pregnancy: The Pregnant Woman Who Drinks Ellie Lee

Introduction Arguments about what influences a child’s development are far from resolved … Serious research, unlike the plethora of parenting advice available through child-rearing manuals and parenting magazines, is very hesitant on this question … Inflating the public’s perception of parental impact promises influence and power but inevitably delivers disappointing results. (Furedi, 2008, p. 68)

One important observation about parenting advice concerns the relationship between the outcomes of practices based on the idea of parental determinism and the development of parenting culture. Furedi’s argument, above, is that ‘serious research’ calls into question the notion that ‘parental impact’ has unparalleled ‘influence and power’. Yet, he suggests, the failure of efforts to improve the lives of children through changing parental behaviour has not, unfortunately, led to a questioning of whether the emphasis on ‘parenting’ made sense in the first place. Instead, its main effect is a troubling disappointment in parental impact. The extract above is taken from a chapter in Furedi’s book Paranoid Parenting that is partly concerned with pregnancy, where it is argued that one aspect of parental determinism is a marked tendency to expand © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Lee et al., Parenting Culture Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44156-1_6

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parenting backwards, to the point before a child is born. ‘The idea that experiences of early life are decisive in influencing what happens in later years is increasingly interpreted to include the experience of pregnancy’, Furedi explains (2008, p. 65). Pregnancy has become, he suggests, understood as the time when ‘parenting’ needs to begin, leading to the phenomenon of ‘parenting before children’ (Furedi, 2008, p. 69). If this was true when Paranoid Parenting was published almost two decades ago, it is even more the case today. In Britain the formalization of pregnancy as the first stage of ‘parenting’ was expressed earlier this century in the idea of the ‘Foundation Years’, the name that was given by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government of the time to the phase of life from pregnancy to age five (4Children, 2013). As the twenty-­ first century has progressed, consensus has formed among advocates of ‘early intervention’ around the term ‘first 1001 Days’, which begins at conception. The need to change and shape parental behaviour during this time has become a central objective of family policy, on the grounds that this by far is the most effective way to prevent the development of a wider range of social problems (Gillies et al., 2017; Macvarish, 2016). Arguments for ‘early intervention’ of this kind often rework concepts conventionally applied to the period following birth and recast them as relevant for pregnancy. For example, post-natal depression (termed post-­ partum depression in North America) became a growing focus for policymakers through the 1990s. They encouraged the expansion of efforts to assess maternal mood following birth on the basis that the mood of the mother has direct and profound effects for the emotional and mental development of the child (Godderis, 2010; Lee, 2004). The view that the damage created by ‘impaired bonding’ due to maternal depression can occur even earlier than has been previously envisaged is, however, now also frequently expressed (Lowe et al., 2015). A perspective has developed that contends that pregnant women’s mental state should be monitored (and self-monitored) through pregnancy ‘because it is claimed that the hormones associated with stress may affect their preborn child adversely. Psychologists have developed psychometric scales such as the Maternal– Fetal Attachment Scale to measure maternal fetal bonding’ (Lupton, 2012b, pp. 3–4). Gatrell coined the term ‘maternal body work’ to capture the way it is now insisted that women must relate to their bodies in a very different way once pregnant and perform new sorts of work. ‘[It is anticipated that mothers should prioritize maternal body work from the moment of conception, for life’, she explains (2013, p. 627).

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Macvarish and Lee have drawn attention to how the concept Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), which is increasingly dominant as part of policy frameworks in the UK, is assumed to include experience in utero. Discussion of ACEs includes, ‘powerful emphasis on pregnancy, attachment, depression and stress, positioning the mother, her emotions and her body as the primary determinates of normal or abnormal infant development’ (Macvarish & Lee, 2019, p.  471). Ballif (2020), through her research in a perinatal unit in Switzerland, uses the term the ‘psychological government of pregnancy’ to describe the workings of concern with pregnant women’s minds and their feelings in that context. A powerful system is in place that demands women change how they live in an array of ways, on the grounds that everything the pregnant woman does and feels (or does not do and does not feel) will impact on the foetus, for better or worse. An important observation made in literature critiquing such definitions of ‘parenting’, however, is how this process is developing further still. The expansion of parenting backwards does not stop at conception, it is observed; the time preconception has also emerged as a focus of claimsmaking and policy development, with women’s behaviours, habits, and feelings when they are not even yet pregnant construed an important matter if child health and well-being is to be improved (Karpin, 2010). ‘[P]rospective parents, including men but particularly women, are exhorted to ensure their lifestyles are appropriately healthy enough both to conceive a child and then to ensure the optimal health and development of the preborn child’, notes Lupton (2012a, p. 3). Kirsty Budds’ research considers the term ‘preconception health’, which she observes has become used in claims about what is of ‘critical importance for pregnancy and birth outcomes’ and is ‘prompting calls for public health advice to be targeted at women before rather than during pregnancy’ (2021, p. 463). Budds has explored how these calls play out in media reporting. She found that despite the limits of research on the subject, or the concerning effects that might attend raising alarm about the health of all women who might become pregnant, ‘few challenges to these dominant messages were identified’ and that there should be more attention placed on, ‘the potential impacts on the autonomy and subjectivities of women of reproductive age, regardless of pregnancy intentions’ (2021, p. 463). Aspects of these developments in parental determinism are explored further in later chapters, which look at claims about attachment, and about the foetal/infant brain as part of ‘neuroparenting’. Here, we focus on the example of the social construction of the problem of drinking alcohol when pregnant (and, before becoming pregnant). We describe and explore

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the ascent of the ethos of precaution and, in turn, the dominance in the twenty-first century of the imperative to abstain from any alcohol consumption before and during pregnancy. We review what some research suggests about the effects of the demand that women do not drink when pregnant (or ‘pre-pregnant’) for parental experience and identity. We also discuss the concepts ‘self-surveillance’ and ‘reproductive citizenship’ and highlight research findings pointing to a shift to ‘other-surveillance’ within efforts to increase rates of alcohol abstinence among women.

The Imperative to Abstain It’s safer not to drink alcohol during pregnancy, or if you are planning to become pregnant, because it can damage your growing baby. By not drinking, you are protecting your baby and minimising the risks to their development and future health. (Start4Life, n.d.) Advice to pregnant and pre-pregnant women stretches far beyond the boundaries of what has been proven. (Furedi, 2008, p. 72)

As this century has progressed, one message communicated to women has become increasingly unequivocal; abstain from alcohol if you are pregnant. For well over a decade, the National Health Service in the UK has informed pregnant women to ‘avoid alcohol’. While there is arguably some acknowledgement that all and any alcohol consumption and foetal impairment are not simply causally related—Start4Life, the official source of advice about pregnancy and early parenthood in Britain, for example, tells women not drinking is ‘safer’ and drinking ‘can’ cause damage—the very clear message is that it’s better to act as though alcohol will be harmful. As Furedi suggests, the boundaries around what counts as evidence when it comes to advice about alcohol and pregnancy have, in this way, proved to be very elastic. The activity of advice-giving based on certain interpretations of evidence has also extended to include the time before, as well as during, pregnancy. Campaign groups which play an important role in shaping official advice and policy have been often explicit in stretching the boundaries of evidence by attributing causality to alcohol consumption when discussing the causes of impairment. ‘Positive development during pregnancy’ requires women ‘not consuming alcohol’, stated the Wave Trust back in 2013 (2013, p.  10), and some now claim more than 400 variants of impairment are caused by alcohol consumption during pregnancy

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(NoFASD, n.d.). This large array of problems impacting all aspects of biological development are described as features of a multifaceted spectrum of disorders and difficulties, termed Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). FASD has been described through use of further terms that include ‘Partial Fetal Alcohol Syndrome’ (PFAS), ‘Fetal Alcohol Effects’ (FAE), ‘Alcohol Related Neurodevelopmental Disorder’ (ARND), and ‘Alcohol Related Birth Defects’ (ARBD) (Armstrong, 2003). Those seeking to raise awareness of FASD have argued associated problems include intellectual disability, lowered IQ, memory disorders, learning disorders, attention disorders, sensory disorders, speech and language disorders, mood disorders, behavioural disorders, autistic-like behaviours, and sleep disorders. FASD goes ‘undiagnosed’, or is misdiagnosed, ‘for example as Autism or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)’, it has been argued, and also that autism and ADHD are in fact symptoms of FASD. FASD, when undiagnosed, it has been claimed, can lead to ‘secondary disabilities’ which can include loneliness, school expulsions, addictions, chronic unemployment, promiscuity, unplanned pregnancies, poverty, criminality, prison, homelessness, depression, and suicide (Egerton, n.d.). The birth defects, disabilities and impairments that appear this way in lists of symptoms of FASD may be considered complex (that is, difficult or impossible to explain by reference to a single cause and likely involve the interaction of genetics, environment, socio-economic factors, and cultural perceptions of what is ‘normal development’). Yet part of the case pressed by those who advocate ‘no drinking’ is, by contrast, that there is one explanation, if a woman drank alcohol at all during pregnancy. In health policies and official advice, the point has been reached internationally whereby this presentation of risk in accounts of alcohol consumption and pregnancy is unchallenged or endorsed. Thus, despite research repeatedly finding ‘low level’ alcohol consumption by pregnant women to be unrelated to the development of impairment and disability, FASD prevention has, as we have noted, come to centre on promoting total alcohol abstinence. It is the terminology of a ‘precautionary approach’ that is routinely used to justify such advice, and discussion of what evidence shows about alcohol consumption at a ‘low level’ (as opposed to ‘high level’) is increasingly not discussed in advice and information (Leppo et  al., 2014; McCallum & Holland, 2018). This chapter now looks further at how this construction of risk developed from the early 1970s to the present, focusing on the interaction

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between science and medicine, medical entrepreneurs, and the wider culture. It discusses the evidence about how the precautionary account of risk that emerged and has come to dominate all advice around alcohol and pregnancy shapes women’s experience of becoming mothers. Points are summarized from recent research about developments in health policy based on precaution which focus on preventing the ‘Alcohol Exposed Pregnancy’ (AEP), a term now used to describe a pregnancy where the woman has consumed any alcohol at any point.

Pregnancy, Alcohol, and the Expansion of Risk The contemporary social problem of drinking in pregnancy begins in the US; the story starts in the early 1970s, when it was first proposed that there is an association between a woman drinking a great deal of alcohol when pregnant and a specific set of health problems in babies, termed Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS). FAS was (and remains) a condition described as identifiable by retarded growth pre- and/or post-natally; abnormalities of the face including a flattened nose, very rounded eyes, and heavy, drooping eyelids; and intellectual impairment and developmental delay, observed in babies born to alcoholic women (Golden, 2005). It is emphasized in the literature that these health problems in the child are associated with very heavy drinking by the pregnant woman, but notably do not occur in the children of all pregnant women who drink heavily, suggesting that, even where the level of alcohol consumption is ‘high’, the detrimental effects of alcohol for foetal development work in concert with other factors (those emphasized in the literature, such as very poor diet, are mainly by-products of the socio-economic situation of populations in which FAS is more prevalent, for example Native Americans in the US) (Armstrong, 2003). That is, correlation or association does not equal causation. Secondly, there is the question of the size of the problem. FAS was initially described as a rare condition: ‘The first prospective study [published in 1980] showed that FAS was a rare outcome of maternal alcoholism during pregnancy, an observation subsequently confirmed by numerous investigators’, note Armstrong and Abel (2000, p. 278, see also McDermott, 2020). Yet, as indicated above, the problem is now widely presented in terms that construe it neither complex nor rare. Women are told that any drinking in pregnancy is the cause of most health and developmental problems in children.

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Armstrong and Abel (2000) explored the origins of this redefinition of the risk a woman’s behaviour has been said to present for foetal development through their discussion of ‘exaggeration’ and ‘democratization’. Armstrong also pointed to the import of what she called ‘medical entrepreneurs’, whom she defined as individuals with a powerful sense of mission regarding their assessment of ‘the evidence’ who seek to ‘impress their … vision on the rest of society’ (Armstrong, 1998, p. 2027). Their claims, she suggests, redefined risk from the mid-1970s onwards in two main ways. First, exaggerated claims about the incidence of FAS were reported, based in part on broadening FAS as a category. As interest in the syndrome grew, an ever-widening range of anomalies were mooted as symptoms of FAS, ‘more often than not based on single isolated incidences’ (Armstrong & Abel, 2000, p. 278). Expansion of what ‘counts’ as FAS, and so exaggeration of the incidence of the condition, was also reflected in the use of terms ‘Partial Fetal Alcohol Syndrome’ (PFAS), ‘Fetal Alcohol Effects’ (FAE), ‘Alcohol Related Neurodevelopmental Disorder’ (ARND), and ‘Alcohol Related Birth Defects’ (ARBD), listed above, leading eventually to the concept FASD (Armstrong, 1998, 2003). ‘Democratization’, secondly, also changed how risk was defined, through shifting claims about which foetuses should be considered to be at risk. This happened as FAS was less and less described as a condition associated with specific subgroups of the population—alcoholic women, usually also in poverty—to an ‘equal opportunity disorder’ (Armstrong & Abel, 2000, p. 279). Those who organized to advocate for alcohol abstention, such as the National Organization for Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (NoFAS), founded in the US in 1990, sought to emphasize how reported cases occurred in a wide variety of ethnic groups and social strata with just one, common causal factor: alcohol consumption. Through their work, the claim that every woman was equally at risk gained increasing visibility, although it contradicted research findings that showed not even every chronic alcoholic gave birth to an affected child, and that other factors, most notably poverty leading to poor diet, were significant (Armstrong, 1998, p. 2028). As McDermott notes, ‘Where doctors once regarded FAS as a disorder associated with maternal alcoholism, they began to speak of alcohol use in pregnancy’ (McDermott, 2020, p. 79). Golden (1999, 2005) summarized this shift in definition of the cause of FAS as a movement from alcoholism (defined as a complex, multicausal medical condition, suggesting the need for focused, specialist assistance to a subgroup of women) to

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alcohol (the substance itself, consumed in any quantity, by any woman, leading to the claim that all women need to be warned against drinking when pregnant). These ‘exaggerated’ and ‘democratized’ claims were then joined by what has, perhaps, proved to be most significant aspect of the construction of this social problem: claims about theoretical risk. Armstrong and Abel noted how those who coined the term FAS later engaged in ‘subtle broadening of the problem’. This happened as the case was pressed that no case of FAS had ever ‘been reported in a human being with a negative maternal history of ethanol use’ (2000, p. 278). In this approach, the absence of health or developmental problems in children of mothers who did not drink in pregnancy is construed as evidence of a possible (if unproven) relation between consuming alcohol at any level and these problems. From this perspective, in lieu of positive evidence that ‘just one drop’ of alcohol is undoubtedly harmful, it is ‘better to be safe than sorry’ and act as though that evidence exists. The outcome in the US from this starting point was a shift in representations of risk. One form this took was the growth of portrayals of the detrimental effects of alcohol as a sort of sliding scale. ‘In the public imagination and in much of the medical literature, it is assumed that if heavy alcohol exposure causes severe birth defects, then lesser levels of exposure must cause more moderate effects’, explained Armstrong (2003, p.  6). The other was direct advocacy of thinking of risk in a possibilistic, theoretical way. As Ruhl noted, from her examination of Canadian advice manuals directed at the pregnant woman, by the 1990s Canadian women were ‘informed that in the absence of thorough studies it is safer (less risky) for her to abstain from alcohol entirely’ (1999, p. 104). The policy response as it has developed internationally has reflected these risk-conscious constructions of the problem of drinking during pregnancy. In 1981—just eight years after FAS was first named—the US was the first country to issue advice to women about the dangers of drinking when pregnant. The first Surgeon General’s Advisory of Alcohol Use in Pregnancy cautioned women, however, to ‘limit’ alcohol consumption. By 2005, the advice was that both pregnant women and women who might become pregnant should abstain completely (Copelton, 2008). In 2007, the official advice from the British Department of Health changed similarly, with health officials making it clear that this was despite there being no evidence linking ‘low to moderate’ alcohol consumption with health problems, but rather because there are no studies proving what is ‘safe’ (Lowe & Lee, 2010a). As the chapter discusses further below, a decade

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later advice was changed again to remove any reference to ‘a choice to drink’ and to what a woman might do to reduce risk by drinking at low levels, a move which has formed the basis for important shifts in healthcare practices. The evidence summarized above indicates that in a short space of time, the meaning of risk was redefined. FAS moved in the course of three decades from being ‘a medical condition diagnosed by doctors and dealt with through effective management of pregnant women into a public health problem that required educating women not to drink during pregnancy’ (Golden, 1999, p. 275). The need was established for what is considered in the sociological literature as a moral crusade—framed in the language of risk—to warn pregnant (and subsequently all fertile women) of the dangers of alcohol, and this has continued and expanded, influencing experiments in activities aimed to increase rates of alcohol abstinence among women. Those advocating for this approach have come to enjoy a high degree of success in gaining support for their perspective, notably among policymakers. Indeed, it is notable how influential this commitment to abstinence advocacy is, in the face of competing evidence. Over the past few years, a series of studies have been published in which no relation was found between drinking occasionally or even quite frequently at low levels, and health and developmental problems in children. Using ‘childhood balance’ as the measure (a proxy for motor development and coordination), the authors of one such study reported ‘no evidence … of an adverse effect of maternal-alcohol consumption on childhood balance’, and that, ‘Higher maternal-alcohol use during pregnancy was generally associated with better offspring outcomes’ (Humphriss et al., 2013). The response from the UK Royal College of Midwives, however, was that, ‘Our advice continues to be that for women who are trying to conceive or those that are pregnant it is best to avoid alcohol’ (Press Association, 2013). Indeed, this is the advice despite the fact that a relation (not considered causal) has been found between drinking at low or moderate levels and better outcomes for children (Gavaghan, 2009; Lee et al., 2016). The sociological task, in this light, is not to debunk the existence of FAS or FASD; as Armstrong put it: ‘There is good evidence for a recognizable syndrome of severe birth defects associated with high levels of alcohol exposure in utero’ (2003, p.  4). Rather, it is to understand the interaction between developments in science and medicine, claims made by medical and moral entrepreneurs about these developments, and the

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wider cultural and political context, that makes it possible for any drinking in pregnancy to be constructed as a social problem in the way it has come to be, and to be alert to the ways this impacts the development of parental identity and experience, and understandings of the causes of individual pathologies and social problems.

Science, Culture, and the Separation of the Woman from Her Pregnancy Since the sixties, much attention has been devoted to what can and cannot harm a developing pregnancy. Medical science has demonstrated that the health of the baby is affected by the actions of the mother … Parental determinism has attached itself to this discovery leading to a reorientation of the focus on modern antenatal and preconception care. (Furedi, 2008, p. 70)

The prenatal period has been a focus of scientific attention in modern sense for over a century, and sociocultural research suggests that the motives, rationales, and effects of what is frequently termed the ‘medicalization’ of pregnancy over this time have been ambiguous (Fox et  al., 2009). The notion that this attention developed out of simple concern for improving the health of women and children does not adequately explain these developments. This ambiguity is clear, for example, in the history of campaigns for the development of contraception and ‘family planning’. Recognition of the detrimental health effects of repeated pregnancy and childbirth, and the wish on the part of women to be able to control their fertility, was synthesized through the twentieth century with eugenic and Malthusian preoccupations with the number of children born to families from poorer sections of society, taking a markedly racialized form in the US (Kline, 2005; Marks, 2001). In general, accounts of childbirth and the development of the medical care of pregnant women emphasize a combination of improvements in health but as part of a wider picture of what can be broadly termed ‘population control’. As Furedi notes, above, matters took a particular turn from the 1960s. These included scientific innovations Ann Oakley described as ‘Getting to Know the Fetus’. Oakley commented that until this time, by and large, ‘knowledge of the foetus could only be acquired through knowledge of the mother—by asking her questions, by clinically examining her abdomen and by laboratory examination of her metabolic products’. However,

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through the 1960s and 1970s, what she described as a ‘revolution’ in antenatal care took place. For Oakley, developments in medicine at this time were revolutionary because: [F]or the first time, they enable obstetricians to dispense with mothers as intermediaries … It is now possible to make direct contact with the fetus, and to acquire a quite detailed knowledge of his or her physiology and personality before the moment of official transition to parenthood—the time of birth. (Oakley, 1986, p. 155)

Ultrasound imaging of the foetus is the most obvious and widely discussed example of this ‘direct contact’, but it has come to take other forms (Lupton, 2013; and see Casper, 1998, on fetal surgery). There is a rich and extensive literature on the interaction between these scientific developments and the wider culture, demonstrating how these developments in science and medicine are recycled, giving rise to new cultural tropes and constructions of the foetus and the pregnant woman (Lupton, 2012a, 2013). While the foetus today is no more a fully developed person and is no less part of the pregnant woman that it was before ultrasonography, it has come to be perceived as if it is. The foetus exists in culture (and in at least parts of the world of medicine) as an independent entity, imagined to be really identical to an already born baby; the foetus has become simply the baby ‘unborn’. The dimensions and ramifications of this cultural shift are numerous, but for parenting culture, central among them is the emergence of a more or less explicit conceptualization of the mother and foetus as separate but also in competition, with their interests pitted against each other. This development has been neatly summarized by Armstrong this way: [T]he crucial movement … is from thinking of the woman and the fetus as a single entity to thinking of the woman and the fetus as two separate individuals. From thinking of pregnant as something a woman is to regarding pregnancy as something she carries. Once we conceive of the pregnant woman and the fetus as two separate individuals rather than as one, it becomes possible to think of the woman and her fetus as potential antagonists. (Armstrong, 2003, p. 9)

The ‘abortion problem’ has been viewed as the archetype of this idea of ‘maternal foetal conflict’, with literature on the development of the

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so-­called abortion war indicating how medical and scientific developments are utilized and drawn upon by, in particular, those opposed to abortion, to press their case about the vulnerability of the foetus in the womb. The modern abortion debate—featuring the free-floating foetus with its own needs and interests, set against the woman who exists as a person somehow separately (although the foetus is within her)—develops as claimsmakers opposed to abortion draw on the language and imagery of science and medicine. This same conceptualization is, however, very apparent in the instance of drinking and pregnancy. One video produced by the UK-based alcohol abstinence advocacy organization FAS Aware, for example, promoted an image of a ‘talking’ foetus imperilled by its mother. In this video the foetus ‘comments’ on what it feels at the point of the first ultrasound scan (performed at around 12 weeks in Britain). The words spoken by the foetus, pictured as a shadowy ultrasound figure, went as follows: It’s my first scan today. They’ll check for Down’s Syndrome. They’ll check for abnormalities. But I wish they’d check for how much alcohol my mum drinks. (FAS Aware UK, 2010)

The unborn, in this video, literally comes to life as an already-existing person (who can, for example, speak), but one who is also entirely vulnerable in the face of her mother’s actions. Indeed, given her total dependency on the mother—and the mother alone—by merit of location in the womb, the construction of the mother as manager and minimizer of risk is absolute, even compared to that of the mother following birth. Following Armstrong (2003), the mother literally and individually, in this portrayal of matters, ‘conceives risk’ and ‘bears responsibility’ for any problems that emerge once the child is born. Lupton discusses this way of thinking about the foetus as follows, highlighting how the assumption of potential antagonism is framed in conditions of risk consciousness. The separated foetus, she indicates, comes to be considered ‘in danger, not least from the mother’: Preborn organisms are considered as particularly fragile, open to harm. The womb that is in some ways viewed as a warm, nurturing, safe protective place for the preborn, where the outside world cannot enter, has in recent times been conceptualised as opened to danger, not least from the mother who is supposed to protect her child. (Lupton, 2012a, p. 3)

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This separation of the woman and foetus now finds its reflection in the stream of warnings issued and advice given about the detrimental effects of the actions (or inactions) of the pregnant woman for the future child, about everything from hair dye to tuna fish (Fox et al., 2009). Yet while a precondition for this separation may be technological developments, in that they make it possible to see the foetus (through ultrasound) and understand more about its development (through medical research about, for example, FAS), it is by merit of developments in culture that this comes to reflect itself in the barrage of warnings and rules that now surround pregnancy. While FASD takes the form of a medical diagnosis and is at some level dependent on new scientific knowledge about the foetus, the social problem of alcohol and pregnancy is the product of wider and definitively sociocultural concerns. For this reason, Armstrong’s major work on the subject is titled ‘Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the Diagnosis of Moral Disorder’ (our emphasis) to capture her notion that medical knowledge, in the late twentieth century, became the society’s struggle to manage uncertainty. In a context where society lacked clarity about its future, that is, experienced moral disorder, ‘what science tells us’ came to attain particular significance (2003, p. 9). As she explains, ‘Medicine provides an arena in which society can sift through and express moral ambiguities’ (2003, p. 12). It was, this suggests, certain cultural and social conditions that developed from the 1970s onwards (not science or medicine in the abstract) that made it possible for an expanded and all-encompassing definition of the problem of drinking in pregnancy to become dominant so fast. A central issue identified of the social and historical context of this time is the changing social role of women, which is discussed in the literature in two ways. The growth of concern about female consumption of alcohol, and recognition of alcoholism as a female as well as male disorder, is highlighted. ‘The discovery of FAS in the 1970s, notes Golden, ‘coincided with the growing visibility of female alcoholism with evidence of its increasing relevance, especially among younger women, and with expanding government concern’ (1999, p. 272). That women seemed more and more to be ‘behaving like men’, in particular in their adoption of the ‘risky’ practice of drinking alcohol, is an important part of the story of this social problem. The changing social role and position of women is also discussed as important in a second way, as more and more women came to be involved in the world of employment and other public arenas. This shift in the social role of women, away from motherhood first and foremost, is

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viewed by both Armstrong and Golden as important to perceptions of ‘moral disorder’, which come to take a ‘medicalized’ form. These North American analyses suggest a linkage between drinking in pregnancy as a social problem and a cultural context of what could be termed a conservative response to changes in gender roles and cultural norms in post-1960s America. More recently, however, other countries have followed suit. This century has seen changes to advice and to the messages communicated to pregnant women in countries with contrasting wider and social contexts including Britain (Lowe & Lee, 2010a) and notably Finland, which, as Leppo notes, has been, ‘characterised as women-friendly’, scoring high when it comes to gender equality and women’s reproductive rights (2012, p.  180), but where abstinence has been officially recommended since 2006 to pregnant women and women planning pregnancy. Media analysis has shown, similarly, that warning women about drinking has not been distinct to more conservative sections of the press (Lowe & Lee, 2010b). Important insights are also offered by studies that have looked at a variety of sorts of pregnancy advice. One finding is that there is very little difference in what is said by Armstrong’s ‘medical entrepreneurs’, and those who self-define as advocates for, representatives of, or a friendly support to, pregnant women. As Copelton notes, ‘Most popular pregnancy books warn that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption on pregnancy and often conflate any amount of drinking during pregnancy with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS)’ (2008, p.  13). Marshall and Wollett (2000) analysed information about pregnancy from the British National Childbirth Trust (NCT) alongside that from other sources. Although the NCT defines itself as the feminist, consumer voice of the pregnant women and mother, opposed to the disempowerment of women by the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth, its message was that drinking in pregnancy can lead to serious health problems in the baby. They argue that the NCT’s account, in line with others, characterizes the ‘risks and dangers facing women … as numerous’ (2000, p. 360). Overall, evidence thus suggests that the precept of parental determinism finds political and cultural support far beyond that arising out of ‘traditional’ ideas about women and motherhood—parental determinism crosses the old boundaries of ‘feminist’, ‘liberal’, and ‘conservative’. Indeed, research indicates this precept now informs a thoroughgoing acceptance of maternal–foetal separation on the part of diverse social actors. We conclude this essay with brief comments about two areas. First,

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we consider the relation between this cultural context and law and policy, and second, what evidence suggests about its effects for the experience of pregnant women themselves.

Policing, Self-Policing, and the Turn to ‘Other-Surveillance’ [T]he construal of pregnant women as actively engaged in warding off risk contrasts with that of the ‘passive’ pregnant woman … The maintenance of the safety of the body is cast in terms of an individual locus of responsibility. (Marshall & Wollett, 2000, p. 360)

This important insight from Marshall and Wollett made at the start of this century indicates that the pregnant woman, in the culture of intensive parenting, has not been thought of as only a passive patient, who should simply take orders from medical professionals. The contemporary form of her medicalization, instead, construes her as ‘actively engaged in warding off risks’. Ideally, she should be fully engaged in working out how best she can manage and minimize risk, and she should conduct her pregnancy accordingly. Lupton has used the term ‘reproductive citizenship’ to capture the way pregnant women are ‘subject to imperatives which expect them to engage in an intense ascetic regime of self-regulation and the disciplining of their bodies’ (2012b, p. 329) and as Hammer notes: Social researchers have largely used the framework of self-surveillance to describe the experience of pregnant women within a social context characterised by risk avoidance for the sake of their baby. (2019, p. 335)

A consensus about the power of the pregnant women as the manager of risk through actions of self-regulation spans the worlds of medicine, abstinence advocacy campaigns, health care provision, and advice books and contemporary culture (Armstrong, 2003). As risk management requires the woman to seek out and absorb all the information about risk she can and take advice from those who seek to support her as she manages risk, this also means a new intensity is given to the ‘public’ pregnancy. The management of pregnancy becomes everyone’s business. The ways in which laws and policies have defined what this project of risk management requires, it has been argued, comprise both ‘occasionally draconian state interventions’ but more commonly policies and

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programmes that ‘depend on the entrenchment on a sense of personal responsibility’ (Ruhl, 1999, p. 96). The former, most apparent in the US, have drawn on a definition of maternal alcohol consumption as ‘nothing less than child abuse through the umbilical cord’ (Golden, 1999, p. 270). There are examples from the 1990s onwards of the incarceration of women once their child was born on the grounds they had abused their offspring, drawing clear attention to the link noted in the introduction between risk consciousness and (literal) pregnancy policing. Golden (1999) explains further that by the early 1990s, this claim came to feature in explanations for violent crime, with one convicted murderer presented as damaged by FASD and child abuse. It was thus claimed that violent crime ‘goes back to the womb’, in a clear instance of extreme infant (and parental) determinism. Yet evidence suggests the dominant modus operandi through which women have been made accountable for their child’s health has—until very recently—relied on ‘the interiorization of social constraints’ and a ‘process of psychological assimilation’ (Queniert, 1992, p. 167 [in Ruhl, 1999, p. 96]). In other words, the main effect of the cultural dominance of risk consciousness has been to modify and change the nature of the inner world and identity of women, who come to participate in, and adopt, ‘the “risk model” of pregnancy’ (Ruhl, 1999, p. 96). We later consider what evidence has suggested about how this process of ‘psychological assimilation’ has worked itself out, but first comment on the findings of research about the most recent shifts in policy approaches to alcohol abstinence promotion. As noted already, the literature generally suggests that women’s responses to the association of any alcohol with danger are shaped by an expectation self-surveillance. Hammer (2019) has extended this concept to consider men’s position within discourses of risk and discusses ‘co-­ surveillance’. My research, with colleague Rachel Arkell, adds the idea of a turn to ‘other surveillance’ to the literature. This refers to a marked shift in the policy framework around alcohol and pregnancy in the UK, within which health professionals are looked to, to surveille pregnancy. This shift, we argue, is apparent in guidance developed first by health authorities in Scotland and then adopted by those in England, which is: … directed not to women advising them to abstain, but instead is about women and tasks health professionals with managing the risk pregnant woman’s behavior is deemed to present. (Lee et al., 2022, p. 17)

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The policies and guidance at issue take FASD as their starting point and set out a programme of action for health professionals to enact that aims not only to respond to diagnoses of FASD after birth, but also prevent FASD through interventions both before and during pregnancy. This agenda for prevention takes the revision of the advice given to pregnant women by the UK’s Chief Medical Officers (CMOs) in 2017 as its starting point. That year, as part of a larger revision of advice about alcohol consumption, the CMOs opted to remove from their advice any reference to low-level alcohol consumption and to risk reduction where women choose to drink, in favour of only advocating abstinence. This change was justified with reference to a ‘precautionary approach’, as discussed previously, but also to the perceived need for advice to be simple and clear (and so exclude any reference to uncertainty in evidence in favour of simplicity and clarity) (Lee et al., 2022) The new guidance interprets this message about the need for ‘clarity’ to mean that a new approach to healthcare is warranted. This is one in which healthcare professionals act to advise and intervene to prevent what is termed, in recent policy documents, the Alcohol Exposed Pregnancy (AEP), which means any pregnancy where any alcohol has been consumed. The proposed activities that constitute AEP/FASD prevention include ongoing discussion of the need for abstinence at every meeting between pregnant women and healthcare providers; recording of the content of conversations in a woman’s maternity notes; what is described as ‘screening’ for alcohol consumption using questionnaires but also suggestions of using other means such as blood tests and also testing meconium (the baby’s first faeces); and also efforts to increase use of Long Acting Contraceptives before pregnancy, where a woman is not already abstinent. Critiques of abstinence advocacy have suggested that a ‘culture of extreme risk aversion’ they are part of has serious deficits based on, ‘subjecting all pregnant woman to demands that are extremely onerous, but that may ultimately yield few or no benefits in terms of child development of health’ (Ballantyne et al., 2016, p. 21). Others have raised questions about abstinence advocacy as opposed to risk-reduction, such as elevating women’s anxieties, doing little to address the needs of women most likely to be alcohol dependent, and even making it less likely such women might attempt to access support (Bell et  al., 2009; Salmon, 2011). Those responding to the new guidance about FASD prevention add the further erosion of women’s autonomy to these concerns about, and also a decrease in trust between women and healthcare professionals, to the detriment of

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all parties, including babies yet-to-be-born. Bennett and Bowden strongly argue against routine screening for alcohol consumption during pregnancy on these grounds, concluding: [T]here is no evidence that this kind of screening will result in any reduction of fetal harm and there is danger that undermining the autonomy of women and the trust relationship between women and healthcare professionals may even increase harm to future children. (2022, p. 1)

Living with Risk There is an empirical literature based on qualitative studies of the experience of pregnant women and alcohol consumption. Hammer and Rapp provide a useful review of 27 studies, and interesting and important themes they detected are women’s perception of abstinence is as ‘obvious behaviour’, not necessarily because of expert information but rather due to personal experience of pregnancy and bodily sensations such as nausea; tolerant attitudes towards an occasional drink based on justifications of relaxing, having a treat, and maintaining social bonds; and reported experience of social expectation and social pressure based on an expectation of abstinence, especially in public (2022, p. 6). The ambiguities and tensions of being pregnant in a culture that expects alcohol abstinence are detected and central to accounts by Copelton (2008), Fox et al. (2009), Nicolson et al. (2010) and Heffernan et al. (2011), and we conclude with a brief summary of themes in this work. Copelton’s study was part of a larger project about the experience of pregnancy, based in part on interviews with 55 pregnant women living in the US. The study by Fox et al. took the innovative approach of conducting in-depth interviews with recent mothers, and their own mothers, to explore changing perceptions and experiences of pregnancy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A finding to emerge from both studies was the influence of the ‘no drinking’ message. This aspect of pregnancy was an inescapable part of women’s experience, with respondents in both the US and UK keenly aware that whether and how much they drank was considered a matter of great import. In line with the constructions of risk outline above, any drinking at all, including very small amounts on one or two ‘special occasions’, was at issue. What both studies detected, further, was that in instances where women did drink, it has become an everyday matter of comment from strangers.

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The policing of pregnancy went far beyond advice giving or questioning by health professionals, as these comments from women in the English study indicated: I think people frown upon certain things and are certainly not slow in telling you. I found a lot of people (particularly men!!) had something to say about me having one glass of wine, which I found quite offensive and insulting. Often from people who hardly knew me and had little or no experience of pregnancy. (Anna, 28) (Fox et al., 2009, p. 558) I once went into a restaurant when I was about five months pregnant and was about to order a glass of wine with my meal, but the waiter said ‘a soft drink for you madam?’ and I know he was only trying to be nice, but then I felt I couldn’t order one because he’d said that. (Lola, 37) (Fox et  al., 2009, p. 559)

Copelton described one of her respondent’s experiences this way: For Eleanor, drinking during pregnancy was not something she could do just anywhere with anyone … [She] was worried about her server’s reaction [in a restaurant], which was pleasant and nonconfrontational, she believed, only because he had not noticed that she was pregnant. On a different occasion, Eleanor’s sever responded to her request for a margarita by questioning, ‘With alcohol?’ Eleanor explained, ‘They look at you, like, “But you’re pregnant!”’ Though the waitress did serve her, Eleanor swore ‘they didn’t put any alcohol in!’ (Copelton, 2008, p. 21)

This evidence suggests that pregnant women are treated as a ‘class apart’ for whom different rules are applied in the informal world of everyday life. That parenting culture now sustains this degree of discrimination attests to the power of the regulatory effects of risk consciousness outlined previously. Copelton drew attention to another important aspect of the present situation, namely the divisive consequences of ‘no drinking’ rules. Women who abstained from alcohol whom she interviewed often went far beyond considering this simply their personal decision based on how they wanted to manage risk. Rather, they were ‘especially likely to judge negatively other pregnant drinkers’ (2008, p. 15) and indicated they found hard to see what they could have in common with these other pregnant women. ‘I felt a certain disconnect’, commented one of her respondents (2008,

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p. 16). The ‘psychological assimilation’ of the idea that to abstain is to be a good mother (and to drink is to be a bad one) in this way strongly influences maternal identity. Similarly, Copelton documented the identity work engaged in by those of her respondents who did drink. As they felt the need to justify their actions, one strategy they adopted was to draw distinctions between themselves and other sorts of pregnant drinkers, whom they positioned as being not like them. Fox et al. drew this conclusion from their work, regarding the overall position of women in a context of risk consciousness. They argued: Whilst today’s women experience increased freedoms to work or dress attractively during pregnancy in comparison with their own mothers, they also experience new pressures in the form of restrictions on diet, alcohol, smoking and unrealistic expectations regarding body size and shape. (Fox et al., 2009, p. 564)

The way society limits the freedom of women in an ostensibly far more liberated world than that of 40 years ago, through the growing insistence that they restrict and modify their behaviour, is an important observation.

Conclusion One focus for research ongoing should be about how the new FASD policies discussed above are experienced by women, and health care professionals. Another aspect that remains under-researched is the experience of parents whose children do have ‘something wrong’. Furedi has argued the following, of the general effect for such parents of ‘parenting before children’: When a child arrives less than perfect—and around 2 per cent of newborns are affected with an abnormality—most parents scrutinize their lives to discover if they could have ‘done anything’ to cause the problem. (Furedi, 2008, p. 74)

Given the scope of the problems alcohol abstinence advocates attribute to drinking in pregnancy, the proportion of mothers who may be now expected to ‘scrutinize their lives’ and conclude that they caused their child’s problems could be predicted to be considerably larger. A task for

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the study of parenting culture is to research the ways (and variations in them) that parents of ‘less than perfect’ children experience the messages and activities of those who seek to suggest they are to blame because the woman ‘touched a drop’.

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Lee, E., Bristow, J., Arkell, R., & Murphy, C. (2022). Beyond ‘the choice to drink’ in a UK guideline on FASD: The precautionary principle, pregnancy surveillance, and the managed woman. Health, Risk & Society, 24(1-2), 17–35. Lee, E., Sutton, R., & Hartley, B. (2016). From scientific article to press release to media coverage: Advocating alcohol abstinence and democratising risk in a story about alcohol and pregnancy. Health, Risk and Society, 18(5-6), 247–296. Leppo, A. (2012). The emergence of the fetus: Discourses on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome prevention and compulsory treatment in Finland. Critical Public Health, 22(2), 179–191. Leppo, A., Hecksher, D., & Tryggvesson, K. (2014). ‘Why take chances?’ Advice on alcohol intake to pregnant and non-pregnant woman in four Nordic countries. Health, Risk and Society, 16(6), 512–529. Lowe, P., & Lee, E. (2010a). Advocating alcohol abstinence to pregnant women: Some observations about British policy. Health, Risk and Society, 12(4), 301–312. Lowe, P., & Lee, E. (2010b). Under the influence? The construction of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome in UK Newspapers. Sociological Research On line, 15(4), 2. http://www.socresonline.org.uk/15/4/2.html Lowe, P., Lee, E., & Macvarish, J. (2015). Growing better brains? Pregnancy and neuroscience discourses in English social and welfare policies. Health, Risk and Society, 17(1), 15–29. Lupton, D. (2012a). Precious cargo’: Foetal subjects, risk and reproductive citizenship. Critical Public Health, 22(3), 329–340. Lupton, D. (2012b, June 4). Configuring maternal, preborn and infant embodiment. Sydney Health & Society Working Group Paper No. 2. Sydney Health & Society Group. Retrieved July 15, 2013, from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/ papers.cfm?abstract_id=2273416 Lupton, D. (2013). The social worlds of the unborn. Palgrave Macmillan. Macvarish, J. (2016). Neuroparenting, the expert invasion of family life. Palgrave. Macvarish, J., & Lee, E. (2019). Constructions of parents in adverse childhood experiences discourse. Social Policy & Society, 18(3), 467–477. Marks, L. (2001). Sexual Chemistry: A history of the contraceptive pill. Yale University Press. Marshall, H., & Wollett, A. (2000). Fit to reproduce? The regulative role of pregnancy texts. Feminism and Psychology, 10(3), 351–366. McCallum, K., & Holland, K. (2018). ‘To drink or not to drink’: Media framing of evidence and debate about alcohol consumption in pregnancy. Critical Public Health, 28(4), 412–423. McDermott, N. (2020). The problem with parenting, how raising children is changing across America. Praeger. Nicolson, P., Fox, R., & Heffernan, K. (2010). Constructions of pregnant and postnatal embodiment across three generations: Mothers’, daughters’ and oth-

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ers’ experiences of the transition to motherhood. Journal of Health Psychology, 15(4), 575–585. NoFASD. (n.d.). About FASD. Retrieved March 13, 2023, from https://nationalfasd.org.uk/about-­fasd/ Oakley, A. (1986). The captured womb: A history of the medical care of pregnant women. Basil Blackwell Ltd. Press Association. (2013, June 18). Moderate drinking during pregnancy “does not harm baby’s development”. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian. com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/18/drinking-­m oderation-­p regnancy-­b aby-­ development Ruhl, L. (1999). Liberal governance and prenatal care: Risk and regulation in pregnancy. Economy and Society, 28(1), 95–117. Salmon, A. (2011). Aboriginal mothering, FASD prevention and the contestations of neoliberal citizenship. Critical Public Health, 21(2), 165–178. Start4Life. (n.d.). Can I drink alcohol during pregnancy? Retrieved March 15, 2023 from https://www.nhs.uk/start4life/pregnancy/alcohol/ Wave Trust. (2013). Conception to age 2  – The age of opportunity. Retrieved June 3, 2013, from https://www.wavetrust.org/

CHAPTER 7

The Problem of ‘Attachment’: The ‘Detached’ Parent Charlotte Faircloth

Introduction: The Emergence of Problematic Attachment It hardly seems noteworthy to say that, today, we have a cultural interest in how ‘attached’ parents are to their children. The NHS encourages mothers to try ‘skin-to-skin’ contact with their babies straight after birth because ‘skin to skin contact really helps with bonding’ (NHS, 2022), and a wealth of experts advocate ‘natural’ parenting styles which encourage ‘attachment’ with infants (most famously, Sears & Sears, 2001) as a means of bolstering the social fabric (for example, Jones, 2007). As I explore in this chapter, and at the policy level in particular, this has familiar gendered, classed, and raced ramifications. Kanieski sees the concern with detachment as part of a long-running trend in the twentieth century towards the medicalization of parenthood: in particular, the medicalization of maternal emotion and mother love itself. Where, for example, mothers’ love was promoted and idealized in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as an extension of women’s inherent virtue (Badinter, 1981), during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, maternal emotion came under much greater scrutiny with the rise of what Apple has termed ‘scientific motherhood’ (Apple, 1995). Mothers’ own ‘instincts’ were increasingly considered inferior to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Lee et al., Parenting Culture Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44156-1_7

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the findings of experts, who based their guidance to mothers on a more rational account as to what promoted the emotional well-being of children (see Chap. 3). This turn towards an interest in children’s emotional well-being was due, in part, to the emergence of the psychological framework, described in Chap. 2, where early infant experience was understood to be responsible for later mental health in children and adults, a key facet of ‘parental determinism’. The ‘mother–infant dyad’ became an object of the scientific gaze, with the interactions of this dyad held to have important social ramifications: The belief that what mothers did would have such permanent consequences for both the individual and the society legitimized the medicalization of mothers. Social problems became viewed as problems with mothers. (Kanieski, 2009, p. 7)

Fairly rapidly, the idea that children’s health and emotional well-being were at risk from maternal disorders took purchase. Where failing mothers in the eighteenth century were perceived as immoral or sinful, they were now understood as ill. Consequently, says Kanieski, ‘maternal emotion became worthy of medical scrutiny because it was viewed as the foundation for successful mothering and healthy children’ (Kanieski, 2009, p. 8). Initially, psychologists’ concern, as expressed in Watson’s Psychological Care of Infant and Child (1928), was about the purported dangers of too much mother love and the risk of spoiling children. By the 1930s and 1940s, however, concern had turned towards the emotional rejection of children by mothers (Figge, 1932; Levy, 1943).

Attachment Theory and Its Expansions As Kanieski observes, early medicalizers of maternal emotion saw maternal love as something which began in a woman’s own childhood—that is, if she had not been loved by her mother as a baby herself, this ‘damage’ risked being passed on to her own children in due course. By contrast, later medicalizers tended to view the development of maternal love as ‘a nearly instantaneous process, related to pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period’ (Kanieski, 2009, p.  11). Whilst one might expect this to reduce anxiety about the correct development of maternal love, in fact, the shorter time frame meant that the risks of failure were considered to be greater.

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In this latter ilk, the work of Bowlby and Ainsworth in the 1950s and 1960s formed the basis of what is now known as ‘attachment theory’ (Bowlby, 1969). The central tenet was that infants must form an emotional attachment with their caregiver as the foundation for future emotional health. Based on observations of institutionalized children, Bowlby (1969), 2005 [1988]) coined the term ‘maternal deprivation’ to argue that if the mother was absent (either physically or mentally) during the formative period of attachment, the child could suffer personality disorders such as anxiety or depression. He suggested that a (biological) mother was predisposed to respond to her child, particularly due to the hormones related to birth, and attachment was framed in an evolutionarily logic as beneficial for both parties. Bowlby realized, however, that not all mothers would relate to their children like this. Indeed, Ainsworth’s research showed that many mothers responded to their children in ways that did not promote ‘attachment’. As a means of gauging attachment, Ainsworth developed what is called the ‘Strange Situation’ test. The infant, who was left alone in a room with a stranger, was categorized based on their behaviour on being reunited with their parent. The clinical definition of a securely attached infant is one who is distressed when the parent leaves but easily comforted on their return. Ainsworth showed that sensitive mothers who were aware and responsive had the most ‘attached’ children. Thus, for these researchers, attachment was synonymous with love. The Bonding Mystique Building on the interest in maternal attachment, animal studies became the basis for arguments about the importance of ‘bonding’, a specialized form of attachment. Some of the first work in this area was done by Lorenz (1937, 1950), who introduced the term imprinting to refer to a phenomenon of an ‘attachment window’. The basic principle was demonstrated by studies conducted by Hess (1966), whereby ducklings were shown to form an attachment to whichever caretaker they first came into contact with (Gardner, 1997). Initially, the focus was on the critical period immediately after birth, though this later expanded to the period around birth as a whole. The argument was that a child’s first hours, weeks, and months of life had a lasting impact on the entire course of the child’s development (see, for example, Klaus & Kennell, 1976). Birth was singled out particularly as one

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of the ‘critical moments’ for bonding to take place. After birth, new mothers were told to look into the eyes of their infant, hold their naked child, preferably with skin-to-skin contact, and breastfeed for optimal bonding (Klaus et al., 1995). Mothers should be sheltered from society for a period of three to four weeks so that they could devote themselves to becoming acquainted with their babies and learn the ‘primary maternal preoccupation’ of putting themselves in the place of their infants’ (Klaus et al., 1995, paraphrased from Kanieski, 2009). From the outset, successful bonding thus required both a set of behaviours that maintained proximity with one’s child and an emotional bond (Kanieski, 2009, p. 14). Behaviours such as ‘fondling, kissing, cuddling, and prolonged gazing’ (Klaus & Kennell, 1976, p. 2) could not just be performed, but must be matched by an emotional commitment to the child. ‘Attachment’ in Contemporary Parenting Culture More recently, attachment researchers have found new instruments for identifying the attachment status of adults (whether through self-­reporting or analysis of narratives, Kanieski, 2010, p. 341). As a result, they claim to be able to link adult attachment status to ‘parenting style, success in romantic relationships, psychopathology’, and even ‘a tool for determining child custody’ (Kanieski, 2010, p. 341). Clarke provides a very interesting overview as to changes in advice literature for mothers (in Canada) between the 1970s and the 2010s, pointing out that there seems to be ‘an increasing pathologisation of individual children through increased coverage of the risks of psychiatric diagnoses and the possibility of pharmaceutical and other biomedical intervention’ (2013, p. 416). There has also been, as Kanieski (2010) observes, a shift from focusing on attachment disorders to seeing normal attachment as something to be ‘achieved’. In this way, (poor) attachment has become a risk factor, whilst (good) attachment has become a protective one. ‘Achieving’ normal attachment in children is therefore both a means of ensuring the benefits of secure attachment and a way of avoiding the risks of less secure attachment. This intersects with contemporary parenting culture, in encouraging mothers to engage in intensive parenting, with clear implications for parents’ (and particularly mothers’) subjectivity:

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To be a responsible mother meant that one needed to be a sensitive, responsive mother. Mothers were taught to monitor themselves in relation to their behaviour towards their children as advice regarding attachment and ­bonding that appeared in parenting magazines and books in the 1970s and 1980s. (Kanieski, 2010, p. 341)

Indeed, where Bowlby recognized that mothers’ social environments had an impact on women’s attachment disorders, today, even children in stable, middle-class homes are seen as at risk from insecure attachment (see discussion in Chap. 2). The social context is thus eclipsed: As with other individualizing projects, the emphasis on attachment as a risk factor linked to the quality of mothering took attention away from external factors such as the social and economic structure that might also impact a family’s ability to create a sense of security for their children. (Kanieski, 2010, p. 342)

Taking a more nuanced view, Veltkamp et al. (2020) give a good overview of the ways that families cultivate ‘competence’ in ways that enable both attachment and detachment according to ideals around, for example, gender, race, and class. But this idea, particularly around the importance of ‘bonding’ immediately after birth, has been increasingly baked into policy around the management of birth not only in national (NHS, 2022) but global contexts by NGOs such as Save the Children with a view to reducing infant and maternal mortality (Watson & Mason, 2015). As we explore further here, much of the evidence in support of this theory of ‘attachment’ has been called into question by critics. Diane Eyer’s (1992) book Mother–Infant Bonding: A Scientific Fiction noted, for example, that rather than being tied to a consistent primary attachment figure or restricted to a specific sensitive period, ‘attachment’ should be considered a highly plastic phenomenon amongst human beings (Eyer, 1992, p.  69; see also Bruer, 1999; Burman, 2008; Kagan, 1998, Scheidecker et al., 2023, and discussion in Chap. 3). Fearon and Roisman (2017) give a good overview of attachment theory and contemporary directions in psychological research—making the point that there is a conflation between ‘attachment theory’ and methods of parenting which are presented as promoting ‘attachment’ (such as attachment parenting to which we turn below). But despite the critiques, the ideas of Bowlby and Ainsworth remain extremely influential in discourses around

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contemporary parenting—partly, we suggest, because they latch on to a wider cultural anxiety around childhood and a view of society in breakdown. This cultural concern with ‘detachment’ is not a new one, of course (Kukla, 2005). There has long been a wish to protect the family (and the domestic sphere in general) from a harsh outside world, which is seen as corrosive to bonds of intimacy (Lasch, 1977; Schneider, 1969). But more recently, this anxiety around protecting childhood (and motherhood) seems particularly pronounced, chiming with Hays’ comments about the contemporary cultural ambivalence we have around mothering in general. ‘In pursuing a moral concern to establish lasting human connection grounded in unremunerated obligations and commitments, modern-day mothers, to varying degrees, participate in the implicit rejection of rationalized market society’, Hays writes. The tension between the ‘contemporary ideal of intensive mothering’ and the norms and demands of the market is, she argues, ‘indicative of a fundamental and irreducible ambivalence about a society based solely on the competitive pursuit of self-­ interest’, and motherhood ‘is one of the central terrains on which this ambivalence is played out’ (Hays, 1996, p.  18; see also discussion in Chap. 2). For the purposes of this chapter, we look at how these anxieties and ambivalences have been mobilized by a group of advocates—‘attachment parents’—who understand their parenting style to be a means (perhaps the primary means) of bringing about wider social harmony through the production of emotionally aware, ‘attached’ children. As we explore, however, their vociferous claims-making about the benefits of attachment parenting are an expression of a parenting culture that exacerbates both a (group) cohesion and a (general) corrosion of adult solidarity (Faircloth, 2013). Advocating for ‘Attachment Parenting’ In the mid-1970s, the author Jean Liedloff aimed to reintroduce a style of ‘traditional’ parenting to the ‘modern’ world (see Bobel, 2002, p. 61, for an account of this). Based on the time Liedloff spent with the Yequana of Venezuela, The Continuum Concept method of childcare expounds a ‘chain of experience of our species which is suited to the tendencies and expectations which we have evolved’ (Liedloff, 1985, pp. 22–23). Babies parented according to the continuum concept mimic those whom Liedloff

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witnessed in South America—they are held constantly by the mother or another close relative, nursed on demand, and sleep with the parents. It was not until the 1980s, however, that William and Martha Sears coined the term ‘Attachment Parenting’ (AP) in The Baby Book. Like Leidloff, they argued that ‘AP’ is: [A] n approach to raising children rather than a strict set of rules. Certain practices are common to AP parents; they tend to breastfeed, hold their babies in their arms a lot, and practice positive discipline, but these are just tools for attachment, not criteria for being certified as an attachment parent … Above all, attachment parenting means opening your mind and heart to the individual needs of your baby and letting your knowledge of your child be your guide to making on-the-spot decisions about what works best for both of you. In a nutshell, AP is learning to read the cues of your baby and responding appropriately to those cues. (Sears & Sears, 2001, p. 2)

Sears and Sears argued that the optimum way of caring for a baby is to keep the mother and child in extended physical contact (‘attached’). Drawing on historical arguments, they contended that this is really just ‘common sense’ parenting that ‘we all would do if left to our own healthy resources’ (Sears & Sears, 1993, p. 2). They provided the following ‘tools’ of attachment parenting (Table 7.1). In line with the ‘attachment’ philosophy, which values long-term proximity between caretaker and infant as a means of optimizing child Table 7.1  The tools of AP (Sears & Sears, 2001, p. 4) The ABC’s of attachment parenting When you practice the Baby B’s of AP, your child has a greater chance of growing up with the qualities of the A’s and C’s: A’s B’s C’s Accomplished Birth bonding Caring Adaptable Breastfeeding Communicative Adept Baby-wearing Compassionate Admirable Bedding close to Confident baby Affectionate Belief in baby’s cry Connected Anchored Balance and Cuddly boundaries Assured Beware of baby Curious trainers

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development, typical practices amongst attachment parents include breastfeeding until the child ‘outgrows the need’ (often for a period of several years), breastfeeding ‘on cue’ (whenever the child shows an interest), ‘bed-­sharing’ (until the child decides to move to their own bed), and ‘baby-­wearing’ (with the use of a sling or similar). Set up in 1994, Attachment Parenting International (API) is a non-­ profit organization founded in the United States, which continues to be one of the key organization existing to support parents who practice ‘AP’, with members all over the world. Drawing heavily on the work of Sears and Sears, API’s website states that its mission is: … to educate and support all parents in raising secure, joyful and empathic children in order to strengthen families and create a more compassionate world. (APT, n.d.)

As such, their principles read: ( 1) Prepare for Pregnancy, Birth, and Parenting; (2) Feed with Love and Respect; (3) Respond with Sensitivity; (4) Use Nurturing Touch; (5) Ensure Safe Sleep, Physically, and Emotionally; (6) Provide Consistent and Loving Care; (7) Practice Positive Discipline; (8) Strive for Balance in Your Personal and Family Life (API, n.d.).

Accounting for Attachment Whilst attachment parenting cannot be described as a majority pattern of childcare (in terms of the number of people who practice it), it is clear that this style of parenting is gradually becoming more popular in Anglophone countries around the world (Faircloth, 2013; Hamilton, 2022; Hulen, 2022; Sánchez-Mira & Muntanyola Saura, 2022) as well becoming ideologically more prominent in the expert literature available to contemporary parents (Gross-Loh, 2007; Jackson, 2003; Sears & Sears, 2001). It has also been hugely magnified by the growth of social media platforms and ‘mommy blogs’ where ‘attachment parenting’ has become a widely recognized practice (see for example Lehto (2020) writing about online

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fora in the Finnish context). In their article, Moore and Abetz (2016) point out that of all the styles of parenting out there, it is attachment parenting that is most vociferously discussed online in the new ‘Mommy Wars’. It is interesting to consider why this might be. Certainly, fashions in parenting are best understood as barometers of wider cultural trends, which, recently, have seen a growing validation of the ‘natural’ way of doing things in issues as diverse as what we eat, how we learn, and how we treat illness. There is an enduring conviction in this position that ‘nature’ is a force to be trusted and respected, and with respect to parenting, deference to the ‘natural’ bond between mother and child (paraphrased from Bobel, 2002, p. 11). In recent years, this philosophical belief has intersected with the growth of a wider environmentalist consciousness—‘natural’ food, ‘green’ solutions to modern life, and so forth. Moscucci (2003) notes that ‘natural’ childbirth and parenting as a philosophy has long served as a political and cultural critique aimed at the various crises of modern society—be that industrialization, capitalism, materialism, or urbanization. Klaus and Kennel certainly saw their work as a critique of the contemporary management of the perinatal period (the period around birth) (Kanieski, 2009). The solution to these problems is seen to lie in a return to nature, variously understood as the rural, the primitive, the spiritual, or the instinctive (Moscucci, 2003). Furthermore, this dovetails with a particular branch of feminist thinking which celebrates women’s ‘natural’ body-based capacities for reproduction (see Bobel, 2002) and an affinity with a more ‘eco-­ conscious’ orientation (see, for example, Etelson, 2007). As Hulen puts in her qualitative exploration into women’s experiences of attachment parenting, ‘What is natural is [considered] best’ (2022). In my own research with attachment parents in the UK and France (Faircloth, 2013), I identified three ‘accountability strategies’ that mothers would use in rationalizing their choice to be attachment parents. Typically, they would talk about their decision as the ‘natural’ one: ‘evolutionarily appropriate’, ‘scientifically best’, and ‘what feels right in their hearts’. (The first two are discussed here; see Faircloth, 2013, for a discussion on the role of instinct and ‘affect’ and parenting, and Faircloth, 2021 for how this plays out in couple relationships.) As above, each of these was narrated as part of an argument about the importance of mother–child attachment in guarding against the breakdown of wider communal bonds endemic to ‘modern’ society. More recently, Patricia Hamilton’s work on black mothers’ experiences of attachment parenting (2021, 2022) in the

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UK and Canada has developed this line of thinking to explore how this facilitates a form of identity-building specifically with regard to racialized ideals of motherhood. Evolutionary Evidence In lay terms, the logic behind AP is that women should ‘parent’ in the way primates and primitive humans did (or do) because our bodies adapted to a specific form of lactation which was evolutionarily advantageous. The biological anthropologist Katherine Dettwyler (a long-time and prominent advocate of AP) uses cross-cultural, cross-species, and cross-temporal examples of a range of factors, including age of eruption of first molar and length of gestation, to come to a blueprint for human weaning, free of ‘culture’: [I]f humans weaned their offspring according to the primate pattern without regard to beliefs and customs, most children would be weaned somewhere between 2.5 and 7 years of age. (Dettwyler, 1995, p. 66)

The idea that humans have the same body as humans 400,000  years ago is, for many, a way to rationalize ‘attachment’ parenting, and specifically, ‘full-term’ breastfeeding. They reason that our physical make-up is primarily the same as those early humans who hunted and gathered for millions of years, because the time that has passed since their emergence is ‘only a blip in an evolutionary sense’ (Hausman, 2003, p. 128). The environmental conditions under which the early humans lived shaped their physiology and their biosocial practices: danger from predators (meaning a need to have infants close at hand so as to stifle any loud cry, usually by nursing); a lack of appropriate weaning foods (meaning prolonged breastfeeding); and a continuous cycle of pregnancy and lactation for fertile females (during which prolonged lactation, inducing amenorrhoea, helped to space childbirth at optimal intervals for infant survival) (paraphrased from Hausman, 2003, p. 128). The evolutionary perspective presents norms of modern infant care, such as scheduled sleeping and feeding routines, as being out of sync with the biological requirements of human beings. Part of the appeal of attachment mothering is that the model is imitative of infant care practices that follow an ancestral pattern, biologically appropriate to the human species; that is, not only traditional, but adaptive in a biological sense. This is a very powerful idea. To quote Hausman:

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The idea that specific, supposedly traditional, mothering practices are really evolutionary adaptations—rather than cultural constructions that emerge at specific historical juncture—is a persuasive rhetoric, delineating natural and unnatural maternal practices within a speculative evolutionary paradigm (Hausman, 2003, p. 125).

Extended breastfeeding, for example, is therefore part of attentive mothering and appropriate to a child’s need for emotional and physical support. Child-led weaning is cast as ‘natural’, whereas mother-led weaning is ‘cultural’ and therefore not appropriately biological (Hausman, 2003, p. 125). Scientific Evidence Increasingly, attachment parenting advocates have also referred to neuroscientific work to bolster their claims about providing the optimal form of care for children. This is a ‘breakthrough’, as an article in the AP advocacy publication Mothering Magazine once put it, since proponents of attachment theory have, until recently, had little ‘unbiased and testable information’ with which to back up their claims (Porter, 2003). In the UK, writers such as Gerhardt (Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain, 2004) and Sunderland (The Science of Parenting, 2006) have been two of the prominent authors who have drawn on work looking at the interactions between parents and children and how these affect the structure of the infant brain. The argument is that from late pregnancy through the second year of life, the human brain undergoes a critical period of accelerated growth. With the use of MRI scans and other technologies, interaction between the development of the brain and the social environment (nature and nurture) can (arguably) be observed. Thus, a Mothering Magazine article stated, citing Schore (2001): ‘What has emerged is mounting evidence that stress and trauma impair optimal brain development while healthy attachment promotes it’. It continued, further citing Bowlby (1969) and Spangler et al. (1994): Babies, we know, cannot survive on their own. All basic needs must be met through a relationship with a caregiver … In order to maintain emotional equilibrium, babies require a consistent and committed relationship with one caring person. As you might expect, the research indicates that the person best suited for this relationship is the mother. (Porter, 2003)

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The claim made is that during the early stages of distress—perhaps at the absence of the mother, as in the Strange Situation test—a baby’s heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration will be heightened, to which the brain responds by releasing stress hormones, elevating the brain’s levels of adrenalin, noradrenaline, and dopamine (Brown, 1982). Should the distress continue, the infant may go into ‘shut-down mode’—a ‘survival strategy’ allowing the infant to restore homeostasis. Prolonged periods in this state are said to have damaging effects on the development of the infant’s brain. The focus on restoring equilibrium can, according to this argument, permanently alter the chemistry of the brain, to the extent that ‘states becomes traits’ and the child’s personality is shaped accordingly; so children who experience stress in early life, it is argued, are more susceptible to mental health disorders in later life. This claim appears to be gathering momentum and influence in recent years. As Jan Macvarish’s essay in this book explores, a move towards early intervention based on the same logic is now a key target for policymakers with an interest in social mobility (see also Macvarish, 2016).

Attachment in Policy In the UK, this advocacy of attachment is not confined to individual mothers, parenting experts, or even lay support groups, but has been increasingly evident in policy, which relies on evolutionary narratives in recommendations of appropriate infant care. Infant sleep is one good example (Ball, 2007). Ball, who for a long time advised the English government’s Department of Health, has advocated the practice of bed-­ sharing, with the argument that putting infants to sleep in a separate bed is ‘historically novel, culturally circumscribed, developmentally inappropriate, and evolutionarily bizarre’ (Ball, 2005). The argument is that, in comparison to other primates, human infants are drastically more neurologically immature at birth due to the play-off between being big-brained and bipedal (which requires birthing through a narrow pelvis). This means that human infants therefore require more intensive care than other primate infants (constant bodily contact to regulate heat, for example). More recently, the Department of Health has endorsed the importance ‘safe’ bed-sharing, rather than its earlier advice to avoid it entirely (NHS, 2023a). There has also been an endorsement of on-demand or ‘response’ (breast)feeding and skin-to-skin contact with a similar logic (UNICEF, n.d.; NHS, 2023b).

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For many years, breastfeeding support or attachment parenting support groups such as La Leche League or the National Childbirth Trust, or Attachment Parenting International have served in an advisory role to policymakers and government. An important example of this was the Breastfeeding Manifesto Coalition, a grouping of diverse organizations who came together in 2006 to counter health inequalities across the UK through the promotion of breastfeeding. 1 So whilst many advocates of attachment claim to be ‘marginal’ with respect to their parenting philosophies, many of the ‘attachment’ ideas have had quite considerable airtime in mainstream discourse for some time. Indeed, chiming with comments in Chap. 8, this concern with attachment has therefore been formalized in not only national but international development initiatives, with a specific focus on ‘Global Early Childhood Development’, with the aim of improving the brain structure and function of future generations—particularly in the global south (Scheidecker et al., 2023). The kind of parenting advocated here is ‘responsive caregiving’, a particular parenting style derived from attachment theory, which is thought to positively affect the child’s development, not only in terms of brain structure but also their physical health (in Scheidecker et al., 2023, p.  7). As Watson and Mason discuss in their commentary on the ‘The Power of the First Hour’ campaign by the charity Save the Children, the cultural eclipsing that goes on here is troubling. In line with comments made by Kanieski above, about individualization, the campaign implies that through better education for mothers, more infants could be saved. This is in place of addressing the root cause of infant mortality: Misrepresenting racialized women in the developed world as uneducated on infant health, childcare and child rearing and as lacking agency and empowerment… with the erroneous conflation of medical science, morality, capitalism and public health…this conflation is mobilized to manufacture crisis at the expense of examining the root causes of infant mortality globally. (2010, p. 573)

Tribalization These wider political trends also have implications for interpersonal relationships, of course. In my research, I noted that one of the reasons mothers felt so compelled to ‘account’ for their decision to ‘attachment parent’ with reference to nature and science (particularly robust sources of

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authority in contemporary culture, unlike affect, or ‘what feels right’) was because of the moralized atmosphere that currently engulfs contemporary parenting culture (Faircloth, 2013). Because of the vital importance for the survival and healthy development of infants, feeding is arguably the most conspicuously moralized element of mothering—a highly scrutinized domain in which mothers must counter any charges of practising unusual, harmful, or morally suspect feeding techniques (Murphy, 2003). In breastfeeding their infants into childhood, these mothers are in a minority (we do not have statistics for those who feed beyond a year, though by six months (according to the latest data in 2010), over 75% of infants in the UK are weaned from breastmilk entirely, and the number of women who breastfeed beyond toddlerhood is marginal). Thus, many of my informants were aware that they were often viewed as ‘unusual’, even ‘sick’, or ‘abusive’ (showing that, for all the cultural concern with detachment, one can be considered ‘too attached’, albeit in extreme cases). Not surprisingly then, ‘judgement’ was a commonly cited challenge that women mentioned to their full-term breastfeeding (see also Dowling, 2009). Logically, then, this culture around feeding (and parenting) leads women to seek out ‘evidence’ to support their decisions. Yet as we saw in Chap. 2, these mothers are in a bind: they are affirmed because they claim that what they are doing is ‘healthiest’ (in the nutritional, physiological, or even psychological sense endorsed by the ‘breast is best’ message), yet they are open to the charge that they are doing something ‘risky’ with respect to the social and emotional development of their children. The constant bolstering and defence against these charges have the effect of accentuating the differences between different parenting ‘camps’ (as noted, see Moore & Abetz, 2016, on the exacerbation of this in the media). Sociologists have noted that one of the enduring features of social groups is their ‘commitment mechanisms’. To some extent, the women in this sample are already success stories; they are those who have ‘persevered’ through the often difficult early stages of breastfeeding. At the same time, they need validation of their continuation of breastfeeding and attachment parenting. A person’s commitment to their choice rests, says Kanter, on their knowledge of excluded choices and a validation of the one they have made. This is a process which intensifies over time: A person becomes increasingly committed both as more of his own internal satisfaction becomes dependent on the group, and his chance to make other choices or pursue other options declines. (Kanter, 1972, p. 70)

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Echoing this, these mothers said, in a joint interview: Lila [37, breastfeeding her four-year-old son]: Rachel [41, breastfeeding her three-year-old son]: Lila:

Rachel: Lila:

And people make out [breastfeeding] is such a long time, and so tedious, and you think … it really is not that long a period, it’s just a few years. Their IQ and things, it really makes a difference, and I don’t think people are aware of those facts … I think if people knew about it, they would change their attitudes. People are more selfish today. People still have this idea of self-­ sacrifice with breastfeeding … So they have to promote it in terms of losing weight … this ‘me’ thing comes through, they have to watch what they eat, can’t drink. People have such a drive towards selfishness. My sister-in-law wanted to go out drinking! So she stopped [breastfeeding] at six months! People have such a drive for individuality. They see it as a sacrifice. People don’t see that investing now will save time later. It is a fraction of their lives … Other people are too selfish to mother like we do—we are all too much part of the ‘me’ generation. (Faircloth, 2013, pp. 218–219)

Like the mission statement from Attachment Parenting International, above, these mothers understand attachment parenting as a social movement which can make the world a more harmonious place, with little sympathy for those who have yet to ‘see the light’. This, in turn, had the effect of making ‘other mothers’ feel uncomfortable. One particular woman said, for example, that although she was ‘very pro all the natural stuff’ and breastfed her children for a year each, she found some members of her local La Leche League (breastfeeding support group, with a significant proportion of AP members) to be ‘spoiling for a fight’ or ‘militant lactivists’ (Faircloth, 2013). As in Chap. 2, this brings us to questions around ‘identity work’ and working patterns: for women who have given up careers to fulfil the attachment parenting philosophy fully might be said to have a greater investment in motherhood as a source of identity work than those who had not.

Assessing the Advocacy It is worth reiterating that there is no evidence that attachment parenting is harmful, either psychologically or physiologically. Nor, however, is there evidence that parenting in ‘normal’ (i.e. nonattachment ways) is damaging. What follows is a contextualization of the claims that attachment

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parenting is positively beneficial. It is also important to note a nominative slippage here: ‘attachment’ parenting, as a specific way of raising children, has little correlation with the ‘attachment’ theory of Bowlby: practices such as co-sleeping, breastfeeding, and baby-wearing are not necessarily tied to the development of greater ‘attachment’ in mother–infant pairs. Pylypa notes, for example, that ‘attachment theory’ is often misrepresented in parenting education, particularly as it relates to adoptive parents who are encouraged to use ‘attachment parenting’ on the grounds of securing ‘attachment’ with their children (2016). First, there are some problems with the secure attachment or ‘Strange Situation’ test when used to defend attachment parenting methods. According to a meta-analysis of studies using the test (van Ijzendoorn & Kroonberg, 1988), 75% of British babies tested in 1988 were securely attached—at a time in Britain when bottle-feeding and separate sleeping were at higher rates than today. In the ‘primitive societies’ considered to exhibit ideal parenting by attachment parenting advocates—such as the Gusili mothers in Kenya who wear their babies, breastfeed into toddlerhood, and respond quickly to their babies’ crying—only 61% of babies were shown to be securely attached. This might, of course, say something about the cross-cultural applicability of such a test—though in that case, there is no way of comparing psychological well-being cross-culturally, and little argument that replicating ‘primitive’ parenting in contemporary Britain is superior to other forms of care. If the test is applicable cross-culturally, then there is clearly little correlation between attachment parenting and the rate of securely attached babies. Scheidecker et  al. (2023) make a similar case with the ‘Early Childhood Development’ evidence as used in international development policy, highlighting the problematic colonial legacy of these standards. (For further critiques of the ‘Strange Situation’ test, see Burman, 2008; Eyer, 1992; Mainstream Parenting Resources, 2008.) Furthermore, even though some research has shown that mothers who are sensitive and responsive to their infants’ needs are more likely to have ‘securely attached’ children, the mother–infant dyads studied have not included mothers who show atypically high levels of involvement with their children. It has even been claimed that maternal overprotectiveness shows an association with raised levels of anxiety in children, suggesting that high intensity ‘attachment’ parenting leads to insecure rather than secure attachment relationships between children and their mothers (McNamara, 2006): however, there is little research on this topic.

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Problematizing ‘Evolutionary’ Parenting Typically, in advocacy literature (such as that by Leidloff or Sears & Sears), contemporary foraging societies are used to represent ‘natural’ patterns of lactation and care. As stand-ins for earlier hominid hunter-gatherers, statistics concerning length and frequency of lactation are used to demonstrate the ancestral pattern. Local cultural traditions are largely ignored, and the !Kung, for example, are treated as passively representative of human biological patterns, existing outside of wider cultural trends and with no culture of their own. The primitive is thus constructed as a site for fantasies of the natural to be played out. That the !Kung wean their children by pasting bitter herbs on to their breasts (Small, 1998, p. 82), or that they use enemas with their infants, both of which would be considered dangerous by attachment parents is overlooked. Similarly, a generic cross-species blueprint for the time of weaning assumes no interaction between animal and environment. As many primatologists will argue, this is a misrepresentation. Whilst some primates might wean their offspring at a very late age where suitable weaning foods do not exist, it is not necessarily the case where resources are more bountiful. Indeed, where weaning foods are readily available, primate behaviour is characterized by decreased length of lactation and active weaning behaviour, to enable the mother to invest her labours in gestating and nurturing other offspring (Wells, 2006). There exist a set of cultural blinkers, then, in mothers’ attempts to emulate natural patterns of lactation. Few women actually want the ‘primate’ or ‘hunter-gatherer’ lifestyle of course, where health and mortality are concerns of a different order to contemporary British mothers (Hausman, 2003, p. 147). Rather, they wish to cherry-pick those elements that fit with our current cultural sensibilities. To assume that, given the real possibility, !Kung mothers would not use painkillers in childbirth or formula milk for weaning is to ignore the evidence of numerous other societies. As soon as agriculture made soft weaning foods more available, weaning occurred earlier and babies were spaced more closely together (Blaffer Hrdy, 2000, pp.  201–202; Palmer, 1993). Human adaptation to local environments moves in a steady direction away from !Kung patterns of infant feeding, child care, and fertility, which are extreme because of the harsh conditions they live under. Thus:

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It is one thing, then, for a !Kung mother living where suitable weaning foods do not exist to breastfeed her 4-year-old, and quite a different thing for a woman living in London—and neither of them is more ‘natural’ than the other. A view of culture as something external to nature presents a dichotomy in which human interaction with, and manipulation of, the environment is considered artificial. Arguably, this adaptation—finding the best fit—is what evolution has always been about. (Faircloth, 2013, p. 130)

Problematizing ‘Science’ Furedi has remarked that the use of ‘Science’ as an arbiter of good policymaking is a trend on the increase (a theme he develops in his more recent book on socialization (2021)). This is pertinent to family life, because parenting is not only an exercise in creating scientifically optimal children: [T]urning science into an arbiter of policy and behaviour only serves to confuse matters …Yes, the search for truth requires scientific experimentation and the discovery of new facts; but it also demands answers about the meaning of those facts, and those answers can only be clarified through moral, philosophical investigation and debate. (Furedi, 2008)

This reliance on science is problematic when ‘science’ becomes a yardstick by which we outline appropriate human interactions. ‘Science’ has the capacity to flatten out the affective, joyous qualities of the parenting relationship. Maternal love, according to the title of Gerhardt’s book, is not only an enjoyable part of the parenting experience but also a tool for optimizing brain development, as Glenda Wall puts it, even ‘love’ itself can be understood as a parenting tool for ‘building better brains’ (2018), whilst Scheidecker et  al. (2023) remark on the problems of applying a culturally relative idea of love in a global sense. Apple (1995) describes the ideology of scientific motherhood as one that designates good mothers as those who are guided by scientific information, subjugating their own perspectives to authoritative experts (Hausman, 2003, p. 3). Similarly, the ideology of intensive motherhood celebrates scientifically informed care (Hays, 1996). Although Apple talks specifically about the almost wholesale shift from breastfeeding to bottle-­ feeding in twentieth-century America, based on offering a ‘scientific, modern’ form of feeding, her insights might just as well be applied to this new generation of ‘neuroscientific motherhood’. Today, this kind of

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science—seen as a battle against the ‘scientization’ of the formula manufacturers Apple describes—has been given the extra twist of ‘returning to nature’, rather than moving away from it. Unrealistic Attachments The articulation of ‘natural truths’ which stress the availability of mothers to children is often in contrast to the actual experiences, and indeed, identities of many mothers today (Buskens, 2001). After Hays, following ‘natural’ patterns of lactation in the social and economic context of post-industrialized societies creates a ‘cultural contradiction’ for the women who practice it (Hays, 1996). Numerous anthropologists and historians have shown how intensive, romanticized caregiving carried out by biological mothers in the private sphere is a result of modern economic and political arrangements (Ariès, 1962; Badinter, 1981; Blaffer Hrdy, 2000; Engels, 1884; Maher, 1992). Yet proponents of ‘natural’ or ‘attachment’ parenting seem ‘blissfully unaware’ (to quote Buskens, 2001, p. 79) of the social differences between a hunter-gatherer society and those of mothers in the contemporary UK or US. The approach eclipses the social surroundings of women—and the presence or otherwise of alloparents who share the job of parenting. Símonardóttir (2016) observes that even in ‘the world’s most feminist country’ (Iceland), this edict to be an ‘attached’ mother remains fraught, and many women’s experiences of breastfeeding and the early post-natal period are far from the rosy experience presented by policymakers. Indeed, gendered split in capitalist society has rendered parenthood an isolated business for many mothers. Early childhood is a period of high emotional and physical dependency: this is not just an invention of an ‘intensive parenting’ culture. As Buskens argues: Infants do require a long period of intensive, embodied nurture. The problem is not the fact of this requirement but rather that meeting this need has come to rest exclusively, and in isolation, on the shoulders of biological mothers. This historically novel situation is precisely what is left unsaid and therefore unproblematized in popular accounts of ‘natural’ parenting. (Buskens, 2001, p. 81, emphasis in original)

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Push-back? It would, of course, be inaccurate to say that there has not been some backlash to this general trend in validating a more ‘attached’ parenting. One of the most visible forms of push-back has been in the debate about feeding babies. If we use breastfeeding as one index of a drive towards a more ‘attached’ parenting agenda (see also Carter, 2017 on the way the breast stands in as an index of this more ‘natural’ approach), there has been an increasingly loud public debate around the drawbacks of a ‘pro-­ breastfeeding’ lobby, particularly in terms of women’s reproductive rights (see this BPAS, 2023). This has been led by groups advocating for formula feeding to be seen as a legitimate choice for parents in how to feed their babies. This issue has recently become politicized in debates over Food Banks, which more and more families have had to turn to during what has been termed a ‘cost of living crisis’ in the UK (an article in the newspaper Metro (2023) gives an overview of the issue and the various groups, including FeedUK and BPAS). There has been significant media attention around, for example, the way that many food banks refuse to take or give out formula milk, which is seen to undermine breastfeeding in line with the WHO Code of Marketing on Breastmilk Substances (first published in 1981). They are instead expected to refer parents to medical professionals or local authorities. This is in the context of formula milk prices rising as much as 22%, and referrals for services at an all-time breaking point. As the journalist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett put it in the Guardian (2023): Parents who can afford formula (which is legally available in supermarkets) are trusted to feed their babies safely, yet poor people are only expected to do so with the input of a medical professional. It is patronising, and will make parents feel even more stigmatised when they are already shamed…We saw the “just breastfeed your baby” discourse over shortages in the US, despite it making little social, economic or biological sense (you can’t just magic up a milk supply)

This ‘just breastfeed your baby’ discourse was also prominent in the UK during the Covid pandemic, with some advocacy groups calling for more information to be provided to women about re-lactation rather than use formula milk, which was increasingly hard to source (UNICEF, 2020). The tone-deaf nature of this message, particularly for women in low-­ income groups during a global pandemic, was striking.

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As well as this activity from campaign groups, there has also been further academic scrutiny of the claims-making in breastfeeding promotion more generally (Balint et al., 2018), particularly around skin-to-skin contact, the merits of exclusive breastfeeding from birth and so on. This has been led by the academic Joan Wolf (2011) and, more popularly, Emily Oster in her critique of information presented to new parents around the merits of various parenting options, including co-sleeping and ‘sleep training’ methods (Oster, 2019). Both authors conclude with Heinig (2007) that ‘the infant feeding research taken as a whole does not consistently support either the benefits of breastfeeding or risks associated with formula-feeding in industrialised countries’ (2007, p. 374).

Conclusions The growing popularity (and cultural presence) of attachment parenting is but one manifestation of a wider cultural concern with parent–child ‘detachment’. The central idea—that parenting not only has important implications for a child’s development but also the fabric of society more broadly—clearly resonates with the wider culture of intensive parenting, and specifically, intensive mothering. Yet again, we see how risk consciousness and individualization operate to intersect with contemporary trends in the making of parenting policy. Yet this project, which portrays motherhood as a means of countering social breakdown, is a deeply ironic one. Ironic because it can pit groups of women against each other (those who do it ‘right’, those who do it ‘wrong’). The climate of intensive parenting (of which AP is one particularly voluble permutation) has created a situation where mothers feel less certain of their ability to turn to each other for support in the general business of raising children (Lee & Bristow, 2009). Instead, the ‘tribe’ that does it ‘right’ is pushed further inward, away from society, identifying others ‘out there’ not as partners in a shared endeavour of community building, but as ‘feckless’ or victims in need of education (Faircloth, 2013).

Note 1. The Breastfeeding Manifesto Coalition was an organization set up amongst the following pro-breastfeeding advocacy groups, environmentalist groups, health professionals’ organizations, and other NGOs. At

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the time of writing the first edition of Parenting Culture Studies, the membership was listed as Amicus the Union, Association of Breastfeeding Mothers, Baby Feeding Law Group, Baby Milk Action, Best Beginnings, Biological Nurturing, Birthlight, BLISS, Bosom Buddies, Breastfeeding Network, Childfriendly Places, The Community Practitioners’ and Health Visitors’ Association, Friends of the Earth, Independent Midwives Association, La Leche League Great Britain, Little Angels, The Midwife Information and Resource Service, National Childbirth Trust, National Obesity Forum, Royal College of General Practitioners, Royal College of Midwives, Royal College of Nursing, Save the Children, The Baby Café Charitable Trust, The British Dietetic Association, The Food Commission, The Mother and Infant Research Unit, The Royal College of General Practitioners, The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, The United Kingdom Association for Milk Banking, UNICEF UK, UNISON, WOMB, and Women’s Environmental Network.

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CHAPTER 8

Babies’ Brains and Parenting Policy: The Insensitive Mother Jan Macvarish

Introduction The rise of ‘brain claims’ relating to parenting in the late 1990s and early 2000s can be located within a broader culture of ‘neuromania’, in which the study of the brain was held to offer insights into the meaning of almost all aspects of human behaviour (Legrenzi & Umilta, 2011; Tallis, 2011). Many scholars have drawn attention to the significance of the idea that ‘new brain research’ provides a new way of understanding how to raise children (Broer & Pickersgill, 2015a, b; Furedi, 2001; Gillies et al., 2017; Hulbert, 2004; Romagnoli & Wall, 2012; Rose, 2010; Rose & Abi-­Rached, 2013; Snoek & Horstkötter, 2021; Thornton, 2011; Wall, 2004, 2010; Wastell & White, 2017; Wilson, 2002). As the Canadian academic Glenda Wall argued: Throughout the 1990s, claims about the potential of early education and appropriate stimulation to enhance brain capacity in children have gained a new and prominent place in child rearing advice literature and discourse. These changes in the social understandings of infant and child development have significant implications for mothers, with whom the majority of responsibility for child outcomes is placed. (Wall, 2004, p. 41)

One of the most forthright critics of ‘neuromania’ as a cultural phenomenon, Raymond Tallis, stresses the importance of distinguishing © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Lee et al., Parenting Culture Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44156-1_8

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between neuroscience, which has brought significant insights to our understanding of brain function and dysfunction, and neuroscientism, which is an ideological attempt to discover the essence of humanity in the brain (Tallis, 2011, p. 28). This distinction is useful because it allows us to separate the work of scientists within the scientific domain from the activities of those who appropriate the authority of scientific objectivity to pursue moral, political, or commercial agendas in the public sphere. Most of the time, neuroscientists themselves have been notably absent from, and even critical of, brain-based advocacy; however, there is a tendency for some of those conducting research on brain function to speak beyond their scientific findings, to suggest that their research may allow lessons to be learnt for the proper conduct of human relationships (Bruer, 1999). This is not to say that scientific research offers no new insights into infant development which might inform the way we raise our children. Rather, scholarship on ‘neuroparenting’ explores the implications for existing sources of authority (moral, parental, familial, intergenerational, governmental) given by the incorporation of neuroscientific authority into the paradigm of child-rearing (Macvarish, 2016). This chapter summarizes some key themes from that literature.

Optimizing and Warning In cultural and political discourse, the lessons drawn for child-rearing from apparently new neuroscientific discoveries have tended to take one of two forms: ‘optimizing’ or ‘warning’. The following article, promoting a public lecture by Canadian psychiatrist Dr Jean Clinton, demonstrates the brain ‘optimization’ approach, in which neuroscientific knowledge is claimed to underpin new insights into how we might enhance our child’s brain capacity by loving and stimulating them in particular ways: ‘I’m going to be talking about, it’s not the terrible twos, it’s the terrific twos, and talking about some of the behaviours that we see in the little ones, and ways of understanding where the behaviour comes from,’ Clinton said. ‘It’s their brain developing and their curiosity and their need to learn. ‘Sometimes parents can misinterpret the behaviour as either not doing what they are told or doing things over and over again like dropping keys from the high-chair, and we have to look at that and say “Wow! She’s experimenting” rather than, “Oh! She’s driving me crazy”’. ‘We now know that babies are more like little scientists and are observing us all the time,’ said Clinton. ‘We now know that we are, quite literally, building the architecture of their

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brains, and quite literally sculpt what areas will be strong and what areas will be weak’ … ‘I don’t just talk about the science,’ she said. ‘I talk about how does this science apply to me as a mom, as a dad and what I can do.’ (Roach, 2013)

As we can see from her description of the baby as a ‘little scientist’, Clinton sees the infant brain as a source of wonder, with babies naturally predisposed to forge connections with caregivers and to experiment with the world around them. This positive-sounding approach can make infant care more interesting and rewarding (Gopnik, 2016) and help parents feel that they understand their child better (Mackenzie & Roberts, 2017). But it also lends itself to the opening up of intimate family relations to external interests, notably commercial ones. Products and services advertized as tools to assist parents in maximizing their child’s emotional and cognitive potential have proliferated, beginning with ‘brain stimulating’ videos and toys and progressing to digital apps and monitoring devices, but also including parent training led by ‘experts’ such as Dr Clinton, in the translation of claims about neuroscientific advances into parenting practice (Chen, 2021; Nadesan, 2002). The ‘warning’ perspective has more pessimistic connotations, expressing anxieties about social disorder and alienated individuals, but also constructing particular social groups (usually the poor) as neurologically disadvantaged and behaviourally problematic. For a period of time in the early 2000s, a new brain-based discourse generated considerable attention and excitement in the UK policy field. Images and evidence claims about new brain science were used by policymakers to support calls for greater ‘early intervention’ in the ‘early years’ to solve long-standing problems such as social inequality, social disorder, educational underachievement, unemployment, and mental health. A highly dramatized ‘warning’ outlook predominated, but with a promise that intractable social problems could be solved, once and for all, by paying attention to the way infant brains are nurtured by parents. In an interview, Andrea Leadsom, a Conservative Member of the British Parliament and one of the earliest UK advocates of the neuroparenting approach, articulated its tenets: ‘The period from conception to two is about the development of a baby’s emotional capacities,’ she says. ‘Mum saying: “Oh darling, I love you”, and singing baby songs and pulling faces literally stimulates the synapses in the brain.’ (Rustin, 2012)

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Citing research into the impact on babies of the stress hormone cortisol and the example of neglected Romanian orphans whose brain growth was stunted by neglect, Leadsom argued that poor early parenting experiences and weak attachments make it far more likely that the child will exhibit a range of problems later: ‘If you’re left to scream and scream day after day, your levels of cortisol remain high and you develop a slight immunity to your own stress, so what you find is babies who have been neglected tend to become risk-takers,’ Leadsom says. ‘The worst thing, however, is the parent who is inconsistent—you know: sometimes when I cry my mum hugs me and other times she hits me. That is where the baby develops an antisocial tendency. Kids who go and stab their best mate, or men who go out with a woman and rape and strangle her—these are the kinds of people who would have had very distorted early experiences.’ (Rustin, 2012)

In this invocation of brain science, the effects of inappropriate parenting are inscribed in the infant brain through the vector of what is often referred to as ‘toxic stress’, bearing consequences not just for the child and its parents but for society as a whole. Despite the apparently social orientation of the ‘warning’ perspective, it is ultimately what individual parents do with their children that is said to create social disadvantage and social problems, with a clear imperative for the state to act to ensure that parents follow a path proven to be correct by scientific evidence. Similarly, within the more positive ‘optimization’ approach articulated by Clinton above, the brains of babies are ‘literally sculpted’ by their parents, and so the importance of getting it right can never be underestimated. The implicit threat in both the ‘warning’ and the ‘optimization’ approaches is that human infants are exquisitely vulnerable to the type of care provided by their parents. Importantly, although parents are said to be the most significant influence on their child’s development, it is clear from the words of Clinton and Leadsom that they are also assumed to be out of step with their baby’s true emotional and cognitive state unless they familiarize themselves with the latest scientific explanations for their child’s behaviour. Common to both the ‘optimizing’ and the ‘warning’ strands of neuroparenting discourse is the dual presumption of parental determinism combined with parental incompetence. We now further illustrate the prevalence of brain claims and the form they take in the media and in policy, discuss some of

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the explanations given for the centrality of neurothinking to parenting culture, before finally exploring some of the ways in which this development has been critiqued.

Brains at Risk As discussed in earlier chapters, a defining feature of contemporary parenting culture is the expansion of the number of risks to the child that a parent is obliged to take account of and avoid. The body and mind of the child are constructed as vulnerable in multiple ways, but of all the infant organs, the brain is most easily imagined as affected by maternal care and susceptible to maternal misdemeanors. This vulnerability is increasingly evident in claims about the brains of babies yet to be born. One study of UK newspaper articles about brains and child development found that prenatally, the foetal brain was reported as being vulnerable to a wide variety of risks, primarily through the ingestion of harmful food, drink, or other intoxicants by the mother. Besides the threats to intelligence, the researchers found that: Diverse phenomena, ranging from psychiatric disorders and obesity to alcoholism, romantic success and sexual orientation, were presented as direct consequences of prenatal events. Considerable coverage was given to research that suggested that intra-uterine conditions influenced ‘naughtiness’ in childhood and elevated risk of antisocial behavior in adulthood. (O’Connor & Joffe, 2013, p. 301)

It is not just inappropriate food, drink, and drugs that are said to harm the foetal brain. Maternal stress (often talked of in terms of the ‘toxic stress’ generated by the hormone cortisol) is also claimed to represent a determining factor in a baby’s future. Thus, one newspaper article asserted: Uptight mums can pass on stress to their unborn babies, experts claimed yesterday. And it could have a major impact on a child’s behaviour and brain function in later life. (Mirror, 31 May 2007, cited in O’Connor & Joffe, 2013, p. 302)

These examples seem to fit the ‘warning’ model of brain claims, however, the ‘optimization’ model is also evident. Mothers, but also fathers, are increasingly told of the benefits of ‘bonding’ with their baby while it is

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still in utero (see the previous chapter on ‘The Problem of “Attachment”’). This is sometimes advocated with the aim of creating a secure and comforting environment, with familiar voices and touch, which will ease the transition of the baby from womb to world; but parents are also encouraged to actively ‘nurture’ the developing foetus in order to maximize the intellectual potential of the child in its future life. One book, titled ‘Brain Health from Birth: Nurturing Brain Development During Pregnancy and the First Year (It Starts with the Egg)’ (Fett, 2019), claims to offer ‘strategies that…help reduce the odds of autism and ADHD’. Pitts-Taylor explains how the foetal brain has even been targeted in order to ‘stave off’ dementia at the end of life, with mothers recommended to eat diets rich in folates, expose the foetus to classical music, and devote maternal attention to the ‘bump’ to ensure optimal brain capacity throughout life (2010, p. 645). Parents are thus required to secure the emotional development of their baby and to optimize their cognitive capacity before it is even born: an example of the tendency to expand ‘parenting’ backwards, discussed in Chap. 5, ‘Policing Pregnancy’. Once the child is born, as discussed in earlier chapters, brain claims have also been mobilized to make the case for breastfeeding rather than formula feeding, with the breastfed baby claimed to be both emotionally and cognitively more advanced than the formula-fed baby. The neurological benefits of breastfeeding have been expressed both in terms of the nutritional value of breast milk to physical development and the emotional effects of the kind of maternal attention associated with breastfeeding, in particular, a supposed intense responsiveness. ‘Attachment parenting’, as described in Chap. 6, is also increasingly argued for as beneficial for brain development, with the ‘new brain research’ promoted as confirmation that ‘ancient’ maternal practices of extended breastfeeding and continuous physical contact between mother and infant are necessary to safeguard the physical and emotional well-being of the infant now and in the future. The idea that ‘love’ is a ‘tangible resource that has a demonstrable effect on a child’s neurobiology’ (O’Connor & Joffe, 2013, p. 302) has been popularized in bestselling parenting guides, such as Sue Gerhardt’s Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain (2004). An example of how this claim is articulated is provided by an article from the British Guardian newspaper: Optimal brain development was promoted when love was demonstrated to the child through regular physical affection and attentiveness. Normal

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­ eurobiological development required caregivers who devoted considerable n time to engaging the child in meaningful and reciprocal exchanges. Depriving young children of cuddles and attention subtly changes how their brains develop and in later life can leave them anxious and poor at forming relationships, according to a study published today. (Guardian, 22 November 2005, cited in O’Connor & Joffe, 2013, p. 302)

In addition to the media appetite for hyperbolic neuroscience-infused claims and the promotion of particular neuroparenting styles in books, on the internet, and through parent-training courses, manufacturers have also employed brain claims to sell products to parents. These include videos and toys designed to stimulate babies with images and music, toys developed with neuroknowledge in mind and even special ‘belly’ earphones to play stimulating or soothing music to the foetus. Interestingly, there has sometimes been a tension between the imperative to optimize intellectual capacity and the need to nurture a child’s emotional resilience. The Baby Mozart range of videos and toys was part of the Disney Corporation’s ‘Baby Einstein’ brand, and the marketing initially claimed that listening to Mozart could enhance brain development, based on a misinterpreted study published in the journal Nature in 1993. However, in 2006, a US campaign forced the company to drop the word ‘educational’ from its Baby Einstein marketing, and the company was made to refund parents who, it was decided, had been falsely led to believe that the products would produce smarter babies (Pitts-Taylor, 2010, p.  649). Thornton (2011) argues that this signified a backlash against the commercialization of brain science and a competitive parenting culture in which parents are persuaded to spend money on raising their child’s IQ. However, the campaign against Baby Einstein also made use of brain claims, arguing that watching videos is harmful to babies, because ‘research shows’ that excessive ‘screentime’ can inhibit linguistic development (Park, 2007). Baby Einstein is no longer owned by Disney but continues as a brand. It now markets its products as inviting ‘imagination through free, child-led play’, while also involving ‘multi-sensorial engagement to boost cognitive development’, ‘confidence development’, and ‘creative thinking’, reflecting more recent ambivalence about ‘pushy’, one-dimensional, success-oriented parenting (see website https://www. kids2.com/pages/the-­einstein-­way). Another new development is the extension of the ‘brain-building’ metaphor from parent–child relationships to its recommendation as the

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paradigm through which all members of the community should relate to children. A video produced by Vroom, a global programme funded by the Bezos Family Foundation, encourages not only parents and teachers, but also medical professionals, first-responders, and shopkeepers to create ‘Vroom Brain Building Moments’ (a phrase protected by trademark) where adults can ‘make a child’s brain grow strong’. The emphasis is not on buying toys or watching videos, but on interpreting everyday adult– child interactions through a ‘brain-building’ lens (see website https:// www.vroom.org/about).

Brain Claims and Policy Hulbert identifies ‘the beginnings of a deferral by policy makers to neuroscience’ in a report by the US Carnegie Corporation in 1994. In dramatic terms, this report, titled Starting Points: Meeting the Needs of Our Youngest Children, raised the alarm about a ‘quiet crisis’ caused by family change and persistent poverty: Our nation’s children under the age of three and their families are in trouble, and their plight worsens every day. (Carnegie Corporation, 1994, p. 1)

According to Hulbert (2004), Americans had become ‘habituated’ to outcries about imperiled children, but Starting Points grabbed attention because of its ‘perfectly pitched’ claims that a new neuroscientific evidence base existed, proving that the ‘quiet crisis’ was caused by the child’s ‘environment’ in the earliest years of life (Hulbert, 2004, p.  311). When it comes to very young infants and to foetuses, ‘the environment’ is not society or community but the home and their mother’s womb. Starting Points went on to set out the case for taking heed of the ‘new brain research’: With the help of powerful new research tools, including sophisticated brain scans, scientists have studied the developing brain in greater detail than ever before. This research points to five key findings that should inform our nation’s efforts to provide our youngest children with a healthy start: • First, the brain development that takes place during the prenatal period and in the first year of life is more rapid and extensive than we previously realized.

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• Second, brain development is much more vulnerable to environmental influence than we ever suspected. • Third, the influence of early environment on brain development is long lasting. • Fourth, the environment affects not only the number of brain cells and number of connections among them, but also the way these connections are ‘wired’. • And fifth, we have new scientific evidence for the negative impact of early stress on brain function. (Carnegie Corporation, 1994, p. 3)

The claims of Starting Points were popularized by the ‘I am your child’ campaign, set up in 1997 by American actor and film director Rob Reiner. The campaign was successful in turning policy and political attention towards babies’ brains. Its activities included producing and disseminating the video ‘The First Years Last Forever’, corralling celebrity support, and taking the argument for brain-based childcare approaches into policymaking at the highest level. Reiner’s conviction that brain science created a new imperative for the provision of early years education and parenting support initiatives was shared by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton, who in April 1997 hosted the conference ‘Early childhood development and learning: What new research on the brain tells us about our youngest children’ (Bruer, 1999). Reiner and the Clintons were not, of course, neuroscientists, and as Bruer points out, a significant feature of the ‘brain message’ is that it has been disseminated not by scientists but by child welfare advocates. In fact, both Hulbert and Bruer note that at the 1997 White House Conference, the experts present, Dr Carla Shatz, a neurobiologist, and Dr Patricia Kuhl, a psychologist, made far more modest claims than the campaigners who were calling for policy to be organized around brain science. Hulbert suggests that the enthusiasm for brain claims in policy circles and the media was out of step with the fact that neuroscientific claims were being ‘stretched to the limit’: Along with most of the media, Reiner failed to note the fact that no such radically new evidence of neural vulnerability actually existed. It was an admission that the Carnegie report made in passing: ‘Researchers say that neurobiologists using brain scan technologies are on the verge of confirming these findings.’ In truth, they were nowhere near demonstrating that the

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‘cognitive deficits’ measured in toddlers growing up in poverty reflected irreversible neurological damage caused by under-stimulation and stress during the first three years. Nor had their studies proved that ‘enriched’ environments in babyhood are responsible for the long-term social, emotional, and cognitive success of many who have the luck to start out in them. (Hulbert, 2004, p. 311)

Despite this, the brain claims made in the United States by Starting Points in 1994 are startlingly similar to those made by early intervention advocates in other countries and in subsequent decades. Wall described how the ‘I am your child’ campaign was heavily promoted by the Canadian Institute of Child Health (Wall, 2004, p.  42) and Wilson reported the incorporation of the same brain claims into family policy in New Zealand (Wilson, 2002). Analysis in Europe shows similar developments across nations with very different histories of state intervention in family life (Knijn et al., 2018; Martin, 2013, 2014; Martin, 2017; Sihvonen, 2018a, 2018b; Widding, 2018) and other studies chart its spread to parts of Asia, South America, and Africa (Chen, 2021; Wilson, 2002). Scheidecker et al.’s (2023) paper on the globalization of early child development interventions notes the inclusion of brain claiming in a joint programme implemented by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), World Health Organization (WHO), and the World Bank Group (WBG): A comparably new approach within child-focused interventions aims at optimizing children’s brain development in the global South by changing views and practices of parents and caregivers. (Scheidecker et al., 2023, p. 4)

A key institution in the development and dissemination of neuroparenting has been the Harvard Center for the Developing Child. Nisbet (2010) describes how the HCDC worked with public relations experts to ‘frame and re-frame’ the issue of early years intervention by borrowing vocabulary and metaphors from neuroscience. This strategy was designed to challenge the ‘dominant cultural model’ which regards early childhood as being contained within the ‘family bubble’ and therefore shielded from political attention and policy intervention. The novel authority of neuroscience, epitomized in the phrase ‘we now know’ which is often attached to brain-based arguments, has proved effective in disrupting earlier arguments about where the boundaries between the state and the family ought to lie (Macvarish, 2016; Vandenbroeck et al., 2017; Wastell & White, 2012).

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In the UK, the Royal Family has drawn heavily on the Harvard Center for the Developing Child in its development and promotion of The Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood, the primary project of the future Queen, Catherine, Princess of Wales. The royal centre’s launch report was written in collaboration with the HCDC, and in December 2022, the Prince and Princess of Wales met with HCDC Director Professor Jack Shonkoff and his team at Harvard. The royal centre’s publicity incorporates familiar claims about infant brains: What we experience in our early years, from conception to the age of five, shapes the developing brain, which is why positive physical, emotional and cognitive development during this period is so crucial. It is a time when the building blocks are established, laying foundations that help provide greater resilience to deal with future adversity. (see website https://centreforearlychildhood.org/report/#executive-­summary)

The idea that a neuroscientific revolution provides a new rationale for tackling social deprivation has served an important purpose in reinvigorating demands for resources, but also in reconceptualizing the nature of social problems such as poverty and inequality. In the UK, the argument that focusing on babies’ brain development is the only way to prevent a multiplicity of social problems, from unemployment, lack of social mobility, and educational underachievement to crime, violence, and antisocial behaviour, gained ground in policy discourse from 2006 (Cabinet Office, 2006; DfES, 2007). The repetition of claims echoing the Carnegie Report is evident in Labour MP Graham Allen’s 2011 report, Early Intervention: The Next Steps: The early years are far and away the greatest period of growth in the human brain. It has been estimated that the connections or synapses in a baby’s brain grow 20-fold, from having perhaps 10 trillion at birth to 200 trillion at age 3 … The early years are a very sensitive period … after which the basic architecture is formed for life … it is not impossible for the brain to develop later, but it becomes significantly harder, particularly in terms of emotional capabilities, which are largely set in the first 18 months of life. (Allen, 2011a, p. 6)

Politicians and others who advocate brain-based strategies argue that if individuals with fully functioning brains are created from conception, state services will not have to cope with the consequences and costs of poverty in future years. In its early UK incarnation, brain-based policy deployed

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Fig. 8.1  Front cover of the official report, Early Intervention: Smart Investment, Massive Savings (Allen, 2011b)

highly dramatized language and imagery, most commented on was a series of government-commissioned reports which popularized an image of the supposed ‘shrivelling’ effect on babies’ brains of sub-optimal parenting (see Fig.  8.1). (Allen, 2011a, 2011b; Allen & Duncan Smith, 2008, 2009). In these reports, poverty and social disorder were attributed to

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individual emotional and cognitive dysfunction, ‘written into’ the brain in the earliest years of life by inadequate parenting. Subsequent developments have expanded claims-making to include epigenetics and ‘Adverse Childhood Experiences’ (ACEs), further embedding in the policy domain the idea that early life experiences get ‘under the skin’ and become ‘biologically embedded’ (Ryan, 2023). While the ‘shrivelled brain’ image, and the alarming claims associated with it, were highly successful in gaining attention across national and local levels of government, creating a buzz around early years policy and a sense of zeal in the early years workforce, it also drew criticism for its fatalistic and stigmatizing connotations (Gillies et al., 2017; Sihvonen, 2018a, 2018b; Wastell & White, 2017). Over time, greater care has been taken by the more sophisticated advocates of neuroparenting to emphasize that the ‘plasticity’ of the infant brain represents a ‘window of opportunity’ for optimizing child development and to downplay the negative, ‘warning’ message that sub-optimal parenting is creating a huge population of essentially brain-damaged children. Even so, the message of incredible vulnerability during the ‘1001 critical days’ from conception and that ‘two is too late’ continues to dominate in early years policy (see HM Government, 2021).

Accounting for the Appetite for Brain Claims This chapter now turns to consider some attempts to explain the appeal of brain claims to parents, policymakers, and practitioners, before moving on to discuss the critiques which have emerged in response to these developments. Kagan (1998) argues that the appeal of brain claims resides in the prior cultural tendency towards ‘infant determinism’ in which the early years are said to determine adult lives. Yaqub (2002) observes that scientific vocabulary endows pre-existing commonsense ideas of infant determinism with renewed authority. Although Wall (2010) and O’Connor and Joffe (2013) trace societal concern about the impact of early experiences on later development to the popularization of psychoanalysis and attachment theory in the early and mid-twentieth century (see previous essay), they suggest that the expansion of the influence of brain research has become an ‘important reference point in child-rearing decisions’ used to ‘indicate the “correctness” of parenting practices’ (O’Connor et  al., 2012, p. 221). While the use of a neuroscientific vocabulary of synapses, neurons, and cortisol appears to bring scientific advancements to bear on

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parenting, the recommendations derived from it tend to chime with existing commonsense ideas about what constitutes good parenting, indicating that shifting cultural norms shape the kinds of scientific ‘truths’ on which claims about correct parenting are made (Thompson & Nelson, 2001, p. 5; Wilson, 2002, p. 96). The dual construction of the brain as both wondrous and vulnerable, as susceptible to both optimization and damage, lends brain discourse a potentially universal appeal. While attending baby-signing classes, playing Mozart to a foetus via specially purchased ‘belly’ speakers, or committing to extended breastfeeding may appeal only to a particular kind of mother who is keenly engaged in the project of optimizing her child’s life chances, other parents may be subject to targeted attempts by state agencies to persuade (or compel) them to engage with professionals in parent-training programmes in the name of safeguarding their child’s development. Applied at a global level, invoking ‘the brain’ as a universal source of truth allows for the overriding of localized practices of child-rearing (Macvarish & Martin, 2021; Scheidecker et al., 2023). ‘Five to Thrive’ was an attempt by UK brain advocates to make attachment ideas accessible to all parents and to educate them in brain-based understandings of child development (Kate Cairns Associates, 2012). Based on the ‘Five-A-Day’ public health campaign to promote the consumption of fruit and vegetables, the recommended parental priorities promoted by the ‘Five to Thrive’ campaign were initially ‘Talk, Play, Cuddle, Relax and Respond’ but have since changed to ‘Talk, Play, Relax, Engage and Respond’. Those who designed the campaign for policymakers were particularly sensitive to the need to reinforce what parents already do, rather than to alienate them from state services by being seen to preach novel techniques from on high. We can see here that by rooting official parenting guidance in brain-based claims and delivering it through child health professionals, the advice gains the legitimacy of being objectively health-based, rather than being perceived as promoting a particular moral agenda (Macvarish, 2016).

The Critique of Brain Claims As established so far, brain claims have most often been promoted by individuals and organizations which are not themselves rooted in neuroscience (Bruer, 1999; Hulbert, 2004). A critique, therefore, emerged soon after the launch of ‘I am your child’, which explored the disjuncture between

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brain claims and actual brain science. Most influential have been John T. Bruer’s book, The Myth of the First Three Years (1999), his other articles (1997, 1998a, 1998b), and Jerome Kagan’s essay ‘The Allure of Infant Determinism’ (1998). Many scholars have since made use of these works to challenge the most prevalent brain claims underpinning the argument that new brain research provides proof that a child’s experiences in the early years are determinate of future outcomes. The fact that the growing critique has remained unacknowledged by those advocating brain-based early intervention indicates that such initiatives are motivated not by the scientific pursuit of truth, but by non-­ scientific, ostensibly well-meaning agendas of social reform of the kind discussed at length in Chap. 3 of this book. Here, we briefly review the specific ways in which brain claims have been challenged in their own terms and by those concerned about the consequences of such claims for ways of understanding social problems and for parent–child relationships. Scientism Not Science As suggested at the beginning of this essay, a useful way of understanding the influence of claims about the infant brain, despite their contested scientific validity, is to draw a distinction between science and scientism. Here it is useful to outline Bruer’s specific critique of the most influential brain claims before we look at some other challenges to the apparently scientific claims of the early intervention advocates. a. ‘Developmental synaptogenesis’ or a synaptic explosion in the early years. This finding is often interpreted as meaning that the early years represent a ‘use it or lose it’ opportunity to shape infant brains. However, Bruer argues that more synapses do not equate to more brain power: in fact, increased dendritic density occurs at any age, and only certain areas of the brain show increased density in the early years. b. The years 0–3 represent a ‘critical’ or ‘sensitive’ period in brain development. This claim tends to be based on experiments concerning the visual development of kittens and studies of severely deprived Romanian orphans. The conclusion is drawn that if the right kinds of conditions are not experienced at the right time, particular aspects of brain development will never be possible. Bruer argues that criti-

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cal periods are the exception, not the norm, in human brain development. While there seems to be evidence that language acquisition is particularly rooted in the early years, this is atypical of other aspects of development. c. Enriched environments are necessary to stimulate infant brain development. Bruer takes up this claim in a number of ways. He argues that invalid inferences are made from animal experiments (usually in rats), noting that, for ethical reasons, very little research is possible on children. Those children who have been studied tend to have existing brain disorders or have been raised in very extreme conditions. In the case of the latter, evidence from studies of severely deprived children shows that normal development can occur after deprivation ends. A review by psychologists Thompson and Nelson (2001) of media coverage of early brain development concluded that the media tend to exaggerate the extent of knowledge about the developing brain, inflate the importance of the first three years by not acknowledging the life-long nature of brain development, and overemphasize the developmental significance of parental care relative to other influences. Besides the misuse of brain science to overstate infant and parental determinism, those who use brain claims to strengthen their arguments have also been criticized for taking a cavalier approach to the evidence they invoke, suggesting that the mantle of science is adopted to add neutral authority without a sincere engagement with scientific method (Maxwell & Racine, 2012; Wastell & White, 2012). The disjuncture between neuroscience itself and the way in which neuroscience is appropriated by others to legitimize certain causes or ways of thinking can be seen in the way the brain is conceptualized. When scientists describe the brain as ‘plastic’ and ‘resilient’, they mean that it is not determined from conception or birth by genetics nor is it inevitably shaped down particular routes by specific experiences. Psychologist Professor Michael Rutter, who conducted some of the most famous studies of the impact of severe neglect on child development with Romanian orphans, argued that even in extreme cases of trauma or neglect: The ill effects of early traumata are by no means inevitable or irrevocable … the evidence runs strongly counter to views that early experiences irrevocably change personal development. (Cited in Kagan, 1998, p. 112)

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Even Professor Bruce Perry, whose image of two contrasting brains, one ‘normal’ and the other allegedly shrivelled by neglect, became ubiquitous in brain-advocacy literature (as shown in Fig. 8.1, above), acknowledged that ‘the majority of individuals who are emotionally neglected in childhood do not grow into violent individuals’ (Perry, 1997, p.  133, cited in Wilson, 2002, p. 195). Indeed, the Baby Einstein brand coexists in a marketplace for ‘brain-training’ products with others selling the promise of enhanced cognition throughout the life course. And yet, in much of the popular and policy extrapolation of brain science to childhood, ‘plasticity’ tends to be talked of as being limited to the very early years of a child’s life and, even more importantly, tends to be equated not with resilience but with vulnerability: it is because the infant brain is extremely adaptable that it is inherently ‘at risk’ from its environment. What we can see here is a misinterpretation of scientific evidence by those deploying a veneer of scientific authority to make their arguments. The persistence of deterministic ideas despite evidence to the contrary indicates that the ideology of infant and parent determinism is prior to, and stronger than, actual evidence emanating from the scientific domain. As Furedi puts it, this is ‘prejudice masquerading as research’ (Furedi, 2008, p. 163). Individualizing Social Problems As Chap. 3 discussed, a corollary to the politicization of parenting is the individualization of social problems. A strong theme in the critique of neuroparenting is the resonance between the belief in parental determinism and what is described as the ideology of neo-liberalism. Wall describes neo-liberalism as placing greater emphasis on ‘the ability of individuals to adapt to change, to engage in self-enhancing behaviour, and to manage the risk they pose to themselves and thus reduce their potential burden on society’ (Wall, 2004, p. 46). Others have also associated the arguments for brain-based early intervention with a desire to cut welfare spending and to ‘responsibilize’ the raising of children solely to parents, in particular mothers (Gillies, 2013). This concurs with Wall’s assessment that: The focus on educating parents fits well with a model of individual responsibility and privatized parenting. It does not require governments to re-­ invest in the welfare state and design policy to alleviate poverty, provide affordable housing and child care services, and improve employment practices. (Wall, 2004, p. 47)

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However, it is clearly not the case that families are being ‘responsibilized’ to the extent that they are left to their own devices in the way they raise their children. Chapter 3 outlined how the state currently seeks to become more intimately involved in shaping parental behaviour than ever. Wall acknowledges that ‘while governments may not be prepared to invest socially in families with children, they are prepared to increase scrutiny and control in an effort to ensure that parents fulfill their individual responsibilities’ (Wall, 2004, p. 47). Wastell and White conclude that neuromania is ‘the latest of modernity’s juggernauts reifying human relations into “technical objects” to be fixed by the State’ (Wastell & White, 2012, p. 399). Policies enacted by the state to ensure ‘correct’ child-rearing have clear moral and political underpinnings and ramifications, and yet recourse to the biological serves to obscure what should be a highly controversial agenda and shuts down debate with the claim that ‘the evidence says’ or ‘research shows’. As Bruer writes: ‘The findings of the new brain science have become accepted facts, no longer in need of explanation or justification’ (Bruer, 1999, p. 61), but more than this, such claims ‘float free’ of particular experts, theories, or interest groups by gaining the authority of nature in the form of the biological organ of the brain. In ‘The Allure of Infant Determinism’, Kagan argued that brain claims serve to avoid moralizing parental behaviour, and therefore divert attention from the absence of consensus about what is right and wrong in family life, or about the role of the state. The problem represented by differential child ‘outcomes’ is therefore redefined as one of knowledge and expertise, not right or wrong behaviour. The solution is for parents to commit to improving their knowledge and skills by engaging with expert knowledge to improve the outcomes for their children. Kagan characterizes this construct thus: ‘… poor mothers love their children, but do not know the basic facts of human development’ (Kagan, 1998, p. 90). Writing Children Off An additional effect of brain claims on thinking about social inequality and other social problems is to consolidate a profoundly pessimistic view of children’s potential. If the years 0–3, or even 0–2, are indeed the most important in a person’s life, then there is no scope for the older individual to transform themselves or for society to help in the later amelioration of disadvantages. As Hulbert draws out, despite the intentions of the US

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brain advocates such as Rob Reiner to make a case for public funding of programmes to help children, the invocation of brain science tended to induce profound fatalism: If young brains subjected to deprived conditions, and to the inadequate parenting that often goes along with them, are irrevocably damaged—pickled in stress hormones, stripped of synapses—there is no time to waste, that is true. Yet such alarm, though it conveys urgency, can all too easily fuel defeatism. If children become neurologically unresilient at an early age, then only intrusive and intensive remedial efforts seem equal to the job. And if—or, let’s face it, when—such intervention fails to materialize, the case for subsequent help is bound to seem weaker. (Hulbert, 2004, p. 316)

Sensitivity to the tension between dramatically deterministic claims-­ making and the desire to open up a space for more family interventions continues to run through neuroparenting discourse. This is particularly evident in publicity emanating from the new generation of UK royalty: The important message from the science is that there is a golden opportunity to act in the first five years, when the brain has greater plasticity. However, experiencing adversity in early childhood is not determinative and the early years are not the only opportunity to act—support can, and should, be provided throughout life. (Royal Foundation, 2021, p. 14)

Building a Healthy Brain Despite this apparently de-moralized framework, brain claims not only shut down any discussion about different ways of raising children, they also promise to make parental love directly measurable in the behaviour of their offspring. In this way, parental love becomes literally embodied in the child’s brain, evident in the child’s happiness and achievements, and theoretically ‘readable’ through the technology of the brain scan. Parents are held to account for an impossibly burdensome range of decisions by an apparently objective locus of authority—the brain—and their feelings and actions are opened up to public evaluation. According to Nadesan, brain science, as popularized in the United States from the late 1990s, functions as a ‘tool of social engineering for the poor’, while it also ‘exacerbates aspiring middle-class parents’ anxiety by holding them accountable for each and every stage of their infant’s “development”’ (Nadesan, 2002, p.  424). If nurturing their child’s neural

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development is the most important job in the world, it must be too important to be trusted to parents themselves, who, after all, are not experts in neuroscience. At the most extreme end of ‘early intervention’ in the name of protecting infant brains, scholars have raised concerns with the strengthening rationale for the state to remove children from their birth parents on preventative grounds. In that case, the argument is made that we can now identify which babies are at risk of neglect prior to any neglect actually occurring, and that therefore such children should be removed and adopted by other, more suitable parents at the earliest opportunity, to prevent damage being inflicted on their brains by inadequate care in the early months of life (Featherstone et al., 2013).

Conclusion: Reinforcing Intensive Parenting The instructions issued to parents on the authority of neuroscience are familiar to us from a broader understanding of the culture of intensive parenting. According to this orthodoxy, parents must be attentive, available, responsive, cheerful, free of stress, sensitive, and warm. In the quest to avoid below par neurological development (whether with cognitive or emotional consequences), parents are exhorted to play with their children, to limit time spent watching television, to read bedtime stories, to avoid shouting, never to leave babies to cry, or let them sleep unattended. While these may seem to be sensible rules rather than rocket science, the fact that they draw on the external authority of science, and have an instrumental purpose, means that they have a potentially intrusive and disruptive impact on spontaneous parent–child interactions. Lupton’s interviews with Australian mothers indicated that the new imperative of paying active attention to ‘brain development’ was quickly absorbed and enacted: amongst the descriptions of how Lupton’s subjects saw their roles as mothers, they spoke of the importance of ‘stimulation’ to optimize intellectual and physical development (Lupton, 2011, p. 646). For parents, the primary demand constructed from brain claims is that they (mothers in particular) should pay extremely close attention to potential risks to their baby’s neurological development and do as much as possible to stimulate the growth of the child’s brain by their interactions with the baby (Thornton, 2011). Given that neuroparenting is just one feature of contemporary parenting culture, it is unlikely that clear evidence will emerge of parents adopting it wholesale as a unique parenting style. In this respect, the ‘new science’ is likely to form an additional layer to the

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existing culture of intensive parenting rather than independently revolutionize the way parents think about their role. As Wall suggests: The focus in child rearing advice on brain development thus increases pressure to conform to a model of intensive parenting. It is now not only children’s emotional and psychological well-being that are at stake if parents neglect to spend adequate time with their children, but also their full potential in terms of brain development. (Wall, 2004, p. 45)

Claims about the infant brain continue to be used to add weight and urgency to official discourse aimed at shaping parental behaviour, but the initial evangelical zeal with which they were promulgated has given way to a more pared down, embedded state of normalization. However, in its essence, neuroparenting concretizes in the form of the brain the idea that what parents do has lifelong consequences for their child, which has presumably only further added to the extent to which ‘parenting [is] turned into an ordeal’ (Furedi, 2008, pp. 89–99). Looking at the implications of the expansion of brain claims for the meaning and experience of the parent–child relationship, we can see that Hays’ components of intensive motherhood (Hays, 1996, p. 8) are each strengthened by the imperative to focus parental efforts on the appropriate development of their child’s brain. The focus on nurturing the foetal brain and developing extremely ‘attached’ and ‘attuned’ parenting skills in the early months and years can only further intensify the responsibilization of mothers for the care of children. The demands on women’s time, labour, and emotions by the need for constant love and nurture are rendered even less negotiable by the threat of long-term, biologically rooted damage to their children’s brains.

References Allen, G. (2011a). Early intervention: The next steps. Cabinet Office. Allen, G. (2011b). Early intervention: Smart investment, massive savings. Cabinet Office. Allen, G., & Duncan Smith, I. (2008). Early Intervention: Good parents, great kids, better citizens. Centre for Social Justice and the Smith Institute. Allen, G., & Duncan Smith, I. (2009). Early intervention: Good parents, great kids, better citizens (2nd ed.). Centre for Social Justice and the Smith Institute. Broer, T., & Pickersgill, M. (2015a). Targeting brains, producing responsibilities: The use of neuroscience within British social policy. Social Science & Medicine, 132, 54–61.

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Broer, T., & Pickersgill, M. (2015b). (Low) Expectations, legitimization, and the contingent uses of scientific knowledge: Engagements with neuroscience in Scottish social policy and services. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, 1, 47. Bruer, J. (1999). The myth of the first three years: A new understanding of early brain development and lifelong learning. The Free Press. Bruer, J.  T. (1997). Education and the brain: A bridge too far. Educational Researcher, 26, 4–16. Bruer, J.  T. (1998a). Brain science, brain fiction. Educational Leadership, 56(3), 14–18. Bruer, J.  T. (1998b). Time for critical thinking. Public Health Reports, 113(5), 389–397. Cabinet Office. (2006). Reaching out: An action plan on social exclusion. Cabinet Office. Carnegie Corporation. (1994). Starting points: Meeting the needs of our youngest children, abridged version. Carnegie Corporation. Chen, J. S. (2021). Beyond black and white: Heibaika, neuroparenting, and lay neuroscience. BioSocieties, 16(1), 70–87. Department for Education and Skills (DfES). (2007). Every parent matters. Nottingham. Featherstone, B., Morris, K., & White, S. (2013). A marriage made in hell: Early intervention meets child protection, British Journal of Social Work, March, 1–15. Fett, R. (2019). Brain health from birth: Nurturing brain development during pregnancy and the first year (It starts with the egg). Franklin Fox. Furedi, F. (2001). Paranoid parenting: Abandon your anxieties and be a good parent. Allen Lane. Furedi, F. (2008). Paranoid parenting: Why ignoring the experts may be best for your child (2nd ed.). Continuum. Gerhardt, S. (2004). Why love matters: How affection shapes a baby’s brain. Routledge. Gillies, V. (2013). From baby brain to conduct disorder: The new determinism in the classroom. Paper given at the Gender and Education Association Conference, 25th April 2013. London: Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, London South Bank University. https://www.academia. edu/3549456/From_Baby_Brain_to_Conduct_Disorder_The_New_ Determinism_in_the_%20Classroom Gillies, V., Edwards, R., & Horsley, N. (2017). Challenging the politics of early intervention: Who’s’ saving’ children and why. Policy Press. Gopnik, A. (2016). The gardener and the carpenter: What the new science of child development tells us about the relationship between parents and children. Macmillan. Hays, S. (1996). The cultural contradictions of motherhood. Yale.

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CHAPTER 9

Intensive Fatherhood? The  (Un)involved Dad Charlotte Faircloth

Introduction: New Fatherhood? So, congratulations! You’re on your way to becoming a father! How do you feel? Happy? Excited? Stressed? Nervous? Frightened? Angry? Mixed? Maybe it’s also a bit daunting? Or maybe you don’t really feel much—or anything—yet. That’s fine. Many men experience a variety of emotions before and when they first become fathers. It’s natural. What matters most at this point is that you’re here and open to thinking about what this all means to you. In this guide we’re going to focus on helping you make sense of what it can be like to be a Dad, to look after yourself and the others around you, and to do the best possible job of becoming a confident father. Becoming Dad—A guide for new fathers, The Mental Health Foundation and the Fatherhood Institute (Davies, 2021)

Much of this book has centred on women’s experiences of parenting culture, exploring a trend towards the de-authorization of the mother. As Chaps. 2 and 3 showed, where motherhood has become ‘intensive’, it has also become expert-driven, having a profound effect on women’s subjectivity (and confidence) as parents. It is important to recognize that the process of de-authorizing the mother has not, however, led to an endorsement of paternal authority in its place. Rather, we see that existing precepts about what is wrong with mothers—as critical yet incompetent, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Lee et al., Parenting Culture Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44156-1_9

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risky, and in need of support—have been applied to fathers, however they might be defined. (We do not undertake a discussion of the changing definitions of fatherhood here related to shifts in marriage and divorce, sexuality and reproductive technologies. See Featherstone (2009) for a good overview of ‘who counts’ as a father). In reading the full guidance cited above, ‘Becoming Dad’, we see that in the twenty-first century the ‘ideal father’ is presented as one who demonstrates the wider model of ‘intensive’ parenting: ‘involved’, properly schooled in the right ‘parenting skills’, and willing to ‘seek support’. Indeed, today’s ideal father has come to be considered not one who works things out for himself, in accordance with experience: he is one who absorbs official information and learns both ‘about himself’ and about how to interact with his child in a ‘confident’ way. This chapter explores the extension of already established precepts of ‘good parenting’ to men, highlighting the ‘gap’ between the ‘ideal’ model and men’s actual experiences of fathering. In doing so, it draws on and expands many of the points made in Chap. 3 around parental authority. Men provide a particularly useful case study in our exploration of these issues because they are not thought to have the ‘natural’ foundation for fathering that women do for mothering. They are therefore considered in need of additional training to enable good parenting, for even the most everyday interactions. The ‘Becoming Dad’ guidance says the following about playing together, for example: The key to making a success of ‘rough and tumble’ is taking your lead from your child, pausing and waiting for them to indicate they want more—they may do this through eye contact, body movement, making a noise, or a combination of these. If they do, say the word ‘more’ and repeat the activity. This helps them learn that they can communicate and get what they want or need: this is a key aspect of what the experts call ‘secure attachment’—a close, loving relationship. (Davies, 2021, p. 54)

In some ways, this kind of guidance echoes the way that policymakers have approached the issue of ‘teenage parenthood’ in recent years (Macvarish, 2010a, 2010b). As Macvarish explains, policymakers hold up teenage parents as archetypes of the parenting problem because they: [A]ffirm the idea that parenting is impossibly difficult for everybody, that it is to be expected that parents will sometimes act like children, and that ­raising children is a task that most ordinary adults require external support and expertise to perform adequately. (Macvarish, 2010a, para 5.1)

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Both fathers and teenagers allegedly lack the natural instinct of (age-­ appropriate) mothers, and this is considered to justify an overt policy emphasis on the need for training, and, as we note, with a particular eye on maintaining their own mental health during this period. The teenage mother and the ‘new father’ therefore provide some of the clearest crystallizations of how norms around contemporary parenting culture displace the idea that parenting is instinctual or common sense.

Ambiguous Authority Whilst today’s fathers are no doubt more monitored and scrutinized than generations past, it would be too simplistic to imply that there was a golden age of paternalistic authority, where fathers were simply trusted to do the right thing with their children. History tells a different story. Whilst the emphasis of historical accounts of child-rearing has largely been on mothers, those about fathers suggest their fathering has also been called into question. Going back to early modern Europe, for example, we see that fathers were considered more important than mothers in the caring, raising, and education of children, including overseeing wet-nursing and feeding of infants, and taking primary responsibility for children’s moral and religious instruction (Lupton & Barclay, 1997, p.  37). This was underpinned by: [A]ssumptions about the rationality of men, their representing culture rather than nature and their ability to bestow order, whilst women were conceptualized as little more than the passive vessels in which children grew. Fathers were believed to be superior to mothers in providing such guidance because of their greater reason and their ability to control their emotions (Lupton and Barclay, 1997, p. 37). Until the early decades of the eighteenth century, it was fathers who were considered the ‘natural parent’. (Gillis, 1995, pp. 6–7)

However, this did not exclude fathers from expert proscriptions. If anything, they were just as subject to guidance and expertise. The philosopher John Stuart Mill, for example, linked his call for the compulsory schooling of children to his distrust of parental (paternal) competence, believing that state-sponsored education would free children from the ‘uncultivated’ influences of their parents (Furedi, 2009a, p.  90). So as Lupton and Barclay make clear, the popular idea that fathers were either ‘authoritarian’

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or ‘absent’ (either physically or emotionally) in the past is also something of a myth. For instance, whilst in Edwardian and Victorian Britain the upper-class father might have been regarded as ‘remote’ and may often have been absent on business, there is also evidence that such fathers were benevolent and affectionate towards their children (Lupton & Barclay, 1997, p. 15). What is true, however, is that the model of fatherhood started to shift in the eighteenth century, when industrialization and urbanization created a watershed in gender relations. By the mid-nineteenth century, many fathers were away from the home for much of the day, undertaking paid work. As Lupton and Barclay explain, ‘[p]arenthood, including the close supervision and rearing of young children gradually became the province of mothers rather than fathers’ (Lupton & Barclay, 1997, p. 38). And as Chap. 3 detailed, this was coupled with a growth in expert prescriptions around children’s health and development, with mothers being encouraged to monitor their own activities in line with this advice. The psychologization of motherhood and infant development, notably Bowlby’s work on ‘maternal deprivation’ (discussed in Chap. 2 and in my essay on ‘The Problem of “Attachment”’) bolstered claims that men and women had different, but complementary, roles within the family, as well as society more broadly. The functionalist sociologist Talcott Parsons, for example, argued that whilst women performed the ‘expressive or emotive function in caring for her children, the father performed a primarily instrumental function, in terms of engaging in paid work to support the family’ (Lupton & Barclay, 1997, p. 53). But whilst they were less intensively targeted than those which positioned women as mothers, men were not ignored by these expert discourses. Indeed, as Lupton and Barclay explain: In the context of the spread of ‘expert’ knowledges on childrearing in western countries throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both fathers and mothers have been portrayed as requiring professional assistance to carry out their parenting role, and as possibly neglectful if they fail to do so. (Lupton & Barclay, 1997, p. 41)

In more recent years, the psychoanalytic research into motherhood has been mirrored by a growing amount of research into the psychological dimensions of fatherhood. This has emphasized the psychological benefits for infants of a strong paternal attachment or ‘bond’ in particular (again,

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as echoed throughout the ‘Becoming Dad’ document and the emphasis on ‘secure attachment’). At some level, ‘new fatherhood’ is modelled on the psychologized ‘new motherhood’, to the extent that there is presently a growing sensibility about the problem of male mental health and ‘post-­ natal depression’ specifically (Lee, 2010; Burman, 2008; Hodkinson & Das, 2021).

Fragmenting Fatherhood: Breadwinning and the New Dad The relationship between fathers and their children has rarely (if ever) been considered a straightforward or common-sense one. What is clear in the accounts, however, is that insofar as there was a solidity around the role of fathers over the past few centuries, it was one concerned with breadwinning: Post-war debates about the level, structure and distribution of wages, taxes and welfare benefits reflected the idea that men and women had different primary commitments towards their families. Sociological research … broadly reflected the extent to which these divisions had become embedded in household economies and prevailing cultural norms. (Collier & Sheldon, 2008, p. 109)

In this sense, long-standing concepts such as the ‘family wage’ or even more recently ‘child support’ are manifestations of the idea that paid employment has ‘a central part to play in the maintenance of a secure and stable masculine identity across many areas of law, with assumptions about a father’s primary commitment to his work seen as largely, if not entirely, precluding his extensive participation within both childcare and domestic labour’ (Collier & Sheldon, 2008, p. 110). However, with women’s wholesale entry into the workforce in the past 50 years, the traditional division of labour in the household has begun to alter—itself accompanied by debate over the ‘crisis of masculinity’ (see Roisin’s The End of Men, 2013, as one prominent example). By the 1990s, in line with a blossoming post-structuralist academic interest in masculinity, queer theory, and sexuality, discussion about fatherhood in academic, popular, and policy spheres has largely been part of wider discussions around creating the ‘new man’ and ‘equal parenting’ (see Connell, 1995 and Faircloth, 2021 for overviews of these two fields).

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Certainly, the model of the ‘new father’ today is one who has left the ‘remote disciplinarian and breadwinner’ model of the past behind to adopt a more ‘emotionally involved’ stance. This has been called the shift from ‘cash to care’ (Hobson & Morgan, 2002): [There has been a move] towards an increased expectation that men will be ‘engaged’, ‘hands-on’ fathers, parents who will ‘be there’ for their children … Encapsulated in the idea of ‘new fatherhood’, contemporary fathers are now widely expected to have, and to desire, a closer, more emotionally involved and nurturing relationship to their children … British fathers are now expected to be accessible and nurturing as well as economically supportive to their children. They are increasingly self-conscious about juggling conflicts between looking after children and having a job. (Collier, 2008, pp. 172–173)

For Dermott, the emergence of this ‘new man’ (and ‘new father’) can be seen as part of a wider trend towards the validation of ‘intimacy’ in personal relationships (Jamieson, 1998; Smart, 2007), whereby ‘close association, privileged knowledge, deep knowing and understanding and some form of love’ (Jamieson, 1998, p. 13) are valued as primary. What we suggest here is that this undermining of the breadwinning role has had some profound implications for the way men perceive and experience fatherhood (whilst we contain our discussion to the UK and to some extent the US here, it’s worth noting that this is a trend with global purchase—see, for example, Li, 2020 on the Chinese case, and Grunow et al., 2018 for a pan-European perspective).

Work-Life Balance: Gender Equality or Intensive Fathering? The goal of having more mothers retained in or returning to work is often used as a rationale for measures to ‘involve fathers’, advocated to ease the childcare burden that women generally shoulder and the resulting resentments that may ensue (Hochschild, 2003; Faircloth, 2021). Indeed, policymakers’ interest in improving the ‘work-life balance’ and ‘shared parenting’ practices of couples seems to be higher up the policy agenda than the provision of subsidized childcare facilities (whilst the recent 2023 budget makes some promises towards investment in this area, many remain sceptical as to how the funding proposals will work in practice (Coram

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Family and Childcare, 2023). From the early 2000s in particular, there has been a strong emphasis on the importance of flexible working and longer parental leave to enable fathers to take a greater responsibility for the care of their children, and particularly taking parental leave alone, as primary carers (Dermott, 2001, 2008; see also Marsiglio et al., 2000, and Pleck, 1993; O’Brien & Wall 2016). In 2011, Additional Paternity Leave (APL) was introduced, offering mothers the opportunity to transfer some of their maternity leave to their partner or the father of the child from six months after the birth or adoption of a child. Shared Parental Leave (SPL) was introduced four years later (2015). SPL extended the potential transfer of maternity leave, allowing fathers to take leave from two weeks after the birth of the child. Both APL and SPL have had low up-take amongst parents (of less than 10%). In their article, Twamley and Schober (2019) note the very limited eligibility of fathers for this scheme, which excludes non-­ employees or partners of non-employees (i.e. those who work freelance or on zero-hours contracts). As such it remains mothers who take extended periods of maternity leave. For Asher, author of the provocatively titled Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality, these sorts of changes to parental leave in the UK are a ‘welcome step that enshrines in law the possibility of sharing care for very young children more equitably’ (Asher, 2011, pp. 52–53). That said, Asher predicted some of the main problems with this new leave structure: Parents may worry about fathers taking the earnings hit involved … Fathers may fear alienating bosses by going on extended paternity leave. Families in which mothers can afford not to return to work earlier than twelve months may be minded to stick with the status quo: habits within the household have already been formed at this stage in the leave period; and women may be reluctant to give up what has been established as ‘their’ leave. (Asher, 2011, pp. 52–53)

In her work with families, Gillies (2009) found that despite a policy discourse around ‘gender equality’, most fathers in her sample were in paid work, and most mothers were primary caregivers. Gillies’ research, which looks at how working patterns and parenting strategies are correlated with social class, leads her to question the usefulness of measures to extend parental leave to men, when employment is often temporary or shift-based for men (and/or women) in lower socioeconomic groups. For

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many of her informants in these groups, taking unpaid leave is simply not an option. Further, even those in higher-paid professions, who might be able to afford a split leave system, do not appear to be taking it, partly because they are in jobs which demand long hours and have a ‘presentee’ culture (see also Dermott, 2008, and Doucet, 2006). Things have, of course, changed in terms of men’s actual experiences of looking after their children. Fathers are, on average, spending more time with their children than 50 years ago. For example, British fathers’ care of infants and children rose 800% from 1975 to 1997, from 15 minutes to 2 hours on average for a working day (Fisher et al., 1999). Between 2002 and 2005, the percentage of new fathers in the UK working flextime to spend more time with their infants rose from 11% to 31% (Smeaton & Marsh, 2006), and between 1993 the number of ‘home-dads’ doubled (Fatherhood Institute, 2011). This trend has continued post-pandemic, showing that in 2023 one in nine stay-at-home parents is a father, up from one in fourteen in 2019 (Fatherhood Institute, 2023). These figures do, however, need to be put into the context of the wider parenting culture which has seen both men and women spend more time with children, a culture increasingly cemented in policymaking (see Chap. 2). So as much as it is often framed as a means of promoting gender equality, one of the ways in which recent policymaking in the area of ‘work-life balance’ could be read is as fostering a shift from ‘cash to care’ (Daly, 2013; Hobson & Morgan, 2002). There has certainly been a change in how fatherhood is presented to fathers (and mothers) today when compared with the past. What comes out quite strongly in these arguments is that direct involvement with childcare is as, if not more, important to family life than is earning the main wage, this is something particularly noted for post-separation parenting arrangements (see, for example, Bertelsen 2021 on this). As the Becoming Dad guidance says: The more you aspire to being an involved, rather than the more traditional, slightly distant ‘breadwinner Dad’, the more likely you are to experience a close attachment when your baby arrives. (Davies, 2021, p. 9)

In this light, current policy measures around work-life balance mentioned above could be said to be less about trying to effect gender equality than about a self-conscious policy goal to encourage both parents to spend more time with their children. One paradoxical outcome of this is that, rather than women being enabled to do more work outside the home

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because their partners are on hand to look after the children, such policies could simply extend the logic of ‘intensive parenting’ to men, thereby doubling the labour for both parents. This means that men become increasingly subject to the ‘cultural contradiction’ between work and home. This takes us back to the discussion in Chap. 2, about the cultural view of children as vulnerable and in need of intensive ‘quality time’ with parents. Again, Chap. 11 shows, during the pandemic this expectation became not only untenable but was also revealed to be undesirable for many parents, who appreciated a less hurried and intensive time with their children.

Fostering the New Father in Policy Opening her essay Changing Fatherhood in the 21st Century: Incentives and Disincentives for Involved Parenting, the sociologist Anastasia Prokos identified a paradox at the heart of US discourses around fatherhood at the turn of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, a popular perception had emerged that fathers had become more ‘involved’ with their children than ever before: This ‘new father’ spends quality time with his children, is nurturing and caring, and prioritizes family over all else. Popular media increasingly portrays fathers as actively involved in their children’s lives, as creating organisations centred on fatherhood (including those geared towards helping fathers win custody cases), and employers as increasingly offering ‘parental leave’ rather than maternity leave. (Prokos, 2002, p. 1)

On the other, there was a considerable amount of public concern with what are called ‘deadbeat dads’ (in the United States) or ‘feckless fathers’ (in the UK). These are fathers who fail to support or spend time with their children. This is arguably a tension that has remained evident over the last 20 years. It is the latter group in particular that was the original target of policy and advocacy initiatives (in both the United States and the UK) to ‘engage’ fathers. These are proposed largely with the aim of building stronger families (and communities) by providing ‘positive male role models’ for children, particularly boys. This was encapsulated in the then Justice Secretary Jack Straw’s 2007 campaign to tackle the problem of absent dads (notably in black communities). Straw told BBC Radio Four’s Today programme:

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And as we know—lads need dads. Of course they need their mums as well, but there is a particular point in teenagers’ development, of young men, where fathers are very important and they are more likely to be absent in the case of the Afro-Caribbean. (BBC News, 2007)

A similar rhetoric was apparent in politicians’ response to the riots that swept through British cities in August 2011, where ‘dadlessness’—and the consequent lack of male ‘role models’—was seen as one factor contributing to what Prime Minister David Cameron described as a ‘broken society’ undergoing a ‘slow motion moral collapse’ (BBC News Online, 2011; Bristow, 2013). The importance of fathers as ‘role models’ in general was highlighted in the New Labour government’s 2007 policy document Every Parent Matters, which made explicit that a key policy goal is to ‘involve fathers’ in the project of intensive parenting. This document also noted some of the struggles that the policymakers experience in doing this, and the need, therefore, for a more aggressive programme of ‘support’ targeted at fathers specifically: Research shows that a father’s early involvement in their child’s life can lead to a positive educational achievement later on, and a good parent–child relationship in adolescence. It can, however, be a challenge to involve fathers and other males in services targeted at families with pre-school children … Irrespective of the degree of involvement they have in the care of their children, fathers should be offered routinely the support they need to play their parental role effectively. (DfES, 2007)

The talk of positive education outcomes became biologized with the use of research around the importance of engaged fathering for enabling optimal brain development in children: Talking to and gazing at your baby, screwing up your face and waiting for a response (babies just a few days old can mimic you), mirroring his or her facial expressions … all these things help develop the synaptic pathways in your baby’s brain. Later on, this will affect their speaking/listening skills, their reading and writing, popularity and friendliness. (Fatherhood Institute, 2010)

As Chap. 6, ‘The Problem of “Attachment”’, explores, under the rubric that reiterates the fragility of the infant brain, both a father’s absence and

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his presence can be construed as a social problem. We therefore see again the way in which this neurological discourse precipitates a spread in the definition of neglect: where once ‘deadbeat dads’ were the original concern of policymakers, now ‘engaging’ all dads is seen to be important for ensuring normal brain development, down to the most intimate and specific of daily tasks (again, see the ‘Becoming Dad’ guidance as indicative of this shift, 2021). Dad-Proofing and Avoiding Exclusion It is not the case, then, that the ‘distant’ breadwinning father has simply been called into question by policymakers. At the same time, there have been concerted efforts to construct an alternative model of what it means to be a good father today. Indeed, since fathers are not considered to have the same ‘instincts’ as mothers when it comes to parenting, it becomes possible for claims to be made in a much more direct way about the need for ‘skilling up’ dads. Many scholars have noted that from the 1990s onwards, there was a deliberate effort to ‘engage fathers’ in services at the policy level. Concurring that there was an ideological background of the ‘absent father’ or the ‘distant father’, Featherstone traces the genealogy of British policy moves to ‘engage fathers’ to the election of the New Labour government in 1997 (2009, p. 2). The 1998 document Supporting Families, for example, which we discuss at length in Chap. 3, was the first government consultation on families that spoke explicitly about engaging dads, and this trope was continued in further policy statements and programmes. The 2007 document Aiming High for Children: Supporting Families expressed the government’s trajectory thus: The government believes that much more can be done to release the potential improvements in outcomes for children through better engagement between fathers and services for children and families. This requires a culture change—from maternity services to early years, and from health visitors to schools—changing the way that they work to ensure that services reach and support fathers as well as mothers. (HM Treasury/DfES, 2007, pp. 34–35, in Featherstone, 2009, p. 3)

Making sure that fathers were not ‘excluded’ from seeking this support became an underlying rationale for the policy approach. For example, the

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2008 Think Fathers campaign contained an explicit aim to ‘Dadproof’ public services (Featherstone, 2009). With the election, in 2010, of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government, the dynamic around engaging fathers continued apace, using very similar language. As the Department for Education’s document Supporting Families in the Foundation Years put it: From pregnancy onwards, all professionals should consider the needs and perspectives of both parents. Government and the sector have a role to play in setting the right tone and expectation, and helping professionals to think about how to engage fathers in all aspects of their child’s development and decisions affecting the child. (DfE, 2012, our emphasis)

In more recent years, these kinds of initiatives have taken a digital turn, as outlined by Scheibling and Marsiglio (2021) as a new means of ‘reaching’ uninvolved fathers. As Macvarish (2009) has noted, there is something of a paradox here, because the state appears to project its own relationship with fathers onto real relationships between fathers and children. If state services appear not to have any ‘contact’ with fathers, it is assumed that mothers and children also have little ‘contact’. But this is not a necessary correlation. So when policymakers speak of the need to ‘engage’ fathers, do they mean that the state should engage with them, or that fathers should engage in their own families? The New Model Father Mirroring the expertise-led ‘intensive’ mothering, many of the interventions around fathering focus on enabling men to ‘relate’ to their children through listening and talking, as a means of fostering intimacy in the place of (assumed) distance that comes with more traditional breadwinning. In the United States, for example (as well as the UK), there have been numerous programmes which encourage fathers to read with their children, fostering the archetypal stereotype of the ‘new model father’: Dads have to make a special effort to read to their children … It is important for dads to promote reading by reading to your children when they are young. Encourage them to read on their own as they get older. Instill a love of reading in your children and you will help ensure that they have a lifetime of personal and career growth … Take your kids to the library on a regular

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basis. Your community library offers your kids the chance to explore new interests and imaginary worlds through hundreds of books, ‘every couple of weeks’ make it a daddy–child ‘date’ to go to the library and pick out 5 or 10 new books to read together. Your library probably also offers reading programs or special events that will make reading fun and encourage your child to expand his or her literary horizons. (National Fatherhood Initiative, 2013)

This reiterates the point that men are considered to need to make a ‘special effort’ to relate to their children by demarcating particular activities at ‘daddy–child dates’ (although, as Featherstone noted that many of these schemes fail to recognize the importance of ‘maternal gate-keeping’, which often present the father’s relationship as independent from the mother [Featherstone, 2009, pp. 155–175]). As we explored in Chap. 2, it is not only ‘extra-curricular’ activities which have been subject to expert guidance. Other examples of this shift in expert discourse around fathering included schemes to encourage fathers to be present at the birth of babies (Think Fathers, 2009) and take an ‘active’ role in supporting perinatal health in women and breastfeeding in particular (see for example the Royal College of Midwives’ report Reaching out: Involving Fathers in Maternity Care, 2013, or more recently The Dad Shaped hole in Maternity Care, 2022; Murphy, 2010). These schemes therefore mirror and reiterate the edicts of the ‘intensive mothering’ culture explored throughout this book so far. On the one hand then, what we see in these moves to ‘engage dads’ is that there has been a shift in perceptions of the importance of fathering for children’s development (something also picked up on by the range of fathers’ rights organizations who advocate for paternal custody, as discussed by Collier & Sheldon, 2008). On the other, fathers are presented as a special case, who need particular help with enacting this ‘new’ parenting, even in the most basic of tasks, and that professionals must make special efforts to enable. There is therefore an implicit assumption that fathers need help to access the support they need in order to parent appropriately—and an overt need to develop ‘dad-proof’ services. Men’s Experiences: Does Policy Miss the Point? Exactly what the ‘engaged’ fatherhood policymakers and experts talk of actually translates to in practice remains a bit of a mystery. In her landmark study of 25 British fathers, Dermott found that notions of emotional

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openness, communication, and a close relationship with one’s children were endorsed—although a wide variety of childcare and labour patterns were covered under this rubric (that is, variations in leave patterns and childcare arrangements between couples). As Dermott said at the time, the discourse around good fathering (both at the level of policy and from her informants) stresses the development of an emotional and close relationship between father and child, rather than emphasizing childcare activities or economic provision (Dermott, 2008, pp. 39–61). As noted above, many of the efforts to ‘engage dads’ seem to see men’s role in the public sphere (that is, in employed labour) as less important than the ‘emotional openness’ associated with the private sphere. The broader discussion of adulthood in crisis, which we have discussed in Chaps. 2 and 5, therefore shapes the context in which contemporary fathering takes place. But as work by Dermott, Collier, and Sheldon has also shown, despite respondents’ willingness to pay lip-service to the ‘new fatherhood’, being a breadwinner has remained an important part of the way in which men see themselves as (involved) fathers—both in theory and in practice. This is interesting because it does not tally with the policy notion of ‘involvement’, which poses the two as mutually exclusive: [E]mployment and the ‘breadwinner ethic’ still remain of central significance in the formation of a distinctive masculine identity for many men, and … not just fathers, but also other family members, perceive being a ‘good father’ as something bound up with the role of the breadwinner. (Collier & Sheldon, 2008, p. 130)

This is not only a question of ‘choice’, of course. Miller’s work with heterosexual, middle-class, first-time fathers has drawn attention to the material constraints which families must negotiate as they go about enacting (and narrativizing) their identities as mothers and fathers (2011a, 2017). Despite having an antenatal commitment to ‘new fatherhood’, for example, for many fathers in her study, the exhaustion and financial implications of parenthood lead them to fall back into what she calls ‘patriarchal habits’ (see also Miller 2011a and Miller, 2011b, p. 1094). (For an interesting take on how military fathers deal with this new expectation of ‘being there’ whilst having to be ‘be away’, see Heiselberg, 2018).

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Resisting Intensive Fathering? What emerged from these developments is that the ‘new model father’ is an externally generated idea of what a good father looks like—and it’s not one that necessarily resonates with fathers themselves. With a focus on class, Gillies (2009) noted that whilst there was evidence of ‘hands-on’ fathering in very low-income families (because, for example, fathers might be unemployed), this seems not to be the ‘engaged’ caring or ‘concerned cultivation’ (Lareau, 2003) that policymakers desired. Rather, there was an inherent classed validation of activities like reading to children, which counted as ‘involvement’. As Klett-Davis (2010) observed, there is, therefore, a middle-class bias to what counts as good parenting. Not surprisingly, working-class fathers tend to be more hostile to, and more likely to reject, official initiatives to ‘involve’ them in the care of their children, which they felt were irrelevant to their lifestyles. With a focus on gender, work by Shirani et al. (2012) explored the ways in which expectations around what it means to be a ‘good parent’ have affected men differently to women. They showed that men, whilst very willing to be ‘involved’ in caring for their children, were less influenced by a culture of expertise around parenthood and were happier relying on their ‘common sense’. Mothers, by contrast, felt the weight of ‘moral responsibility’ more than fathers and worried about doing the right thing to a greater extent. Instead, men in their study drew on a ‘cultural resource of masculinity’ and associations of independence and confidence. For many fathers (and indeed many mothers) in their study, being a breadwinner and taking responsibility for financial planning was their way of demonstrating their commitment as a father. In a different era, fathers’ articulation of self-confidence and focus on taking financial responsibility for their families would have been seen by policymakers as something to be encouraged. But in government evaluations of British parenting classes, men’s confidence and lack of interest in ‘seeking support’ is generally presented as a negative thing: a low uptake of the scheme apparently showing a ‘lack of knowledge of the positive outcomes from parenting programmes’ (DfE, 2013, p. 10; echoed more recently in the Royal Foundation initiative to make sure parents are aware of the importance of the early years, 2022). This is therefore used as justification to increase efforts to involve fathers (which, ironically, might well have the effect of undermining the confidence men had to begin with).

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Policy drives to involve fathers in more and more aspects of perinatal care, particularly pregnancy care, might also be situated as a challenge to the intimacy of the couple. In a context where ‘breast is best’, Lee’s research on feeding babies, for example, shows that mothers see the genuine and non-directive support their partners give them as very important. ‘Many mothers value fathers doing night feeds with formula milk to relieve tiredness and share baby care’, she says (cited in Murphy, 2010). Where fathers are increasingly the direct target of educational schemes around the benefits of breastfeeding (or the importance of a healthy diet or not smoking in pregnancy, for example), it is interesting to think about the implications of this ‘opening up’ of a couple’s relationship. If women cannot trust their partners not to pressurize them into breastfeeding or report them to the midwife for formula feeding (or smoking or drinking, for instance), this opens up a worrying space between the state, the couple, and individual mothers and fathers (see Ellie Lee’s essay on ‘Policing Pregnancy’ for more on this theme). One study by Ives (2014) showed that many fathers actually felt it is appropriate for the focus of perinatal care to be on women and saw little need for the services to be directed at them. Authentic ‘involvement’ was achieved by playing this supportive role, and many fathers felt that they would be ‘transgressing a moral boundary’ if they were to influence their partners by expressing their own ideas and preferences. As a final point, the impact of the political and cultural developments reviewed here upon the subjectivities of parents and children also needs to be brought into these debates. Macvarish (2009) noted an increasing association between parenting and panopticism: with fathers ‘performing’ their fathering for the social audience—for example, reading to their children or being encouraged to be present for their children in the school environment (see Campana et al., 2020 on the way that social media has magnified this trend). As we discuss in Chap. 5, men, in particular, are already tied to notions of risk because of their association with abuse in the private sphere and as a sexual or violent threat in public spaces. One question we might ask is how this impacts men’s experience of being parents. Gabb’s (2013) work on responses to father–child intimacy, as expressed in family photographs, highlights how fraught this area has become.

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New Directions A recent trend that Macvarish has picked up on in her work is the de-­ gendering of ‘parents’, something that has arguably happened to fathers as much as mothers, as policymakers try to be more inclusive around diverse family formation (e.g. same-sex couples). Indeed, there has been a large volume of work published over the past decade on a range of aspects of ‘involved fatherhood’, predicated on recognition of this as a social norm, and in turn, attention to greater gender neutrality in ‘parenting’ and of gay and queer parenting (see, for example, Bower-Brown & Zadeh, 2021). This clearly influences parental subjectivities, albeit in unanticipated ways. As Macvarish and Martin note, what is interesting about verbal nouns such as ‘parenting’ is that they have no subject. ‘While calling someone “the parent” defines a person in particular ways, “parenting” is detached from the parents, floating more freely from the particular adult subject … In this respect, “parenting” could be done by people who need not be parents and, parents may not necessarily be “parenting” at all times or at any time all. Thus, it has been argued, “parenting” signifies a de-­ centring or demoting of the parent as an autonomous subject while focusing attention on monitoring their relationship with their child as the implementation of a series of tasks requiring the acquisition and application of skills and techniques’ (Macvarish & Martin, 2021, see also Ramaekers & Suissa, 2011; McDermott, 2020). Whilst we do not elaborate further on this large body of research, I developed one aspect of these debates in my own more recent work. This was an interview-based project with 20 couples (in London, UK) as they became parents over a five-year period (2021). The couples were largely different-sex, first-time parents, but there were a quarter who were same-­ sex and/or second-time parents. The argument to emerge there was that new parents are caught in an uncomfortable crossfire between two competing discourses: those around ideal relationships and those around ideal parenting. On the one hand, they should be committed to being ‘equal partners’. On the other, they should be parenting their children ‘intensively’, in ways which are markedly more demanding for mothers. Reconciling these ideals can be difficult, and, as the book explores, had the potential to create resentment and disappointment when these ideals emerge as impossible to maintain in practice (for example, around the expectation to breastfeed exclusively for six months). Drawing largely on the narratives of couples who faced relationship difficulties, the data points

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to the social pressures at play in raising the next generation at material, physiological, and cultural levels. In particular, the book makes the case that there is an inherent paradox at the heart of many contemporary family set-ups. On the one hand, couple relationships are idealized as ‘loose’, equitable, and intimate; on the other, parenting relationships are idealized as ‘permanent’, intensive, and highly gendered. As such, it explores how the assumed need for ‘equal parenting’ affects couples—as couples—(rather than just mothers or fathers). Whilst the expectations of highly gendered care do, of course, impact women disproportionately, the book also shows how they make life very difficult for men, who can be left feeling ineffectual in how best to ‘support’ their partners. This picks up on the paradox Ives points to, and the difficulty for men of providing genuine support without being either relegated to a secondary role or seen as overstepping their mark (Faircloth, 2021). To give an example, this comes from Claudia (an academic) speaking when her first baby was 12 months old: I’m a woman who is like a man because I’ve always looked after myself financially, and I’m independent and I go and do my things and I don’t have anyone dependent on me, except now I do, and now I suddenly have to be a woman and a man … I have to be loving and a mothering nurturing person … and that’s a massive conflict in my identity because that’s something I’ve always shunned because I always wanted to be an independent masculine (essentially) woman! … I don’t know how that leaves us and that’s probably why [my husband] is saying, “I don’t really understand what 50-50 is because you’re doing everything and now you want me to do everything that you’re doing in the same way you’re doing it but you seem to have everything covered.” But obviously I’m not actually coping.

So more than just pointing to the difficulties for men or women, the book tries to capture the mental toll of this culture on couples who struggle to reconcile their concern with doing things ‘equally’ and the obligation to do what they perceive to be best for their child. Indeed, this couple found this tension too hard to navigate and actually separated. But it seems ironic that those couples who were most committed to ideals of equality and were also well resourced and arguably best placed to tackle the contradiction were actually the ones who struggled the most (Faircloth, 2021).

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What emerged for the women in the research was that what really ‘counts’ for them in terms of sustaining a sense of equality (and by extension, a sense of relationship satisfaction) was played out at the level of interpersonal negotiations. Whether they understood equality as overall ‘balance’ (with mothers taking the lead on care) or 50/50 (with the couple splitting it), what they wanted was for their partners to really ‘understand’ what life with a baby involved, ‘the good and the bad’, and more than that, they wanted a division of the ‘mental load’, particularly of parenting. So, whilst ‘equality’ between men and women can be seen as a social or political ideal, it is clear that there are barriers to this being realized. Some of these are material, in the sense that financial backing for sharing of care in the early years does not exist. Some of them, however, are cultural, in that it is women who are more strongly attuned to, and who undertake their identity work through the prism of an increasingly intensive parenting culture, itself tied to their very physiology as people who gestate, birth, and lactate (Shirani et al., 2012). In terms of recent European-wide policy agendas, ‘involving’ fathers in family life would go some way towards easing the burden of care shouldered by many women and would certainly help them ‘see’ the realities of life at home with a child. However, there is also cause for caution in that the extension of an intensive parenting to men might actually leave them in a similar ‘cultural contradiction’ between the worlds of work and home, which is not desirable either and does not tackle this larger paradox. One solution, suggested by Hays (1996), is to take greater social responsibility for raising children, through greater investment in and acceptance of childcare—both at the level of the state and by employers more widely. This would go some way to challenging the intensive, privatized, individualist (rather than shared, public or stratified) approach to parenting, which can result in huge pressure on individual parents and couples, left trying to balance the pulls of intensive parenting and egalitarian intimacy within the confines of their own relationships and households. This finding was echoed by more recent research into the impact of the pandemic on parenting (see Chap. 11), where the ‘privatization’ of parenting onto individual parents was exacerbated like never before. Rather than leading to a change in gender relations as many had hoped, the overwhelming evidence from around the world was that gender roles in parenting were re-traditionalized (Twamley et  al., 2023). Indeed, the pandemic revealed that although men were ‘doing more’ women were still

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doing ‘even more’. As noted in Chap. 1, during the pandemic, for every one hour of uninterrupted paid work done by mothers, fathers were doing three hours; and the only time mothers and fathers reported undertaking the same amount of unpaid work was when a father had been furloughed, and the mother was continuing to do her paid job (Sevilla et al., 2020).

Conclusions This chapter has mapped out some of the current trends in thinking around fatherhood, both in policy circles and in academic research. What it points to is an important gap in the way policy understands fathering and the way fathers themselves experience it. Certainly, the emotionally involved ‘new father’ that current measures try to encourage acts as an important cultural model for the way in which many men shape their identities—but to say that this has come at the cost of the more traditional provider model would be a mistake. Instead, the new model father emerges as a construct of policymakers and researchers, and insofar as there is evidence to suggest that their ideas are connecting with fathers, it appears to be limited. However, this lack of connection has not deterred policymakers—indeed, in line with the wider dynamics of parenting culture, it has led to efforts to generate further initiatives. How this relationship between policymaking, intensive parenting, and the everyday experiences of fathers develops, particularly post-pandemic and ‘new’ forms of balancing work and care, will be an interesting process to watch.

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CHAPTER 10

The Double Bind of Parenting Culture: Helicopter Parents and Cotton Wool Kids Jennie Bristow

Introduction Writing in Time magazine back in 2009, about ‘the growing backlash against overparenting’, Nancy Gibbs begins: The insanity crept up on us slowly; we just wanted what was best for our kids. We bought macrobiotic cupcakes and hypoallergenic socks, hired tutors to correct a 5-year-old’s ‘pencil-holding deficiency’, hooked up broadband connections in the treehouse but took down the swing set after the second skinned knee. We hovered over every school, playground and practice field—‘helicopter parents’, teachers christened us, a phenomenon that spread to parents of all ages, races and regions. (Gibbs, 2009)

The ‘widespread acceptance’ that the culture of paranoid parenting has gone too far was noted by Furedi, introducing the second edition of his book (Furedi, 2008, p. 2). For example, he writes, ‘many parents … recognise that the experience and that of their children bears no relation to their own childhoods and that childhood is in many respects less free than in the past’; ‘[s]ome experts now insist that our obsession with health and safety has gone too far and that childhood has become too risk averse’; and ‘[e]ven politicians and policy makers now argue that children need more freedom and access to outdoor activities’ (Furedi, 2008, p. 2). Since that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Lee et al., Parenting Culture Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44156-1_10

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time, critiques of the overprotection of children, both by parents and institutions, have become more widespread and focused. Thus, as we discuss below, the problem of the ‘helicopter parent’, the parent who ‘smothers’ or ‘coddles’ their child out of well-intentioned but misguided love (Lee & Macvarish, 2020), is mirrored by a concern about the problem of ‘helicopter colleges’: educational institutions that, in attempting to protect students’ well-being, end up thwarting their development into independent young adults (Couture et al., 2017; Bristow, 2019b). The central argument of this chapter is that the apparently contradictory coexistence of a risk-averse parenting culture and concerns about its ‘overprotective’ consequences can be conceptualized as the ‘double bind’ of parenting culture. Parents find themselves subject to criticism if they do not prioritize their children’s safety and equally subject to criticism if they do not permit their children to take (limited) risks. In this vein, Furedi goes on to explain that, while it is increasingly common to hear concerns about children being ‘wrapped in cotton wool’, these tend to have ‘a fatalistic and rhetorical character’, where counter-panics about obesity or the threat of online bullying and paedophiles are mobilized to indicate that indoor play holds as many (if not more) dangers as outdoor activities (Furedi, 2008, pp.  3–4). Furthermore, the ‘normalization of parent-­ bashing’ has meant that concerns about the overprotection of children tend to be focused on the problem of the parent: We have a culture that not only continually promotes a hyper-alarmist orientation towards the well-being of children but also blames parents for internalizing its message. Not infrequently parents are blamed for being anxious about their children. (Furedi, 2008, p. 4)

Lee and Macvarish (2020) elaborate on this observation in their study of narratives about the ‘helicopter parent’ in the British media and ‘the paradox of intensive parenting in the 21st century’. Their review of academic work about histories of ‘bad mothers’ (Ladd-Taylor & Umansky, 1998) reveals that ‘concern with proximity between parents and their children constitutes a long-standing cultural resource on which present constructions of the helicopter parent draw’: [T]erms denoting ‘excessive’ parental, specifically maternal, involvement with children, have been often presented as a cause of individual and social pathology through the 20th century. Some of the language used now as part of discussion of helicopter parents, ‘overparenting’, and ‘smothering’ or ‘coddling’, originates in this earlier period. (Lee & Macvarish, 2020, p. 21)

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In more recent discourse, parental love, parental ‘pushiness’, and the class position of the helicopter parent emerge as the main themes. Criticism of helicopter parenting expressed through these themes, argue Lee and Macvarish, ‘can be understood as form of recoil at perceived outcomes of the key components of intensive parenting, but which leaves their basic premises unaltered’ (Lee & Macvarish, 2020, p. 21). This chapter discusses this phenomenon through briefly reviewing the twin problems of the ‘cotton wool kid’ (the child who is overprotected) and the ‘helicopter parent’ (who hovers over the child, preventing him or her from taking the risks necessary to develop independence). We indicate that the recent positioning of ‘overparenting’ as a problem is itself informed by central tenets of intensive parenting culture, which presume that what parents do (or do not do) is of central and determining importance, and that any problems with what parents do or do not do should be measured by their (presumed) impact upon the child. This is exemplified by the way that the injunction not to be a helicopter parent is now routinely framed as ‘parenting advice’. Assarsson and Aarsand’s (2011) study of ‘media representations of parenting’ in the US and Sweden discusses a ‘parenting to-do list’ published in the influential US magazine L.A. Parent in 2009, in which ‘one piece of advice differs from the others—“don’t be a helicopter parent”’. This, they note, is ‘the only piece of advice that is formulated in the negative’. Furthermore: The fact that helicopter parenting is not explained to the readers shows how much the notion is taken for granted. This has to be seen in light of the US debate on parents who oversee their children’s everyday lives in every way, which the media presents as very negative. (Assarsson & Aarsand, 2011, p. 84)

‘Overparenting’ is considered problematic primarily insofar as it has a negative effect upon the child. The extent to which the orthodoxy of intensive parenting culture takes a toll on parents’ time, emotional energy, and capacity to pursue their ambitions in the adult world is barely mentioned, and where these issues are raised, they tend to be couched in defensive terms. Thus, such erstwhile features of normal everyday life, such as allowing children to watch television when they want to or to play with their friends without adult supervision, are presented as part of a deliberate child-rearing philosophy grandly titled ‘benign neglect’; while allowing a child to walk to school alone has become a fraught,

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self-­conscious exercise in finding ways to inculcate independence, which can then fit with the identity work of being a ‘good parent’. Above all, the ‘backlash against overparenting’ means that parents continue to behave in a fashion entirely consistent with intensive parenting culture, yet in the knowledge that there is something wrong—‘insane’ or ‘mad’ (Gibbs, 2009; Warner, 2006)—about what they are doing.

Cotton Wool Kids As Furedi (2008) notes, there has been mounting concern, led primarily by developmental psychologists and those concerned with children’s play, about the extent to which a risk-averse culture is creating a generation of ‘cotton wool kids’ whose development is stunted by their lack of freedom and who lack the experiences to navigate dangers as they get older (Gill, 2007; Guldberg, 2009; Lindon, 1999; Skenazy, 2009). As noted above, there has been an increasing recognition in media and policy circles of the problem of raising a generation of children unwilling and unable to engage with the risks inherent in everyday life. This often takes a highly instrumental form, to do with a concern about the capacity of young people to handle the challenges they will face as adult workers. For example, back in 2007, Sir Digby Jones, former Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), published a paper for the organization Heads, Teachers and Industry (HTI), titled Cotton Wool Kids. ‘Overprotecting our children—swaddling them in cotton wool—is bad for society, the economy and young people’s preparation for adulthood in a world full of uncertainties’, wrote HTI Chief Executive Anne Evans in the Foreword to the paper (Jones, 2007, p. 4). Guldberg (2009) has made a deeper case for why children need to be able to grow up. In her introduction to Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear, Guldberg explains that the combination of research for a doctorate in developmental psychology and experience as a primary school teacher led her to the conviction that: Children need to be given space away from adults’ watchful eyes—in order to play, experiment, take risks (within a sensible framework provided by adults), test boundaries, have arguments, fight, and learn how to resolve conflicts … [W]atching the speed at which that free space is becoming eroded by a culture that prizes ‘safety’ above all else has weighed upon me as a grave concern. (Guldberg, 2009, p. 1)

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For Guldberg, unsupervised play is crucial for children’s personal development, in terms of enabling them to develop an understanding of the world and to navigate risks and relationships. Allowing children the space to play requires acknowledging that parental determinism is a ‘myth’— what makes us ‘who we are’ derives from a complex combination of experiences and relationships, and even the most controlling parent cannot guarantee their child’s safety or predict how the child will turn out. Allowing children the freedom to create their world—and, by the same token, allowing parents the freedom to let their children explore—is a vital part of child-rearing (Guldberg, 2009). Guldberg’s emphasis on the freedom to play is echoed by the American writer Lenore Skenazy, who found herself labelled ‘America’s Worst Mom’ after she allowed her nine-year-old son to ride the New York City subway alone, and then wrote about it in a newspaper column. The column ‘ignited a global firestorm over what constitutes reasonable risk’, reports Gibbs. ‘Skenazy decided to fight back, arguing that we have lost our ability to assess risk. By worrying about the wrong things, we do actual damage to our children, raising them to be anxious and unadventurous or, as she puts it, “hothouse, mama-tied, danger-hallucinating joy extinguishers”’ (Gibbs, 2009). Skenazy followed up this media work in her book, Free-Range Kids: Giving our children the freedom we had without going nuts with worry (2009); and, subsequently, with the ‘Let Grow’ project, which runs school and community programmes designed to bolster children’s independence and advocates for legislative change with the aim of ‘making it easy, normal and legal to raise resilient, resourceful, independent kids’ (Let Grow, 2023). Skenazy’s work engages directly with the problem at the heart of the ‘cotton wool kids’ debate. Parents recognize that children need some freedom and independence and that these are good things to have; but this recognition takes place within a culture that emphasizes the need for safety and protection above all. Parents thus find themselves under contradictory pressures, not only to avoid stifling their children but also to keep them safe from possible harms to their physical safety or emotional well-being. This contradiction is starkly revealed by Jenkins’ (2006) study of the ways that families in the South Wales area of Britain constructed and articulated ideas about risk in relation to young people’s outdoor play. Jenkins concluded that respondents were ‘actively attempting to wrestle with competing sets of cultural orientations regarding the health and well-­ being of their children’, explaining this point as follows:

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Much of the anxiety parents reported experiencing stems from the development of an increasingly privatized approach to parenting. However, the interviews also revealed that the ways in which parents talked about risk contained sediment from a previous generation of parents, who perhaps tended to see the immediate outside world in far less hostile terms. Thus, although parents deeply feared the risk of their child being attacked by strangers, they also feared the damage excessive restriction would do to their offspring’s social and physical development. (Jenkins, 2006, pp. 390–1)

Here, Jenkins relates the impact of risk-aversion to a wider experience of isolation, in which parents become both more susceptible to fears that other adults—‘strangers’—might harm their children and less able to experience a situation in which unsupervised play between children can be entered into spontaneously. To put this another way: a child will not want to go and play outside on his or her own; so in a situation where most children are kept indoors, it requires a particular motivation on the part of the parent to push the child to be ‘free range’. Jenkins’ insights speak to the points discussed in Chap. 5, to do with how the wider breakdown of adult solidarity and the nervousness surrounding contact between the generations fuels the imperative of risk-aversion. Jenkins also makes an important observation regarding the way that one’s life experience and the experience absorbed ‘from a previous generation of parents’ provide a limit to the imperative of overprotection. The implication here is that the challenge to the excesses of parenting culture will come from the common sense of parents themselves. However, as Lee et al. note, in discussions about parenting and risk, it has become ‘fashionable’ to ‘point the finger of blame at “helicopter parents” or to suggest that parents are damaging the next generation by raising cosseted “cotton-wool kids”’ (Lee et al., 2010, pp. 228–9). This is what we term the ‘double bind’ of parenting culture, in which parents, as the popular English saying would have it, ‘can’t do right for doing wrong’.

Helicopter Parents Somers and Settle’s (2010) widely cited ‘research towards a typology’ of the helicopter parent offers the following definition: A helicopter parent (helopat for short) is a mother, father, or even a grandparent who ‘hovers’ over a student of any age by being involved—some-

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times overly so—in student/school, student/employer, or student/social relationships. (Somers & Settle, 2010)

They attribute the term ‘helicopter parent’ to Charles Fay and Foster Cline, authors of the Love and Logic parenting series, and it was popularized by Ned Zemen, writing in Newsweek in 1991. Zeman described the ‘helicopter parent’ as ‘a nosy grown-up who’s always hovering around. Quick to offer a teacher unwanted help’ (Somers & Settle, 2010). Lee and Macvarish (2020) note that the term is now ‘familiar enough to warrant dictionary definition’, and that ‘an associated collection of terms has emerged in recent years to expand further the problem of “overprotective” or “excessively interested” “parenting”’: Parents are said to wrongly express their interest in their children through snowplough parenting, hyperparenting, alpha parenting, cossetter parenting, curling parenting, lawnmower parenting and bulldozer parenting. Helicopter parenting is itself now subdivided into types, called reconnaissance, low altitude and guerrilla warfare. (Lee & Macvarish, 2020, p. 20)

Neil Howe, a US consultant well known for his writing on generations, including a book titled Millennials Rising: The next great generation (Howe & Strauss, 2000), has noted that the development and popularization of the term ‘helicopter parent’ coincides with the orientation of parenting culture around the priority of safety. An article reproduced on the website of LifeCourse Associates, of which Howe is President, summarizes his argument thus: Parents of millennials have been obsessive about ensuring the safety of their children … When the first wave was born in the early 1980s, “Baby on Board” signs began popping up on minivans. Children were buckled into child-safety seats, fitted with bicycle helmets, carpooled to numerous after-­ school activities and hovered over by what Howe describes as “helicopter parents.” (O’Briant, 2003)

For Howe and Strauss (2000), the ‘helicopter parent’ is the result of an era in which children are ‘wanted’, ‘protected’, and ‘worthy’. ‘From conception to graduation, this 1982 cohort has marked a watershed in adult attitudes toward, treatment of, and expectations for children’, they write:

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Over that eighteen-year span, whatever age bracket those 1982-born children have inhabited has been the target of intense hope, worry, and wonder from parents, pollsters, pundits, and politicians. Not since the Progressive Era, near the dawn of the twentieth century, has America greeted the arrival of a new generation with such a dramatic rise in adult attention to the needs of children. (Howe & Strauss, 2000, p. 32)

While the term ‘helicopter parent’ appears pejorative, and the phenomenon has attracted some critical commentary, implicit in all definitions of the ‘helicopter parent’ is that he or she is motivated by love and concern for the child. Thus, because the parent is following the central ‘feeling rule’ (Hochschild, 1979) of intensive parenting culture—where desire to do the best for one’s child trumps all other considerations—criticism of the ‘helicoptering’ phenomenon is inconsistent. The writer Katie Roiphe (2012) picks up on this inconsistency, contending that the orthodoxy of overprotection is so ingrained that it is often hard for parents even to know whether they are ‘helicoptering’ or not. ‘In the recent clamor on the subject of whether this generation of parents is hovering too much and oversteering, overmanaging, and otherwise spoiling their children, I’ve heard parents say, “But we don’t know any actual helicopter parents”’, writes Roiphe. ‘They say this because they don’t know anyone who fits the obvious caricatures—that is anyone who schedules Mandarin classes for their 5-year-old and dutifully shuttles them off every Saturday morning for theater-to-express-yourself classes. But the overabundance of extracurriculars is only one small part of [a] larger, disturbing phenomenon’: The belief that we can control our children on a very high level and somehow program or train or condition them for a successful life however we define it is extremely prevalent and takes many forms. Do you not allow your children to watch television? Do you allow them any time on the Internet unsupervised? Are you keeping very close track of what they eat? Do you get a little too involved in homework? Do you barely ever hire baby sitters at night? I know parents who think of themselves as very unhelicoptery but who are just helicoptering in different ways. (Roiphe, 2012)

Critical commentary tends to focus less on a distinction between ‘helicopter parenting’ and ‘non-helicopter parenting’ than on a distinction between ‘good helicoptering’ and ‘bad helicoptering’. Somers and Settle contend that ‘[h]elicopter behaviour can have a positive or a negative effect’:

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Positive results accrue when the ‘hovering’ is age appropriate; when parents and students engage in a dialogue; when the student is empowered to act; and when parents intercede only if the student needs additional help. We label this behaviour positive parental engagement. Negative helicopter parents can be found in many settings, including educational, and are inappropriately (and at times surreptitiously) enmeshed in their children’s lives and relationships. (Somers & Settle, 2010)

By attempting to distinguish between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ helicopter parents, Somers and Settle highlight the fine line that the twenty-first-­ century parent treads between showing that they are properly (and ‘positively’) engaged in, and concerned about, their children’s lives, and being ‘inappropriately’ overprotective. They draw a typology of five helicopter parent ‘types’: consumer advocates, ‘these parents view college not as an educational journey but as consumer transaction’; equity or fairness advocates, who ‘demand fairness for their children’; vicarious college students, who ‘missed out on many college experiences themselves and want to recreate those golden four (or five) years spent as undergraduates’; toxic parents, who ‘have been written about extensively in self-help literature’—they have ‘numerous psychological issues and are controlling, negative, and try at once to live their children’s lives even as they “one-up” their children in the process’; and safety patrol parents. For Somers and Settle,  only the ‘toxic parent’ is deeply problematic; for the other types, their article suggests ways in which they can best be ‘handled’ by college managers. The attempt to differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms of helicopter parenting lies at the heart of the study by Fingerman et  al. on ‘Helicopter parents and landing pad kids’. The authors begin by noting that ‘[p]opular media describe adverse effects of helicopter parents who provide intense support to grown children’; however, ‘it remains unclear whether intense parental involvement is viewed as normative today and whether frequent support is detrimental or beneficial to the parents and grown children involved’ (Fingerman et al., 2012, pp. 880–1). This study found that parents and grown children alike found helicoptering ‘non-­ normative’ when it took the form of ‘too much support’. However, ‘grown children who received intense support reported better psychological adjustment and life satisfaction than grown children who did not receive intense support’ (Fingerman et  al., 2012, p.  880). Thus, even though ‘[p]arents who perceived their grown children as needing too much support reported poorer life satisfaction’, there is an implicit

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sentiment that some helicoptering might be beneficial for young people and should therefore not be totally discouraged. The notion that colleges and employers should see the role of the ‘helicopter parent’ as a potential advantage that simply needs to be managed appropriately is elaborated by Howe and William (2007). ‘While most employers see young workers’ close relationships with parents as a problem, it is in fact an enormous opportunity’, they assert, continuing: Handled properly, helicopter parents can be an enormous asset to employers’ goals of recruitment, productivity, and retention. Instead of shutting out parents, employers can develop a strategic response to enroll parents as allies and harness these potential strengths. (Howe & William, 2007, p. 2)

By the same token, argue these authors, even the reluctance of Millennials to move out of the family home and attempt an independent life should not be viewed as a ‘failure to launch’ but rather as ‘a natural, even desirable step in their close relationship with parents and extended families’ (Howe & William, 2007, p.  2). The closeness of relationship between Baby Boomer parents and their adult children should, they contend, ultimately be viewed as a positive development to which society needs to adjust, rather than a negative trend towards infantilization. From the discussion reviewed above, we can see that the ambivalence with which ‘helicopter parenting’ is perceived speaks to the contradictions within both the culture of intensive parenting and the backlash to it. What lies beneath this ambivalence is a wider anxiety about the extent to which adults are seen to be capable of protecting children from the perceived ‘toxicity’ of the adult world.

Resistance to Intensive Parenting: Navigating the Contradictions As discussed in Chap. 2, intensive parenting works as a cultural script to which responses are far from stable. The imperative of risk-aversion has had a powerful effect but has not become a total orthodoxy: for the simple reason that it is practically impossible to raise children without encountering some kind of hazard on an everyday level. By a similar token, the imperative of ‘concerted cultivation’ (Lareau, 2003) raises as many problems for the concerned parent as it does solutions, first in deciding which of the myriad cultivation projects are the most important, and second in

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raising anxieties about whether a child’s social or emotional development might suffer from too demanding a programme. This conundrum was illustrated by the furore that greeted Amy Chua’s book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, published in 2011, in which she gave a personal account of practising ‘Chinese-style’ parenting, with a heavy focus on academic achievement and musical accomplishment. The reaction to Chua, both in the US and Britain, can best be described as startled, as commentators simultaneously recoiled against the intensity of pressure that Chua seemed to be recommending should be put onto children and recognized that many of the excesses of the ‘Tiger Mother’ were merely extreme versions of what passes as ‘normal’ parenting in middle-­ class western culture. One interesting response came from the US commentator David Brooks, who criticized Chua not for the hardness of her approach but for its one-sidedness. ‘She’s protecting them from the most intellectually demanding activities because she doesn’t understand what’s cognitively difficult and what isn’t’, Brooks argued, in response to Chua’s admission that she refused to let her children attend sleepovers with their friends. ‘Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-­ old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group—these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale’ (Brooks, 2011). Brooks’ criticism of Chua is thus that the imposition of a particular narrow set of adult goals and ambitions upon children fails to prepare them for the real world that they will have to navigate. This reveals how, within the culture of intensive parenting, it is possible to resist ‘tiger mothering’ without at all resisting the logic of intensive parenting, which is to attempt to ensure that everything possible is done to equip one’s child for a life of happiness and success. A similar tension is apparent in Cucchiara’s (2013) study of American urban middle-class parents ‘choosing an urban public school in an era of parental anxiety’. 1 In choosing to send their children to a particular public school, rather than following the path taken by other middle-class parents and sending their children to a private school, the parents interviewed by Cucchiara were self-consciously attempting to reject ‘what is seen as intensive, hyper protective parenting’ (Cucchiara, 2013, p. 90). However, acting on this desire to reject the orthodoxy took a significant amount of

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work. ‘[E]ven those who bemoaned contemporary “over-parenting” devoted significant time and energy to choosing a school and managing their children’s experiences’; and the process of rejecting the ‘focus on admissions to elite colleges as the ultimate indicator of “success”’ required that parents engage in a dialogue about what other ‘choices could count as “legitimate”’ (Cucchiara, 2013, p. 90). The parents in Cucchiara’s study have thus internalized an anxiety about ‘the negative consequences of “invasive parenting”’, which operates against the anxiety that they will damage their children’s life chances by not trying to ensure their children’s academic success through choosing the best schools. In this way, we can see that the logic of risk-aversion that informs the orthodoxy of intensive parenting also informs the resistance to its excesses. Hence the headline of Cucchiara’s study reads: ‘Are we doing damage?’

The Diseasing of Childhood Some of those who have critiqued the phenomenon of ‘cotton wool kids’, such as Guldberg and Skenazy, are motivated by a concern about the impact of overprotection both on children and on their parents. Furedi’s Paranoid Parenting stresses that the rearing of robust children relies on adults being confident in their own abilities; conversely, ‘if parents stifle their children with their obsessions and restrict their scope to explore, then the young generation will become socialized to believe that vulnerability is the natural state of affairs’ (Furedi, 2008, p. 195). As discussed in Chap. 2, resistance to the orthodoxy of risk-averse parenting is, in these works, articulated as part of a call for a more open, expansive approach to adults and children interacting with each other and with the world. Others who critique the problem of ‘cotton wool kids’ or ‘helicopter parents’ take a different approach, in that their main concern appears to be a desire to free children from what is perceived to be a damaging, ‘toxic’ adult culture. In Britain, this view has been clearly articulated by Sue Palmer’s (2006) book Toxic Childhood: How modern life is damaging our children … and what we can do about it and its sequel Detoxing Childhood (2007). Palmer summarizes the extent of ‘toxicity’ surrounding the modern child as follows: • ‘Physical toxicity’ (unhealthy food and a ‘couch-potato screenbased lifestyle’);

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• ‘Emotional toxicity’—parents being too busy with work to provide enough ‘family time’ and set clear routines and boundaries, family breakdown, and exposing children to ‘emotionally destabilising’ ‘screen-based violence’; • ‘Social toxicity’—the lack of unsupervised play outside the home, leading to an inability to form friendships and an unprecedented openness to ‘marketeers, unsuitable role models and celebrity culture’; • ‘Cognitive toxicity’—too little time with ‘real-life adults’ and too much time with the television leading to poor language development, while education in schools suffers from a preoccupation with targets and the threat of litigation (Palmer, 2007, p. 5). The positioning here of myriad features of everyday modern life as toxic influences upon the child speaks to a highly idealized (and inaccurate) notion of childhood as a period untainted by adulthood. This idea is a powerful strand in the arguments put forward by advocates for children’s free play, and often leads to the argument that more should be done to free children from over-intervention by their parents. Here again, the contradictions of intensive parenting culture are starkly revealed. While Guldberg, Skenazy, and Furedi view the problem with this culture as the extent to which it prevents children from growing into the adult world, Palmer’s perspective views the problem as one where adult preoccupations and interventions despoil the innocence of childhood. Furthermore, campaigners and policymakers are highly selective about the kind of ‘freedoms’ they think children should be able to access. So, for example, while unsupervised, outdoor play is increasingly lauded as important for children’s development (and parents blamed for restricting children’s access to it), parents are being increasingly pressured to engage in their children’s activities on the internet, providing more supervision rather than less. Thus, Claire Perry, the British Conservative MP who in 2012 chaired a parliamentary inquiry into ‘online child protection’ (Independent Parliamentary Inquiry into Online Child Protection, 2013), proclaimed in an interview with the Daily Telegraph newspaper: ‘We need to take control’ (Moreton, 2013). She continued: Parents say they want to be involved, but the children have overtaken them … That’s awful. We must be like the first generation whose children learnt to read and write, and we’re all blundering about like illiterate ignoramuses. (Moreton, 2013)

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The idea that today’s parents lack both the skill and the will to protect their children from the myriad risks posed by the online world is a recurrent theme in policy debates about parenting. The presentation of parents here as incompetents—‘illiterate ignoramuses’—goes hand-in-hand with the presumption, described in Chaps. 2 and 3 of this book, that parents can and should direct every influence that comes to their children via the online world. Contradictory narratives about the internet, and social media in particular, have developed significantly over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Livingstone and Haddon’s report EU Kids Online (2009) summed up this contradiction as follows: Balancing empowerment and protection is crucial, since increasing online access and use tends to increase online risks. Conversely, strategies to decrease risks can restrict children’s online opportunities, possibly undermining children’s rights or restricting their learning to cope with a degree of risk. (Livingstone & Haddon, 2009, p. 1)

On one hand, the access to educational resources, social communication, and cultural experiences offered to children by the online world is presented as an antidote to the restricted freedoms that overprotected children experience ‘in real life’. On the other, fears about the myriad dangers presented to children online, from ‘grooming’ by paedophiles to bullying by their peers to exposure to ‘harmful content’ glamourizing eating disorders or risky behaviours, drive a demand to train parents to navigate this space and engage in constant vigilance about their children’s online use. Wall’s (2022) discussion of ‘being a good parent’ explicitly makes the connection with ‘intensive parenting norms, heightened risk awareness, and growing concerns about the effects of “over-parenting”, especially in the teenage years’ (p. 340). Her study examines contemporary advice to parents on managing adolescents’ digital experiences, finding that parental roles are depicted as ‘instrumental and pedagogical’, while youth are portrayed as lacking agency and judgement. Thus, Wall writes: Intensive parenting expectations are extended as parents face advice to be both highly vigilant agents of surveillance and trusted confidantes of their children, with an overall goal of shaping children’s subjectivity in ways that allow them to become self-governing. (Wall, 2022, p. 340)

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The fraught character of discussions about outdoor play or young people’s use of the internet reveals a set of wider anxieties about childhood, adulthood, and the modern world. Furedi describes this as the ‘diseasing of childhood’, where the metaphor of toxic childhood, ‘which conveys the idea of the moral pollution of childhood, readily resonates with a cultural imagination that interprets every childhood experience as destructive and dangerous’ (Furedi, 2008, pp. 12–13). He continues: Proponents of this idea claim that everything is getting worse for children. Technological change, new digital applications, rampant consumerism, incompetent parenting, pressures of school exams, peer pressure and family breakdown are some of the forces considered to be fuelling toxic childhood … Such pessimistic interpretations of childhood have little to do with the real life experience of children. They are fuelled by adult anxieties about the ability of mothers and fathers to parent and of children to deal with the challenges they face. (Furedi, 2008, p. 13)

The imposition of adult anxieties onto the experience of children is starkly indicated by the American psychologist Madeline Levine, whose (2012) book Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success makes use of the metaphor of toxicity. In her favourable review, Judith Warner (2012) describes this book as ‘a cri de coeur from a clinician on the front lines of the battle between our better natures—parents’ deep and true love and concern for their kids—and our culture’s worst competitive and materialistic influences’. ‘When apples were sprayed with a chemical at my local supermarket, middle-aged moms turned out, picket signs and all, to protest the possible risk to their children’s health’, says Levine. ‘Yet I’ve seen no similar demonstrations about an educational system that has far more research documenting its own toxicity’ (Warner, 2012). The parents whom Levine is concerned about are those who ‘run themselves ragged with work and hyper-parenting, presenting an “eviscerated vision of the successful life” that their children are then programmed to imitate’, writes Warner: They’re parents who are physically hyper-present but somehow psychologically M.I.A.: so caught up in the script that runs through their heads about how to ‘do right’ by their children that they can’t see when the excesses of keeping up, bulking up, getting a leg up and generally running scared send the whole enterprise of ostensible care and nurturing right off the rails. (Warner, 2012)

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Judith Warner’s own (2006) book was a high-profile critique of the ‘Perfect Madness’ of parenting culture, and many of its insights into the impact of society’s one-sided approach to safety, achievement, and success illuminate well some of the tensions experienced by parents as they balance the imperative to be a good parent according to the accepted cultural script against their intuitive discomfort with some of the excesses of hyper-­ parenting. However, as the case of the helicopter parent and the cotton wool kid illustrates, the message that ‘essentially, everything today’s parents think they’re doing right is actually wrong’ (Warner, 2012) tends to dominate well-placed criticisms and concerns.

Ambivalent Adulthood and Institutional ‘Coddling’ The sensibility that childhood is being polluted by the problems of the adult world relates to another phenomenon that has achieved increasing attention in recent years: ambivalence about the meaning of adulthood. This is seen to take the form of young people being apparently reluctant to ‘grow up’ and has been most clearly captured by the concept of ‘emerging adulthood’, coined by US psychology professor Jeffrey J.  Arnett in 2000 (Arnett, 2000). It was an attempt to provide ‘a new term and a new conceptualization’ to make sense of the life stage experienced by 18–29 year olds, who were ‘neither adolescents nor young adults but something in-between’; who were ‘taking longer to grow up than young people had in the past, as measured by their entry to stable adult roles as well as their own self-perceptions of not-fully-adult status’ (Arnett, 2015, pp. vii–viii). As critical reflections have noted, Arnett’s idea of ‘emerging adulthood’ developed from a focus on middle-class college students in the US and a rather one-sided account of this life stage as a period of experimentation and freedom (see discussion in Bristow, 2019a). Furthermore, it is difficult to discern the specific drivers behind this phenomenon. Are young, middle-class people in Anglo-American societies resisting adulthood because they are repelled by the sense of its responsibilities—as indicated by the popularity of the term ‘adulting’ to denote the boring and stressful tasks associated with living an independent life—or are cultural and institutional pressures pushing them away from the kind of adult life they would otherwise aspire to? To what extent is the ‘infantilization’ (Furedi, 2016) of young adults promoted by the very institutions that, historically, aimed to encourage the transition of children to adult life—namely, education and the family?

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In this vein, the role played by massified, marketized higher education systems organized increasingly around therapeutic concerns about student satisfaction and welfare has attracted scholarly attention (Ecclestone & Hayes, 2009; Collini, 2012; Williams, 2012; Furedi, 2016; Haidt & Lukianoff, 2018; Bristow et al., 2020). Couture et al.’s (2017) study of ‘Helicopter Colleges’ examines the extent to which university practices and processes are increasingly organized around the principle that these institutions should act in  loco parentis. The authors use Somers and Settle’s (2010) typology of ‘the over-involved parent’ to identify ‘policies and procedures related to over-involved parental styles, as well as to examine practitioner attitudes toward these policies and procedures’. The results, they write, ‘suggest that changes in practices may be enabling or replicating some of the same “helicopter” parenting behaviors that were once scorned’, and that ‘higher education institutions are beginning to “over-parent” their college students to satisfy both students and parents’ (Couture et al., 2017, p. 398). Couture et al. note that ‘Higher education officials have long implored parents to “let go” of parental tendencies to shield their college students from harm, to let them make their own decisions, and to let them fail a little’—but, as Selingo (2015) writes, ‘colleges instead are practicing a new version of “in loco parentis”—they are expected to be stand-in parents—and it begins as soon as students step foot on campus’. They warn: If institutions are doing too much for students, then they may be implying to students that colleges do not have confidence in students and this leads to dependence, which is exactly what higher education and student affairs professionals have been warning parents against for the past couple of decades. (Couture et al., 2017, pp. 404–5)

Noting the concern that ‘students with overbearing parents are stifled’, Couture et  al. suggest that ‘overbearing institutions can have a similar effect’: Students need supportive, not over-protective families, just as they need supportive, not over-protective colleges. Put another way, students need faculty and staff who are nurturing (Couture et al., 2017, pp. 404–5)

But what is right balance between support and nurture, and overprotection? Arguably, ‘helicopter colleges’ face a similar dilemma to

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‘helicopter parents’ here. The context of higher education in the UK and USA is one in which undergraduate students are increasingly considered to be, Furedi (2016, p. 186) argues, ‘biologically mature school children’, to whom the university has a more significant pastoral responsibility than in previous eras. An institutional attempt to be ‘supportive, not over-­ protective’ will therefore experience its own version of the ‘double bind’ of parenting culture: castigated both for neglecting their responsibilities to protect their students and for failing to allow them to develop the requisite skills (see further discussion in Bristow, 2019b). A limitation of some critiques of ‘helicopter colleges’, like those of ‘helicopter parents’, is that they often fail to address the wider cultural context of young adults’ alleged ‘failure to launch’. This is one in which aspirations to independence among emerging adults already appear to be ambivalent and relatively weak. In their insightful UK study of ‘parents’ involvement and university students’ independence’, Lewis et al. (2015) note that while going away to university ‘has long been seen as a marker along the road to fully independent living’, the ‘extent of college students’ autonomy and independence’ in Anglo-American societies has recently been questioned by changing trends and expectations of parental involvement (Lewis et al., 2015, p. 417). The literature on this question ‘tends to be divided between the psychological … and the sociological’ (p.  418) and indicates that ‘assessing the importance of parental involvement is a complex task’, with ‘ambivalence’ recurring as ‘central concept that crosses the disciplinary divide’ (p. 419). Lewis et al. draw on the ‘paradoxical task faced by parents’, as identified by Karp et al. (2004, pp. 358–9), of managing ‘“attached individuation” for themselves and their children—a balance between “distance and engagement”, a process of giving the young person both “roots” and “wings”’ (Lewis et al., 2015, p. 420). Their own study, of 29 parent–student dyads comprising students from two UK universities, found that only two parents ‘reported providing little support’: both were mothers with chronic health problems, one divorced and one estranged. Of the remainder, the authors identified four categories of parental involvement, ‘according to the degree and style of support and how parents felt about that support’: . Parents who wanted to be involved and were often directive; 1 2. Parents who were involved and might or might not be directive, but who felt ambivalent about their involvement;

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. Parents who were involved but strived not to be directive; 3 4. Parents who wanted to be involved but who tried to limit involvement and ‘hold back’. (Lewis et al., 2015, p. 422). Lewis et al. conclude that most of the parents in their study ‘wanted to promote greater independence, while also remaining close’; however, ‘parents differed in how urgently they wanted change in this respect, and in how far and in what ways they sought to promote independence’ (Lewis et al., 2015, p. 427). In this regard, this study ‘supports the conclusion that involved parental support does not routinely become smothering, “helicopter” parenting’ (Lewis et  al., 2015, p. 429). Indeed, ‘involved parenting’ can mean actively encouraging the development of independence among the emerging adults in the parent–student dyads. Arguably the most striking finding of Lewis et al.’s study is the difference identified between parents’ assumptions and aspirations regarding their children’s independence and those held by the students themselves. They write: Unlike their parents, the students mostly assumed that they would continue to be ‘close’ to their families. They viewed the achievement of independence differently from their parents in two respects: they lacked the urgency that most parents felt about the need to become more independent; and they did not share their parents’ linear model of progress towards adulthood in which going away to university marked an important transitional stage. (Lewis et al., 2015, p. 429)

While parents in this study ‘tended to hold fast to the ideal of a linear passage to full independence and were sometimes unsure about how to react to their children’s apparent insouciance in the face of their manifest dependence’, many of the students ‘appeared to be reliant on their parents, exhibiting few signs of autonomy’ (Lewis et al., 2015, p. 429). If the attitude held by emerging adults towards independence is, as Lewis et al. suggest, one of ambivalence and even insouciance, this raises some important questions regarding the delineation of ‘helicopter parenting’ as a causal factor in young people’s alleged ‘failure to launch’. As indicated above, much of the focus of debates about both parental and institutional ‘helicoptering’ is on the experiences and expectations of a particular demographic: namely middle-class families. Lee and Macvarish (2020) argue that an important feature of the helicopter parent term is the

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characterization of problem parents as middle class. It is widely contended that policymakers have presented parenting practices characteristic of middle-­class parents, such as parental involvement in school and in children’s education, as of central importance in, for example, improving social mobility and addressing social inequality. Yet in narratives of helicopter parenting, ‘middle-class’ parenting emerged as sometimes almost despised, and certainly as undesirable, rather than upheld and valued. Assarsson and Aarsand argue that helicopter parents are, ‘depicted as having the best intentions even when it goes wrong. Parents are thus portrayed as people who have to work on their parental competence to recognise when they cross the border of involvement’ (Assarsson & Aarsand, 2011, p. 86). Lee and Macvarish’s (2020) analysis of discussion in the British media suggests that alongside depictions of well-intentioned parents, there are far more scathing accounts that expand concepts of abuse, present middleclass parents as incapable of loving genuinely, and construe ‘pushiness’ as harmful to both children and the wider society, by enabling middle-­class children to gain enhanced access to educational and other resources. Discussion of ‘helicopter parents’ in the British news media narratives during the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries frame the phenomenon in terms of parental love ‘gone wrong’, parental ‘pushiness’ (Beauvais, 2017), and the class position of the helicopter parent.

Conclusion: The Double Bind of Parenting Culture Through the diseasing of childhood, parents are positioned as conduits for a ‘toxic’ adult culture. This reverses the traditional dynamic of adult–child relations, in which parents are expected to bring their children gently into the adult world and entrusted with the task of doing that. Rather, their role is positioned as keeping children apart from those aspects of adult culture that are perceived as negative, and continually checking their own behaviour to avoid imposing their own problematic expectations upon their children. The main outcome of this process is not a balanced understanding of the problems of ‘hyper-parenting’, but a further development in the ‘normalisation of parent-bashing’ (Furedi, 2008, p. 8). Parents are castigated for their failure to anticipate and manage bewildering range of risks to their child, and simultaneously criticized for their failure to ‘let go’, which would enable their children both to experience the joys and freedoms of

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childhood and to develop their own resources for dealing with risk. In her study of how the project of childrearing is changing in the US, McDermott (2020) summarizes the tension as follows: No one wants to be a helicopter parent. Helicopter parenting is associated with all manner of pathologies … To make matters worse, helicopter parenting has become associated with a certain sort of antisocial behavior. The archetypal helicopter parent is pushy, overbearing, and prepared to stop at nothing to give their children an advantage—even if comes at the expense of other people. Free-range parents fare no better. Leaving your child unsupervised invites rebuke, public shaming, and possible arrest. Although most parents are probably somewhere in the middle, hovering in some instances and more hands off in others, at a time when the ideal parent is attentive, supportive, and above all involved, it is not at all clear how much is too much. (McDermott, 2020, pp. 186–7)

It is, of course, important to acknowledge that ‘overparenting’ carries negative consequences for children’s development. In this regard, it really is not ‘better to be safe than sorry’. But when the whole of childhood experience (positive and negative) is framed in the language of competing risks, this presents little scope for the discussion that campaigners, policymakers, and scholars need to be having: about the kind of world we envisage for ourselves and our children, and how we might shape it.

Note 1. In the US, ‘public school’ means a school funded by public money— known in Britain as a ‘state school’. In Britain, ‘public school’ refers to a fee-paying (private) school.

References Arnett, J. J. (2000). Emerging adulthood: A theory of development from the late teens through the twenties. American Psychologist, 55(5), 469–480. Arnett, J.  J. (2015). Emerging adulthood: The winding road from the late teens through the twenties (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Assarsson, L., & Aarsand, P. (2011). ‘How to be good’: Media representations of parenting. Studies in the Education of Adults, 43(1), 78–92.

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Beauvais, C. (2017). An exploration of the ‘pushy parent’ label in educational discourse. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 38(2), 159–171. Bristow, J. (2019a). Stop mugging grandma: The ‘generation wars’ and why Boomer blaming won’t solve anything. Yale University Press. Bristow, J. (2019b). Les ‘parents hélicoptères’: une socialisation incertaine des adultes en devenir. Revue des Politiques Sociales et Familiales, 133(1), 9–20. Bristow, J., Cant, S., & Chatterjee, A. (2020). Generational encounters with higher education: The academic-student relationship and the university experience. Bristol University Press. Brooks, D. (2011, January 17). Amy Chua is a wimp. The New  York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/opinion/18brooks.html Chua, A. (2011). Battle hymn of the tiger mother. Penguin Books. Collini, S. (2012). What are universities for? Penguin Books. Couture, R., Schwehm, J., & Couture, V. (2017). Helicopter colleges: A return to in loco parentis? College Student Journal, 51(3), 398–406. Cucchiara, M. (2013). ‘Are we doing damage?’ Choosing an urban public school in an era of parental anxiety. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 44, 75–93. Ecclestone, K., & Hayes, D. (2009). The dangerous rise of therapeutic education. Routledge. Fingerman, K. L., Cheng, Y.-P., Wesselmann, E. D., Zarit, S., Furstenberg, F., & Birditt, K. S. (2012). Helicopter parents and landing pad kids: Intense parental support of grown children. Journal of Marriage and Family, 74, 880–896. Furedi, F. (2008). Paranoid parenting: Why ignoring the experts may be best for your child (2nd ed.). Continuum. Furedi, F. (2016). What’s happened to the university? A sociological exploration of its infantilization. Bloomsbury. Gibbs, N. (2009, November 30). The growing backlash against overparenting. Time Magazine. https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/ 0,33009,1940697-­7,00.html Gill, T. (2007). No fear: Growing up in a risk averse society. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Let Grow. (2023). Website. Retrieved March 30, 2023, from https://letgrow.org/ Guldberg, H. (2009). Reclaiming childhood: Freedom and play in an age of fear. Routledge. Haidt, J., & Lukianoff, G. (2018). The coddling of the American mind: How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure. Penguin Books. Hochschild, A. R. (1979). Emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure. The American Journal of Sociology, 85(3), 551–575. Howe, N., & Strauss, W. (2000). Millennials rising: The next great generation. Vintage Books. Howe, N., & William, S. (2007, November). Helicopter parents in the workplace. Genera. Retrieved November 2, 2023, from https://www.elephantsatwork. com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/helicopter-parents-in-theworkplace1.pdf.

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Jenkins, N. (2006). ‘You can’t wrap the up in cotton wool!’ Constructing risk in young people’s access to outdoor play. Health, Risk and Society, 8(4), 379–393. Jones, D. (2007). Cotton wool kids: Releasing the potential for children to take risks and innovate, Issues Paper 7, HTI. Karp, D, Holmstrom, L, & Gray, P. (2004) Of roots and wings: Letting go of the college-bound child. Symbolic Interaction, 27(3), 357–382. Ladd-Taylor, M., & Umansky, L. (1998). ‘Bad’ mothers, the politics of mother blame in twentieth-century America. New York University Press. Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life. University of California Press. Lee, E., & Macvarish, J. (2020). Le «parent hélicoptère» et le paradoxe de la parentalité intensive au XXI e siècle. Lien Social et Politiques, 85, 19–42. Lee, E., Macvarish, J., & Bristow, J. (2010). Editorial: Risk, health and parenting culture. Health Risk and Society, 12(4), 293–300. Levine, M. (2012). Teach your children well: Parenting for authentic success. Harper/HarperCollins. Lewis, J., West, A., Roberts, J., & Noden, P. (2015). Parents’ involvement and university students’ independence. Families, Relationships and Societies, 4(3), 417–432. Lindon, J. (1999). Too safe for their own good? Helping children learn about risk and lifeskills. The National Early Years Network. Livingstone, S., & Haddon, L. (2009) EU kids online: Final report. EUCPN. Retrieved March 23, 2023, from https://eucpn.org/sites/default/ files/document/files/5._eu_kids_online_-­_final_report.pdf McDermott, N.  A. (2020). The problem with parenting: How raising children is changing across America. ABC-CLIO. Moreton, C. (2013, June 8). Claire Perry MP: ‘Parents, take back control’. The Daily Telegraph. O’Briant, D. (2003, August 11). Millennials: The next generation. LifeCourse Associates. https://www.lifecourse.com/media/articles/ lib/2003/081103-­tajc.html Palmer, S. (2006). Toxic childhood: How modern life is damaging our children … and what we can do about it. Orion. Palmer, S. (2007). Detoxing childhood: What parents need to know to raise happy, successful children. Orion. Roiphe, K. (2012, July 31). The seven myths of helicopter parenting. Slate. Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://slate.com/human-­interest/2012/07/ madeline-­levines-­teach-­your-­children-­well-­we-­are-­all-­helicopter-­parents.html Selingo, J. J. (2015, October 21). Helicopter parents are not the only problem: Colleges coddle students, too. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-­point/wp/2015/10/21/helicopter-­parents-­are-­not­the-­only-­problem-­colleges-­coddle-­students-­too/

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Skenazy, L. (2009). Free-range kids: Giving our children the freedom we had without going nuts with worry. Jossey-Bass. Somers, P., & Settle, J. (2010). The helicopter parent: Research toward a typology (Part I). College and University, 86(1), 18–24, 26–27. Wall, G. (2022). Being a good digital parent: representations of parents, youth and the parent–youth relationship in expert advice. Families, Relationships and Societies, 11(3), 340–355. Warner, J. (2006). Perfect madness: Motherhood in the age of anxiety. Vermilion. Warner, J. (2012, July 27). How to raise a child. The New York Times. https:// www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/books/review/teach-­your-­children-­well-­ by-­madeline-­levine.html Williams, J. (2012). Consuming higher education: Why learning can’t be bought. A&C Black.

PART III

Parenting and the Pandemic

CHAPTER 11

‘Parenting’ After Covid-19: When the Quantity of ‘Quality Time’ Becomes Untenable Charlotte Faircloth, Katherine Twamley, and Humera Iqbal

Introduction This first chapter in Part III of this book draws on a research study into family life in the UK during Covid-19, Families and Communities in a Time of Covid-19 (FACT Covid-19) (Twamley et  al., 2023a). It was a mixed-methods longitudinal study with 38 families with children living at home, resident in various parts of the UK, conducted during the height of the pandemic, in May 2020–June 2021. In what follows, the chapter discusses the categorical assumptions about parenting the handling of the The FACT-COVID study, led by Katherine Twamley (PI) with Humera Iqbal and Charlotte Faircloth as Co-Is, is a project based at UCL which has examined the impact of Covid-19 on family life. The UCL team also led an international consortium (ICo-FACT) of ten countries around the world united by similar research questions and methodological approaches. See https://fact-­covid. wixsite.com/study for further information. In this chapter, Charlotte Faircloth, one of the original authors of Parenting Culture Studies, collaborates with Twamley and Iqbal in analysing the FACT-COVID data to elucidate some of the theoretical trends in ‘parenting’ that the pandemic engendered. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Lee et al., Parenting Culture Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44156-1_11

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pandemic entrenched and those which it disrupted. During UK lockdowns (and those found in many other countries), the boundaries that underpin ‘parenting’ were blurred. Our argument is that the closure of educational and childcare settings, and a ‘locking down’ of families in their homes exacerbated the intensified, individualized, highly gendered expectations around parenting and made ever more clear the logic of ‘parental determinism’ discussed in Parenting Culture Studies. However, space also opened up for a push-back against expectations of ‘intensive’ motherhood. Specifically, the research revealed that ‘parenting’ as a concerted, ‘quality time’ based approach to child-rearing (that is, time which is maximized for the benefit of children’s development) depended to a large extent on a separation of adults and children (into the worlds of work and education), a division which was shattered during lockdown. Not only was an ‘intensive’ approach to parenting revealed to be practically difficult, it was also ideologically challenged by parents, albeit in stratified and complex ways. Some of these findings strongly resonate with other research documenting that parents around the world shouldered an almost impossible burden of managing the care and education of their children whilst often trying to continue with paid work (Twamley et  al., 2023a). This burden affected women, those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and families of children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) disproportionately. Their roles not only ‘expanded’ as never before, but their place as ‘risk managers’ became more highly pronounced as they navigated the complex terrain of ensuring their children’s welfare during a global pandemic without any practical support, a phenomenon related to the concept the FACT team discuss elsewhere as ‘Covid Labour’ (Twamley et al., 2023b). At the same time, lockdown was a context where the limits of parental determinism had to be recognized: parents simply could not always have ‘intensive’ oversight of their children, especially when dealing with competing demands of paid work or making do with limited finances. We go on to show how, in a practical sense, this collapsed the idea of ‘quality time’ as the time in which parents ‘go the extra mile’ for their children (Lareau, 2003; Nelson, 2010) and that, more ideologically, many parents also pushed back against the edicts of intensive parenting, which they described as not only impractical but also increasingly undesirable. Indeed, corroborating findings from a recent ‘Family Review’ by the UK Children’s Commissioner (2022), there was some evidence that many parents and children enjoyed spending less ‘intensive’ time with one another and reported better experiences of family life after lockdown than before. This evidence raises questions around what enabled those ideals of ‘intensive parenting’ to be challenged during the pandemic (or what caused them to endure).

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We also discuss what parents had to say about ‘experts’ and ‘support’. Lockdown included an almost complete, pervasive withdrawal of practical ‘face-to-face’ support to parents (whether from social workers, health visitors, care workers teachers, or otherwise). What did parents make of this? As demonstrated most vociferously by parents of children with SEND in the FACT study, they appear to have felt ‘abandoned’. Common to all parents, however, was communication of the value of support that is practical in nature (schools, playgrounds, playgroups, medical appointments, etc.). Almost no one discussed missing parenting ‘advice’ or ‘parenting support’ programmes. The chapter covers the UK context and policy response to Covid-19, before moving to review work both on ‘parenting’ in general and during lockdown specifically. It then presents the FACT study, discussing findings around what lockdown entrenched in terms of parenting (a privatized, expanded role, fraught with risk management) and what it disrupted (the moralized and tribalized segregation of parents, thereby forging an increased sense of freedom and solidarity, in parts). It considers the implications of this for reproduction as a social and political project as we ‘build back’ from here.

Covid and the UK Policy Response That the Covid-19 pandemic had an impact on family life hardly needs stating. For the first time in the post-industrialized era, the main institutions of social life (including education, care, and work) were pushed largely into the home, causing huge ruptures to daily routines. This exposed ever further the assumptions about care, work, gender, and generation around which family life revolves—at the same time as revealing wider disparities relating to class and ethnicity, which determined different households’ abilities to cope with ‘lockdown’. In this section, we give a brief overview of the UK context and the Covid-19 policy response to set the scene for what follows. The first of three national ‘lockdowns’ was initiated on the 23 March 2020. Although the four nations of the UK (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) set their own policies in relation to public health responses, there was mostly convergence. Crucially for our purposes, in the first lockdown, all schools and childcare settings were closed, except for the children of workers in essential services. A ‘stay-at-home order’ was introduced with a ban on all non-essential travel and contact with people from outside one’s household. Those with Covid-like symptoms were told to self-isolate at home.

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Such an approach revealed assumptions on the part of policymakers around the composition and safety of households. It assumed that families live together under one roof, when in fact it is not uncommon for couples to live in independent households (Duncan et al., 2014), nor for children to live separately from a parent (ONS, 2022). On the other hand, in some households, several families, generations, and/or individuals may share a home or other communal spaces, making self-isolating and shielding measures almost impossible to realize (Bambra et  al., 2020; Burns et  al., 2021). The measures also appeared to assume that parents would be able to both look after and educate or supervise the education of children while continuing to participate in paid work, something particularly challenging for single parent families. Partly in recognition of this, on 13 June 2020, ‘Bubbles’ were introduced to enable those who live alone to create support bubbles with other households, with a gradual expansion over the ensuing months for families across multiple households (Gov.uk, 2020). A steady re-opening of schools and childcare providers started in June 2020, with a full opening in September. A second lockdown was then initiated in November 2020 for one month in parts of the UK, but with schools and childcare facilities remaining open. Restrictions mostly centred around leisure facilities. The third lockdown occurred in January 2021 for three months. Once again schools were closed to all but the children of key workers, though nurseries remained open in recognition of the specific difficulties experienced by parents of young children in combining paid work and care, specialist education providers were able to open to all children registered, the definition of ‘key worker’ expanded to allow more parents to send their children to school. In reality, though, many childcare institutions had to close either temporarily or permanently due to frequent infections among staff and children as well as chronic financial losses (NDNA, 2021). Support for families and children focused on financial assistance for and through business institutions via wage subsidies and tax holidays. A Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme—‘Furlough’—provided employers with a means to cover 80% of employees’ salaries while they were unable to work. As we explore below, there is evidence that mothers were more likely to be offered and to request furlough, further entrenching gendered work inequalities (Andrew et al., 2020). Parents living with young children and women generally reported higher levels of stress (Shum et al., 2021; Pierce et al., 2020). This is likely to be a consequence of the greatly increased domestic and childcare work, which was provoked once childcare institutions were shut, and the responsibility for overseeing

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educational attainment through ‘home schooling’. A time-use study published by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) found that in the first UK national lockdown, parents were doing childcare during nine hours of the day and housework during three (Andrew et al., 2020). (For more on the mechanisms which lead to such differing outcomes and commentary on experiences of the pandemic, see Twamley et al., 2023b). What might be said about how this context modified parenting and its meaning?

Parenting and Lockdown Back in Part I of this book, a new culture of ‘parenting’ was discussed as itself dependent on the emergence of a new way of understanding childhood, as a distinct phase of life set apart from the adult world. Modern understandings of what it means to be a mother or a father are grounded in this distinct social construction of ‘childhood’, which was established from the late nineteenth century onwards. ‘Parenting’ as opposed to ‘child-rearing’, thus draws on the privatization of the responsibility for children away from the dangers of wider community. But it is also foundational to the reasons for schools and nurseries as we have come to know them to exist, in recognition that the state has a role in the ‘education’ and ‘care’ of children. However, considering our comments which follow, this might also be understood as part of the backdrop to a more recent ‘intensive’ parenting culture: in normal times, parents do not have sole responsibility for the education and care of their children, as such providing the setting in which an idea of ‘quality time’ or ‘intensive’ parenting can flourish (Lareau, 2003). Intensive parenting, as explored in this book, has a strong ethos around ‘optimizing’ the child, and is also strongly influenced by a consciousness of risk and is formed around an idea of the parent as risk-manager, replete with a multi-million-pound industry of advice and support around the imperative of child development and safety (see Chaps. 2 and 4 for more on this). The context of the pandemic inevitably provoked further privatization of child-rearing, given the collapsing of the worlds of children and of adults it entailed. The majority of children were no longer sent out of the home for care by others or for education, and adults were no longer leaving the home for work. For most families with nursery and school-aged children, this was a huge shift. Some have argued that the policy response to supporting families was weak in the UK, with the almost total removal of in-person services to families—not only those concerning education and childcare but also health visiting and social services (Cameron et al.,

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2022). However, this did not mean there was an automatic reduction in the expectations around parenting or the responsibilities of parents (either from others or from themselves). Parents and children were suddenly together 24/7, but with the expectation that schooling and work could continue, and that parents would (or should) be able to maintain ‘intensive’ oversight and input into their activities (while also working on their own personal development; see Gill & Orgad, 2022). Nevertheless, the practical reality of parenting as a ‘quality time’ activity in the hours around school or childcare (albeit typically with a lot of ‘cognitive labour’ in the background (Daminger, 2019)) was no longer tenable without the scaffolding of external childcare support. It was just not physically possible for parents to maintain this level of intensive input into their children’s activities. As Suckert notes, ‘Most families were already aware of how tightly calculated their time budgets are. Now, in the midst of the crisis, those budgets have been torn to pieces’ (2021, p. 1172). Not surprisingly then, numerous studies have shown that, around the world, this was a highly testing period for parents used to ‘parenting’. Parents, mothers especially, were left with residual idealistic expectations around parenting but with no material support to enact it. As such, the research suggests, it was a period which reconfigured ideals around parenting—in ways that were both positive and negative, and which created space for a remaking of relations between parents and children. Bailey argues, writing about an online mothering community in the UK, that because families were ‘locked down’ in their homes, the ability to parent intensively in the traditional way (for example, through arranging extra-­ curricular activities outside of the home outside school hours) was removed: Covid-19 lockdown in the UK removed the means to enact intensive mothering through Lareau’s (2011) concerted cultivation. No longer did mothers’ lives revolve around arranging a smorgasbord of extra-curricular stimulation for their children. (2022, p. 686)

In the US, Cummins and Brannon suggest that for their participants at least, this meant that there was some cause for hope: Mothers are not focusing solely on their children, searching out expensive, expert guidance on how to move through COVID-19. Instead, mothers are making life work with what they have, learning to relax old routines to

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establish new ones and creating a new balance. This novel way of parenting challenges intensive motherhood, perhaps creating a shift in how the normative discourse demands unpaid care work moving forward as mothers navigate this liminal space. (2022, p. 134)

International collaborators in the ICo-FACT study (the ten-country study led from London based on similar qualitative research with families around the world1) echoed these observations (Twamley et al., 2023a); in Argentina, for example, many mothers spoke of enjoying this time together and the sense of agency they developed through being able to spend more time with their children in their role as mothers (de Santibanes & Marzonetto, 2023). Bailey, however, is less optimistic, pointing out that this shift did not translate into a direct ‘relaxation’ for parents, as mothering remained ‘intensive’: This was replaced by an expectation that parents (usually mothers) rearrange their lives around the full-time education of their children, and shoulder the additional burden of guarding the mental health of their families. Their identities continued to revolve around the cruel optimism (Berlant 2011) that they could raise a perfect child. (2022, p. 686)

In the move to remote learning (or ‘home schooling’, as it was termed in the UK), she argues that ‘lockdown learning constituted intensive mothering endorsed and normalised by the machinery of government’ (Bailey, 2022, p. 686). The focus of the FACT study (in the UK) was on how everyday life shifted for families with children in response to government COVID-­ related guidelines. What happens to ‘parenting’ when the usual scaffolds to it fall away? We drew on a family practices perspective (Morgan, 2011) that moves the focus from family as ‘household’ or ‘institution’ onto the ‘doing’ of family in everyday life, to enable a dynamic and responsive consideration of how individuals create, maintain, and/or disrupt a sense or meaning of family. A relational approach was embedded in our research design to pay attention to the practices that are negotiated across and between connected individuals that inform life in  lockdown. We used a mixture of research methods in our work with 38 families from across ethnic and socio-economic background in all four areas of the UK, employing a combination of interviews and online diary entries, which were analysed thematically. Each participant family was given a

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flower-­based pseudonym (further information about data collection, sampling, and analytical approach is detailed in Faircloth et al. (2022)). How did our research through FACT-Covid-19 shed further light on parenting and the pandemic?

Familiar Challenges Exacerbated To begin discussion of what emerged from our research, here is an extended quote from Zenobia Mum who is a married, professional mother of a 16-month-old child: The biggest challenge was balancing childcare and work. Our toddler used to be in nursery from 8am-5pm, and now he was at home 24/7 and we were both working too. The only way we could manage was to stagger our start and end times, so I’d start work at 7:30am and break at 12:30 and then pick up again after dinner for a couple of hours. My husband would start at 12:30 and break at 7:30 and then pick up again after dinner until late at night … My work load was reducing as a result of the lockdown but his was increasing and so I found myself having to step in to help with childcare and home during my work hours as well because he’d be pulled into critical meetings. That was annoying and stressful because I felt I wasn’t being a good employee if I cheated on work hours (albeit there wasn’t much to be done) and I wasn’t being a good mother if I didn’t step in for my son … Also I was very aware of the fact that I had absolutely no time at all for myself and was spending all my time making sure everyone else was looked after! Keeping my son stimulated with varied activities and planning healthy meals—two things we didn’t really have to spend too much time thinking about since the nursery took care of them—suddenly became top and front of mind. I found myself having to spend a lot of time brainstorming meal ideas and prepping and cooking and researching activity and toy ideas… Overall, I think I put a lot of pressure on myself in those early days when life suddenly changed to be the perfect parent and I was quite stressed about whether I was making the right choices and doing enough for my son’s health and development—physical, mental and emotional. And I felt I was parenting alone since my husband was very busy with work. So strange as it may sound, when my employer announced they were furloughing several people I wasn’t entirely surprised (seeing how business had dipped) and in a way I was relieved because I wouldn’t be pulled in 4 different directions anymore. With the work equation taken out, it was just my son and home, and I thought of it as an opportunity to focus on myself after the months

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and months of childcare responsibilities whilst I had been on maternity leave. There was a small niggling worry about the future and whether furloughing would mean a redundancy eventually… And I don’t feel guilty about not being able to parent well anymore because I’m able to give my son enough time. So daily life has changed in a big way but it feels more peaceful and structured now and I feel more in control and on an open road.

Zenobia Mum clearly communicates an experience of the privatization of parenting and its expansion. She talks about the need to think about basic requirements for her son’s care (like making meals for him or keeping him safely occupied) that the closure of formal childcare has left her and her husband responsible for, meaning they were unable to carry out their paid work as before. She tells us of its demanding character, describing her orientation towards parenting (arguably a validation of the kind of ‘intensive’ parenting described by Hays) and why the situation with lockdown was so challenging, despite their affluent circumstances. For some other parents, notably those in stable financial households with a stay-at-­ home mother, the onset of lockdown was apparently welcomed for the time it afforded to realize intensive parenting ideals, as expressed here by Begonia Mum: There are many positive things for my children in this lockdown. I dedicate myself to them almost entirely and I’m led by their needs and wants.

However, even Begonia Mum struggled to maintain this positive outlook over the course of the three lockdowns, as we describe further below, as we elaborate three key dimensions of parenting in the pandemic as observed in our data. The Privatization of the Parenting Role: Educational Needs Whilst pre-pandemic there was an ideological ‘privatization’ of child-­ rearing (for example, an assumption that the family would ‘go the extra mile’ in ensuring optimal care within and around formal settings), now there was also a literal privatization of care. The usual support systems for parents were limited, and childcare and education were fully ‘privatized’ to the extent that (in the beginning of lockdown at least) only household members, not even family members, were allowed to care for children in

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that household. This put enormous strain on parents, particularly solo parents or those living separately from co-parents (post-divorce, for example) or those who relied on non-residential grandparental care. As we explore further below, class and gender were key axes of the stratification in how parents weathered this. However, whilst Covid-19 and the impact of three national lockdowns affected all parents, arguably the group who were most affected were those with children who have Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND). We use their case as a means of magnifying the pressures faced by all parents. Many of these pupils were out of childcare/school for a great proportion of the pandemic, and even pupils with Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs), legal document that provides for additional support in both mainstream and specialist provisions, had their learning disrupted even when this was not meant to have happened (see Coram, 2021). The Holly family was one such family. They are a mother and father with an eight-year-old son who has autism. Holly Mum does not work and looks after their son, who normally attends a special school full-time. The father works for a large retailer and as a freelance journalist. During the first lockdown, the son’s school was shut down (despite, as above, the advice that children with ECHP should continue to be provided for). Eventually, it re-opened, but only for three half-days a week. In our interview, Holly Mum describes life with her son: he cannot be left alone for a moment because he is ‘hyper’ and ‘has no sense of danger’. If she leaves him alone to go to the loo, for example, she regularly comes back to find he has made a mess, or if he goes to the toilet on his own, he might ‘eat some soap or something’. She has absolutely no time to herself. She used to find some solace in taking him out of the house to parks or similar, but now with ‘the virus’ and his unpredictability (licking playground equipment or eating things from the floor, etc.), they confine themselves to their home. When the research team enquire how she is coping, she says the following: C: So how would you say you have been coping since lockdown? Would you say you have felt more anxious or upset or…? HM: Yes, yes. Because you don’t have time for yourself, that’s the thing. And when you have an autistic child, with no help, it is very ­difficult. You’re just alone in a way. There’s only three of us, there’s no-where to go, no-where to meet anyone, so it’s not easy, yes.

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She also makes clear that she feels the government was failing under its duty of care. She says several times, for example, that she feels children with SEND should be offered an extra year of schooling and that this is something she is actively campaigning for. Another mother (Kiwi Mum) of a child with disabilities says much the same: …my son has disabilities of Autism, dyslexia and epilepsy. This means medication has to be monitored regularly, he needs to eat on time, the constant change has been a huge struggle. He tried to take his life in May and we have been coping with the fallout from that as well as working etc. To be [f]rank this has been one of the hardest periods in the last 5 years since he was diagnosed.

These examples capture all too tragically the impact of this exacerbated privatization of ‘parenting’—far from raising the next generation being a social responsibility supported by the wider social infrastructure (through schools, occupational therapy, medical appointments, or similar), it became the responsibility for the (biological) parents within the confines of their own home. The toll of this during the pandemic for all parents, but particularly those with SEND, was palpable. The Expansion of the Parenting Role: Accounting for New Risks With the closure of schools and nurseries in the UK, it was clear that parents (or mothers) were also having to do more and ‘expand’ their role like never before. However, the possibility of the contraction of the role through a level of re-opening was perceived differentially, generated varying responses, and central to them was understanding of risk. Take, for example, these two quotes from mothers about whether to send their children back to nursery or school in June 2020, when schools and nurseries had been closed to only a limited number of children during the first lockdown: Magnolia Mum: We have been waiting eagerly for [our son’s] nursery to reopen, and we got the update last Friday that it will reopen on July 13th. Both [my husband] and I are confident that it is the right time to send [our son] back to nursery for two reasons: (1) [He] needs socialising and proper schooling, (2) Both [my husband] and I need to get back to normal working hours and

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arrangements. Especially myself, I need a break from childcare! We discussed the timing of retuning to nursery with 3 of [our son’s] best nursery friends’ family. At the time of that discussion (May 20th), 2 of families were not comfortable sending kids back to nursery. [We] and another family felt that we were ready. I have confidence in my decision because confirmed numbers in London are dropping steadily (although with the recent protests, things may change). The society and lives need to get back to normal somehow so sending kids back to school is one of the first steps. Orchid Mum:

I don’t think it’s the right time to go back to school for most children. The risk of virus transmission is still too high. I think the government in England are motivated more by the impact on the economy of parents being off work than by just about anything else. Their second focus around schools seems to be on the academic progress of children/young people, which I also think is really misguided. The priority should be on supporting children and young people, especially the most vulnerable ones, and their families. Childcare should be available for children of keyworkers, but more important a focus for the others is about relationships and social connections which children need for their development. This is not only about the youngest children (who seem to be the focus of ‘return to school’ policy, presumably because the older ones can supposedly look after themselves when their parents go back to work), but teenagers desperately need that too.

It was argued earlier (see Chap. 2) that the expansion of parenting time was not down to material changes in the health and safety of children (if anything, they are healthier and safer than ever before). Rather, that the intensification of parenting and its expansion temporally is an outcome of changing perceptions of children. Children, it was argued, have come to be seen as highly ‘vulnerable’ to risks impacting on physical and emotional development. In other words, what is considered to constitute a risk, in

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the sense of a threat or danger, has expanded to encompass a far larger number and variety of childhood experiences. Indeed, it has been argued that ‘adversity’ in childhood altogether is now considered a risk, rather than ‘part of growing up’. As a corollary, the parental role is understood— by policymakers, parenting experts, and parents themselves—as entailing responsibility for managing and reducing risk. In the context of the pandemic, this background clearly had an important effect on parental subjectivities, with confused and divergent responses. A general sense of being ‘at risk’ was certainly magnified, and in the initial stages, when the effects of contracting the virus were most poorly understood, this encompassed children (Murray, 2022). Yet it also became apparent rapidly that the medical risk to most children from the virus itself was low, with its health effects characterized by dramatic patterning by age (Murray, 2022). This meant that definitions of risk to children came to compete; mothers made weighing up risks central to how they considered whether and when childcare should re-open, with fears about doing so expressed strongly by Orchid Mum, above, but this is framed very differently by Magnolia Mum. There was also more to developments in the construction of risk, however, as Jennie Bristow discusses in the following chapter. Competition was not only between children being ‘at risk’ from the virus or not, but came to include children defined as ‘the risk’. Children were often understood as the most likely vectors between public spaces (such as schools and childcare settings) and the domestic sphere (where they posed a risk to other household members). This construction of risk clearly had important implications for understandings of care and generation. However, it also posed questions about the relationship of authority between individual families and the state: Was it more of a risk to send children to school (and risk catching Covid) or not (and risk their educational and social development)? And what does this sort of need for risk-assessment do to the experience of parents? One of the main findings in the FACT study, therefore, was that the pandemic prompted a wave of what we called ‘Covid Labour’ (Twamley et al., 2023b); the extra work involved in living through and adjusting to a pandemic, with responding to risk at its centre. It became clear that parents were living in a context where they were not only tasked with looking after and educating their children in testing conditions. They were also constantly having to weigh up the ‘risks’ to their children’s development from, for example, lack of routine and peer interaction when they were not

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attending school. For parents in the FACT-Covid study, this risk calculation was one of the things they were most pre-occupied with, as they weighed up the respective pluses and minuses of various approaches. Intensive Parenting Ideals and ‘Falling Short’: Class and Gender It is recognized that 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). ‘Ideal’ parenting practices can be mobilized especially in a class-­ based way, sometimes with little appreciation for material circumstances. Jensen’s work (2018), for example, shows how what she called ‘crisis talk’ around parenting has been used to police and discipline working-class families who are considered to be morally deficient and socially irresponsible. Nelson draws attention centrally to the classed differences in the internalization of the ‘intensive’ parenting ideology (2010), as do Gillies (2009) and Lareau (2003). The findings from the FACT study are particularly stratified according to class, which was the main axis by which parental experience could said to be divided—access to resources including space, money, and time were key. Where middle class parents talked about the increased opportunity for ‘quality time’ and ‘bonding’, as well as a nice ‘break from the crazy schedule’ (Kalmia Mum), in lower-class households there was far greater anxiety about catching covid and the impact that might have not only on income but also on care. One solo mother, Elderberry Mum, in receipt of Universal Credit as her income source, spoke openly about her fears of becoming so ill that she would be unable to care for her 11- and 6-year-old and her 3-month-old baby. Resources, in short, strongly influenced the experience of the pandemic (see Faircloth et al., 2022for more on this). So, if ‘intensive’ oversight of home-schooling was a struggle for those in affluent homes where devices and Wi-Fi access were plentiful, in lower-­ income households, it seemed a ludicrous expectation that it could happen at all. Mallow Mum described her living set up as a solo parent to three children aged 11, 10, and 6, in a tower block with no outdoor space. She had one mobile phone to use for all three children’s online learning, which she said she found intensely ‘stressful’ to the extent that she just sort of ‘gave up’ with it. There was no support from her school beyond printing out a few worksheets once a week, the collection of which was so complicated, with all the added risk assessment involved, that she didn’t

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continue with trying to make it there. Crucially, however, this inability to make progress with ‘home learning’ was still something she said she felt ‘guilty’ about. Class differences in orientation have been widely observed in parenting styles—as have individual differences throughout social classes. The problem so clearly brought to light through the pandemic, however, is that intensive parenting is assumed and culturally validated, meaning that the vast majority of parents, regardless of class (or ethnic background), will be left feeling that they are deficient. This was particularly the case where an ‘ideal’ of a parent promoted in ‘advice’ literature was simultaneously able to work from home and/or oversee childcare and home-learning was presented as both an ideal but also achievable goal, even if this was clearly not possible for the vast majority. Guilt was, therefore, an overwhelming finding of the study as a result, demonstrated by this quote from Kalmia Mum, an academic, talking about how often her children used screens during lockdown: We don’t have set times they can be on there [on screens] for. I sometimes feel guilty about this. I think they have an unhealthy relationship like an addiction. They use the screens to relax and achieve down time. If they can’t go on them they are grumpy. What makes me feel the worst is that often if I suggest something else with me they jump at the chance—to go on the trampoline or play a game. So I feel like if I did more stuff with them they would go on them less. Or if I imposed more rest there just never seems like time. So that’s what makes me feel bad. (Kalmia Mum)

It was not the case that parents were unaware about the ‘unprecedented period’ they were coping with, or open to ‘giving themselves a break’ about the highly idealistic standards of intensive parenting. However, it is also obvious that the ideals of intensive parenting had been internalized, such that even in extreme circumstances not living up to them was something to reflect on. Hays observed that the most obvious difference in responses to the ideology of intensive parenting are in terms of gender. Women are acknowledged as the ones who carry a heavier burden for ‘parenting’: carrying the ‘mental load’ for the management of parenting responsibilities, as well as often the ‘caring for’ activities of childcare (the laundry, cooking, shopping, etc.), where men tend to focus on the ‘caring about’ activities (reading, playing, ‘quality time’, etc.). It has been documented how this

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impacted on working patterns in the pandemic. For every one hour of uninterrupted paid work done by mothers, fathers were doing three hours; and the only time mothers and fathers reported undertaking the same amount of unpaid work was when a father had been furloughed, and the mother was continuing to do her paid job (Sevilla et al. 2020). In total, this suggests mothers were doing a higher amount of combined paid and unpaid work. In the FACT study, gender emerged most obviously in accounts of discussions around which partner took most responsibility for ‘homeschooling’. The evidence from the study is that women felt more pressure to perform good parenting (mothering) than men. Croton Mum said, for example: We have tried to split the childcare and homeschooling. This is a nightmare. My husband is stressed and does fewer activities with them. I am the dragon who insists on things (don’t overeat, do some exercise do some school work, don’t watch TV etc.)

And Kalmia Mum commented: The worst is when he takes the afternoon off and he’s supposed to do more lessons. He doesn’t do them. The kids just sit around on the screens and he reads his phone. Every time I come down to get a cup of tea the kids beg me to play with them or go on the trampoline. I end up feeling bad and doing stuff with them when I’m supposed to be working. (Kalmia Mum).

Such accounts demonstrate the intransigence of gendered norms around parenting, even during a global pandemic.

Pushing Back Against Intensive Parenting? The discussion so far generally points to an entrenchment of intensive parenting. Yet there was also evidence of a rupturing of or ‘pushing back’ against the unrealistic demands of an intensive parenting culture. Quince Mum, for example, said: Bedtime—this stretched into the early hours during lockdown. In the one hand I was keen that we didn’t lose sight and contact with (my child] if she ended up being up and alone on the internet all night. On the other hand,

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there seemed no reason to enforce. And actually what a once in a lifetime chance to just do nothing much for 6 months!

Croton Mum told us: One of the things that I realised was how stressed out I was by the children’s clubs and taking them to places and how much pressure I was putting myself under that they needed to do these things. And actually now I think, I think, they’ll probably be alright.

Even Begonia Mum, who expressed her initial enthusiasm to ‘dedicate herself’ to her children in lockdown one, expressed much more ambivalence and exhaustion by June 2021, indicating, like many parents, how their experiences changed over time (Twamley et al., 2023c). She said: I’d always very actively made the choice to be at home. [But] I just didn’t leave the kitchen [during lockdown]. You know, it’s just in there from sort of seven till and would eat something and collapse on the sofa. So I have a curiosity about the impact of that, of the experience of women that you know did that and have been left, maybe jobless or without the competence that they had or, you know, feeling a sort of sense of resentment, and they might not have felt before.

For many parents, Lockdowns 2 and 3 were experienced as particularly challenging. The novelty of the pandemic and the opportunity to spend more time with children became increasingly difficult to sustain, as participants began to wonder when and if an end to lockdowns might ever occur. It was evident in some accounts, for example, that parents were simply unable to ‘intensively’ care for their children and oversee their education and nutrition to these idealistic standards; and, indeed, that they enjoyed not trying to keep up with the usual standards. Children also told us that they enjoyed this less regimented time during lockdowns for the space it afforded them to relax with their parents and siblings (Carroll et  al., 2022). Instead, there emerged a discourse of ‘doing what it takes to get through’ and ‘not worrying’ about, for example, screen time. There were also tales of ‘parenting fails’ shared with humour and solidarity, intimating a kind of grim parental solidarity in tough times. The Sun newspaper reported this in the following way:

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Mums are sharing hilarious memes to try and capture what it really means to be a full-time parent who is also juggling the roles of teacher, cleaner, cook and housekeeper since the coronavirus crisis began. (Hawken, 2020)

It has been suggested this reaction was somewhat double-edged, however. Bailey (2022), from her analysis of online forums, notes that mothers tended to endorse the messages of intensive motherhood in the same breath that they held it up for ridicule: ‘In other words, they reject intensive mothering only after demonstrating their attempts to pursue it to its (il)logical conclusion’ (2022, p. 687). This was also evident in the accounts we collected: women on the one hand holding up idealistic portrayals of motherhood for ridicule and speaking of their liberating from them, at the same time as continuing to tacitly endorse them. It was the wealthier mothers who had more scope to reject these ideals without worrying so much about being judged as ‘poor mothers’, whilst those from lower income households were less able to uphold these ideals anyway (more out of necessity than of choice). Interesting responses also emerged where parents told us about ‘support’. It was clear they were unable to access support in the usual way, and there was a move to remote forms of contact with professionals. There was also anxiety on the part of policymakers about the impact of this aspect of the pandemic on both children and parents—there were numerous concerns voiced about how it would lead to children ‘coming to school in nappies’ or ‘forgetting how to talk’ from having spent too much time at home and not enough time in structured education and socialization (DayNurseries, 2020). Many of the parents we worked with did find the collapse of interaction with professionals to be a struggle, sometimes very distressingly so. In this case, although Bacopa Mum would have welcomed a remote interaction, even that was not forthcoming: My severely disabled daughter was a little bit ill during the pandemic. She is nonverbal so unable to tell us what if anything was wrong with her. She was out of form and had a high temperature. Myself and my children are prone to tonsillitis and ear and throat infections. It was at the weekend so I phoned the out of hours doctor on call. As my disabled daughter is at higher risk from Covid-19 I was not wanting to take my daughter into the out of hours surgery at that stage. My hope was that the doctor would leave her a prescription for antibiotics as a precautionary measure. (Bacopa Mum)

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Experience was not uniform, however. It was particularly those with children with SEND, where the absence of material support in the form of in-person care, education, and healthcare was palpable. In contrast, no parents mentioned missing expert advice or ‘parenting’ support per se (for example, in the form of guidance about ‘parenting’ or not having access to parenting classes). Tellingly, and hinting at the reduction in pressures to parent in an ‘intensive’ way, Grevilla Mum said: But now we were kind of all kind of bonding more as a family, like if that makes sense. There was nobody in the background to kind of bother us.

What this seems to show is that it was the social infrastructure that was missed, and which exacerbated a sense of isolation (rather than targeted micro-level parenting ‘programmes’). Pansy Mum put it this way: Easier to be a good parent when have had sleep, and when work hasn’t been too stressful and when the kids are playing ball. Lockdown affected it—kids around a lot more, no playdates, impetus all on parents to entertain them. Fun curtailed, a lot more indoors whilst they were trying to do housework. More stressful environment etc.

It was especially outdoor spaces such as playgrounds, communal indoor spaces, and material help with childcare and education that were most missed (and appreciated when it returned). This is an important message for policymakers to hear about what a supportive parenting culture entails and what it does not.

Conclusions The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted care relations as the boundaries of people’s public and private lives were blurred. Since families began to work and learn from home and were forced to stay indoors, the pre-established care ‘balances’ were destabilized, giving rise not only to changes in daily dynamics but also to reflections about the course of life in the long-term. We have suggested that the foundational (physical and ideological) separation of adults and children which makes ‘parenting’ culture possible was shattered during the pandemic. This re-trenched some elements of the experience (as a privatized, expanded, and moralized one) but also created space for push-back against some elements of an ‘intensive’ parenting

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culture where ‘quality time’ was no longer possible. Lockdown made visible the often-invisible labour of social reproduction (and how critical this is to a functioning economy). Whilst many found the collapsing of these worlds overwhelming as many of the familiar elements of ‘parenting’ intensified, some enjoyed the additional time together and being forced to take less ‘pressured’ approach to parenting. When the boundaries of school and work blurred, it was far from ideal, but it did at least reveal the underlying assumptions underpinning a more ‘intensive’ approach to parenting which were shown to be not only untenable but also undesirable. This ‘pushing back’ was, of course, more easily mitigated by those with plentiful resources, and that this intersects with wider forms of stratification, particularly gender and class. The context also revealed important aspects of what ‘support’ needs to mean. The pandemic provided a magnifying glass on these trends, at the same time as being a catalyst for cultural change.

Note 1. https://fact-­covid.wixsite.com/study/i-­cofact

References Andrew, A., Cattan, S., Costa Dias, M., Farquharson, C., Kraftman, L., Krutikova, S., Phimister, A., & Sevilla, A. (2020, July). The gendered division of paid and domestic work under lockdown. IZA Institute of Labor Economics. Retrieved February 7, 2023, from https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/13500/ the-­gendered-­division-­of-­paid-­and-­domestic-­work-­under-­lockdown Arendell, T. (2000). Conceiving and investigating motherhood: The decade’s scholarship. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 62(November), 1192–1207. Bailey, L. (2022). Constructions of good mothering during lockdown learning. Gender and Education, 34(6), 674–689. Bambra, C., Riordan, R., & Ford, J. (2020). The COVID-19 pandemic and health inequalities. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, 74, 964–968. Burns, N., Follis, L., Follis, K., & Morley, J. (2021). Moving target, moving parts—The multiple mobilities of the COVID-19 pandemic. In D. Lupton & K. Willis (Eds.), The COVID-19 crisis: Social perspectives (pp. 27–38). Routledge. Cameron, C., Hauari, H., Heys, M., Hollingworth, K., O’Brien, M., O’Toole, S., & Whitaker, L. (2022). A tale of two cities in London’s East end: Impacts of

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Covid-19 on low and high income families with young children and pregnant women. In K. Garthwaite, R. Patrick, M. Power, A. Tarrant, & R. Warnock (Eds.), COVID-19 collaborations researching poverty and low-income family life during the pandemic. Policy Press. Carroll, N., Twamley, K., Humera Iqbal, H., & Faircloth, C. (2022). Families & community in the time of Covid-19. Final report. University College London. Retrieved March 31, 2023, from https://b6b7a84e-­0774-­4c48-­962d-­3fee9f a e 7a ba . file s usr.c o m / u g d / 1 9 4 c 0 3 _ 5 5 0 a b 0 67b1b5416d9561d7f 9 ef25748f.pdf Children’s Commissioner. (2022, September). Family and its protective effect: Family review. Children’s Commissioner’s Office. Retrieved March 31, 2023, from https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/resource/family-­and-­its­protective-­effect-­part-­1-­of-­the-­independent-­family-­review/ Coram Children’s Legal Centre. (2021). Coronavirus impact on EHC plans and children with SEN. Retrieved March 31, 2023, from https://www.childrenslegalcentre.com/coronavirus-­impact-­sen/ Cummins, M., & Brannon, G. (2022). Mothering in a pandemic: Navigating care work, intensive motherhood, and COVID-19. Gender Issues, 39, 123–141. Daminger, A. (2019). The cognitive dimension of household labor. American Sociological Review, 84(4), 609–633. DayNurseries.co.uk. (2020, November 10). Children regressed during lockdown returning to nurseries in nappies, says Ofsted. Retrieved March 31, 2023, from https://www.daynurseries.co.uk/news/ar ticle.cfm/id/1636877/ nursery-­children-­returned-­to-­settings-­in-­nappies-­and-­forgot-­how-­to-­use-­cutlery­warn-­ofsted Duncan, S., Phillips, M., Carter, J., Roseneil, S., & Stoilova, M. (2014). Practices and perceptions of living apart together. Family Science, 5(1), 1–10. Faircloth, C., Twamley, K., & Iqbal, H. (2022). ‘Er, not the best time’: Methodological and ethical challenges of researching family life during a pandemic. Families, Relationships and Societies: An International Journal of Research and Debate, 11(1), 39–43. Gill, R., & Orgad, S. (2022). Get unstuck!: Pandemic positivity imperatives and self-care for women. Cultural Politics, 18(1), 44–63. Gillies, V. (2009). Understandings and experiences of involved fathering in the United Kingdom: Exploring classed dimensions. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 624, 49–60. Gov.uk. (2020, September 9). Guidance: Making a support bubble with another household. Retrieved March 31, 2023, from https://www.gov.uk/guidance/ making-­a-­support-­bubble-­with-­another-­household Hawken, L. (2020, May 5). KID YOU NOT Mums share funny memes of life in lockdown, including kids non-stop snacking & a VERY relatable Quarantine Barbie. The Sun. https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/11553365/mums-­ lockdown-­memes-­snacking-­quarantine-­barbie/

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Twamley, K., Faircloth, C., & Iqbal, H. (2023b). COVID labour: Making a ‘livable’ life under lockdown. The Sociological Review, 71(1), 85–104. Twamley, K., Iqbal, H., Faircloth, C., & Carroll, N. (2023c). Inclusions and exclusions in personal life during the COVID-19 pandemic. In K.  Twamley, H. Iqbal, & C. Faircloth (Eds.), Family life in the time of COVID: International perspectives. UCL Press.

CHAPTER 12

From Safeguarding to Childism? Covid-19 and the School Closures Debate Jennie Bristow

Introduction This chapter explores what, at first sight, seemed to be a notable shift in the rhetoric of children’s welfare prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic. From the end of the twentieth century to the spring of 2020, the problem of caring for children had been framed according to the presumption that the most important outcome for children was keeping them safe from physical or emotional harm (Furedi, 2001). In policy terms, this presumption formed the basis of a regulatory agenda that sought to monitor potential threats to children’s welfare, which were seen to arise from risky people, such as adults in the community who had not been officially vetted or ‘licensed’, and risky practices, such as parental behaviours that did not conform to the safety-first orthodoxy. These behaviours ranged from forms of discipline, such as shouting or smacking (Reece, 2013), which were regarded as authoritarian, to lack of supervision over children’s independent mobility or play, which were regarded as recklessly relaxed (Guldberg, 2009; Skenazy, 2009). Chapter 5, ‘Who cares for children?’, examined the development of surveillance and regulation of contact between adults and children in the context of fears about child abuse, encapsulated by the safeguarding agenda developed in the 2000s. Because the imperative of child safety is driven by a generalized anxiety about the myriad dangers of contemporary life, it does not lead to a proscription on © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Lee et al., Parenting Culture Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44156-1_12

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particular people or practices; rather, it demands a state of hyper-vigilance regarding the potential for all situations to cause harm and gives rise to hyper-regulatory practices (Hunt, 2003). The background to the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK, then, was one in which an overarching concern with threats to children’s welfare— whether tangible or potential—dominated parenting culture and policy, and in which official institutions, such as schools, medical, and social services, were charged with hitherto unprecedented expectations for monitoring and safeguarding children’s well-being. As we suggest in Chap. 5, the dominant narrative was that children and young people were at risk from adults. However, during the pandemic, the focus on infectious disease, for which children and young people were considered unwitting (and often asymptomatic) vectors, became the basis for a narrative that presented them as posing a risk to adults; a claim that justified a range of social interventions with adverse impacts on children’s lives. The response to the pandemic brought an abrupt withdrawal of institutional engagement with, and oversight of, children, with schools entering prolonged periods of closure, health services reorganized to focus on containing the spread of Covid, and social services largely operating remotely—both in the sense of operating online and detached from schools. This apparent policy shift away from the prioritization of children’s welfare was accompanied by an abrupt turn in the cultural rhetoric around children. Where the safeguarding agenda focused on potential dangers posed to children by ‘unregulated’ adults, pandemic management strategies focused on the potential dangers posed to adults by ‘socialized’ children. This was especially pronounced in the US, where schools and children’s services are subject to a weaker degree of central governmental control, and different states adopted wildly divergent policies in relation to the imposition of social distancing measures. These debates took place within the context of a deeply polarized public life, and contestations over pandemic management strategies quickly became touchstones for the wider ‘culture wars’. Claims and concerns about children’s welfare and education were rapidly moralized and politicized. This chapter explores how the debates about school closures in the UK and the US during the pandemic, and the fraught debates surrounding their re-opening, revealed some profound tensions and contradictions raised by the question, ‘who cares for children?’. It focuses in particular on the ‘missing narrative’ about the importance of education as central to the responsibility adult society has to children, and indeed to its own future. While the impact of school closures and lockdowns on children’s physical

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and mental well-being became more widely discussed over time, the problem of the suspension of education has rarely been explicitly addressed in forms other than a concern about ‘catching up’ with curriculum content or managing inequalities in attainment. As such, the school closures debate reflected and extended pre-existing uncertainties about the transmission of knowledge and the purpose of socialization. The material for this chapter was collected over the course of an ongoing investigation of the impact of lockdowns upon young people. This began in Spring 2020, when I embarked on the project of writing a short book with my then 15-year-old daughter, whose GCSE exams had been abruptly cancelled (Bristow & Gilland, 2020). Throughout the pandemic, I continued to review debates about the form and consequences of school and University closures for children and young people internationally (see Bristow, n.d.). At the time of writing this chapter (February 2023), the Covid-19 pandemic was generally considered to be ‘over’, but with the social, economic, and educational consequences becoming increasingly apparent. Thus, I reflect on material ranging from early speculations about the impact of Covid-19 and ‘lockdown’ responses, discussed in our initial book, through to international data collected about the cumulative impact of school closures over the course of two years.

School Closures: Three Narratives Of all the restrictions introduced by national governments during the Covid-19 pandemic, the closure of schools, colleges and universities, and the impact of social distancing measures when they re-opened, provoked some of the most intense debates. The dominant narrative, particularly in the early stages of ‘lockdown’ during Spring and Summer 2020, held that such measures were necessary to protect public health. Alternative claims, which achieved greater prominence over the course of 2020 and 2021, questioned the extent to which the closure of educational institutions would reduce deaths from Covid-19 (Munro & Faust, 2020; Lewis et al., 2021) and/or emphasized the potential for negative impacts on young people’s physical and mental well-being. As time went on, concerns deepened about the impact of school closures on existing inequalities of class and race in access to education (Andrew et al., 2020; Dorn et al., 2020; Cattan et al., 2021). In Chap. 11, Charlotte Faircloth provides details about the form and duration of school closures in the UK, and the qualitative experience of

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parents and children. Chapter 12 focuses on three cultural narratives in the UK and US, which framed the purpose of school closures and their societal impact. The first—competing risks—was dominant in the early phase of the pandemic and sought to balance the potential harms caused by school closures against the risk that keeping schools open would fuel transmission of disease. The second—discrimination and ‘childism’— emerged in response to concerns that, as social distancing measures continued into late 2020 and beyond, the safety of adults was being prioritized over the welfare of children. The third—the educational impact—can better be regarded as a ‘missing narrative’. While international and national institutions became increasingly concerned about the amount of schooling lost and the limitations of remote-learning alternatives, attempts to articulate the problem of lost education tended to focus on the negative consequences for the engagement and attainment of individual children. There was little explicit attempt to articulate the moral and cultural problem of the withdrawal of education during a time of social crisis. Narrative 1: Competing Risks Initially, school closures took place largely uniformly, in line with the pattern of population-wide ‘lockdown’ measures introduced when the pandemic first broke. In April 2020, the World Bank reported that schools were closed in 180 countries, affecting around 85% of students globally. Even notable outliers on lockdown policies, such as Sweden, did not keep schools fully open during this period and required older students to pursue their studies online (World Bank, 2020a). As national governments took unprecedented public health measures to restrict the movement and activities of their citizens, the closure of educational facilities was not generally controversial. In the UK, for example, schools were approaching a two-week planned Easter break, fear of the virus was widespread, and while early data indicated that the risk of serious illness and death from Covid increased progressively with age, the effects of Covid on mortality and morbidity in children and young people had not been fully documented. Closing schools for a brief period was given justification as a pragmatic, precautionary measure, with fewer political and legal complexities than the travel bans, ‘stay at home’ orders, and the suspension of public life that rapidly followed. In Spring 2020, official decisions to close schools were also given justification by the need to provide clarity and reassurance to parents, who

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were fearful of sending their children to school and unsure how to follow guidance to keep their children home if they seemed unwell; and to teachers, who were concerned about their own risk of contracting the virus and potentially spreading it. Countries in which the technology existed to provide some form of ‘remote learning’, through the provision of electronic resources and online teaching, rapidly began to resource these activities with the expectation that children could continue to be educated while minimizing the risk of catching or spreading infection (UNESCO, 2022). The dynamic behind school closures during the early phase of the pandemic, then, was broadly in line with the safety-first ethos that underpinned the safeguarding agenda. The potential threat to children’s health loomed larger than the impact of school closures on children’s education, which was initially considered to be temporary and manageable with the use of technology. Schools were positioned as sites of danger, with the home as a place of safety. In April 2020, Kiera Butler of Mother Jones magazine reported anxious tweets by middle-class American parents. ‘No way we go back to a regular classroom without a vaccine’, wrote one. ‘We’ll be sending our kid to an online school. Not ideal but there’s too much of a risk otherwise, particularly in a deep red area where people aren’t adhering to most of the distancing guidelines’, said another (Butler, 2020). Where concern about school closures was articulated, it largely took the form of presenting competing risks to children’s welfare. In April 2020, researchers at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health noted that ‘the scale and speed of school closures are unprecedented globally’, yet there is limited evidence about the positive impact of this in limiting the spread of an infection such as Covid-19. On the other hand, school closures have some clear ‘adverse effects’, including: [E]conomic harms to working parents, healthcare workers, and other key workers being forced from work to childcare, and to society due to loss of parental productivity, transmission from children to vulnerable ­grandparents, loss of education, harms to child welfare, particularly among the most vulnerable pupils, and nutritional problems, especially to children for whom free school meals are an important source of nutrition. (Viner et al., 2020)

Such concerns were amplified over time, as schools’ central role as welfare institutions was highlighted. In the UK, a high-profile campaign by footballer Marcus Rashford, which called for the government to provide

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food vouchers during the school holidays to children in receipt of Free School Meals in term-time, focused attention on the dangers posed to children’s physical health by prolonged school closures (BBC, 2020). Others emphasized the dangers to children’s mental health. In a newspaper article headlined ‘Reopen the schools or a generation will bear the mental health scars’, Lee Hudson, consultant paediatrician and chief of mental health at Great Ormond Street Hospital, wrote in May 2020: I find myself coming back to the same question. Are we thinking about this the wrong way round—is it not more risky instead to keep our children at home? (Hudson, 2020)

By September 2020, the framework of competing risks to children’s welfare brought about by Covid-19 on one hand and school closures on the other formed the backdrop against which schools began to re-open, particularly in high-income countries. Yet re-opening came with a stringent set of new restrictions and regulations designed to safeguard public health, which explicitly impacted on the practice of schooling and implicitly altered the basis on which children were expected to engage. In the UK, for example, schools introduced a range of measures, from internal ‘one way’ systems to classroom ‘bubbles’ and staggered start times, with the aim of keeping children from different year groups apart from each other. Teachers were required to stand in a fixed position at the front of the classroom to limit their proximity to pupils; frequent use of hand sanitiser and wiping down furniture and equipment became a feature of classroom time; and requirements for pupils to wear masks and conduct Covid tests were gradually introduced. Rules about self-isolation and close contact isolation resulted in frequent absences by pupils and teachers, with schools expected to provide ‘catch up’ activities to children in these circumstances. In November 2020, the World Bank reported that ‘693 million children (approximately 40% of the global student population) are still impacted by school closures in 67 countries’ (World Bank, 2020b). From December 2020, another wave of Covid infections, precipitated by a new variant, threw the hesitant re-opening of schools into reverse in many countries: in the UK, schools would close again from January to March 2021. By this point, the competing risks narrative was placing greater emphasis on the negative impact on children. In January 2021, a coalition of child-health experts wrote to the UKObserver newspaper, warning that ‘children’s welfare has become a national emergency’ and arguing:

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The closure of schools has widened the yawning education gap and the spiralling numbers of young people suffering mental illness and psychological distress look certain to increase with every day that lockdown keeps them isolated and uncertain about their futures. (Feuchtwang et al., 2021)

However, despite growing disquiet, the ‘competing risks’ narrative clearly situated the risk of Covid-19 to the general population above other risks to children presented by prolonged school closures. This was evident even in the ‘re-opening’ phases, where educational institutions were required to prioritize public health regulations over and above the imperatives that had previously been considered central to school practice, such as high levels of attendance, interaction between children across the school, proactive engagement by teachers with pupils, and the monitoring of children’s welfare. As time went on, the implications of this shift in focus for child safeguarding became more widely discussed. In the autumn of 2022, headlines such as ‘How nearly 100000 “ghost children” have stopped going to school’ (Akass, 2022) and ‘One fifth of pupils “missing” from classrooms since pandemic’ (Turner, 2022) raised alarm about the number of children in the UK who were either being kept away from school by parents deciding to continue with homeschooling or who were simply absent and not accounted for. In June 2022, a report by Dame Rachel de Souza, the Children’s Commissioner for England, noted that 1.7 million children (almost 1 in 4) were regularly absent from school in Autumn 2021, more than double the figure of 1  in 9  in 2018/19. ‘This was exacerbated as there was no national picture of where children were and if they were attending school’, she wrote. ‘Local Authorities instead relied on time lagged and fragmented data, and in some cases, no data at all’ (Children’s Commissioner, 2022, p. 2). In the US, homeschooling has long been established as an alternative to public or private schooling, and has tended to be associated with affluent, white parents (Duvall, 2021). But the pandemic fuelled changes here too. In April 2022, PBS reported that across 28 states, all reported a spike in homeschooling rates in 2020–2021, ‘when fears of infection kept many school buildings closed’; and ‘of the 18 states whose enrollment data included the current school year, all but one state said homeschooling declined from the previous year but remained well above pre-pandemic levels’ (Thompson, 2022). Thompson’s article gave the example of Minnesota, which reported that 27,801 students were being

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homeschooled in 2022, compared to 30,955 during the previous school year, but compared to homeschool figures of around 20,000 before the pandemic. The article also noted that ‘Black families make up many of the homeschool converts’, with US Census surveys showing that, ‘The proportion of Black families homeschooling their children increased by five times, from 3.3% to 16.1%, from spring 2020 to the fall, while the proportion about doubled across other groups’. The article quotes a mother from Raleigh, North Carolina, who decided to homeschool her 7-, 10- and 11-year-old children: ‘I think a lot of Black families realized that when we had to go to remote learning, they realized exactly what was being taught. And a lot of that doesn’t involve us … My kids have a lot of questions about different things. I’m like, “Didn’t you learn that in school?” They’re like, “No.”’ (Cited in Thompson, 2022)

The reasons behind the rise in homeschooling since the pandemic are complex. As we discuss below, this phenomenon relates to deeper cultural conflicts about the meaning of education and the purpose of schooling that have developed in momentum over the pandemic period. But it also highlights both the contradictions and the continuities with the safeguarding agenda established prior to 2020. In the context of the pandemic, educational institutions were required to withdraw their regular oversight of children’s general welfare, either through closures or through a reorientation of focus on compliance with Covid restrictions. ‘Red flags’, such as non-attendance or observable changes in children’s health, behaviour, or engagement, were practically difficult to observe or act upon. In the community, legal restrictions on social mixing also stymied informal mechanisms to look out for children. One high-profile tragedy in the UK came to exemplify this problem. Six-­ year-­old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes was killed by his father and father’s partner in June 2020, following extreme acts of abuse. Although members of his extended family raised concerns, social services failed to intervene; the boy’s uncle was warned by police that he would be prosecuted for breaching Covid restrictions if he went near the home. Anne Longfield, England’s Children's Commissioner at the time, noted the impact of school closures and lockdown in limiting institutions’ ability to safeguard children:

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‘[A] lot of the services went on to the screens for children, and this child in particular, Arthur, wasn’t in school. And it’s much easier for families who want to evade view to do that when they haven’t got someone in the room. So there’s a big lesson there, instantly about if there is a crisis, there are children who are going to slip from view and we have to make sure they have the protection, which does need face to face contact.’ (Cited in Bland, 2021)

The Labinjo-Hughes case was widely and rightly regarded as a failure of institutional safeguarding. As we discuss below, vocal critics of the impact of school closures and lockdowns on children regarded such cases as evidence that societies, during Covid, had adopted a volte-face in their approach to children: suddenly switching from a concern to put children’s welfare first to one that actively downgraded children’s safety in favour of measures designed to protect adults. We suggest that the situation is more nuanced: that in fact, the ‘competing risks’ narrative was also an extension of the imperatives behind the safeguarding agenda. The pre-pandemic safeguarding narrative promoted the physical safety and psychological well-being of children above all other considerations. This contains its own tensions. As discussed in Chap. 5, one major unintended consequence of the focus on ‘risky’ adults was the hyper-awareness and regulation of interactions between adults and children, including the development of ‘no touch’ policies in early years settings, a heightened wariness on the part of parents about the interaction between their own children and other adults in the community, and an insecurity about how they themselves should interact with other people’s children. The imperative of safeguarding set enhanced expectations about the role that educational institutions should play in protecting children’s welfare and created new barriers to the achievement of that goal by regulating against the spontaneous exercise of adult responsibility. During the pandemic, the withdrawal of institutional oversight regarding children’s welfare can be seen as an unintended (albeit predictable) consequence of a regulatory safety-first approach that focuses on one overriding threat to the exclusion of other problems. The dynamic behind the school closures response contained, at least initially, a fear for children’s physical safety. As such, threats posed to children’s welfare by Covid-19 were considered equally to threats to adults’ welfare. This dynamic was itself problematic, as it indicated a deeper-seated problem: society’s struggle to differentiate between adults and children and to allow the conditions for the exercise of adult responsibility.

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Narrative 2: Childism and Discrimination Critics of school closures argued that this rhetoric dismissed children’s vulnerability to the physical and emotional harms caused by lockdowns and social distancing measures, and that it was indicative of a more fundamental shift in narratives about childhood: away from the assumption of society’s responsibility to protect children, towards a discriminatory perspective of ‘childism’, which actively promoted the welfare of adults over that of children (Cole & Kingsley, 2022). In the early days of the pandemic, Cole and Kingsley founded UsForThem, a UK parents’ campaign that lobbied energetically for the re-opening of UK schools and the removal of requirements for Covid testing and social distancing for children. The Children’s Inquiry, their account of this period, provides numerous examples of the ‘dehumanizing’ language used in relation to children during the pandemic, which ‘framed them as a danger rather than as vulnerable members of society to be cherished, nurtured and championed’ (Cole & Kingsley, 2022, p. 150). They point to ‘the ubiquitous use of the word “vector” to describe children and their “role in viral transmission” during the crisis’ (p. 150) and recount the extraordinary battles that took place between governments and teaching unions in the UK and the US around the questions of whether, when, and how schools should re-open. For example, in the UK, Dr Mary Bousted, Joint General Secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), condemned the government’s decision to prioritize younger children for returning to school on the grounds that this was the group least likely to be able to observe social distancing: children ‘who are mucky, who spread germs, who touch everything, who cry, who wipe their snot on your trousers or your dress’ (Daily Mail, 2020). When the UK government announced a third national lockdown in January 2021, with schools to be closed at least until 8 March, the NEU congratulated its members on a victory: We want to start by congratulating you all. It is never easy to stand up and be counted. It takes nerve and courage. But you did it. You stood up for your own safety, for your pupils, their families and your communities. (Cited in Craven, 2021)

In the US, pandemic rhetoric similarly focused on children as ‘vectors’ of viral contagion, resulting most visibly in demands for children to wear

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masks in schools and other public places for a prolonged period of time (Shalal, 2021), and also in polarized battles over school closures and re-­ openings. UNESCO data shows that in the US nationally, schools did not re-open fully until mid-February 2022 (UNESCO, 2022). However, this data masks significant variation by states, with some states not operating school closure orders and others ordering schools to open. The debate over masking and school closures also became more stridently polarized between Republican (‘red’) and Democrat (‘blue’) states, with ‘red’ states such as Florida keeping schools open over the objections of teachers’ unions, and ‘blue’ states such as California keeping public schools closed for up to 18 months (Cole & Kingsley, 2022, p. 131). The role played by teaching unions in the UK and US in demanding the closure of schools was significant for several reasons. In the early days of the pandemic, it represented a generalized sentiment of fear in which, as noted above, concerns about children’s safety featured highly. But in both the UK and the US, this rhetoric quickly assumed a politicized, and moralized, form. Attempts to open schools were framed as ‘reckless’ actions by the political right, that risked the health of education workers for the sake of economic objectives, while pandemic restrictions such as masking, testing, and school closures were presented as the more ‘progressive’, morally virtuous course of action. As we explore below, this polarization reflected and entrenched a longstanding current in the politicization of education via the entrenchment of the ‘culture wars’ and indicates a deeper insecurity about the purpose and importance of education as a social and moral project. However, teaching unions were not the only voices lobbying hard for school closures. In their discussion of childism, Cole and Kingsley point to a much more widely aired sentiment, aired by the media, policymakers, and the general public, that children presented a particular threat to public health. ‘Not only have [children] been disregarded by policymakers, and burdened by pandemic restrictions, but all too often they have been demonised and stigmatised by adults who should have known better’, they argue: It is one thing to be legitimately anxious about the pandemic threat; it is quite another to cast blame upon a specific group. How did we reach a point where society feared and othered its own children? (Cole & Kingsley, 2022, p. 150)

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The language that was used about children during the pandemic, they argue, ‘has not been used to describe any other group, and in fact, it is hard to imagine how it would be permitted’ (p.  157). Furthermore, ‘Adults who have employed this demeaning language and participated in discriminatory behaviour, such as politicians allowing themselves to be photographed unmasked among a sea of masked children, have often shown an alarming lack of self-awareness’ (p. 157). The basis of Cole and Kingsley’s diagnosis of ‘childism’ is rooted in the understanding of discrimination as ‘the degrading treatment of specific groups as defined by gender, race, sexual identity or other characteristics’ (Cole & Kingsley, 2022, p. 150). Their argument is essentially that society decided to care less about children during the pandemic than in previous times, rolling back on the imperatives of safeguarding and child protection in order to protect the health and safety of adults. As such, it echoes a wider complaint that Covid-19 restrictions were brought in to protect the old at the expense of the young (see discussion in Bristow, 2021a, 2021b). When considering the consequences of restrictions for young people’s education and welfare, set against the low risk presented to their health by Covid-19 itself (Spiegelhalter, 2020), this is a beguiling argument. However, to present it as a conscious act of discrimination ignores two important dynamics. First, as discussed above, the social response to Covid did not represent an abandonment of the safeguarding agenda so much as its logical extension around a different kind of threat. While the narrative of competing risks did, at points, settle on Covid as the greater risk, this was driven by a generalized culture of fear, expressed in a warrant for hyper-regulation developed in deference to a particular section of experts and professionals, considered to embody ‘The Science’ and ‘public health’. Children were not discriminated against as the sole target of restrictions; rather, they were conceptualized as ‘collateral damage’ (Bauman, 2011) in a wider response to a universalized threat. A second, and related, dynamic relates to the difficulty society had in managing the sense of universalized danger: in other words, its struggle to discriminate. Discrimination also means the recognition and understanding of the difference between one thing and another. In this case, universalized restrictions that assumed an equality of risk from Covid-19 led inexorably to a situation where children, whose lives are disproportionately regulated due to their dependence on adults, would be disproportionately affected by restrictions. While public institutions such as schools, colleges, and universities closed, and public social spaces were also subject

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to closures and restrictions, ‘stay home’ or ‘shelter in place’ orders placed total responsibility for children on their parents, who, in turn, were bound by law to obey a complex web of restrictions on social behaviour. In this context, parental responsibility became confused and compromised. An article by Mary Katharine Ham, published in The Atlantic in early 2022, synthesizes many of the concerns raised by those who were bewildered by the apparent lack on cultural concern shown about the impact of social distancing measures on children during the pandemic. ‘“Kids are resilient” has been a refrain of the pandemic, used to justify the removal of regular school, birthday parties, and talking with friends at lunch’, she wrote: But it’s not a kid’s job to be resilient. It’s a parent’s job to be resilient for them, to spare them from our fears and worries. The longer we abdicate, the more damage we will do. (Ham, 2022)

For Ham, the ‘abdication’ of adult resilience, and by extension, adult responsibility, was expressed by an inability to put fear of Covid into perspective and to consider the harms that would be caused to children by prolonged lockdowns. Rather than representing an active campaign to discriminate against children, pandemic rhetoric in the UK and US revealed deeper tensions and confusions regarding the responsibility of adults to children. It intersected with the risk-averse logic of parenting culture, transmitting the message that parents’ primary responsibility was to keep their children safe from harm. As Charlotte Faircloth discusses in Chap. 11, it also dramatically individualized responsibility for children, through the withdrawal of formal, institutional forms of socialization, such as schools, and the restriction of informal opportunities for mixing and support via the community. One effect of this was to diminish the difference between adults and children, as all were cast equally as presenting a risk to public health, over and above all other considerations. The trend that Furedi (2001) described as ‘the emptying out of adult identity’ took its most explicit form in the abdication of responsibility for education. Narrative 3: The Educational Impact By December 2020, the World Bank was issuing dire warnings about the extent of ‘learning loss’ experienced to children globally by prolonged

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school closures, and noting that ‘the losses seem to be excessively uneven, with those disadvantaged faring worst’ (World Bank, 2020c, p. 2). This inequality was evident both between countries, with ‘one in ten countries … not providing any additional support to students during closures’, and within them, as ‘inequities in access to technology and resources has also put some groups at greater disadvantage to access remote learning, and likely to fall even further behind’ (p. 2). By way of example, the World Bank (2020c) cites estimates that in Sub-­ Saharan Africa, ‘55% of children received some type of remote leaning (a very small fraction including online learning), while the rest have been completely disengaged during school closures’ (p.  2). Even in high-­ income countries, school closures resulted in a ‘learning loss’ compared to previous cohorts and exacerbated existing inequalities within cohorts. In the UK, notable gaps emerged early on between the amount and quality of remote education offered by private schools and state schools, and the difference between high- and low-income families in the ability to access remote learning: bound up with material constraints such as the child’s ownership of a suitable device, internet connectivity, the availability of a space in which to study, and the resources available to the school itself (Andrew et al., 2020; Coleman, 2021). In the US, a study by McKinsey predicted that ‘students of color could be six to 12 months behind, compared with four to eight months for white students’, with other studies reaching similar findings (Dorn et al., 2020). This consequence, while unintended, had also been predicted early in the pandemic. Butler’s April 2020 article in Mother Jones warned of some ‘serious downstream consequences’ of the middle-class flight from public schools. Noting that it is already clear that Black and Hispanic communities are ‘bearing the brunt of the disease’, she cautioned: White middle and upper middle-class parents may avoid sending their kids to schools with large Black and Hispanic populations, because they will begin to associate the virus with those communities—and by doing so, they could actually make those stereotypes more true. (Butler, 2020)

Many of the parents in those communities, who work in retail, package and food delivery, and in hospitals, ‘don’t have the option to hide out from the virus at home’. One casualty of the divide, Butler suggested, is that ‘the COVID-19 crisis could undo efforts to integrate schools—which is bad news for all students’ (Butler, 2020).

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The claim that the response to the pandemic fuelled existing inequalities within education systems has few detractors, particularly as time goes on. Neither does the claim that children, globally, have emerged from the pandemic with a significant ‘learning loss’, measurable in terms of time spent in education and curriculum content covered. Early hopes that learning technologies and remote access would provide at least an equally good alternative to classroom teaching, if not an improved, future-­oriented system delivering greater accessibility and driving pedagogic innovation, were swiftly confronted by prosaic realities such as pupils’ lack of access to equipment, teachers’ struggles to use technologies effectively, and parents’ difficulties in managing their child’s motivation and engagement with ‘home learning’ (Andrew et al., 2020; Coleman, 2021). However, while it was broadly acknowledged that school closures had overall negative effects on children’s educational attainment, these effects were generally discussed in narrow terms, such as pupils’ academic progress compared to previous cohorts or other children with more advantages, or the impact on children’s future earnings. What was rarely explicitly addressed was the wider social and cultural cost of disrupting education for a prolonged period. The difficulty in articulating why, exactly, the withdrawal of education presented a problem for society as a whole reflects pre-existing uncertainties about the purpose of education. Writing in 2010, Furedi argued that despite high levels of political and public discussion about the importance of education, such debate ‘rarely considers the fundamental question of its purpose’. Instead, he explained: [C]urrent controversies focus on issues such as how education should be used, how it should be delivered, or how it should be organised… Policy-­ makers are far better at deliberating about education’s aims than its content. Controversies about selection, social inclusion, underachievement, assessment and standards are driven by a clash of opinion about process and procedure, and rarely reflect on education’s meaning. (Furedi, 2010, p. 43)

That debates about the consequences of school closures focused on immediate implications for children’s individual welfare and attainment, and that these debates became so rapidly absorbed into the politicized debates over the management of the pandemic, reflected this existing confusion about the purpose and meaning of education. For many decades, education has been discussed as a political priority; a ‘magic bullet’ (Finn,

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2015, p. 2) for the solution of a host of social and economic problems, ranging from unemployment and ‘social exclusion’ to declining productivity and mental ill-health. Neoliberal discourses have emphasized the importance of education to the development of ‘human capital’ and individuals’ earning potential, while welfarist discourses have focused on the use of education as a means to ameliorating social inequalities (Furedi, 2010; Bristow, 2016). The more that education has been justified with regard to individual, instrumental, and extrinsic ends, however, the less attention has been paid to the importance of education in ensuring society’s cultural renewal. Education, as the political philosopher Hannah Arendt argued in the early 1960s, is the means through which our society ensures its survival. It is ‘the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable’ (Arendt, 2006 [1961], p. 193). It is also a demonstration of our commitment to the younger generation and the means through which we prepare them to meet the future: Education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world. (Arendt, 2006 [1961], p. 193)

Arendt’s account of the purpose of education speaks both to the importance of education as the transmission and renewal of knowledge through the generations and its role in socializing the young. In advanced societies, education provides the means to bring children into a shared set of norms and values, countering the fragmentation that characterizes modern life (Durkheim, 2003 [1925]; Prus, 2011). Arendt was writing about ‘the crisis of education’ in the US during a period when Western societies sought a reinvigoration of democratic values in a world shattered by fascism and war, and existentially challenged by the Soviet Union. As her essay demonstrates, societies have long struggled to articulate the question of what, precisely, education should be for. Over the twentieth century, however, debates about the purpose of education at least constituted a disagreement around broadly shared ends. Writing in 1996, Neil Postman, author of the influential book The

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Disappearance of Childhood (Postman, 1994 [1982]), summarized the longstanding division over the purpose of education. US citizens believe in ‘two contradictory reasons for schooling’, he argued: One is that schools must teach the young to accept the world as it is, with all of their culture’s rules, requirements, constraints, and even prejudices. The other is that the young should be taught to be critical thinkers, so that they become men and women of independent mind, distanced from the conventional wisdom of their own time and with the strength and skill enough to change what is wrong. (Postman, 1996, pp. 60–1)

This polarization, between ‘consensus’ and ‘conflict’ perspectives on the sociology of education (Leighton, 2012), forms the basis of debates about the content of the school curriculum, the form and legitimacy of school discipline, the focus of education policy, and the relationship between education and politics. These debates have been raging for over a century, to the frustration of scholars who see the validity of both perspectives. As Postman argues, ‘Each of these beliefs is part of a unique narrative about what it means to be human, what it means to be a citizen, what it means to be intelligent. And each of these narratives can be found in the American tradition’ (Postman, 1996, pp. 60–1). The problem arises when culture or policy adopts a one-sided perspective that throws the proverbial baby out with the bathwater: demanding that schools either promote a dogmatic approach to the transmission of knowledge and social rules that fail to engage with children’s experience of the contradictions in ‘the world as it is’, or that schools become vehicles to promote a particular kind of radical change, which eschews the knowledge and wisdom of the past (Furedi, 2010; Standish & Sehgal-Cuthbert, 2017). Scholars such as Postman in the US and Michael Young (2007) in the UK have sought to correct for this by emphasizing, at different points, the importance of critical perspectives on education and the importance of retaining a conservative approach to the transmission of knowledge. Yet in the debate about school closures during the pandemic, neither of the ‘unique narratives’ on the human condition that Postman identified featured explicitly. The idea that schooling was necessary to transmit accumulated knowledge about ‘the world as it is’ became reduced to a focus on delivering curriculum content, which in turn was justified by the need to find a basis for assessing children’s learning. Against the backdrop of a pandemic widely presented as an ‘unprecedented’ public health

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emergency, in the face of which all ‘normal’ rules and conventions should be suspended, statements about the importance of the school’s socializing function (beyond a space in which children were allowed to mix and play with each other) were marked by their absence. The perspective that schools should encourage ‘critical thinking’, meanwhile, developed in a novel form. As parents became tasked with managing their children’s engagement with remote learning, many reacted against the ideological turn that school curricula have taken, particularly around issues to do with race and gender. This resulted in a major backlash in the US, where it intersected with the ongoing ‘culture wars’ to ignite parental battles with school boards around claims that children were being indoctrinated by a ‘woke curriculum’ and to draw parents into further conflicts with teaching unions (Furedi, 2021). In both the UK and the US, parents’ closer engagement with schooling during the pandemic encouraged a suspicion of, and detachment from, the project of schooling. This took many forms, including concerns over the content of the curriculum, dissatisfaction with the level of resources and standard of teaching provided during periods of remote learning, and distrust regarding the practices adopted by schools to maintain social distancing, which were often regarded as harmful to children’s welfare. That teaching unions were often arguing in favour of such practices and actively resisting the opening of schools contributed to this sense of suspicion and hostility, centred around the questions of not only ‘who cares for children?’ but ‘who is best placed to teach them?’ The school closures debate during the pandemic thus revealed how intensely the project of education has become individualized and politicized. The idea that education is an important social endeavour that should be preserved, especially in times of crisis, to ensure the continuity of society’s knowledge and values was rapidly subordinated to the present-­ day imperative of safety. The conception of education as a shared adult project, in which teachers and parents collaborate in bringing children into different aspects of the social world, was subsumed by the presentation of ‘learning’ as a series of individual tasks for the benefit of individual children, with teachers and parents confronting each other as competing authorities. The transmission of curriculum knowledge became presented as a technical endeavour (‘content delivery’), while the encouragement of critical thinking took the form of the promotion of a factional value-set. The narrative about the educational impact of school closures, then, was one that failed to engage with the purpose of education itself.

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Conclusions The Covid-19 crisis cannot be regarded as the sole cause of the current disorientation over the purpose of education. However, nor does it seem plausible to regard the impact of the pandemic as merely a continuation of previous trends. The closure of schools, colleges, and universities as institutions dedicated to the education and socialization of children and young people acted as a symbolic marker of a social decision: that during an ‘unprecedented’ emergency, the passing on of both formal and tacit knowledge is unsettled and rendered problematic. Knowledge and wisdom are passed down and remade through informal, intimate relationships within families and communities (Mannheim, 1952). But formal education also plays an important role in the construction and reconstruction of what to know (knowledge) and how to be (socialization). The tensions between primary and secondary socialization have long been of sociological interest, and recent work has explored the implications of cultural trends and policies that seek to ‘blur’ established boundaries between the home and the school (Gillies, 2011). Prolonged school closures, alongside social distancing measures that restricted informal community interactions, intersected with existing tensions regarding adult solidarity. In a linguistic redefinition of the idea of ‘homeschooling’, parents were tasked with ‘teaching’ knowledge and practices with which they were unfamiliar. Simultaneously, ‘unprecedented’ regulations of all citizens’ behaviour weakened parents’ authority to draw on tacit knowledge and experience to set boundaries around their children’s activities (Bristow & Gilland, 2020). As the school came into the home, tensions between parents and schools developed around competing ideas about the values and behaviours into which children should be socialized. Research measuring the impact of the pandemic and associated restrictions on children’s education and welfare is ongoing, and it remains too early to draw firm conclusions in this regard. However, the intersection of school closures with existing trends in education and parenting culture means that its legacy will be ongoing contestation over the content and purpose of education and the fragmentation of cultural values.

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References Akass, A. (2022, September 2). How nearly 100000 ‘ghost children’ have stopped going to school. Sky News. https://news.sky.com/story/how-­nearly-­100-­000-­ ghost-­children-­have-­stopped-­going-­to-­school-­12687778 Andrew, A., Cattan, S., Costa Dias, M., Farquharson, C., Kraftman, L., Krutikova, S., Phimister, A., & Sevilla, A. (2020). Inequalities in children’s experiences of home learning during the COVID-19 lockdown in England. Fiscal Studies, 41(3), 653–683. Arendt, H. (2006 [1961]). Between past and future: Eight exercises in political thought. Penguin Books. Bauman, Z. (2011). Collateral damage: Social inequalities in a global age. Polity. BBC. (2020, November 8). Marcus Rashford: Government changes decision on free school meals. BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/54862230 Bland, A. (2021, December 3). Arthur Labinjo-Hughes: Vulnerable children ‘slipped from view’ in pandemic: Former children’s commissioner says Covid pandemic had put Arthur and other children at increased risk. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/dec/03/arthur-­labinjo-­hughes-­ vulnerable-­children-­slipped-­from-­view-­in-­pandemic Bristow, J. (2016). The sociology of generations: New directions and challenges. Springer. Bristow, J. (2021a, January 27). Lockdowns don’t protect the elderly. UnHerd. https://unherd.com/2021/01/lockdowns-­dont-­protect-­the-­elderly/ Bristow, J. (2021b). Growing up in lockdown academy of ideas: Letters on liberty. Retrieved February 19, 2023, from https://academyofideas.org.uk/wp-­ content/uploads/2021/02/jennie-­bristow-­letter-­on-­liberty-­lockdown.pdf Bristow, J. (n.d.). Coronavirus crisis. Archive on author’s website. http:// jbristow.co.uk/ Bristow, J., & Gilland, E. (2020). The Corona generation: Coming of age in a crisis. John Hunt Publishing. Butler, K. (2020, April 28). Many wealthy parents won’t send kids back to school this fall. That’s a Disaster Waiting to Happen. Mother Jones. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/04/many-­wealthy-­parents-­wont-­send-­kids-­back-­ to-­school-­this-­fall-­thats-­a-­disaster-­waiting-­to-­happen/ Cattan, S., Farquharson, C., Phimister, A., Salisbury, A., Krutikova, S., & Sevilla, A. (2021, February 19). Inequalities in responses to school closures over the course of the first COVID-19 lockdown. Institute for Fiscal Studies. Retrieved February 24, 2023, from https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/output_url_files/ WP202104-­Inequalities-­in-­responses-­to-­school-­closures-­over-­the-­course-­of-­ the-­first-­COVID-­19-­lockdown.pdf Children’s Commissioner. (2022, June). Voices of England’s missing children: The findings of the children’s commissioner’s attendance audit. Retrieved

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CHAPTER 13

Pregnancy and Vaccination: The Precautionary Principle and Parenting Culture in Covid Times Ellie Lee

Introduction Knight … attributes the deaths of pregnant women to low vaccination rates, the delta variant, and inequitable treatment. “Even though it’s very clear in the RCOG guidelines that women should be treated, there is still a very risk averse culture that weighs fetal risk over maternal benefit,” she said. (Iacobucci, 2021)

Given that vaccination has been central to global experience since late 2020, in a way that has never been the case before, it would seem remiss to discuss parenting and the pandemic without attention to it. Billions of vaccine doses against Covid-19 have been administered since the first and the experience of vaccination—as medical intervention, political project, and a focus for disagreement over the meaning of personal freedom—has touched families the world over. The question of the place of children in vaccination programmes has emerged as characterized by markedly contrasting approaches in different countries, with parental opinion diverse and unsure, and debate often fraught and heated (Saxena et al., 2021). Given the role vaccination status has played in some countries in decisions about access to educational provision, this aspect of policymaking should © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Lee et al., Parenting Culture Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44156-1_13

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be an important concern for further consideration of the issues raised in the previous chapter. This chapter, however, is concerned specifically with vaccination and pregnancy and its purpose is to further explore the theme of meanings given to the concept risk. Following Furedi’s (2008) proposition of ‘expanding parenting backwards’, Chap. 6 discussed use of the so-called ‘precautionary principle’ within thinking about risk. With reference to alcohol and pregnancy, that chapter considered the framing of claims that pregnant women should avoid even theoretical risk to the health and welfare of future children. This chapter discusses how the example of vaccination and pregnancy draws attention to possible dangers of precautionary thinking and argues that during the pandemic, debate about these dangers opened up. The observations above from Marian Knight, then Head of the University of Oxford’s National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit and a leading authority on the medical aspects of Covid infection in pregnancy, form a point of departure. Her comments, reported on 22 November 2021 in the British Medical Journal, were provoked by the deaths of pregnant women infected with the Covid virus earlier that year, when vaccination was being ‘rolled out’ in the UK, but had not been made available to most pregnant women on ‘precautionary’ grounds. Knight noted, with reference to the UK’s Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), that professional guidance had, by November 2021, become explicit in its message that vaccination in pregnancy was definitively recommended. Her worry, however, was that a now reassuring and encouraging message about vaccination, and a perceived urgent need to respond to a raised risk of serious illness and even death for pregnant women, stood in conflict with aspects of ‘culture’. Specifically, it was running up against a powerful form of ‘weighing’ in which ‘maternal benefit’ and ‘foetal risk’ were set against each other. Foetal risk, thought of as any uncertainty around effects of the vaccine, however speculative, was given priority, and so vaccination was viewed with caution. The concern she communicated was that further avoidable serious problems, including more deaths of pregnant women, might be the outcome, as rates of vaccination were proving slow to respond to this reassurance. It is this ‘culture’ and its workings that this chapter considers. The second half discusses an analysis of reporting in UK newspapers to explore how risk-aversion was questioned in public discourse in the light of maternal illness and death. Here, the chapter discusses the extent to which problems of a precautionary approach and its effects for pregnant women’s

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health became the focus of commentary. If so, what aspects of it did journalists use to frame their case? First, to give context and background, the chapter summarizes insights and findings from mainly qualitative research about ‘vaccine hesitancy’. Specifically, discussion highlights research that has explored the workings of a consciousness of risk by drawing on the concept ‘intensive motherhood’ as part of its explanatory framework. Discussion begins where the largest amount of relevant research has been done, with childhood vaccination, and emphasizes as a key insight that one important driver of vaccine hesitancy comes from constructions of good motherhood and responsibility for child health that characterize public health itself. Work is then discussed that detects, similarly, how an idea of personal, maternal responsibility for child health and the management of risk influences uptake of the main vaccinations offered to pregnant women in the UK prior to that against Covid-19, which protects against influenza and pertussis.

Intensive Motherhood and Vaccine Hesitancy Most research about intensive motherhood and vaccination takes as its point of departure the body of work from public health and psychology that investigates the reasons why parents may be refusers of vaccination, or ‘vaccine hesitant’. This research points to problems of ‘information deficits’ or ‘science literacy’ as incomplete explanations; as Ward et al. note: …the concern with the risk assessment process—and its apparent path to vaccine refusal—was that parents had insufficient information about vaccines, community immunity and vaccine preventable diseases. (2018, p. 1118)

Ward et al. question this ‘health education logic’ and refer to the associated (discredited) ‘deficit model’, which seeks to address vaccine refusal by ‘filling-up parents with appropriate information’. They make the case for a different approach on the grounds that the deficit model lacks the capacity to make full sense of, ‘how and why parents make (for them) appropriate and logical assessments and decisions in social contexts’ (Ward et al., 2018, p. 1118). Alternative understandings, drawing on a view of risk assessment as a cultural product influenced by ideas, especially about mothering, are similarly advocated by Schuster et  al. (2023) in their account of intensive motherhood and vaccinating children against Covid-19.

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Lupton’s research is an especially good example of this approach. She emphasizes ‘maternal ambivalence’, understood not as an outcome of not knowing enough about vaccination and being unsure for that reason, but rather as a response to a ‘growing predominance of discourses in public and medical forums’ which generate an identity based around, ‘the importance of pregnant women protecting the health of their foetuses and of mothers taking responsibility for the health status of infants and young children’ (2011, p. 638). Lupton thus reported, of the thinking of those she interviewed: They conceptualised the infant body as highly vulnerable and requiring of protection from contamination. They therefore generally supported the idea of vaccination as a way of protecting their babies’ immature immune systems, but were also ambivalent about it. (2011, p. 637)

The paradox, or source of ambivalence, arises in this light from the strong emphasis on personal responsibility and ‘constant reflexivity’. This includes weighing up all sides and possibilities as a necessary attribute of good motherhood, meaning more or less explicit dissonance with an institutionalized programme which aims to reduce the risk of disease in children. In effect, a culture that has placed so much emphasis on ‘what the mother does’ in relation to taking responsibility for child well-being has ended up in tension with trust and belief in the advantages that can accrue from a societal measure that asks little of parents beyond taking a child to a clinic. Some argue that this forms the basis of the appeal of core anti-vaccine messages, which actively encourage distrust in medical systems: The core claim by anti-vaccinationists that parents should be fully informed in decisions about their child’s health clearly had some resonance for parents who do not want to feel they are careless in choices about their child’s health. (Leask et al., 2006, p. 7242)

Other work, also now over a decade old, postulates an idea of ‘redundant risk’, where efforts to assess risk ends in cancellation of competing fears, and what is left is fear and uncertainty (Brown, 2011). More recent commentary reiterates this observation:

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[Respondents discussed] A strong burden of responsibility around decision-­ making and talked about living in fear, fear that by choosing to vaccinate, they may expose their child to harm (from the vaccine) and also fear from not vaccinating, that they would regret this should their child later develop the target disease. (Diaz Crescitelli et al., 2020, p. 42)

There are further insightful themes in the literature. One is the connection between rejection of vaccination and formation of specific identities. Attwell and Smith argue that this can include a ‘tribe outlook’, ‘formed in opposition to what they [mothers] perceive as the damaging practices of modern mass society’, where mothers ‘distrust what they see as unthinking deference to industrialised, commodified and financially co-opted medicine’ (2017, p. 184). Others detect a less coherent or singular perception and focus on ‘vaccine hesitancy’, emphasizing less outright hostility to ‘mass society’ than the power of certain medico-cultural norms. Ward et al. (2018) offer support to the term ‘redundant risk’ and suggest an experience of uncertainty in which, ‘Vaccine-refusing parents see engagement with risk assessments as a part of the requisite practice of questioning vaccines, undertaken as part of their vigilance in late modernity’. They interpret this as concordant with State-encouraged ‘responsibilization’, where it is assumed that individuals take on personal responsibility for health and have to make ‘healthy choices’, paradoxically, ‘with an unintended consequence being that some … end up rejecting the broader aims or mandates of State policies’ (2018, p. 1118). Mothers in Wiley et al.’s study varied in their ‘vaccine trajectories’, and ‘sometimes shifted, along the mainstream through to alternative parenting spectrum’ (2020, p. 3). However, they commonly expressed, ‘parenting values and approaches aligned with modern societal expectations of taking responsibility for their child’s health’ (2020, p. 1), and this research found ‘a common drive to fulfil the role of the responsible parent underpinned pathways to non-vaccination’ (2020, p. 3). Through her research in the US, Reich similarly gives weight to the idea that ‘taking personal responsibility’ is important within vaccine hesitancy. ‘Disease is seen as preventable through personal responsibility’, she states, and argues that two intersecting ideologies shape vaccine hesitancy:

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One that expects parents to intensively invest in their children and the other that calls for individuals to become savvy consumers of health technology and health interventions. (2016, p. 104)

Thompson (2021), who did research with Canadian mothers, emphasizes a similar theme. She acknowledges that the very success of vaccination programmes is part of the explanation for a risk perception that considers vaccination sceptically, on the grounds that disease does not appear as a pressing threat. She strongly argues, however, that public health itself creates vaccine hesitancy and refusal, a paradox that is resolved if the emphasis within public health on individual, and especially maternal, responsibility for health is fully appreciated. ‘Public health regimes’ have made some mothers, particularly those from the middle class, ‘hypervigilant risk managers who place self-and-infant-care above care for the other’, and Thompson concludes: Public health has created the very maternal subjectivities that made the emergence of this form of resistance to public health directives inevitable. (2021, p. 88)

Ward and his research collaborators concur that vaccine hesitancy is an outcome of ‘responsibilization’, and they make sense of their research findings with reference to Hays’ thinking about intensive motherhood. They present an idea of salutogenic parenting, whereby ‘salutogenic’ means focusing on factors that support health and well-being, as opposed to a medical focus on pathology: Salutogenic parenting is an enactment of responsibilisation, with parents demonstrating a high level of agency in ensuring their child’s development, well being and health. (Ward et al., 2018, p. 1121)

These observations position vaccine hesitancy within wider components of public health and its contemporary emphasis on personal responsibility and well-being. Most of the research discussed above has been conducted in the US, Canada, and Australia, where a recognition of the powerful influence of intensive mothering ideology is strong, but a similar case has been made about Taiwan:

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Taiwanese parents have gradually synchronised their views with those of their Western counterparts. … The new parental norms have become the foundation of attitudes towards childhood vaccination. Parents no longer simply follow rules but seek information to make informed decisions for their children. (Kuan, 2022, p. 695)

This research found that parents who were untrusting of vaccines sought to improve their children’s health through everyday practices. Study author Kuan concludes: The qualitative results indicate that parents’ vaccine hesitancy is related to their struggle to fulfil their parental responsibilities. … Under the premise that each child is unique, parents carefully observe and tailor their care for each child. Vaccination as a universal intervention for all children is thus perceived as problematic. (Kuan, 2022, p. 703)

Vaccination, Pregnancy, and Precautionary Thinking Pertussis and Influenza What does research suggest about vaccination and pregnancy in a culture of intensive motherhood? Since earlier this century, globally, universal vaccination during pregnancy against seasonal influenza (impacting the pregnant woman herself) and pertussis (whopping cough, impacting newborns) has been recommended, alongside other specific vaccinations for some pregnant women. In England, since 2010 and 2012, respectively, vaccination programmes against influenza and pertussis have been active, in line with similar programmes in many other countries (Wilson et al., 2015). Advocates for such programmes argue that maternal immunization is extremely effective at preventing illness in women and babies (Wilson et al., 2015). Indeed, it has been argued that it should be considered ‘the new normal’ on the grounds that maternal immunization is the ‘missing link’ to continual improvements in maternal and child health (Larson, 2015). Given the intention for vaccination to be considered a helpful and welcome contribution to avoiding disease in women and babies, a body of research has considered responses to the relevant efforts, with the following starting point:

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One thing is clear. Despite their proven efficacy, maternal influenza and pertussis vaccines are not being accepted as widely as they could be. (Larson, 2015, p. 6374)

Commentary highlights relatively low uptakes of both programmes, not just in England (Martin et  al., 2020), and that uptake is relatively lower for the influenza vaccine compared to that for pertussis (Wiley et al., 2015). Uptake reported in 2015 in England, for example, was 40% and 63% for the vaccines respectively, with much lower rates in some areas of the country (Wilson et al., 2015). In line with the approach to childhood vaccination discussed above, some research about these statistics begins from perceived limitations of models that rely on theories of health behaviour or deficits in knowledge. The literature emphasizes the significance of both easy access to vaccination and encouragement from health professionals for increasing vaccination rates. One meta-analysis of research about uptake thus makes the point that ‘the odds of receiving a pertussis or influenza vaccination were ten to twelve-time higher among pregnant woman who received a recommendation from HCPs [Healthcare Professionals]’ (Kilich et  al., 2020, p. 1). Wilson criticizes some ‘vaccination rhetoric’ that works ‘….by blaming certain groups for not accessing such healthcare technologies as vaccination. … as the responsibility of healthcare institutions to ensure equal access to healthcare across population groups is masked’ (2019, p. 514). There is also criticism in the literature, however, about lack of engagement with the larger context of the social construction of behavioural norms for pregnancy and their influence. Robinson and co-authors, in their larger consideration of medication and pregnancy, explain: ….pregnant women are inundated with information in both a medical and social context as to the do’s and don’ts of pregnancy. … The covert assumption. … is that a healthy baby will be assured so long as the pregnant woman does everything right. (Robinson et al., 2011, p. 53)

This presumption about the relation between ‘the pregnant women doing the right thing’ and child health informs Rose Wilson’s work about pregnancy and vaccination. She concluded from her research that, ‘the currently popular individualist approach to healthcare places burdens on women that can negatively influence their vaccination decisions’ (2019, p. 498).

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Her study based in Hackney, an area of London which has a relatively low vaccination rate, noted as background that advice during pregnancy generally, is often ‘ambiguous and conflicting’ and includes both ‘alarmist statements about prevention of birth defects’ and comments on the ‘naturalness of pregnancy’. This, she explains, is part of the context for vaccination, meaning decisions made cannot be thought of as simply calculations of risk informed by evidence and information. Rather, they are shaped by range of social, cultural, and personal experiences around pregnancy and motherhood (2019, p. 500). A second contextual aspect is institutional norms generating expectations of ‘health behaviour’, and Wilson notes the strong emphasis on patient choice, knowledge, and information. This creates a sensibility of personal responsibility to search and think, and she concludes: The ideology of patient choice could become a synonym for patient neglect. … it can induce anxiety and a heightened sense of personal responsibility … Such an individualist focus has also caused risk discourse to proliferate during pregnancy. … [giving] ample ground for individuals to internalize pressures of parenthood and the judgement of others. (2019, p. 509)

Women are caught between messages that convey certainty, for example: ‘You should vaccinate to protect yourself and the rest of the population’, and those that emphasize ‘your health, your choice’, which Wilson describes as ‘a notion that has become the holy grail of healthcare provision in many contexts’ (2019, p. 509). She points to the difficulties created when language that draws on concepts of ‘patient autonomy’ blurs with imperatives of ‘personal responsibility for health’. Other recent research includes comparisons of uptake of the two vaccines and provides important insights about the workings of this contradiction. Wiley et  al. (2015) draw on ideas including Lupton’s and recognize that culturally, ‘ideal mothers-to-be place the highest priority on the needs of their fetuses before their own’ (2015, p.  361), and so experience is shaped by related cultural presumptions about risk and responsibility. A key finding from their research with women in Australia was that: Women were more concerned about potential risks to their infant’s health before their own. They saw influenza as a disease affecting the mother,

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whereas they viewed pertussis as a threat to the baby, and therefore comparatively more risky. They were thus more likely to vaccinate against pertussis to protect their infant. (2015, p. 360)

They note that ideas about risk were ‘assigned according to the risk posed to the fetus of newborn infant, before risk to the women themselves, and also through personal experience of the disease’. This meant that vaccinating for a disease that would make them feel ill was given relatively low priority. These researchers report that many women described influenza as ‘a mild disease’ and notably drew attention the general restrictions surrounding provision of medication when pregnant women are ill, noting, ‘Several spontaneously expressed a concern that they cannot take medication to relieve flu symptoms when they are pregnant’ (2015, p. 367). Finally, they observe that the language used by women reflects perceptions of the significance of ‘weighing’ risk. ‘Women also used a more emotive and descriptive tone and language when discussing pertussis’, they note, concluding: The reason for the apparent disparity between influenza and pertussis risk perception appeared to be based in the societal notion that reproductive citizenship involved the mother protecting her fetus or infant by putting their needs before their own. (Wiley et al., 2015, p. 366)

Covid-19 Vaccination At the time of writing, in January 2023, several surveys about the uptake of this vaccination by pregnant women had been done in various countries, identifying variations according to range of factors, including geographical location, age, ethnicity, social class, and the extent of the impact of pandemic generally (Kuciel et al., 2022; Skirrow et al., 2022; Skjefte et al., 2021; Januszek et al., 2021). A set of important points emerge and form the departure point for the remainder of this chapter. The first is that pregnancy has been perceived as an obvious reason to disregard vaccination (rather than as a reason to obtain a vaccine). Skirrow et al. thus state: Vaccine acceptability was highest when women were not pregnant, with over 8 in 10 of women answering they would likely accept COVID-19 vaccination. A significantly lower proportion of 6 in 10 women would likely accept a COVID-19 vaccine when pregnant. (2022, p. 12)

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They also found that experience of prior vaccination appeared to impact decisions: ‘We found that women who had not been vaccinated against pertussis in pregnancy were four times more likely to also reject the COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy’ (Skirrow et al., 2022, p. 12). Second, there is acknowledgement of the role of health authorities themselves in normalizing connections between vaccination and harm in pregnancy. Attention has been drawn to the role of ‘anti-vaxx’ voices outside of the mainstream in promoting fear about the relation between vaccination in pregnancy, alleging harm to female reproductive systems and organs and waring of future infertility, as well as harm to fetuses. Opponents of Covid vaccination have drawn parallels between vaccinations for pregnant women and, for example, doctors’ prescribing thalidomide to pregnant women in the 1950s (Martin et al., 2020) and did so about vaccination against Covid-19 (Hsu et al., 2021). Commentary also draws attention, however, to the role of mixed messages from within mainstream medical organizations and encouragement of the idea that caution is needed because of lack of evidence. Blakeway et  al. note it is understood that ‘theoretically, COVID-19 vaccines are safe for use in pregnancy, as they do not contain a live attenuated virus’. Knowledge draws on understanding of how vaccination works and prior experience of the debilitating effects of coronaviruses for pregnant women. They explain: Based on vast previous experience with other vaccines in pregnancy and no hypothesised mechanism for harm, similar efficacy and side effects are anticipated with COVID-19 vaccination in (vs outside pregnancy). (2022, p. 236.e1)

This suggests that the likelihood of harm from vaccination is ‘theoretical’ but messaging and policy decisions have tended to interpret this to mean vaccination should not be provided in pregnancy generally until there was a body of evidence attesting to safety, accumulated via designated ‘at risk groups’. The result has been that ‘Pregnant women have been very reluctant to receive COVID-19 vaccination and guidance for healthcare professionals has not been consistent’ (2022, p. 236.e2). Finally, some academic literature that reflects on the more general experience of pregnancy in the time of Covid-19 has offered commentary on the dangers of this precautionary thinking. The UK-focused WRISK study is a large piece of research based mainly on a survey with women. This

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began before the pandemic and considered communication about risk and pregnancy in public domains, and women’s interpretations of it. The reporting of the results of this research, in keeping with other work, notes: Other research on pregnancy related COVID19 public health messages found that women felt it was better to be “safer than sorry”, and over-­ interpreted advice to stringently social distance, “shielding” from the ­outside world. Reflecting the hesitancy among pregnant woman to accept the COVID-19 vaccination, in this research we found that even when counselled on the importance of using medication by HCPs, some women preferred not to do out of fear of harming their baby, leaving them vulnerable to serious deterioration in their health. (Blaylock et al., 2022, p .9)

The literature that situates ‘vaccine hesitancy’ within a historically specific socio-cultural context has, in this way, elaborated how imperatives of that cultural context generate ambivalence about vaccination programmes. It has shown how health systems themselves generate dissonance through contradictory messages about the need to vaccinate and the need to take personal responsibility for child health. Vaccination programmes for pregnant woman have encountered this double bind in an arguably intense form, since risk-averse norms of precautionary avoidance of even theoretical harm generally dominate pregnancy advice. Some literature assessing the Covid vaccine and pregnancy has highlighted this problem of risk-­ aversion and indicated the importance of precautionary thinking in explaining vaccine hesitancy. The remainder of this chapter considers whether and how these concerns were debated in the public domain during the pandemic, taking reporting about vaccination and pregnancy in national UK newspapers as the source of public discourse (see Appendix 1 for a summary of study design and sample). This reporting, as indicated below, was driven in large part by professional and policy decisions. In the UK, for the first months of its availability, the professional body responsible, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), initially advised against vaccination during pregnancy on explicitly precautionary grounds, unless a woman worked in healthcare settings or had additional health conditions. It was several months later, in April 2021, that pregnant women generally were included in the vaccination programme, initially alongside other people of the same age. Then, in late 2021, they were named as a priority group.

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Against this background of policy decisions and media coverage, the overall question informing the analysis of media discourse was, how was the approach to vaccine provision, and the take up of it by women, framed? Analysis first considered how definitions of risk and its assessment that drove policy about offering vaccination to pregnant women were reported. After that, attention was paid to the ways ‘risk-aversion’ was framed as a problem. This generated linked themes of covid risks and typifying stories, vaccine hesitancy, and mixed messages, and as the chapter now shows, a perhaps unexpected level of criticism of precautionary thinking and its effects was identified.

Framing Precaution in the UK News Media Policy Changes: Evidence, Vaccine Safety, and Covid Risk The initial announcement about how vaccination would be provided to UK residents was made in late 2020. At this point, the decision was to exclude most pregnant women and offer vaccination only to those with additional health conditions or who worked in environments where ‘risk of exposure. … to infection is high’ (JCVI, 2020). News reporting across the sample covered this decision and its rationale. It also covered later policy changes, which were first, from April 2021, to include pregnant women in the vaccine programme in line with their age group (Gov.Uk, 2021a), and then, at the end of 2021, to include pregnant women within a designated priority group and instigate a campaign, ‘urging them to come forward for vaccination’ (Gov.uk, 2021b). These policy developments were also referred to as part of the discussion in many of the articles. News reporting mainly drew on comments from spokespeople for the expert body recommending the changes (the JCVI) and other professionals supportive of the policies adopted. The consistent theme across the different newspapers was about evidence. The initial decision to advise against vaccination back in December 2020, reporting said, was ‘precautionary’, reflecting absence of evidence due to pregnant women not being involved in vaccine trials. No reporting contained suggestion that there was evidence of the vaccine being harmful. Some described risk as ‘unknown’ (Jones, 2020), but other reporting went to some length to explain there was ‘no evidence’ of risk. The Daily Mail carried the longest article about the initial recommendation, which stated in bullet points at the start, ‘measure is purely precautionary because pregnant women were

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not in trials’ and ‘regulator says no evidence to suggest they would be at risk if they did take it’ and went on to detail these points through extensive quotation from medical experts (Boyd, 2020). The change in policy in April 2021 to include pregnant women generally in the vaccine programme was then reported to be justified by ‘real world safety data’ from the United States, where pregnant women had been offered vaccination from the start (Lintern, 2021; Topping & Davis, 2021; Lay, 2021). Alongside this reporting about safety was that about Covid risks. There were ‘particular concerns about premature birth’ and mention was made of unvaccinated pregnant women being hospitalized with Covid and some being very unwell, reported The Times (Lay, 2021). Reporting about serious illness and death, often through discussion of the findings of new studies, was more and more dominant from summer 2021 onwards. It was also pronounced around December 2021 when, a full year after the initial decision-making, the Government announced it was to prioritize pregnant women and actively encourage vaccination through a video-based campaign based around pregnant women who had become very ill (Glover, 2021). Attention was drawn in many articles to data from Oxford University on the deaths of 17 women between March and September, and to evidence about pregnancy loss and still birth (Roberts, 2021). Notably, there was no reporting in which this presentation of the core issues around evidence of vaccine safety and of covid risks was questioned. The only reference to opposition to this presentation of the issues was in article noting condemnation of people who reportedly had sent ‘death threats’ to the head of the Royal College of Midwives in response to her ‘encouraging pregnant women to have the Covid vaccine’ (Gibbons, 2021), and in commentary about ‘rumours and myths’ online about vaccination and fertility scaring women (Best, 2021). Across the reporting certain themes that were apparent from near the start became more prominent as the months went on. One was typifying stories about Covid-19 dangers. This type of account first appeared in April 2021, in comments from Ernest Boateng, about his now deceased wife Mary, who was a nurse. ‘I lost my wife, and she has left two kids behind’, he was reported to have said (Lintern, 2021). The other was vaccine hesitancy and low take-up, but notably, this was framed as a damaging outcome of precautionary thinking and most of all ‘mixed messages’; the chapter now elaborates these themes.

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Covid Risks and Typifying Stories As noted above, by the time policy shifted to actively encourage vaccination, reporting about evidence had come to strongly emphasize Covid-19 risks, through reference to statistics on hospitalizations, premature and still birth, and maternal death. This type of warrant for the need for vaccination was ubiquitous. Reference was made to statistics from the UK Obstetric Surveillance System (UKOSS) that collects data from hospitals, and that it showed ‘the overwhelming majority’ of pregnant women hospitalized were not vaccinated (Geddes, 2021), detailing aspects of severe illness (Marsh, 2021; Turner, 2021) and also death. It was reported that some women died in the February 2021 Covid wave (Thomas, 2021), and between March and September 2021, ‘at least 13’ women had died (Ng, 2021; Phillips, 2021). Additionally, articles centring on personal stories of pregnant women hospitalized with Covid, whose experience included very serious illness and even death, began appearing from Summer 2021. Some focused on these women’s advice to others. Claudia Li, ‘was left unconscious on a ventilator, with medics. … forced to urgently deliver the baby, who was not due for 16 more weeks’, reported The Guardian, with Li commenting, ‘Please, take the vaccine. … Don’t risk yours and your baby’s life’ (Marsh, 2021). ‘“Get the vaccine”: family of Covid victim’s please to pregnant women’ was the title of article centring on Saiqa Parveen, who, pregnant with her fifth child, ended up ventilated in hospital and died with her baby delivered by caesarean section, ‘after spending five weeks in intensive care’ (Brown, 2021). Saskia Lane was featured in another story, described as ‘a young mother who gave birth while in a coma’, with it reported that, at eight months pregnant, ‘she was sent down for an emergency c-section. … To help her body recover without being pregnant’ and did not meet her daughter until she was eight weeks old (Thorburn, 2021). ‘Mother, 18, who almost died urges pregnant women to have jab’ was the title of another such story in The Times. The message of the bereaved husband and father Josh Willis, whose 35-year-old pregnant wife Samantha died in August 2021 was, ‘Get your vaccine so you or your family don’t have to go through what I have had to’, he was reported to have tweeted (Wace, 2021). As already noted, when the Government eventually came to make active efforts to encourage vaccination, it also utilized this way of communicating about Covid-19 dangers through its video campaign urging

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women to come forward. Typifying stories like these also featured, however, in reporting that more or less explicitly criticized the precautionary approach adopted by Government. This reporting particularly took issue with the pace of policy change and power of efforts to make vaccination available, under the general themes of ‘mixed messages’ and ‘lack of access’, and it was notable that ‘vaccine hesitancy’ was explained with reference to these framings. Vaccine Hesitancy and Mixed Messages I am haunted by the posters that featured in our clinic with the prominent heading—‘Pregnant?’ In line with official guidelines, patients were advised that ‘the vaccine has not been tested in pregnancy’ and that ‘those who are pregnant should not routinely have the vaccine’. Patients were sent away from the clinic to consult with their own GPs (at a time when this was difficult to achieve). The official advice was later softened, but the language remained tepid and hedging. It is not surprising that vaccine uptake in pregnancy remained low and, by the summer, some were being admitted to intensive care. (Fitzpatrick, 2021)

The article in which the extract above appeared is titled ‘Risk aversion has cost us in the race to beat Covid’. Authored by a doctor (GP) with a regular column in The Telegraph, it was published in November 2021 and brought criticism of precautionary policy to bear on explanation of vaccine hesitancy and its consequences. It was ‘official guidelines’, messages, and lack of access that were presented as to blame for low vaccine uptake and then admission to intensive care. While this stands as a particularly clear example, more or less explicit criticism of precautionary policy and ‘mixed messages’ in explanations for ‘vaccine hesitancy’ appeared across the sample. Reporting included comments on the health service and its messages in discussions of low vaccine uptake, with statistics cited comparing how few pregnant women had been vaccinated compared to all other adult population groups. Notably, however, there was no evidence in the reporting of women being blamed. Rather, their hesitancy was explained through reference to ‘official failures’. Low vaccination rates were also blamed on poor access; ‘Pregnant women trying to get Covid vaccines face delays and wasted trips because they keep being offered appointments for the wrong job, charity warns’, began one article reporting comment critical of the NHS from the charity Maternity Action (Andrews, 2021).

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The two people who featured most frequently in this reporting were Professor Marian Knight from Oxford University, whose research revealed the incidence of serious illness and death during pregnancy, and Joeli Brearly, from the campaign group for pregnant women and mothers, Pregnant Then Screwed. Knight’s emphasis was on ‘confusion’, ‘mixed messages’, and ‘wrong advice’ being given by vaccine centres, including still turning women away when policy had changed. She explicitly drew attention to the problem of ‘mixed messaging’ at the very outset, in what was communicated about ‘absence of data’ and this being ‘interpreted as the vaccine being unsafe’ (Gibbons, 2021). Brearly’s comments appeared in about one quarter of the articles analysed, with her forthright criticisms of policy and its effects reported most frequently by The Guardian. In April 2021, she ‘called for the Government to take a step further and prioritise pregnant women for vaccines’ (Topping & Davis, 2021). In October, she was cited raising the problem of ‘old leaflets advising against the jab … still in circulation at some healthcare centres’ and of ‘some professionals … giving conflicting advice on safety’. ‘Hesitancy’, it was reported, was driven by the lack of inclusion of pregnancy women in booster drives. ‘It sends out the message: we are not sure about pregnant women and the vaccination’, Brealy stated (Elgot & Geddes, 2021). When the JCVI decided to move pregnant women ‘into priority group 6’ at the end of 2021, and urge them to get two doses, it was reported that ‘maternal health experts’ had already ‘repeatedly called for pregnant women to be prioritised’, and the announcement was described as ‘Too Little, Too Late’, by Brealy. ‘Had they done this from the outset then many more pregnant women would now be vaccinated’, she said, continuing, ‘Instead, months later, they shove them in priority group 6 without any practical plan as to how to access the jab or the booster’ (Devlin, 2021). Criticism of the precautionary stance adopted was in fact present from early on in feature articles, with commentary centring on the theme of what is known and should have been acted on regarding infection during pregnancy. The first of these appeared in April and centred on a ‘new study’ that ‘reveals for the first time just how devastating the virus can be for mothers and their unborn children’. This detailed a study called Intercovid that has followed ‘2,130 pregnant women across the world’ through the first eight months of the pandemic, documenting ‘stark’ results about ‘premature birth, pre-eclampsia, admission to intensive care

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and death compared with pregnant women unaffected by the disease’. The study’s authors were cited at length, detailing not only the evidence of covid harms but also the background of predictability of these harms in prior evidence from the Sars and Mers outbreaks, and the well-understood context of lowered immunity in pregnancy. The decision to only include pregnant women in line with age group and not prioritize for vaccination was explicitly questioned. ‘They are saying pregnant women are at the same risk … which is not true’, the researchers were reported to have said (de Quetteville, 2021). Other research had been reported by this point in April 2021, about both extensive evidence of vaccine safety based on experience in the US and about research documenting the particular risks associated with pregnancy. ‘Pregnant women with Covid face MUCH higher risks’, reported The Mail (Kekatos, 2021). The most explicit criticism of the precautionary stance and the risk-­ averse approach adopted appeared, however, later in 2021, in commentaries in The Guardian titled ‘It’s scandalous so few pregnant women in the UK are vaccinated against covid’ (Cosslett, 2021) and ‘Samantha Willis was a beloved young pregnant mother. Did bad vaccine advice cost her her life?’ (Kale, 2021). The journalist Cosslett addressed the continuing low uptake of the vaccine, and squarely blamed ‘mixed messaging’ through inconsistent policy and lack of provision and encouragement. She explicitly drew attention to the problem of the wider precautionary assumptions that form the background, commenting, ‘Women are used to being told to avoid certain foods and medication when they are pregnant’ and have ‘become accustomed to a “better not, just in case” philosophy’, continuing: Can you have a glass of wine? Eat feta? Take medication? Use sun lotion? In this way, pregnant women are primed to always take what they believe is a risk averse approach. (Cosslett, 2021)

Sirin Kale’s lengthy feature placed Samantha Willis, who died eight months pregnant, having ‘received advice against getting jabbed at an antenatal clinic’, at its centre. This journalism was most explicit in its criticism of the approach to risk taken by the JCVI, including comments from a range of voices arguing against its precautionary stance and highlighting tardiness to act on what was known about the particular dangers presented by pregnancy (Kale, 2021).

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Conclusions Pregnant women were defined as ‘vulnerable’ from the start of the pandemic, indicating recognition that Covid infection presented a particular risk to their health (Anderson et al., 2021). As subsequent commentary has noted, however, this idea of ‘vulnerability’ did not find reflection in extra support or medical care. Rather, measures taken increased risk and compounded isolation (Manca, 2021). Although it is not an area there is space to detail in this chapter, women were advised to ‘isolate’ when pregnant, but found medical care hard to access, and that they could not even look to support from partners or relatives when they were able to attend medical facilities (including to give birth). ‘Isolation’ became literal and expansive, an experience that, for the UK at least, has pervaded well past the ‘opening up’ of society in general. This chapter has discussed how pregnant women’s medical vulnerability did not, initially at least, translate into an emphasis on the importance of offering vaccination. To the contrary, in the UK at least, it was reasons not to vaccinate that dominated, organized through reference to a framework of precautionary thinking. Research about newspaper reporting on risk and pregnancy prior to the pandemic has generally emphasized the dominance of alarmist, precautionary messages (Blaylock et al., 2022; Lee et al., 2016). It was perhaps surprising, then, to find that in UK newspapers at least, the precautionary approach to vaccination in pregnancy that dominated was constructed more or less explicitly as mistaken. Vaccine hesitancy among pregnant women was predominantly explained as a troubling outcome of this approach, and the associated failure to provide and explain the case for vaccination. This strong emphasis on the benefits of vaccination is consistent with the emphasis in reporting in the mainstream media generally, with an especially marked polarization between this mainstream account and that evident on digital and social media, where alarm about vaccination has been very apparent. The effects of this bifurcation in accounts will be an important area for research ongoing, but based on the limited snapshot set out above, it is notable that some issues raised previously in academic literature about the problem of precautionary thinking and pregnancy gained wider visibility. Robinson and co-authors detailed these problems over a decade ago, acknowledging there are ‘countless examples of early life exposures leading to various physical and behavioural health outcomes’, but contending that ‘pregnant woman tend to assign an unreasonably high risk to

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non-­ teratogenic medications and grossly over-estimate their risk after exposure to such medications’. Doctors, too, over-estimate risk to the fetus from medication (Robinson et  al., 2011, p.  54). A little more recently, Ballantyne argued as follows, when making her case for the inclusion of pregnant women in drug trials: Pregnancy continues to be dominated by the precautionary principle, advocating for the routine exclusion of pregnant woman from medical research. … on the grounds of fetal vulnerability. But this stance simply shifts the risk onto the community. Due to a lack of evidence-based data, many pregnant women are refused medically important drugs, are subject to dangerous delays in getting drugs, or are prescribed drugs that are thought ‘safe’ despite evidence of possible teratogenicity. (Ballantyne, 2016, p. 64)

At the time of writing, it is already the case that the approach to medical trials is shifting, suggesting some movement in the workings of precautionary thinking. However, the larger issues that have their roots in a culture of intensive parenting, and which are identified so usefully in the literature discussed in this chapter, continue to pervade.

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Blakeway, H., Prasad, S., Kalafat, E., Heath, P. T., Ladhani, S. N., Le Doare, K., Magee, L. A., O’Brien, P., Rezvani, A., von Dadelszen, P., & Khalil, A. (2022). COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy: Coverage and safety. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 226(2), 236.e1–236.e14. https:// pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34389291/ Blaylock, R., Trickey, H., Sanders, J., & Murphy, C. (2022). WRISK voices: A mixed-methods study of women’s experiences of pregnancy-related public health advice and risk messages in the UK. Midwifery, 113(October) https:// www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026661382200184X Boyd, C. (2020, December 10). Why pregnant women CAN’T have coronavirus vaccines: UK regulator will not offer jabs to mothers-to-be because none were vaccinated in clinical trials but say there’s ‘no evidence’ to suggest they would harm them. Mail Online. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article­9038589/Why-­pregnant-­women-­coronavirus-­vaccine.html Brown, M. (2011). A shot in the dark: Vaccinations and redundant risks. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 39(1/2), 141–160. Brown, M. (2021, November 7). ‘Get the vaccine’: Family of Covid victim’s plea to pregnant women. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/nov/07/family-­of-­covid-­victim-­plea-­to-­pregnant-­women-­vaccine Cosslett, R. (2021, October 29). It’s scandalous so few pregnant women in the UK are vaccinated against Covid. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2021/oct/29/pregnant-­w omen-­v accinated-­c ovid-­ mother-­child de Quetteville, H. (2021, April 23). A year on, startling new findings about Covid and pregnant women revealed. Daily Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co. uk/women/life/year-­startling-­truth-­covid-­pregnant-­women-­finally-­revealed/ Devlin, H. (2021, December 16). JCVI makes pregnant women priority group for Covid vaccination. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2021/dec/16/jcvi-­m akes-­p regnant-­w omen-­p riority-­g roup-­f or-­ covid-­vaccination Diaz Crescitelli, M. E., Ghirotto, L., Sarli, H., Artioli, G., Bassi, M. C., Appicciutoli, G., & Hayter, M. (2020). A meta-synthesis of the key elements involved in childhood vaccine hesitancy. Public Health, 180, 38–45. Elgot, J. & Geddes, L. (2021, October 26). Pregnant women are being turned away from Covid vaccine clinics, experts warn. The Guardian. https://www. theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/26/pregnant-­w omen-­a re-­b eing­turned-­away-­from-­covid-­vaccine-­clinics-­experts-­warn Fitzpatrick, M. (2021, November 29). Risk-aversion has cost us in the race to beat Covid. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-­fitness/doctors-­ diary/risk-­aversion-­has-­cost-­us-­race-­beat-­covid/ Furedi, F. (2008). Paranoid parenting: Why ignoring the experts may be best for your child (2nd ed.). Continuum.

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Geddes, L. (2021, July 30). Pregnant women urged to get Covid jab amid rise in hospital admissions. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2021/jul/30/pregnant-­women-­urged-­to-­get-­covid-­jab-­amid-­rise­in-­hospital-­admissions Gibbons, K. (2021, August 4). NHS staff suffer ‘sinister tide’ of abuse. The Times. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/nhs-­doctors-­and-­nurses-­suffer-­sinister-­ tide-­of-­abuse-­w7b6bg7v9 Glover, E. (2021, December 4). Unvaccinated mothers tell of ‘terrifying’ ordeals as they urge pregnant women to get jabbed. The Independent. https://www. independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-­n ews/covid-­v accine-­p regnant-­ women-­b1969880.html Gov.uk. (2021a, April 16). JCVI issues new advice on COVID-19 vaccination for pregnant women. Retrieved November 15, 2022, from https://www.gov.uk/ government/news/jcvi-­i ssues-­n ew-­a dvice-­o n-­c ovid-­1 9-­v accination-­f or­pregnant-­women Gov.uk. (2021b, December 16). Pregnant women urged to come forward for COVID-19 vaccination. Retrieved 15 November, 2022, from https://www. gov.uk/government/news/pregnant-­women-­urged-­to-­come-­forward-­for­covid-­19-­vaccination Hsu, A. L., Johnson, T., Phillips, L., & Nelson, T. B. (2021). Sources of vaccine hesitancy: Pregnancy, infertility, minority concerns and general skepticism. Open Forum Infectious Diseases, 9(3). https://doi.org/10.1093/ofid/ofab433 Iacobucci, G. (2021). Covid-19 and pregnancy: vaccine hesitancy and how to overcome it. BMJ, 375. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n2862 Januszek, S. M., Faryniak-Zuzak, A., Barnaś, E., Łoziński, T., Góra, T., Siwiec, N., Szczerba, P., Januszek, R., & Kluz, T. (2021). The approach of pregnant women to vaccination based on a COVID-19 systematic review. Medicina, 57(9), 977. https://www.mdpi.com/1648-­9144/57/9/977 JCVI. (2020). Independent report, joint committee on vaccination and immunisation: Advice on priority groups for COVID-19 vaccination. Gov.uk. Retrieved November 20, 2021, from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ priority-­groups-­for-­coronavirus-­covid-­19-­vaccination-­advice-­from-­the-­jcvi-­30-­ december-­2020 Jones, A. (2020, December 3). Pregnant women won’t get jabbed while risk examined. Daily Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/12/ 03/pfizer-­coronavirus-­vaccine-­questions-­answered/ Kale, S. (2021, November 23). Samantha Willis was a beloved young pregnant mother. Did bad vaccine advice cost her her life? The Guardian. https://www. theguar dian.com/society/2021/nov/23/samantha-­w illis-­w as-­a ­beloved-­young-­pregnant-­mother-­did-­bad-­vaccine-­advice-­cost-­her-­her-­life Kekatos, M. (2021, April 22). Pregnant women with Covid face MUCH higher risks: Mothers-to-be were 20 times more likely to die before giving birth and

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their infants may have to spend more time in NICUs, study suggests. Mail Online. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-­9500561/Pregnant-­ women-­COVID-­20-­times-­likely-­die-­infants-­NICUs-­longer.html Kilich, E., Dada, S., Francis, M.  R., Tazare, J., Chico, R.  M., Paterson, P., & Larson, H. (2020). Factors that influence vaccination decision-making among pregnant woman: A systemic review and meta-analysis. PloS One, 15(7). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0234827 Kuan, C. (2022). Vaccine hesitancy and emerging parental norms: A qualitative study in Taiwan. Sociology of Health and Illness, 44(3), 692–709. Kuciel, N., Mazurek, J., Hap, K., Marciniak, D., Biernat, K., & Sutkowska, E. (2022). COVID-19 vaccine acceptance in pregnant and lactating women and mothers of young children in Poland. International Journal of Women’s Health, 14, 415–424. Larson, H. J. (2015). Maternal immunization: The new “normal” (or it should be). Vaccine, 33, 6374–6375. Lay, K. (2021, April 16). Jab green light for pregnant women. The Times. https:// www.thetimes.co.uk/article/pregnant-­women-­should-­be-­offered-­covid-­19­vaccine-­in-­their-­age-­group-­b68s99lt9 Leask, J., Chapman, S., Hawe, P., & Burgess, M. (2006). What maintains parental support for vaccination when challenged by anti-vaccination messages? A qualitative study. Vaccine, 24, 7238–7245. Lee, E., Sutton, R., & Hartley, B. (2016). From scientific article to press release to media coverage: advocating alcohol abstinence and democratising risk in a story about alcohol and pregnancy. Health, Risk and Society, 18(5–6), 247–269. Lintern, S. (2021, April 17). Pregnant women to be offered virus vaccination. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/covid-­vaccine-­ pregnant-­women-­safety-­b1832775.html Lupton, D. (2011). ‘The best thing for the baby’: Mothers’ concepts and experiences related to promoting their infants’ health and development. Health, Risk and Society, 13(7–8), 637–651. Manca, T. A. (2021). Risk and intersectional power relations: An exploration of the implications of early COVID-19 pandemic responses for pregnant women. Health, Risk & Society, 23(7–8), 321–338. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369857 5.2021.1994933 Marsh, S. (2021, August 9). ‘Worrying’ numbers of pregnant women in intensive care with Covid. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ aug/09/worrying-­numbers-­of-­pregnant-­women-­in-­intensive-­care-­with-­covid Martin, S., Kilich, E., Dada, S., Kummervold, P. E., Denny, C., Paterson, P., & Larson, H. J. (2020). “Vaccines for pregnant women…?! Absurd”—Mapping maternal vaccination discourse and stance on social media over six months. Vaccine, 38, 6627–6637.

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Ng, K. (2021, October 27). Covid: Is the vaccine safe for pregnant women? The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-­style/health-­and-­families/ pregnant-­women-­covid-­vaccine-­advice-­b1978129.html Phillips, J. (2021, October 27). Thirteen ‘mostly unvaccinated’ pregnant women have DIED from Covid since July, study shows. Mail Online. https://www. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-­10134569/Thirteen-­unvaccinated-­pregnant-­ women-­DIED-­Covid-­July-­study-­shows.html Reich, J. A. (2016). Of natural bodies and antibodies: Parents’ vaccine refusal and the dichotomies of natural and artificial. Social Science & Medicine, 157, 103–110. Roberts, L. (2021). December 17). Jab clinics urged to prioritise pregnant women to prevent deaths. Daily Telegraph. https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-­ daily-­telegraph/20211217/281788517370872 Robinson, M., Pennell, C.  E., McLean, N.  J., Oddy, W.  H., & Newnham, J. P. (2011). The over-estimation of risk in pregnancy. Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics & Gynaecology, 32(2), 53–58. Saxena, S., Skirrow, H., Bedford, H., & Wighton, K. (2021). Covid-19 vaccines for teenagers: Conversations and consent. British Medical Journal, 374, n2312. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n2312 Schuster, L., Guerrieri, L., & Dootson, P. (2023). Emotions of burden, intensive mothering and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. Critical Public Health, 33(2), 218–229. https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2022.2061917 Skirrow, H., Barnett, S., Bell, S., Riaposova, L., Mounie-Jack, S., Kampmann, B., & Holder, B. (2022). Women’s views on accepting COVID-19 vaccination during and after pregnancy, and for their babies: A multi-methods study in the UK. BMC Pregnancy Childbirth, 22(33). https://doi.org/10.1186/ s12884-­021-­04321-­3 Skjefte, M., Ngirbabul, M., Akeju, O., Escudero, D., Hernandez-Diaz, S., Wyszynski, D. F., & Wu, J. W. (2021). COVID-19 vaccine acceptance among pregnant women and mothers of young children: results of a survey in 16 countries. European Journal of Epidemiology, 36, 197–211. Thomas, R. (2021, November 21). Revealed: Over 600 babies born premature and needing critical care to mothers hospitalised by Covid-19. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/babies-­premature-­mothers-­ covid-­hospital-­b1959359.html Thompson, A. (2021). The paradox of vaccine hesitancy and refusal: Public health and the moral work of motherhood. In P.  J. Ballantyne & K.  Ryan (Eds.), Living pharmaceutical lives (pp. 88–102). Routledge. Thorburn, J. (2021, November 4). Young mother, 21, who initially REFUSED Covid vaccine because she was pregnant and gave birth while in a coma after contracting the virus, finally meet her daughter for the first time one month later. Mail Online. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-­10164539/ Young-­mother-­refused-­Covid-­jab-­gave-­birth-­coma-­meets-­daughter-­time.html

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Topping, A., & Davis, N. (2021, April 16). Pregnant women in the UK given green light to have Covid jab. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2021/apr/16/pregnant-­women-­offered-­covid-­vaccine-­uk Turner, C. (2021, October 11). Unvaccinated mother-to-be face severe risks: Pregnant women without jabs account for a fifth of critical Covid patients on lunch treatment machine. The Daily Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/2021/10/11/fifth-­critically-­covid-­patients-­unvaccinated-­pregnant­women/ Wace, C. (2021, August 26). Mother, 18, who almost died urges pregnant woman to have jab. The Times. Ward, P.  R., Attwell, K., Meyer, S.  B., Rokkas, P., & Leask, J. (2018). Risk, Responsibility and negative responses: A qualitative study of parental trust in childhood. Journal of Risk Research, 21(9), 1117–1130. Wiley, K. E., Cooper, S. C., Wood, N., & Leask, J. (2015). Understanding pregnant women’s attitudes and behavior toward influenza and pertussis vaccination. Qualitative Health Research, 25(3), 360–370. Wiley, K. E., Leask, J., Attwell, K., Helps, C., Degeling, C., Ward, P., & Carter, S. M. (2020). Parenting and the vaccine refusal process: A new explanation of the relationship between lifestyle and vaccination trajectories. Social Science & Medicine, 263. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113259 Wilson, R. (2019). The institutional embedding of maternal vaccination and its effect on vaccination acceptance during pregnancy. Journal of Anthropological Research, 75(4), 498–523. Wilson, R.  J., Paterson, P., Jarrett, C., & Larson, H.  J. (2015). Understanding factors influencing vaccination acceptance during pregnancy globally: A literature review. Vaccine, 33, 6420–6429.

CHAPTER 14

Conclusion Ellie Lee, Jennie Bristow, Charlotte Faircloth, and Jan Macvarish

Parenting Culture Studies has made the case for interdisciplinary research about and discussion of the workings of two linked problems: intensive parenting and parental determinism. The chapters have explored how this allows us to develop an alternative perspective about the significance and meaning of the parental role. Back in the 1st Edition of the book, we concluded that a key tension to highlight as part of this analysis was the gulf between the imperatives and assumptions of parenting culture—often clearly expressed in Government policies—and the everyday experience of parents. We ended that edition with discussion of examples of this gulf, including a parent-training scheme of the day, CANparent, and concluded, ‘[T]hose who think of “parenting” as the determining cause of social problems inevitably and inexorably rub the experience of real parents out of the picture’, and that ‘exploration of this gulf and its implications needs to be a point of departure for the future study of parenting culture’ (Lee, 2014, p. 219). This edition of Parenting Culture Studies includes new chapters reflecting on parents’ experience in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Our comments about this experience necessarily constitute a snapshot based mainly on research about one location (the UK) at a particular point in time, during events that continue to unfold. We have suggested, however, that this snapshot exposed much about the continued, troubling reality of parental determinism and intensive parenting. We argue that the general © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Lee et al., Parenting Culture Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44156-1_14

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experience during this time indicated that it is inconceivable that ‘parenting’ is the driver of social problems and social inequalities, or that parents can ensure maximized ‘outcomes’ for their children if better ‘skilled up’ through parent training. Instead, it showed that much of what passes for ‘parenting support’ is in fact dispensable, and that it is simply not possible to effectively socialize children through intensive parenting at home. Children need school most of all (centrally, they need education) and they need interaction with other children (and adults other than their parents in their social world) if they are to develop and thrive as part of communities. It also showed the power of the influence of risk-aversion, borne of a deterministic emphasis on the effects of pregnancy behaviour for child health, in driving limits on the provision of necessary medical and practical support to pregnant women. In this light, we remain strongly of the view, expressed in the previous edition of this book, that effective child-rearing is (or should be) a collective effort requiring collaboration between adults. At the same time, however, a better parenting culture than we have now needs to counter to the assumption that there is a ready-made science of parenting that ‘we know’ can be applied to train parents, to enable them to play their part. The assumption that there is, and the continued initiatives based on this assumption, will only make matters worse and work to underestimate and undermine what matters about parenthood. They contribute to a continuing process of diminishing the significance of parental authority and to the effacing of the specific and unique meaning of parenthood as part of adulthood. In 2014, we argued there were a set of connected areas that we thought important for research seeking to develop a critique of current parenting culture. Our thoughts on developments in those areas, a decade on, are as follows.

The Social History of Parental Determinism One of the themes highlighted in the Introduction to this book was the historical specificity of parenting culture. We have indicated throughout our writing in both editions of this book, and elsewhere, that deterministic thinking about infancy has historically formed an important component part of ways of thinking about the future. We have also discussed the strong associated tendency, expressed from the nineteenth century onwards, to present the socialization of children as best guided by professionals and experts rather than parents and through communities. We

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have also discussed the importance of research that concerns itself with capturing the right balance between continuity and change, increasing insight about the key dynamics leading to change. A significant gain of the past decade has been the critical attention paid to key contemporary expressions of deterministic thinking. This includes work taking up the institutionalized, increasingly globalized preoccupation with children’s brains and the reorganization of claims about social change associated with it (Scheidecker et al., 2023). Questioning of the meaning of an ‘adverse’ experience in childhood, and the associated assumptions about the outcomes of the identification of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) for intervention in the lives of children and their families, is also a very positive development (Edwards et  al., 2019). The publication of books disseminating research strongly focused on mounting arguments about history, to illuminate and explain the distinctiveness of the present, is also a great gain. Nancy McDermott’s The Problem with Parenting, How Raising Children Is Changing Across America (2020) is one such book, raising new thoughts about the history of the bourgeois family and about the significance of changes initiated in the 1970s in the US especially. Frank Furedi’s focus on the concept ‘socialization’, including its capture by psychologically oriented experts, as set out in his 100 Years of Identity Crisis (2021), suggests important avenues for future work to build on regarding changing definitions of identity and its influence over both children and parents.

Comparative Parenting Culture Studies The collection of essays Parenting in Global Perspective (Faircloth et al., 2013), published a year before the 1st Edition of this book, was one of the first contributions to look at the intensification of parenting both comparatively and cross-culturally. There, the authors called attention to the ways that parenting—as a set of practices that are culturally and historically specific—was nevertheless obtaining a global significance as a set of ideas, sometimes with little consideration for local conceptions of raising children. This dynamic was explored further in subsequent publications (Faircloth & Murray, 2015), and as noted, important work is developing in relation to the globalization of this aspect of parenting culture, focusing on the global South (Scheidecker et al., 2023). Most recently, Faircloth has explored this dynamic with colleagues working in both parenting culture studies and childhood studies to see

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what insights might emerge in the dialogue across these fields in a range of global contexts (Faircloth & Rosen, 2020). Both fields have been pressed to consider the complex ways that tropes of parenthood and childhood travel globally (Faircloth et al., 2013) and to theorize from everyday lives in the global South (Balagopalan, 2019). Rabello de Castro (2019) argues this does not mean reading outwards from a taken-for-granted centre to periphery, but instead requires an approach of de-linking from knowledge ‘assumed to be valid everywhere’ (Rabello de Castro, 2019, p. 9). This requires consideration of how family life, parental experience, and wider social contexts are shaped by global processes (Katz, 2004). This project is critical to Parenting Culture Studies in the future, particularly after the global response to Covid-19. Further exploration along these lines is needed, to bring to light how the scientization of child-rearing is internalized by parents and other adults, and the differential effects of this aspect of the ‘intensification’ of parenting across and within cultures. The working of the contemporary State regarding parenting culture is another important area for this sort of work. Certainly, the individualized and competitive approach to parenting we outline in this book is linked to wider cultural norms as well as to state infrastructures, which differ dramatically in terms of welfare and resources for education and care (for example, competition for college places in the US, which puts extra pressure on parents to ‘go the extra mile’ (Lareau, 2003; Nelson, 2010)). Similarly, in industrialized countries, the differential movement from the welfare state to the ‘therapeutic’ or ‘interventionist’ one is a key focus to consider further in a comparative sense. Macvarish and Martin (2021), through their assessment of parenting politics across Europe, suggest that the following thematic aspects as central to ongoing investigations: ‘parenting’ de-gendered; parenting de-naturalized; parenting as a form of work; parenting as an activity requiring ‘scaffolding’; and a reversal of previously assumed authority relations in the parent–child relationship. They point to the need for ongoing research elaborating how state policies differentially re-define the meaning of parenthood along these lines, and the effects for parental experience.

The Problem of Generations Since the 1st Edition of Parenting Culture Studies, engagement with ‘generations’ has developed considerably. This is critical because the study of parenting culture should devote energy to understanding the ongoing

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relation between ‘parenting’ and the wider reposing of social problems as ones of generational conflict. Bristow’s work on ‘Boomer blaming’ and narratives of generational conflict has explored the way in which claims about economic problems, cultural conflicts, and public resources (such as pensions and healthcare) have increasingly been expressed as the result of older generations promoting their own interests over those of the young (Bristow, 2015, 2016b, 2021). Such narratives, popularized through media and policy discourse, chime with the trend towards ‘parent blaming’ explored in this book, and encourage sentiments of fatalism and grievance among young people that mitigate against their ability to conceptualize themselves as adults, with the agency and responsibility this entails (Bristow, 2019). Furthermore, in positioning ‘older generations’ as the cause of present-day problems, the focus on conflict undermines the exercise of inter-generational collaboration in those areas of social and intimate life that centrally rely on this: including education and family life (Bristow, 2016a; Bristow et al., 2020). The Generations Network was established in 2019 to bring together scholars from a range of disciplines with Third Sector organizations working with the concept of ‘generation’ (CPCS, 2023; Kingstone & Bristow, 2024). It seeks to encourage an ongoing dialogue about the use and abuse of generational language in understanding relations between old and young, and in mediating the relationship between past, present, and future, adding a new dimension to work around parenting culture. We hope you have enjoyed reading this updated edition, and as ever, we welcome contact from researchers with shared interests. Our hope is that through the project of Parenting Culture Studies, we can work collectively to make sense of genuine experiences of raising children, encouraging dialogue and conversation where parents (and other adults) take seriously the idea of making sense of real-world experiences as they find it.

References Balagopalan, S. (2019). Childhood, culture, history: Beyond ‘multiple childhoods’. In S. Spyrou, R. Rosen, & D. T. Cook (Eds.), Reimagining childhood studies (pp. 23–40). Bloomsbury Academic. Bristow, J. (2015). Baby boomers and generational conflict. Palgrave Macmillan. Bristow, J. (2016a). The sociology of generations: New directions and challenges. Palgrave Macmillan. Bristow, J. (2016b). The making of ‘Boomergeddon’: The construction of the Baby Boomer generation as a social problem in Britain. The British Journal of Sociology, 67(4), 575–591.

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Bristow, J. (2019). Stop mugging grandma: The ‘generation wars’ and why Boomer blaming won’t solve anything. Yale University Press. Bristow, J. (2021). Post-Brexit Boomer blaming: The contradictions of generational grievance. The Sociological Review, 69(4), 759–774. Bristow, J., Cant, S., & Chatterjee, A. (2020). Generational encounters with higher education: The academic–student relationship and the university experience. Bristol University Press. CPCS. (2023). Generations network. Retrieved June 30, 2023, from https:// blogs.kent.ac.uk/parentingculturestudies/research-­t hemes/generations/ generations-­the-­network/ Edwards, R., Gillies, G., & White, S. (2019). Themed section: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)—Implications and challenges. Social Policy and Society, 18(3) https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-­policy-­and-­society/ issue/424134A6B7E07A64A88A0ABAE3DAE1C0 Faircloth, C., & Murray, M. (Eds.). (2015). Special Issue: Parenting: Kinship, expertise and anxiety. Journal of Family Issues, 36 (9). https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/jfia/36/9 Faircloth, C., & Rosen, R. (Eds.). (2020). Childhood, parenting culture, and adult child relations in transnational perspectives. Families, Relationships and Societies, 9(1), 7–22. Faircloth, C., Hoffman., D. M., & Layne, L. L. (Eds.). (2013). Parenting in global perspectives, negotiating ideologies of kinship, self and politics. Routledge. Furedi, F. (2021). 100 years of identity crisis, culture war over socialisation. Dr Gruyter. Katz, C. (2004). Growing up global: Economic restructuring and children’s everyday lives. University of Minnesota Press. Kingstone, H., & Bristow, J. (Eds.). (2024). Studying generations: Multidisciplinary perspectives. Bristol University Press. Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life. University of California Press. Lee, E. (2014). Conclusion. In E. Lee, J. Bristow, C. Faircloth, & J. Macvarish (Eds.), Parenting culture studies (pp. 216–222). Palgrave. Macvarish, J., & Martin, C. (2021). Towards a ‘parenting regime’: Globalising tendencies and localised variation. In A.-M. Castrén et al. (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of family sociology in Europe (pp. 435–451). Palgrave. McDermott, N. (2020). The problem with parenting, how raising children is changing across America. Praeger. Nelson, M. (2010). Parenting out of control: Anxious parents in uncertain times. New York University Press. Rabello de Castro, L. (2019). Why global? Children and childhood from a decolonial perspective. Childhood, 27(1), 48–62. Scheidecker, G., Chaudhary, N., Mezzenzana, H., & Lancy, D. (2023). “Poor brain development” in the global South? Challenging the science of early childhood interventions. Ethos, 51, 3–26.

Correction to: Parenting Culture Studies Ellie Lee, Jennie Bristow, Charlotte Faircloth, and Jan Macvarish

Correction to: E. Lee et al., Parenting Culture Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44156-1 The original version of this book has been revised. The chapter authors’ names have been included in TOC and respective chapter opening pages.

The updated version of the book can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­031-­44156-­1 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Lee et al., Parenting Culture Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44156-1_15

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 Appendix: Data Set for Media Analysis (Chapter 13)

The database of international newspapers, Nexis, was searched using the timeframe from March 2020 to July 2022 using the terms pregnant/vaccination/Covid; selecting for UK daily national newspapers only; and restricting results to those with five or more items generated from the search. The newspapers included as a result were The Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, and The Daily Mail, and once the sample generated had been cleaned to remove duplicates, reporting from international desks, and any articles not focusing exclusively on pregnancy, 69 articles remained. Most of the sample came from The Independent, The Guardian, and The Daily Mail (21, 20, and 16 articles, respectively). About a quarter of the sample was news articles which, predictably, covered changes to Government policy on providing vaccination to pregnant women. The rest were a combination of news reporting about research findings or expert statements, with about a quarter comprising feature and comment pieces (with the latter often authored by medical professionals, for example, obstetricians). Newspaper Articles Andrews, L. 2021. Pregnant women trying to get Covid vaccines face delays and wasted trips because they keep being offered appointments for the wrong job, charity warns. Mail Online (May 7)

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AP news wire. 2021. What should I know about Covid-19 vaccines if I’m pregnant? The Independent (January 14) AP news wire. (2021). Do the Covid-19 vaccines affect my chances of pregnancy? The Independent (August 12) Best, S. 2021. Covid-19 vaccines do NOT affect fertility, expert claims – women being duped by ‘rumours and myths’ about the jabs circulating online. Mail Online (January 15) Boyd, C. 2020. Why pregnant women CAN’T have coronavirus vaccines: UK regulator will not offer jabs to mothers-to-be because none were vaccinated in clinical trials but say there’s ‘no evidence’ to suggest they would harm them. Mail Online (December 10) Brown, M. 2021. ‘Get the vaccine’: family of Covid victim’s plea to pregnant women. The Guardian (November 7) Callery, J. 2022. Most pregnant women still unvaccinated despite risks. The Times (February 24) Chappell, L. 2021. As an obstetrician, here’s my advice to pregnant women: get your vaccine and stay safe. The Guardian (30 November) Connor, L. 2021. 5 key facts about Covid-19 vaccines that pregnant women need to know. The Independent (July 30) Cosslett, R. 2021. It’s scandalous so few pregnant women in the UK are vaccinated against Covid. The Guardian (October 29) Craig, E. 2021. No evidence Covid vaccines can raise the risk of miscarriage or affect fertility, drug watchdog insists. Mail Online (August 17) de Quetteville, H. 2021. How dangerous is Covid for pregnant women: A landmark new study reveals for the first time just how devastating the virus can be for mothers and their unborn children. Daily Telegraph (April 23) Davis, N. 2021. Hopes UK trial will allay pregnant women’s vaccine concerns. The Guardian (August 3) Devlin, K. 2021. Doctors call for changes to vaccination booking system as pregnant women unable to find Covid jab. The Independent (May 7) Devlin, H. 2021. JCVI makes pregnant women priority group for Covid vaccination. The Guardian (December 16) Donnelly, L. 2021. Pfizer and Moderna jabs ruled safe for pregnant women. Daily Telegraph (April 17) Dowd, J. 2021. After 30 years in obstetrics, Covid vaccination has made me reassess my advice to pregnant patients. The Guardian (October 19) Elgot, J. and Geddes, L. 2021. Pregnant women are being turned away from Covid vaccine clinics, experts warn. The Guardian (October 26).

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Ely, J. 2022. Mothers-to-be who get Covid within a month of their due date are at greatest risk of complications and are twice as likely to give birth prematurely, study finds. Mail Online (January 13) Fitzpatrick, M. 2021. Risk-aversion has cost us in the race to beat Covid. The Telegraph (November 29) Geddes, L. 2021. Pregnant women urged to get Covid jab amid rise in hospital admissions. The Guardian (July 30) Gibbons, K. 2021. NHS staff suffer ‘sinister tide’ of abuse. The Times (August 4) Gibbons, K. 2021. Pregnant women turned away by vaccine centres. The Times (October 28) Glover, E. 2021. Unvaccinated mothers tell of ‘terrifying’ ordeals as they urge pregnant women to get jabbed. The Independent (December 5) Gregory, A. 2021. Pregnant women urged to take Covid jab as data from England shows it is safe. The Guardian (November 25) Gregory, A. 2022. Pregnant women’s vaccination protects baby from Covid – study. The Guardian (February 16) Grover, N. 2021. Covid jabs offered to pregnant women: your questions answered. The Guardian (April 16) Grover, N. 2021. No evidence Covid vaccine raises risk of miscarriage, MHRA says. The Guardian (August 16) Javed, S. 2021. WhatsApp service provides fact-checked vaccine information for pregnant women. The Independent (August 24) Jones, A. 2020. Pregnant women won’t get jabbed while risk examined. Daily Telegraph (December 3) Kale, S. 2021 Samantha Willis was a beloved young pregnant mother. Did bad vaccine advice cost her her life? The Guardian (November 23) Kekatos, M. 2021. Should pregnant woman receive the Covid-19 vaccine? Mail Online (March 17) Kekatos, M. 2021. Pregnant women with Covid face MUCH higher risks: Mothers-to-be were 20 times more likely to die before giving birth and their infants may have to spend more time in NICUs, study suggests. Mail Online (April 22) Kekatos, M. 2021. Covid vaccines do NOT increase the risk of miscarriages in pregnant women, two new studies find. Mail Online (September 8) Kekatos, M. 2021. Pregnant women with symptomatic Covid-19 have an increased risk of emergency deliveries – and their babies are more likely to need NICU admission. Mail Online (October 8)

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Kekatos, M. 2021. Covid-19 pandemic increased pregnant women’s risk of gestational diabetes and high blood pressure – but was NOT linked to a higher rate of stillbirths, study finds. Mail Online (October 15) Kilander, G. 2021. Vaccinated pregnant mothers pass antibodies to babies, research shows. The Independent (March 21) Knapton, S. 2022. Covid jab ‘cuts number of stillbirths by 15pc’: study on anti-vaccine pregnant women finds that inoculation is ‘safer for them and their babies’. Daily Telegraph (May 11) Ladyzhets, B. 2021. Pregnant women with Covid-19 are 59 times more likely to be admitted to the ICU and 40 times more likely to does than mothers-to-be not infected with the virus. Mail Online (November 30) Lay, K. 2021. Jab green light for pregnant women. The Times (April 17) Lintern, S. 2021. Pregnant women to be offered virus vaccination. The Independent (April 17) Lovett, S. 2021. No evidence that Covid vaccines increase risk of miscarriage, says UK medicines regulator. The Independent (August 17) Marsh, S. 2021. ‘Worrying’ numbers of pregnant women in intensive care with Covid. The Guardian (August 9) Mathers, M. 2021. Study launched to find best Covid vaccine gap for pregnant women. The Independent (August 3) Ng, K. 2021. What should I do if I’m pregnant and can’t book a Covid jab? The Independent (May 7) Ng, K. 2021. Covid: Is the vaccine safe for pregnant women? The Independent (October 27) Ng, K. 2021. Covid: Is the vaccine safe for pregnant women? The Independent (December 17) Phillips, J. 2021. Thirteen ‘mostly unvaccinated’ pregnant women have DIED from Covid since July, study shows. Mail Online (October 27) Rao, A. 2021. I took the Covid vaccine while pregnant – let’s not pretend it’s an easy decision. The Guardian (October 5) Roberts, L. 2021. Jab clinics urged to prioritise pregnant women to prevent deaths. Daily Telegraph (December 17) Sabin, L. 2021. Changes to menstrual cycle after Covid vaccination should be investigated, says expert. The Independent (September 16) Salmon, L. 2021. Can I have the Covid vaccine when I’m pregnant or breastfeeding? The Independent (March 26) Shah, F. 2022. Covid vaccine are ‘safe for pregnant women and cut stillbirth risk’, study says. The Independent (May 10)

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Shaheen, M. 2021. Women who contract Covid-19 while pregnant can increase the risk of premature birth by up to 60%, study finds. Mail Online (August 16) Shaheen, M. 2021. Pregnant women are less likely to experience side effects from the Covid-19 vaccine than those who aren’t expecting, study finds. Mail Online (August 17) Shaheen, M. 2021. Less than half of women who are either pregnant or plan to be are confident that the Covid-19 vaccines are safe for them. Mail Online (December 3) Skopeliti, C. 2021. ‘Pregnancy is a scary time’: four women on getting the Covid vaccine. The Guardian (October 12) Sly, E. 2021. Campaign launched to urge pregnant women to get vaccinated against Covid. The Independent (January 10) Sly, E. 2021. First Covid vaccine study for pregnant woman launches in the UK. The Independent (May 17) Thomas, R. 2021. Revealed: Over 600 babies born premature and needing critical care to mothers hospitalised by Covid-19. The Independent (November 21) Thomas, R. 2021. Warning over gap in Covid vaccination levels for poor and black pregnant women. The Independent (November 25) Thomas, R. 2022. Covid vaccine uptake in pregnant woman rises to 60% but racial inequalities persist. The Independent (May 12) Thorburn, J. 2021. Young mother, 21, who initially REFUSED Covid vaccine because she was pregnant and gave birth while in a coma after contacting the virus, finally meet her daughter for the first time one month later. Mail Online (November 4) Topping, A. 2021. NHS to allow pregnant women to book specific Covid vaccines. The Guardian (May 7) Topping, A. 2021. ‘Mixed advice’ driving Covid vaccine hesitancy in pregnant women. The Guardian (July 13) Topping, A. and Davis, N. 2021. Pregnant women in the UK given green light to have Covid jab. The Guardian (April 16) Turner, C. 2021. Unvaccinated mother-to-be face severe risks: Pregnant women without jabs account for a fifth of critical Covid patients on lunch treatment machine. The Daily Telegraph (October 11) Wace, C. 2021. Mother, 18, who almost died urges pregnant woman to have jab. The Times (August 26)

Index

A Abduction, child, 22, 135 Abel, E. L., 170–172 Abortion, 175, 176 Adulthood, 17, 35, 49–53, 74, 144, 159, 219, 254, 270, 279, 281–286, 368 Advice on parenting books, 7, 90, 193 classes, 8, 90, 93, 117, 121, 311 drinking when pregnant, 20, 23, 172 fatherhood, 26 guides, 8, 220 National Health Service (UK), 168 pregnancy, 83, 166, 196, 341–360 Royal College of Midwives (UK), 173, 253, 354 web based, 221 See also Support Alcohol, see Drinking Allen, G., 225, 226 Apple, R. D., 73, 189, 206, 207 Arai, L., 22, 114 Ariès, P., 49, 207 Armstrong, E. M., 14, 20, 22, 169–173, 175–179

Atkins, S., 82 ‘At risk’ children, 15, 16, 24, 48, 54, 57, 91, 92, 114, 116, 135, 136, 149, 155, 190, 193, 305 families, 48, 114, 116, 153 See also Vulnerability Attachment advocacy of, 200 bonding mystique, 191–192 brain development, 199, 220 contemporary debate, 192–194 evolutionary evidence, 198–199 growing popularity as parenting style, 209 as natural, 189, 207 parental justifications, 147 policy, 58, 200–201 scientific evidence, 199 skin to skin contact, 189 as social movement, 203 theory, 190–196, 199, 201, 204, 227 (see also Bowlby, J., as unrealistic parenting style)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Lee et al., Parenting Culture Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44156-1

379

380 

INDEX

Attachment Parenting International (API), 196, 201, 203 Authority father, ix, 72, 243 parental, 13, 24, 50, 57, 71, 89, 92, 131, 242, 368 shared, 81, 86–94 Autonomy child, 123, 182 parental, 13, 102, 123 B ‘Baby P’ case, 120 Back to Basics, 105 Barclay, L., 26, 75–77, 79, 83, 87, 243, 244 Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, 277 Baumrind, D., 12 Behaviour, politics of, 46, 82–84, 89, 165, 269 Belsky, J., 110 Best, J., 20–23, 86, 100, 136, 137, 153 Bichard Inquiry, 2004 (UK), 138, 141 Blair, Tony, 104, 108, 109, 121 Bonding, see Attachment Bowlby, J., 55, 78–80, 149, 191, 193, 199, 204, 244 as unrealistic parenting style, 204 Brain, see Neuroscience Brazelton, T. B., 55 Breastfeeding advocacy, 204 and attachment, 58, 196, 198, 201, 202, 204 historical studies, 4 medicalization, 5 professionalization, 5 Breastfeeding Manifesto Coalition (UK), 201, 209 British Medical Association (BMA), 39 Bruer, J. T., 193, 216, 223, 228–230, 232

C Cameron, David, 150, 151, 250, 297 CANparent scheme (UK), 117, 367 Centuries of Childhood: a Social History of Family Life, 49 Child abuse, 112, 113, 124, 136, 137, 144, 145, 157, 180, 317 Child development, 35, 38, 40, 54, 57, 58, 70, 78, 83, 84, 107, 112, 167, 181, 195–196, 215, 216, 219, 224, 227, 228, 230, 297 Childhood construction of (see Social construction in crisis) extension of, 53 and the future, 5, 225 history of, 48 Childism, 317–335 Child protection, 112, 113, 126, 137, 141, 144, 157, 328 Child psychology, 70, 74 See also Psychology Childrearing changes in, 33 cultural variation, 43 privatization of, 47 scientific enterprise, 73 Children Act, 2004 (UK), 112 Child safety, see Risk consciousness Child Sex Offender Disclosure Scheme (UK), 137 Child the Family and the Outside World, The, 80 Chua, A., 277 Claims making, 22, 27, 194, 209, 227, 233 Class, 34, 41–45, 52, 60, 75, 76, 101, 107, 117, 193, 228, 244, 247, 255, 269, 274, 277, 286, 295, 302, 306–308, 312, 319, 350 Climbie, Victoria, 112, 157 Clinton, Bill, 223

 INDEX 

Conservative – Liberal Democrat Coalition, 102, 107, 117, 139, 157, 166, 252 Consumerism, 281 ‘Cotton wool kids,’ 27, 45, 267–287 Council of Europe, 104 Covid 19, 8, 15, 24, 26, 39, 53, 159, 293–312, 317–319, 321–323, 325, 328, 330, 335, 341, 343, 350–355, 367, 370 Crime and Disorder Act, 1998 (UK), 110 Criminal Justice Act, 2003 (UK), 111 Criminal Record Bureau (CRB), see Vetting Cucchiara, M., 91, 93, 277, 278 Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, The, 8, 27, 34 Culture of fear, 59, 148, 328 Cunningham, H., 49, 51–53 D Daly, M., 9, 99, 100, 102, 109, 248 Department for Children, Schools and Families (UK), 113, 154 Department for Education (UK), 252 Department for Education and Skills (UK), 107 Determinism child, 88 history of parental determinism, 368–369 infant, 56, 227 parental, viii–x, 5–8, 12–14, 23, 24, 26, 56, 57, 107, 108, 165, 167, 174, 178, 180, 190, 218, 230, 231, 271, 294, 367 Detoxing Childhood, 278 Dettwyler, K., 198 Developmental paradigm, 56 Diagnosis of Moral Disorder, 177

381

Disappearance of Childhood, The, 49, 52, 333 Disciplining children, responsibility for, 92 Don’t Touch! The Educational Story of a Panic, 146 Donzelot, J., 123 Dream Babies: Child Care from Locke to Spock, 69 Drinking, 20, 23, 26, 167–174, 176–178, 180–184, 256, 342 See also Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD); Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) Dutroux, Marc case, 120 E Early intervention, 27, 102, 104, 108, 110, 111, 114, 116, 124, 156, 166, 200, 217, 224, 229, 231, 234 Early Intervention: Smart Investment, Massive Savings, 2011 (UK), 226 Early Intervention: the Next Steps, 2011 (UK), 225 Education Act, 1870 (UK), 51 Education, parental role, 250 Education, purpose of, 331–335 Ehrenreich, B., 74–76 Émile, 50 Emotional life, intervention in, 123 Employment, maternal, 149 English, D., 74–77 Enlightenment, 50, 57 Erikson, E., 54 Eugenics, 75 Every Child Matters, 2003 (UK), 133, 156 Every Parent Matters, 2007 (UK), 250 Evidence, use of for early intervention, 110, 217 in parenting advice, 269 See also Science

382 

INDEX

Expertise contemporary, 43, 149 parenting, viii, 43, 82, 83, 90, 93, 94 rise of the child expert, 70 See also Advice on parenting F Factories Act, 1833 (UK), 51 Family diversification of, 106 pressures on, 106 as a public concern, 249 relation to the state, 99, 121 Family and Parenting Institute (UK), 122 Family Nurse Partnership (UK), 109, 114–115 Family policy demoralization of, 107 expansion of, 113 explicit, 99–105, 107, 116, 120, 121 intervention in the family, 121 politicization of, 105, 208 See also Early intervention Family Studies, 6 Fatherhood absent fathers, 251 advice on parenting, 26 authority, 242 construction of, 55 ‘new model father,’ 252, 255, 260 policy making, 13 resisting intensive fatherhood, 255–256 role models, 151, 250 traditional role, 41, 151 Fatherhood Institute (UK), 248 Fear of children, 159

Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD), 169, 171, 173, 177, 180, 181, 184 Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS), 22, 170–173, 176–178 Field, F., 107 ‘Five to Thrive’ campaign (UK), 228 Foetus, relationship to mother, 175, 344 Folk knowledge, 71, 77, 81 Ford, G., 34, 57 Formula milk, 18, 23, 58, 205, 208, 256 Foundation Years: Preventing Poor Children Becoming Poor Adults, 2010 (UK), 107 Free Range Kids: Giving our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry, 271 Freud, Sigmund, 54, 78 Fritzl, Josef case, 120 Furedi, F., 7–10, 14–20, 24, 25, 27, 33, 38, 50, 53, 56–59, 85–91, 93, 103–105, 108, 110, 111, 115, 116, 122, 124, 131, 133, 139, 142, 144, 152–155, 157, 165, 166, 168, 174, 184, 206, 231, 235, 243, 267, 268, 270, 278, 279, 281–284, 286, 317, 329, 331–334, 342, 369 G Gender equality, 46, 178, 246–249 Generations, ix, 6, 19, 27, 37, 43–45, 75, 106, 108, 109, 132, 133, 139, 201, 206, 233, 243, 258, 270, 272–274, 278, 279, 295, 296, 303, 305, 322, 332, 370–371 Gerhardt, S., 57, 199, 206, 220

 INDEX 

Gillies, V., 11, 26, 38, 41, 42, 103, 106–109, 116, 117, 120, 122, 166, 215, 227, 231, 247, 255, 306, 335 Golden, J., 20, 75, 170, 171, 173, 177, 178, 180 Guldberg, H., 20, 49–51, 86, 143, 270, 271, 278, 279, 317 H Hardyment, C., 57, 69, 73, 82 Hausman, B., 198, 199, 205, 206 Hays, S., 8, 9, 24, 25, 33–39, 41, 46, 47, 50, 55, 58–60, 72–74, 76, 78, 80, 81, 101, 122, 125, 155, 194, 206, 207, 235, 259, 301, 307, 346 Head Start (USA), 100, 104, 124 Helicopter parents, 27, 45, 53, 81, 267–287 Hendrick, H., 48, 76, 80 Henricson, C., 103, 105, 122 Highscope Perry study, 104 Historical specificity, 8, 368 History of childhood, 48 Holt, L. E., 75 Hulbert, A., 75, 76, 215, 222–224, 228, 232, 233 Hunt, A., 17–21, 23, 142, 318 I ‘I am your child’ campaign (USA), 223, 224, 228 Identity adulthood, 17 and intensive parenting, 58–59, 259 parental, 6, 174 Independent Review on Poverty and Life Chances (UK), 107

383

Independent Safeguarding Authority (UK), 138, 140 Individualization of social problems, 231 Infant development, see Child development Influenza, 343, 347–350 Informal mechanisms of care, see Instinct; Socialization of children Instinct, 45, 71–73, 75, 79–81, 84, 85, 189, 197, 243, 251, 324 Intensive parenting adult identity, 58–59 alternatives to, 367 and class, 34, 42, 306–308 and cultural variation, 43 double bind of, 268 expansion of during pandemic, 294 fatherhood, 242 and gender, 41, 47, 307 as an ideal, 40, 92, 301 intensive motherhood, 306 push back against, 311 role of neuroscience, 234 See also Parenting Interdisciplinary approach, to study, 6, 367 Inter-generational contact, regulation of, 24 See also Vetting Internet, 48, 56, 69, 83, 84, 221, 274, 279–281, 308, 330 J James, A., 47, 48 Jenkins, N., 39, 271, 272 Jenkins, P., 135, 136, 144 Jenks, C., 47 Joffe, H., 4, 219–221, 227 Jones, A., 145, 148, 149, 353

384 

INDEX

K Kagan, J., 193, 227, 229, 230, 232 Kanieski, M. A., 84, 189, 190, 192, 193, 197, 201 Kessen, W., 70, 71, 74, 77, 100 Key, E., 73, 75 Kids cotton wool, 27, 45, 267–287 free range, 272 Knight, M., 341, 342, 357 Knight, S., 159 L Labour Party, 102–106, 109–112, 114, 120, 138, 250, 251 La Leche League International, 201, 203 Laming Inquiry, 112, 157 Lareau, A., 39, 40, 42, 44, 45, 155, 255, 276, 294, 297, 298, 306, 370 Lasch, C., 122, 125, 194 Layne, L., 41, 59 Leach, P., 55 Leadsom, A., 4, 217, 218 Levine, M., 281 Lewis, J., 76, 101–103, 111, 116, 284, 285 Liberman, E., 133, 135–137 Licensed to Hug, 139, 142, 144, 152 Lockdown, 294–303, 307–309, 311, 312, 318–320, 323–326, 329 Locke, J., 50, 57 Love, 50, 57, 73, 75, 79, 122, 123, 189–191, 206, 217, 220, 232, 233, 235, 246, 252, 268, 269, 274, 281, 286, 332 Lupton, D., 14, 26, 37, 41, 42, 75–77, 79, 83, 87, 166, 167, 175, 176, 179, 234, 243, 244, 344, 349

M Major, John, 105 Male childcarers, suspicion of, 151 Martin, C., 118, 119, 224, 228, 257, 348, 351, 370 Maternal instinct, 73, 75, 80 responsibility, 343, 346 McAlinden, A., 139, 143, 144 McDermott, N., 10, 26, 170, 171, 257, 287, 369 Medicalization, 174, 178, 179, 189, 190 Megan’s Law (USA), 132–138, 140, 142–144, 153 Mill, J. S., 243 Miller, T., 254 Morality moralization of parenting, 18 moral regulation, 17 total motherhood as moral code, 38 Motherhood celebrity mums, 36 France and USA compared, 45 instinct, 45, 189 ‘new momism,’ 36–40 Mother-Infant Bonding: a Scientific Fiction, 193 Mothering Magazine, 199 Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the ‘Experts,’ 81 Myth of the First Three Years, The, 229 N National Childbirth Trust (UK), 178, 201, 210 National Childcare Strategy, 1998 (UK), 103 National Family and Parenting Institute (UK), 109 National Fatherhood Initiative, 2013 (USA), 253

 INDEX 

National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (USA), 168, 171 Nelson, M., 33, 37, 39, 42–44, 86, 228, 230, 294, 306, 370 Neo-liberalism, impact on parenting, 231 Neuroscience attachment parenting, 199, 220 critique, 108 effect of love on brain, 216 effect of stress on brain, 215 effect on policy, 222 fatalism regarding child development, 230 ‘neuromania,’ 215 ‘neuroparenting,’ 216 optimisation approach, 216 risks to child’s brain, 216 Romanian orphan case, 230 scientism, 216 warning approach, 216 See also Science New Labour, see Labour Party ‘No touch’ policies, 133, 142–149, 153, 325 Nudity, 152 Nurse Family Partnership (USA), 114, 124 Nurse Family Partnership Programme (UK), 114 O Oakley, A., 174, 175 Obesity, 219, 268 O’Connor, C., 4, 219–221, 227 Online risks, 280 P Paedophiles, see Sex offenders Pandemic, 8, 14, 16, 25–27, 159, 208, 249, 259, 260, 293–295,

385

297, 300–303, 305–312, 317–321, 323–331, 333–335, 341, 342, 350, 352, 357, 359, 367 Paranoid parenting, 267 Paranoid Parenting, 8–10, 14, 27, 48, 103, 124, 165, 166, 278 Parenting advice (see Advice on parenting, behaviour) child-centred, 35, 59 cultural differences in, 44, 175 defensive, 154, 155 ‘good parenting,’ 11, 16, 107, 108, 114, 117, 148, 228, 242, 255, 308 growth of experts (see Expertise, history of) individuation of, 27 inflation of role, 55 language of, 8, 11 over parenting, 86, 278, 280 parental authority, 13, 24, 50, 57, 71, 89, 92, 131, 242, 368 parents as risk managers, 56 ‘positive parenting,’ 9, 12, 84, 92, 93, 104, 105, 110, 113, 117 problematization of, 26 professionalization of, 118, 123, 124 salutogenic, 346 shared, 246 as a skill set, 11 social construction of, 48, 55, 297 styles, vii, 9, 12, 13, 33, 34, 42, 60, 82, 88, 189, 192, 194, 201, 234, 307 use of technology in, 86 See also Behaviour, politics of; Fatherhood; Intensive parenting; Motherhood Parenting orders (POs), 111, 116, 121 Parenting Out of Control, 33, 44–48

386 

INDEX

Parks, 53, 302 Parton, N., 101, 112, 113, 123, 144 Pertussis, 343, 347–351 Piaget, J., 54, 78 Piper, H., 145, 146, 148 Playgrounds, 39, 143, 267, 295, 302, 311 Policing of Families, The, 123 Population control, 174 Porter, L., 199 Postman, N., 49, 50, 52, 53, 332, 333 Post-natal depression, 115, 166, 245 Precautionary principle, 341–360 Pre-conception period, 38 Pregnancy effect of drinking (see Drinking; Medicalization) parental responsibility during, 105, 329, 347 policing of, 183 scientific approach to, 57 teenage, vii, 22, 114, 115 Privacy, 13, 119–124, 135, 156, 157 Privatization of childrearing, 47 Problem parents, 86, 115, 286 Prout, A., 47, 48, 53 Psychological Care of Infant and Child, 190 Psychology, 7, 70, 73, 74, 83, 270, 282, 343 R Ramaekers, S., 10, 11, 36, 46, 105, 121–123, 257 Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear, 270 Reece, H., 9, 84, 85, 92, 104, 317 Reiner, R., 223, 233 Riots (UK, 2011), viii, 11, 250 Risk anxiety, 145, 148 Risk consciousness

child’s brain, 234, 235 (see also Neuroscience) drinking in pregnancy (see Drinking) and Every Child Matters, 2003 (UK), 156 exaggeration of risk, 171 ‘hypervigilance,’ 39 and morality, 17–19 online risks, 280 over protection, 132, 280 parents as risk managers, 56 parents as risks, 8, 14, 22 possibilistic thinking, 172 and pregnancy, 180 risk as free floating anxiety, 16 risk entrepreneurs, 23, 24 risk management, 179 risk promotion movements, 23 speculative threats (‘what ifs’), 15 stranger danger, 132 See also ‘At risk’; Surveillance; Vulnerability Roiphe, K., 274 Rose, N., 57, 101, 122, 215 Rousseau, J., ix, 50 Rutter, M., 110, 230 S Safeguarding, 141, 156, 157, 159, 228, 317–335 Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act, 2006 (UK), 138 Sarah’s Law (UK), 137 Science as arbiter of policy, 206 and pregnancy, 174–179 scientific approach to childhood, 57 scientism, 229 See also Evidence, use of; Neuroscience Screening, see Vetting

 INDEX 

Sears, M., 189, 195, 196, 205 Sears, W., 189, 195, 196, 205 Sex offenders, 132–139, 142–144, 157, 158, 268, 280 Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality, 247 Sheldon, S., 151, 245, 253, 254 Single mothers, 59, 105, 115 Single Mothers By Choice, 59 Singleton, Sir R., 140 Skenazy, L., 143, 270, 271, 278, 279, 317 Smacking, 12, 92, 317 Smeyers, P., 100, 114, 120, 124, 125 Smith, R., 10, 112, 113 Smoking, 110, 115, 137, 184, 256 Social construction of the child as vulnerable, 55 of childhood, 48, 55 of parenting, 48, 55 Social Darwinism, 74 Social exclusion, 103, 109–111, 114–116, 332 Socialization of children, 131, 324, 335, 368 community role, 368 (see also Solidarity) Soham murders, 138 Solidarity erosion of adult, 154 trust, adults and children, 27, 154–158 See also Socialization of children Somers, P., 272–275, 283 Spanking, 12 Spock, Dr B., 55, 80 Start4Life (UK), 168 Starting Points: Meeting the Needs of our Youngest Children, 222–224 Stearns, P., 16, 20, 39, 54, 73, 80 Stranger danger, 86, 132 Strange Situation test, 191, 200, 204

387

Straw, J., 103, 120, 249 Stronach, I., 146 Suissa, J., 10, 11, 46, 105, 121–123, 257 Sunderland, J., 26, 199 Support creating demand for, 87 for families, 102, 296 for men, 258 for parents, 86–91, 99, 107, 119 See also Advice on parenting Supporting Families, 1988 (UK), 103, 105, 106, 109, 120, 251, 252 Sure Start (UK), 104, 109–111, 114 Surveillance of adults working with vulnerable groups, 138 of children, 47, 53, 280 of college students, 282 in Every Child Matters, 112 of families, 47, 48 parental decisions about, 125 parental use of technology, 86 T Tabula rasa, 50 Tallis, R., 215, 216 Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success, 281 Technology, overuse by children, 48, 56 Therapeutic turn, 122 Therapy Culture, 122 Think Fathers campaign, 2008 (UK), 252 Third Way politics, 103, 105 Tiger mothers, 34 Toxic Childhood: How Modern Life is Damaging Our Children ... and What We Can Do About It, 278 Training, see Advice on parenting

388 

INDEX

Tribalization, 201–203 Trust, see Solidarity U University students, 284 Us for them, 343 V Vaccination, 26, 341–360, 373 hesitancy, 343–347, 353, 354, 356–358 Vansieleghem, N., 106, 125 Vetting, 139, 143, 154, 181, 182 Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS, UK), 132, 133, 137–144, 153, 154, 157, 158 Vigilantism, 133, 135, 136, 140 Villalobos, A., 58, 59 Volunteering with children, 133, 154 Vulnerability children, 54, 326 fathers, 87 foetus, 176 teenage parents, 114 See also ‘At risk’; Risk consciousness

W Waiton, S., 156, 158, 159 Wall, G., 3, 24, 41, 46, 92, 206, 215, 224, 227, 231, 232, 235, 247, 280 Warner, J., 36, 44, 45, 155, 270, 281, 282 Wastell, D., 24, 108, 215, 224, 227, 230, 232 Webster-Stratton, C., 117 Welshman, J., 104, 110, 111 White House Conference on Families, 1980 (USA), 103 White, S., 24, 108, 215, 224, 227, 230, 232 Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain, 57, 199, 220 Winnicott, D., 80 Wolf, J., 3, 14, 37, 38, 41, 209 Wollett, A., 178, 179 Work-life balance, 40, 246–249 World Health Organisation (WHO), 43, 78 World War II, impact on children, 78