As set out in my introduction, parenting is on the public agenda. Hand in hand with the rise in policy initiatives, there has been a proliferation of manuals, television programmes and websites aimed at parents and ‘family’ issues (Ramaekers and Suissa 2012). Social mobility is something of a privileged object in neoliberal government, serving as a proxy for social justice. Articulated as a matter of equality of opportunity, i.e. equal chances, rather than equal treatment or equal shares, it is possible to claim that what the poorest must have is more aspiration rather than more redistribution. Faith in the practices of good parenting as the key to unlocking aspiration and overcoming social and economic disadvantage has gained such credibility in the last two decades as to be almost unquestionable (Jensen 2010a). This despite the fact that there is much robust evidence that inter-generational social mobility has stalled and that social immobility has direct links to social inequality (Atkinson, 2015; Dorling 2014, 2015; Wilkinson and Pickett 2009).
‘Good parenting’ has been identified, first by New Labour, then the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition, and now the Conservative government as the central means by which stagnant social mobility can be invigorated and hence, social inclusion guaranteed (Parker, 2006; Featherstone et al, 2014; Gillies, 2014). Programmes such as Sure Start and the Family Nurse Partnerships Scheme, which assigns a nurse to pregnant women whose unborn child is considered to be at risk of social exclusion, are designed to promote values around caring and child-rearing to ‘disadvantaged’ mothers (Hey and Bradford, 2006; De Benedictis, 2012). In restricting the services in this way it is clear that the target is working-class mothers who can be taught the ‘right’ way to bring up their children and enable them to govern
themselves and their children (Lewis, 20011; Maconochie, 2013; Moss and Petrie, 2002). The first five years of a child’s life, in particular, are seen as critical for later successes and failures. Frank Field, a Labour MP appointed by the coalition government to head a review of poverty and life chances, stated that:
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It is family background, parental education, good parenting and the opportunities for learning and development in those crucial years that together matter more to
children than money.
(Field, 2010: 5) Grover and Mason’s (2013) analysis of Early intervention: The next steps (Allen, 2011), the cross-party report to which Frank Field was appointed, points to the importance of the document in framing policy decisions. The gendered and classed framing of the report and its recommendations is just one example of close scrutiny of policy documents can reveal about taken-for-granted assumption that frame government policy. Mothers, for example, were mentioned seven times more frequently than fathers. Despite women’s increased presence in the workplace more recently, it remains the case that in most instances, they perform the majority of the caregiving, take maternity leave and usually spend more time with the child than do fathers (Faircloth, 2010; Faircloth and Lee, 2010; Fawcett Society, 2014; Shirani et al, 2012). However, ‘parenting’ which is increasingly used as a verb, denoting what people do, rather than a simple noun denoting a relationship with a child, obscures the fact that it is mothers first and foremost who are assumed to parent. The idea that the many dimensions of mothering can be classified and measured seems remote and in its stead, ‘good’ mothering tends to be defined backwards from outcomes; by that, I mean that if children are judged to be successful, the assumption is that they were well brought up. As a result, what the mothers of these successful children do is taken to be ‘good’ practice. When David Cameron (2010) declared during a speech at the left-leaning think tank Demos that ‘we all know what good parenting looks like’, he implied that there is one generally accepted model to which everyone aspires. This begs the question of what it means to speak of a set of criteria for ‘good’ parenting, and who determines such criteria (Gewirtz 2001; Gillies 2008; Jensen 2010b). In addition to policy documents and Prime Ministers’ speeches, which although perhaps not widely read, do enter the public sphere via media press releases, the majority of mothers access information about mothering across multiple platforms, including of course in their own networks. Cameron’s presentation of a single model of ‘good parenting’ masks the complexities, contradictions and tensions of contemporary parenting.
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Oakley (1986) argued that in the past the dominant groups defining mothers comprised men and medical experts, and it is conceivable, although unlikely, that professional advice was entirely one-dimensional. The dominance of men in the field has changed since that time, with many more women than men now publishing child-care books (Hardyment, 2007), nonetheless, two key male theorists, Bowlby, and Winnicott, remain very influential.
Although rarely cited in popular texts aimed at mothers themselves, both are foundational in the surveillance of maternal subjectivity. Bowlby (1953) whose maternal deprivation
paradigm argues that mothers must be constantly available, and Winnicott (1953, 1964), whose ‘sensitive mother’ has a ‘natural’ capacity to know and care for her child, have a legacy that can be traced through the development of childcare theories that retain those tenets, especially attachment theory. Moreover, those central ‘truths’ about mothers’ role in child development have been extended rather than replaced and are fundamental to state endorsed provision aimed at mothers and children, as well as practitioners such as Sure Start, CANparent, Solihull Approach, and TripleP. The same principles are applied in television programmes where their scope reaches beyond parents themselves to wider audiences. Their repetition and further endorsement mean that the message of emotional management, pedagogy, reasoning and ultimately choice, have become common-sense, and contribute to the on-going prioritisation of expert knowledge over experience within
professional circles. In Chapter Four, I explore the relationship that women have with ‘expertise’ and the privileging of different forms, whether professional or experiential. As I will discuss, a range of factors come into play, including age, class, and confidence, meaning that how women relate to different forms of expertise can tell us something about how subjectivities are shaped by, and shaping of knowledge. What it cannot tell us, is ‘what good parenting looks like’.