Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
Attachment parenting is an increasingly popular style of childrearing that emphasises natural activities such as extended breastfeeding, bedsharing and babywearing. Such parenting activities are framed as the key to addressing a variety of social ills. Parents choices are thus made deeply significant with the potential to guarantee the well-being of future societies. Examining black mothers’ engagements with attachment parenting, the book shows the limitations of this neoliberal approach. Unique in its intersectional analysis of contemporary mothering ideologies, the book fills a gap in the literature on parenting culture studies, drawing on black feminist theorizing to analyse intensive mothering practices and policies.
This chapter describes babywearing as the most mainstream and uncontroversial among the techniques of breastfeeding and bedsharing, which are the most associated with attachment parenting (AP). It explains babywearing as an inoffensively visible marker of the values of bonding and attachment that is unquestioningly accepted in contemporary parenting cultures. It also discusses how the acceptance of babywearing is used in AP as a transition from the fringe parenting style to the normative approach to raising children. The chapter highlights the appearance of babywearing in state-produced parenting advice and in the experiences and ideas of black mothers. It looks at the narratives of women that draw attention to the dangers of babywearing, both in terms of physical safety and cultural relevance.
This chapter begins with an analysis of the slogan ‘breast is best’, which is considered a universal refrain that captures state and public attitudes towards breastfeeding. It looks at the interviews with women that expressed broad support for breastfeeding in varying degrees of individual success and described it as the normative practice of the good mother. It also examines the support for breastfeeding and the tensions it creates for women as they invoke the language of nature to justify its superiority, account for breastfeeding failures, and risk breastfeeding for too long. The chapter explores women’s experiences of breastfeeding as evidence of the diversity of socioeconomic circumstances. It expands the predominant thinking around black women’s breastfeeding experiences beyond claims that they reject breastfeeding for its risky proximity to nature.
Attachment parenting is an increasingly popular style of childrearing that emphasises ‘natural’ activities such as extended breastfeeding, bedsharing and babywearing. Such parenting activities are framed as the key to addressing a variety of social ills. Parents’ choices are thus made deeply significant with the potential to guarantee the well-being of future societies.
Examining black mothers’ engagements with attachment parenting, Hamilton shows the limitations of this neoliberal approach. Unique in its intersectional analysis of contemporary mothering ideologies, this outstanding book fills a gap in the literature on parenting culture studies, drawing on black feminist theorizing to analyse intensive mothering practices and policies.
Black Mothers and Attachment Parenting is shortlisted for the 2021 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.
This chapter reviews attachment parenting (AP) through the lens of black mothers’ experiences and draws attention to the philosophy’s place in neoliberal parenting culture. It highlights how ideas about good parenting deploy or elide race, class, and gender at different moments and for different, sometimes contradictory, purposes. It also talks about ideologies of good parenting that intend to be free of gender, class, and race but identify women as uniquely responsible for children’s wellbeing. The chapter explains how AP offers a unique constellation of raced, classed and gendered effects as it draws from monolithic ‘primitive’ cultures and rests on a taken-for-granted family form in which mothers are financially supported to stay at home. It recounts the narratives of the black women that demand an analysis of parenting that addresses the differential effects of racism and unequal access to resources.
Attachment parenting is an increasingly popular style of childrearing that emphasises natural activities such as extended breastfeeding, bedsharing and babywearing. Such parenting activities are framed as the key to addressing a variety of social ills. Parents choices are thus made deeply significant with the potential to guarantee the well-being of future societies. Examining black mothers’ engagements with attachment parenting, the book shows the limitations of this neoliberal approach. Unique in its intersectional analysis of contemporary mothering ideologies, the book fills a gap in the literature on parenting culture studies, drawing on black feminist theorizing to analyse intensive mothering practices and policies.
Attachment parenting is an increasingly popular style of childrearing that emphasises natural activities such as extended breastfeeding, bedsharing and babywearing. Such parenting activities are framed as the key to addressing a variety of social ills. Parents choices are thus made deeply significant with the potential to guarantee the well-being of future societies. Examining black mothers’ engagements with attachment parenting, the book shows the limitations of this neoliberal approach. Unique in its intersectional analysis of contemporary mothering ideologies, the book fills a gap in the literature on parenting culture studies, drawing on black feminist theorizing to analyse intensive mothering practices and policies.
Attachment parenting is an increasingly popular style of childrearing that emphasises natural activities such as extended breastfeeding, bedsharing and babywearing. Such parenting activities are framed as the key to addressing a variety of social ills. Parents choices are thus made deeply significant with the potential to guarantee the well-being of future societies. Examining black mothers’ engagements with attachment parenting, the book shows the limitations of this neoliberal approach. Unique in its intersectional analysis of contemporary mothering ideologies, the book fills a gap in the literature on parenting culture studies, drawing on black feminist theorizing to analyse intensive mothering practices and policies.
This chapter examines contemporary political contexts that focuses on how attachment parenting (AP) matches with neoliberal politics and emphasizes the notion that society is ‘post’ race. It highlights both the specificities and similarities in Britain and Canada as they have similarly sized black populations and comparable histories of migration. It also offers unique and underexplored insights about contemporary blackness and motherhood in the two countries. The chapter looks at interviews with women and their shared characteristics that inform the analysis of their experiences. It describes scientific motherhood as the idea that mothering should be guided by scientific supervision and principles.
This chapter introduces the attachment parenting (AP) phenomenon from the perspectives of black mothers. It reviews insights that the narratives of black mothers offer about the contemporary and particular experience of motherhood. It also analyzes AP journeys from the extreme practice of privileged white hippies to an increasingly accepted and influential dogma in the policies of the state and medical professionals. The chapter talks about the disruption of dominant construction of good mothering as the province of only white, middle-class women through the engagements of black mothers. It documents the diverse ways black women use AP to assert themselves as good mothers.
