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- Author or Editor: Charlotte Faircloth x
Based on longitudinal research with (heterosexual) couples in the UK, this article tracks their experiences of becoming parents for the first time. The suggestion is that new parents are caught in an uncomfortable confluence between competing discourses around ideal relationships and those around ideal parenting. On the one hand, they must be committed to egalitarian ideals about the division of care. On the other, they must be parenting ‘intensively’, in ways which are markedly more demanding for mothers, and which makes paternal involvement more complicated.
Drawing on accounts of relationship difficulties, elicited over a five-year period, the article demonstrates the incommensurability of these ideals at physiological, material and ideological levels. As a contribution to the body of work known as parenting culture studies, this article brings, for the first time, an empirical focus to the question of how an ‘intensive’ parenting culture affects couples, rather than just mothers or fathers.
Many scholars, particularly in Anglophone countries, have observed that mothers and fathers are now expected to do much more explicit ‘parenting’ than in the past. This article draws on the case studies of Norway and the UK as examples of welfare states with different historical orientations to social coherence, equality and diversity as a means of examining the spread (or otherwise) of these ideologies. In particular, it considers theoretical concerns of risk, responsibility and trust, especially as they relate to our ideas of childhood and adulthood. In short, the article suggests that an intensification of parenting has the potential to have a corrosive effect on notions of social solidarity, and makes the case instead for a societal conception of raising children.
In this introductory article for the special issue ‘Childhood, Parenting Culture and Adult-Child Relations in Global Perspectives’, we provide an overview of our fields of study (childhood studies and parenting culture studies) by placing them in dialogue. We do so as a basis for drawing out themes emerging from the special issue, in order to explore potential synergies and open broader debates. We begin by tracing moves towards more relational approaches in the social sciences indicating their epistemological and methodological implications. Relational thinking provides a basis for countering antagonistic positionings of children and adults, allowing for circulations of childhood and parenting cultures to be interrogated in relation to new and enduring forms of inequity and changing state-family-capital relations. We suggest that this complicates existing conceptualisations of neoliberalisation while drawing attention to the need for further interrogation of the transnational nature of adult-child relations.
