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PALGRAVEMACMILLAN
MACMILLANSTUDIES
STUDIESININFAMILY
FAMILYAND
ANDINTIMATE
INTIMATELIFE
LIFE
Parenting,
Parenting,
Family
Family Policy
Policy
and
and Children's
Children's
Well-Being
Well-Being in
in an
an
Unequal
Unequal Society
Society
AANew
NewCulture
CultureWar
Warfor
forParents
Parents
Dimitra
DimitraHartas
Hartas
Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life
Titles include:
Dimitra Hartas
University of Warwick, UK
© Dimitra Hartas 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-349-34677-6
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Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
The parenting doctrine 2
About this book 5
The structure of this book 14
Note 16
v
vi Contents
Conclusion 208
The achievement gap is political 208
A new culture war on parents 209
References 214
Index 238
Series Editors’ Preface
The remit of the Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life
series is to publish major texts, monographs and edited collections
focusing broadly on the sociological exploration of intimate relation-
ships and family organisation. As editors we think such a series is timely.
Expectations, commitments and practices have changed significantly
in intimate relationship and family life in recent decades. This is very
apparent in patterns of family formation and dissolution, demonstrated
by trends in cohabitation, marriage and divorce. Changes in house-
hold living patterns over the last 20 years have also been marked, with
more people living alone, adult children living longer in the parental
home and more ‘non-family’ households being formed. Furthermore,
there have been important shifts in the ways people construct inti-
mate relationships. There are few comfortable certainties about the best
ways of being a family man or woman, with once conventional gen-
der roles no longer being widely accepted. The normative connection
between sexual relationships and marriage or marriage-like relationships
is also less powerful than it once was. Not only is greater sexual exper-
imentation accepted, but it is now accepted at an earlier age. Moreover
heterosexuality is no longer the only mode of sexual relationship given
legitimacy. In Britain as elsewhere, gay male and lesbian partnerships are
now socially and legally endorsed to a degree hardly imaginable in the
mid-20th century. Increases in lone-parent families, the rapid growth
of different types of stepfamily, the de-stigmatisation of births outside
marriage and the rise in couples ‘living-apart-together’ (LAT) all provide
further examples of the ways that ‘being a couple’, ‘being a parent’ and
‘being a family’ have diversified in recent years.
The fact that change in family life and intimate relationships has
been so pervasive has resulted in renewed research interest from soci-
ologists and other scholars. Increasing amounts of public funding have
been directed to family research in recent years, in terms of both indi-
vidual projects and the creation of family research centres of different
hues. This research activity has been accompanied by the publication of
some very important and influential books exploring different aspects
of shifting family experience, in Britain and elsewhere. The Palgrave
Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life series hopes to add to this
vii
viii Series Editors’ Preface
ix
Introduction
1
2 Parenting, Family Policy and Children’s Well-Being in an Unequal Society
Now just consider the evidence. We now know the level of parental
engagement in learning is actually more important in determining
a child’s educational achievement than the social class background,
the size of the family or the parent’s own educational attainment.
A child with a stimulating home environment does better on all the
scores of early childhood development.
For Nick Clegg, ‘parents hold the fortunes of the children they bring
into this world in their hands’ and parenting matters more than parents’
socio-economic status (2010). Frank Field, the coalition government’s
poverty adviser, considers that focusing on parenting and the early years
up to the age of 3 will ‘prevent poor children becoming poor adults’,
offering a rather different approach to tackle child poverty that mainly
considers financial means and opportunities for alleviating structural
inequality. ‘While money is important’, Field (2011, 18–19) said,
welfare state have undermined the strength and diversity of social insti-
tutions, and parents’ and young people’s lives have become disposable,
in line with neoliberal working conditions. Self-interest and the pursuit
of profit have commodified the inherently social relationships between
organisations and individuals.
This book is structured in three parts. The first part examines the role
of the early home environment in an unequal society, specifically the
role that parents play in their children’s development and learning
within their wider socio-economic context. The second part examines
neoliberal family policies in Britain by offering a detailed overview of
family policy in the 21st-century Britain with an emphasis on early
intervention. This part locates the MCS findings in the wider politi-
cal and policy context to understand important shifts in family policy
from fiscal to behavioural interventions to support parents and children,
especially the disproportionate focus on parenting as a mechanism to
alleviate disadvantage and promote children’s learning and life chances
and also the diminished references to social class in political discourses.
In the third part, in light of evidence that social class matters and a grow-
ing awareness that neoliberal policies can no longer guarantee families’
economic and social rights, I propose a new paradigm for family policy
to renew families as civic spaces and build capabilities in parents and
children. The notion of parenting determinism in terms of focusing on
parents to narrow the achievement gap is also discussed here. Finally,
patterns of parenting in unequal societies are discussed and compared
with the MCS findings. What emerges is that parents do not need per-
suading to engage with their children; they are already heavily involved
in supporting their learning and well-being. The unprecedented policy
emphasis on intimate family life however resonates with the demise of
class debates and the wider culture war that is being waged on citizens,
including parents, in neoliberal societies.
The book structure allowed me to draw links between quantitative
research findings on patterns of parenting, social class and their influ-
ence on children’s development and learning and qualitative research
on diverse experiences of parenthood amidst policy initiatives to inter-
vene in family life. Bringing together qualitative and quantitative evi-
dence offers a rigorous and unique perspective to examine parenting,
social class and children’s well-being and dispel myths related to the
evidence base of social policy. The misalignment between what research
Introduction 15
tells us and the current orientation of family policy raises the need for
a new paradigm, a new lens through which to examine the effects of
social class on child outcomes and the widening achievement gap in
unequal societies.
A critique on the neoliberal orientation of current family policy
is timely, considering the MCS evidence that the achievement gap
between poor and wealthier children is as wide as ever despite the fact
that most parents support their children’s learning. This disjunction
prompts questions not so much about the limits of policy but more
about its unequivocal focus on parenting. This is not an isolated phe-
nomenon. As globalisation and neoliberal economic restructuring poli-
cies advance discourses of individual governance and self-responsibility,
parents, mothers in particular, are held accountable for their children’s
success or failure with regard to academic achievement, social mobility
and in becoming ‘good citizens’. As it currently stands, family policy
reflects neoliberal goals in accepting market logic and values and apply-
ing them to family life. This relocates public debates from social class
and inequality to economic justifications for intervening with fami-
lies, and shifts our understanding about the sources of social risk from
poverty and inequality to individuated crises and personal failure.
I would like to finish this introduction with an observation by
Wilkinson and Pickett (2009) that, for many years, progressive politics
have been devoid of any concept of a better society and that much
policy emphasis has been on ‘piecemeal improvements’ rather than
on what makes the good society. With growing inequality and social
upheaval, however, the pendulum swings back and forth and people
have become increasingly aware of their and the next generation’s lim-
ited life chances and access to genuine opportunities for education and
employment. As class becomes ever more important as a determinant
of outcomes in Western societies, more so than race or ethnicity, class
differences are observed in children early on. There is an increasing
acceptance about the need for social change, for how to make soci-
ety a substantially better place to live for the vast majority. I would
like to think that there is a wind of change. Social movements such as
Occupy have started to question mainstream politics and the belief that
unregulated markets will deliver the public good. Class politics is no
longer dismissed as an old-fashioned concept but is gradually coming
back into focus because the economic crisis affects people in different
ways and because the coalition government’s mantra that ‘we’re all in
this together’ and belief that parents are solely responsible for their
children’s life chances and social mobility are offensive and ludicrous.
16 Parenting, Family Policy and Children’s Well-Being in an Unequal Society
Note
The role that parents play in their children’s development and learning
has attracted heated debates, with emotive views expressed about par-
ents as lacking in competence and willingness to support their chil-
dren’s learning, to views that some parents may actually hamper their
children’s development through poor parenting and low educational
aspirations. Within family policy, parenting is conceived as the most
important influence on young children’s academic achievement and
well-being, more important than poverty, school environment and
peers. The research discussed in this part contests this position and pro-
vides evidence on the powerful ways in which socio-economic factors
or, simply, social class, impact on young children’s academic, linguistic
and social development.
Parents have long heeded the call to get involved in their children’s
learning. However, few questions have been asked about how effective
their support is and whether disadvantaged parents stand a chance of
narrowing the United Kingdom’s notorious achievement gap between
their children and the offspring of wealthier families. In the United
Kingdom, at the start of the 21st century, by using a representative
sample from the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), I examined whether
parental support is the key to language, literacy and social develop-
ment of three-, five- and seven-year-olds (or whether other factors are of
greater importance). Specifically, I examined the influences of parental
behaviour, aspirations and educational practices and parents’ social
class on children’s learning and well-being. Drawing upon the MCS
findings, the links between young children’s language, learning and
well-being and (i) parental learning support, emotional responsiveness
18 Parenting, Family Policy and Children’s Well-Being in an Unequal Society
and behaviour and aspirations at home (see Chapter 1) and (ii) parents’
social class (see Chapter 2) were discussed.
The research in this part examined the social ecology of early home
environments to shed light on the ‘how’, ‘under what socio-economic
and family circumstances’ and for ‘whom’ parenting takes place and to
delineate the factors that mediate its contribution to child outcomes.
The ‘how’ refers to the parenting practices and behaviours such as
home learning, parental warmth and sensitivity, discipline and aspira-
tions that have been found to contribute to the effectiveness of parental
involvement (Grolnick, 2003; Pomerantz et al., 2005). Parenting occurs
within diverse socio-economic contexts and is influenced by material
resources and the human and intellectual capabilities that parents bring
into family interactions. The influence of parents’ social class on child
development was examined amidst policy initiatives in Britain to lift
children out of poverty. Children who face socio-economic disadvan-
tage have been found to fare less well academically (Burchinal et al.,
2002; Gutman et al., 2010; Rouse and Fantuzzo, 2009) and socially
(Foster et al., 2005). For ‘whom’ parenting takes place refers to child
characteristics, behaviour and attributes (e.g. attitudes towards school,
cognitive and linguistic abilities) which are likely to influence parenting
considering that parent–child interactions are symbiotic (Collins et al.,
2000). Parental practices and behaviours, child characteristics and fam-
ily income and parental education can function as risk or protective
factors in explaining children’s cognitive, social and academic out-
comes individually and cumulatively (Mistry et al., 2010). Examining
the interplay of these factors is invaluable because parenting and child
development are dynamic processes shaped by a myriad of influences.
An ecological approach to understanding family processes and the
home learning environment means that influences, both proximal
and distal to children’s life, are accounted for. To this end, the influ-
ences of the immediate family context and parents’ social class on
child outcomes as well as the wider social, ideological and cultural cir-
cumstances that surround parents’ and children’s life were examined.
Ecological perspectives regarding the trajectories of academic, linguistic
and social development in children have identified a complex pattern
of child-related characteristics such as cognitive and language skills
(Ayoub et al., 2009); parenting practices, parent–child relationships
(Campbell, 2002; Keenan and Wakschlag, 2000) and parental psycholog-
ical well-being (NICHED Early Child Care Research Network, 1999); and
family income and parental employment and education (Dearing et al.,
2001). The knowledge of either parental or socio-economic influences
The Early Home Environment in an Unequal Society 19
21
22 The Early Home Environment in an Unequal Society
capabilities in ways that balance children’s needs for support with their
needs for autonomy. Cognitive stimulation refers to parents’ efforts to
enrich their children’s cognitive and language development by engag-
ing children in activities that are thought to promote learning. Parents’
warmth refers to parents’ expressions of affection and respect towards
their children to support their evolving sense of the self and feel-
ings of belonging (Barnett et al., 2010; Lugo-Gil and Tamis-LeMonda,
2008).
In the literature on parental influences on children’s learning, the
capabilities that parents bring into supporting their children’s learning
and education are thought to exist in three forms: personal disposi-
tions (e.g. attitudes towards learning, aspirations, willingness to provide
learning support); access to education resources and services; and access
to education-related institutions (Lee and Bowen, 2006). With regard
to parental involvement in children’s education, a broad distinction
has been made between parental involvement with learning at home
and at school. Home learning involves interactions between parents
and children that focus on learning activities such as reading, talking
about school issues (e.g. course selection, exams), homework support or
engagement in intellectual pursuits not directly related to school (e.g.
visits to museums, reading books, going to the library). In general, stud-
ies have shown that parental involvement with children’s education
and learning has positive effects, being associated with children’s early
linguistic and cognitive development and emergent literacy (Dickinson
and Tabors, 2001). However, there is a lack of consensus with regard to
the effectiveness of parental learning support at home, and questions
are often raised as to whether more parental support is always better
for children. Literacy-rich family contexts, where preschool children
have access to books and other print materials and parents engage with
them in age-appropriate learning opportunities, contribute positively to
child literacy and language and well-being (Pomerantz, Moorman and
Litwack, 2007). However, as discussed later in this chapter, literacy-rich
homes should not only be equated with the frequency of home learning
but also with its quality. The quality of home learning is a fluid concept,
shaped by many factors and thus it is not simply a question of the more
learning support the better.
Moreover, although the notion that socialisation is a parent-to-child
process has been challenged long ago (Bell, 1968), there is still little
research on the reciprocity in parent–child interactions, especially in the
early years. Children’s characteristics and dispositions exert a significant
influence on parents in that they evoke different responses in parents,
Home Learning Environment and Children’s Well-Being 23
which feed back into their reciprocal relationships. And the responses
children evoke are also affected by parents’ well-being. For example,
research has shown that mothers who experience depression (usually as
a side effect of the toxicity of poverty and disadvantage) have more diffi-
culties in interacting with their children (e.g. being less responsive) and
are more likely to find child-rearing a challenge (Kiernan and Huerta,
2008). These studies highlight the importance of not only examining
parenting dimensions but also focusing on children’s characteristics and
views and parental well-being to understand the symbiotic nature of
parent–child interactions.
In these studies on parenting, different models of child–parent
interactions tend to converge into three central dimensions: parental
involvement with children’s education and learning (e.g. home learn-
ing); parent–child affective experiences and parents’ emotional respon-
siveness (e.g. sensitivity, warmth, parental well-being; Lugo-Gil and
Tamis-LeMonda, 2008); and behaviour control and modelling (e.g. disci-
pline, expectations regarding behaviour and learning, maternal reading
habits and aspirations; Barber et al., 2005). These theoretical models
guided a large-scale examination of parent–child interactions by focus-
ing on specific aspects such as parental warmth, parental support with
reading and homework, parental aspirations and parental well-being.
Although the quality of the home environment in terms of reading to
children, helping with homework, being attuned to their emotions and
bonding with them and having high educational aspirations for them
has been defined narrowly, the MCS analyses illuminated interesting
relationships between aspects of parenting and child outcomes and their
wider socio-economic context.
While parenting is heralded as a key influence regarding children’s
learning and well-being, not many studies have examined parenting
within its wider social and economic context, especially in light of the
widening inequality gap in the United Kingdom and other Western
countries. In family policy discourses (a detailed discussion about Frank
Field’s and Graham Allen’s reports is in Chapter 5), a disproportionate
emphasis has been placed on parental learning support, behaviour, atti-
tudes and aspirations as key mechanisms for reducing the achievement
gap between poor and economically better-off young children. However,
although literacy-rich home environments have been found to asso-
ciate with positive educational outcomes in children, there is ambiguity
with regard to the effects of parental learning support on children’s lit-
eracy, language and social competence. Parenting is only a small part of
the story of widening inequality and the achievement gap, prompting
24 The Early Home Environment in an Unequal Society
debates about the role of social class in children’s development and life
chances.
This chapter presents research based on MCS analyses on the links
between aspects of parenting (i.e. home learning support, parental
well-being, parents’ emotional responsiveness, parental educational
aspirations and reading habits) and language, literacy and social compe-
tence in three-, five- and seven-year-olds. Parent–children interactions
have been examined within their social ecology, drawing upon the
Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Model (1986a). This is to pro-
vide a theoretical lens to examine the influence of the home learn-
ing environment, parental behaviour and practices in particular, on
young children’s social competence, language and academic outcomes.
Parental learning support and sensitivity and children’s learning and
well-being are dynamic processes whereby child characteristics, atti-
tudes and behaviour; parental behaviour and practices; and the social
and economic circumstances that surround them vary over time and
influence both parenting and young children’s learning and social and
emotional competence. Much scholarship in family and childhood
studies has focused on either children or parents; however, we know
little about parent–child interdependence within its social and cul-
tural context to delineate the myriad of factors that shape children’s
well-being and the role of parents and children in mediating these fac-
tors. In their interactions, parents and children are active agents who
influence each other and whose symbiotic relationship changes over
time. Factors that promote or hinder children’s learning and social and
emotional well-being are examined within these different social systems
(e.g. individual child factors, parent–child interactions, socio-economic
context) by also considering the current political and cultural climate
to understand family policy and the relationship between the state and
individual parents and children.
Educators and family policy makers consider parents to play a key role
in children’s acquisition of literacy and numeracy skills and social com-
petence. It is often assumed that the link between parental learning
support and children’s school performance is direct and causal, with
the view that the more frequent the parental learning support is, the
better children will perform at school. However, what is the evidence
that involving parents in home learning, especially in early years, is
associated with better academic and social outcomes for their children?
Home Learning Environment and Children’s Well-Being 25
quintile (99%) reported that they would like their children to stay on
in education. Roughly the same percentage of parents, that is, 97 per
cent in the bottom, 96 per cent in the second from bottom, 97 per
cent in the third, 97 per cent in the fourth and 98 per cent in the top
quintile, would like their children to attend university. Parental aspi-
rations regarding their children’s education was also found to be high
across ethnic groups. Compared to White parents (97.9%), 100 per cent
of parents of Indian and Black African backgrounds reported that they
would like their children to stay on at school and attend university.
A roughly equal percentage of parents with (99%) and without (96%)
educational qualifications expressed high educational aspirations. Thus,
irrespective of income, education and ethnicity, most parents would like
their children to pursue further and higher education.
As with earlier research (Compton-Lilly, 2003; Gorski, 2008; Lareau
and Horvat, 1999; Leichter, 1978), what the MCS findings tell us is that
parents who live in poverty have similar attitudes towards educational
aspirations and learning as their middle-class counterparts. Johnson and
colleagues (2008) and Gutman and Akerman (2008) also found that dis-
advantaged parents have the same aspirations as their wealthier peers
to support their children’s learning and academic progress, challeng-
ing deficit assumptions of low aspirations and lack of engagement with
children’s education in disadvantaged families. Such assumptions mis-
recognise and misrepresent parents who are blamed for the unequal
outcomes in their children’s school performance. Policy discussions on
parental involvement and educational aspirations tend to construe aspi-
rations as a process that ‘occurs outside of social relations and the
micro-politics of educational organisations’ (Morley, 1999: 722). Aspi-
rations, however, do not materialise in a vacuum but within a context
where inequality is actively tackled and genuine educational opportuni-
ties for both children and adults are available and likely to drive upward
social mobility.
Many myths surround disadvantaged parents, especially about their
work ethic and motivation to support their children’s learning. It is true
that low-income parents are less likely to attend school functions or
volunteer in their children’s classrooms (US National Center for Educa-
tion Statistics, 2005), not because they care less about education but
because they do not have the time and the capacity to easily access
schools. In the United States, according to the Economic Policy Insti-
tute (2002), poor working adults spend more hours working each week
than their wealthier peers: 83 per cent of children from low-income fam-
ilies have at least one employed parent and around 60 per cent have
34 The Early Home Environment in an Unequal Society
at least one parent who works full-time and year-round (US National
Center for Children in Poverty, 2004). The severe shortage of living-
wage jobs means that many low-income parents work multiple jobs,
work evenings, have jobs without paid leave and cannot afford child-
care and public transportation (Gorski, 2008). This evidence paints a
picture that is very different from that of the idle poor. The fallacy of
the idle poor was first challenged by Seebohm Rowntree who, in 1899,
undertook his famous survey in York, England, to explore the ‘minimum
necessaries for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency’. Rowntree
found that the key factor in explaining poverty was that the wage of the
wage earner in the family was ‘insufficient to maintain a moderate fam-
ily in a state of physical efficiency’ despite the fact that the wage earner
was in regular work. Yet, a century later, we witness a resurfacing of the
discourses of a culture of poverty and the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’
poor amidst rising inequality.
As discussed in Chapter 3, despite the increasing pressures on work-
ing parents’ time, as the MCS findings showed, most of them routinely
support their children’s learning at home and have high educational
aspirations for them. However, it may be the quality and orientation,
rather than lack of parental support that works against bridging the
achievement gap. Educated and financially secure parents are better
placed to invest in their children’s learning. For example, in a study
by Bennett et al. (2012), working- and middle-class children’s intensity
and type of participation in extra-curricular activities varied. Middle-
class parents were more likely to ‘customise’ children’s involvement in
activities whereas working-class parents were concerned with safety and
wanted to ensure that participation in activities is somehow linked to
social mobility or results in some form of social advantage for their
children. Most crucially, some working-class children were less likely
to participate, not because their parents did not value extra-curricular
activities but because such activities were not available to them. Increas-
ingly, parents are left alone to generate the intellectual capital necessary
for their children to access opportunities, and are blamed for their
‘low aspirations’ if opportunities do not materialise. Genuine education
opportunities, especially for economically deprived parents, are crucial
to promoting learning at home by enhancing parents’ education and
learning habits. Government policy does not need to persuade par-
ents to get involved, but should support them in tackling the structural
constraints that poverty imposes on their life.
Nick Clegg proclaimed that ‘parents hold the fortunes of the chil-
dren they bring into this world in their hands’ and that ‘the evidence
Home Learning Environment and Children’s Well-Being 35
36
Parents’ Social Class Still Matters . . . 37
The link between poverty and children’s cognitive abilities and lan-
guage has been well documented (Ayoub et al., 2009; Dahl and
38 The Early Home Environment in an Unequal Society
learning support is less likely to close it. Despite growing evidence that
parental involvement with children’s learning explains a far smaller
proportion of the variance in child outcomes than do socio-economic
factors, parenting, often defined in narrow terms (e.g. reading to the
child, bonding with the child, having high educational aspirations), is
used to explain the achievement gap and other social problems. Parental
involvement with children’s learning matters, but what matters most are
parents’ social class and its influences on child development and learn-
ing. Whether we see parental input with home learning as an extension
of the school input with parents transmitting literacy and numeracy
skills down to their children, or as a culture of learning and motivational
experiences at home, the powerful influences that socio-economic fac-
tors, maternal education in particular, exert on children’s well-being and
academic achievement should be acknowledged and accounted for.
The findings that social class is a much stronger predictor of dif-
ferences in cognitive, social and educational outcomes of three-, five-
and seven-year-olds than a range of parenting measures are not surpris-
ing in light of social science research evidence, accumulated over the
last decades. While parenting is important, a policy focus on parenting
alone is insufficient to tackle the impact of social inequalities on chil-
dren (Gillies, 2007; Hartas, 2011; Kiernan, 2010; Sullivan et al., 2010).
Deploying parental involvement with children’s learning as a key strat-
egy to tackle the achievement gap in families in poverty is ineffective
not because parental involvement with their children’s learning is lim-
ited or their educational aspirations are low, but because of inequality
in opportunities for parents to access education and build capability to
support their children’s learning effectively (Hartas, 2011, 2012). The
shift from social class to poor parenting in public discourses reflects a
wider trend of not considering class and other group identities as impor-
tant in understanding inequality. Prominent sociological theories in the
1990s (for example, by Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck) questioned
whether old conceptions of class are relevant to a post-industrial society
characterised by individuated lifestyles and uncertainty and shaped by
global market forces (Gillies, 2007).
The research presented in this chapter does not suggest that read-
ing and talking and showing warmth to children do not matter. They
do matter but not in a way that family policy makers would like
them to: as mechanisms to overcome structural inequality and equalise
opportunity for young children. Social mobility and equalisation of
opportunities require not individuated but political action, likely to be
achieved through income redistribution and tax policies, and open and
Parents’ Social Class Still Matters . . . 47
The time parents spend with their children has increased steadily since
the 1970s (Gershuny, 2000). Analyses of time diaries from 1975 to 2000
have shown that parent time, across all social groups, has increased and
that the gap between fathers’ and mothers’ time spent has narrowed
(Bianchi et al., 2007). During the same time, parents work longer hours
and most women (70% in 2000s compared to 20% in the 1970s) return
to work within the first year of their child’s birth. Parents exert effort
48
Parenting in an Unequal Society 49
frequency with which they engage with their children at the start of
this century in Britain. The MCS analyses examined income and eth-
nic differences with regard to the percentage of parents involved with
homework support and enrichment activities. Across socio-economic
and ethnic groups, relatively small differences were found in the number
of parents involved daily with home learning with their three-, five- and
seven-year-olds. Small differences were found, for example, with regard
to book reading and homework reading, showing that a higher percent-
age of parents living above the poverty line (54% and 61%) read books to
their five-year-olds and helped them with their homework daily, com-
pared to the number of less well-off parents (38% and 55%) (Hartas,
2011). Consistently, the findings from the Avon Longitudinal Study of
Parents and Children showed that educational interactions such as read-
ing, helping with homework, drawing and painting between parents
and their nine-year-olds did not differ by socio-economic background,
and thus home learning support does not appear to ‘form a major
part of the story of educational inequality’ (Gregg and Washbrook,
2011).
Consistently with previous research (Lee and Bowen, 2006; Peters
et al., 2008), what the MCS findings show is that most parents are
frequently involved with their children’s learning at home and this
is irrespective of their socio-economic status and ethnicity. In fact, in
the study by Peters and colleagues (2008), parents from minority eth-
nic backgrounds were more positively predisposed towards involvement
with their children’s learning, compared to White parents. Generally,
and consistently with a study by Siraj-Blatchford (2010), the findings
suggest that parents, especially those living in poverty, do not need
to be persuaded to become involved with their children’s education
and learning. Middle-class parents have always been prompt to fol-
low professionals’ advice about child rearing (Lareau, 2003). Recently,
however, more and more parents, from all socio-economic and ethnic
groups, appear to have internalised what Lareau described as ‘domi-
nant sets of cultural repertoires’ and practise them by engaging with
their children’s learning. Yet, despite routine parental learning support,
the achievement gap between poor and economically better-off five-
and seven-year-olds remained unchallenged, and, as children moved
through schooling, the gap widened (Hills et al., 2010). These find-
ings raise questions as to whether routine parental learning support
alone can influence the pathways through which poverty translates into
underachievement. To approach parental learning support as a key strat-
egy to reducing underachievement without considering families’ social
Parenting in an Unequal Society 51
The culture of poverty discourses distract policy makers from the real
issues, of what Gorski refers to a ‘culture of classism’ and its implica-
tions in posing obstacles to poor people exercising their basic human
rights. As the wealth gap has grown and opportunities for closing the
achievement gap have diminished, parenting has become the key deter-
minant of children’s life chances and social mobility. But the evidence
regarding a link between poor parenting and structural disadvantage,
simply, is not there. Poor parenting does not cause structural disadvan-
tage. Although poverty makes it harder to parent well, most parents
across demographic groups have educational aspirations and are rou-
tinely involved with their children’s education. A culture of classism
thrives on deficit assumptions presented as evidence, and by focusing on
individual factors and ignoring important systemic influences. Narrow
understandings of parental influences favour a relocation of political
and social problems from the public sphere into intimate family life.
Considering parents to be solely responsible for hampering or remedy-
ing their children’s development represents a shift from understanding
poverty and inequality as political issues to approaching them as cul-
tural practices and parents’ lifestyle choices. Deficit assumptions make
policy makers complicit because instead of addressing gross inequalities,
educational inequalities in particular, and the fact that education is no
longer a driver for social mobility, they focus on individual parents and
what they do with their children within a context where health care,
living-wage jobs, safe and affordable housing, clean air and water are
compromised (Books, 2004; Gorski, 2008).
In family policy, parents have been redefined as causal agents, and
parenting as a causal mechanism to explain political and social phe-
nomena. To view parental learning support as the sole causal factor
that directly affects children’s learning outcomes and as a panacea for
reducing the achievement gap is simplistic. Structural inequality and
reduced opportunities are the driving forces behind the achievement
gap. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds have worse achieve-
ment outcomes because poverty shapes their learning within their
immediate environments. The effects of home learning are weak because
of inequalities in the opportunities for and benefits of parental involve-
ment in disadvantaged groups, and because coping with poverty can be
taxing on parenting resources. But this is part of the story of educational
inequality. Children in poverty also fare less well because the social
and civic institutions (e.g. schools, job apprenticeships) have ceased to
function as places for youth socialisation and drivers for social mobil-
ity. In unequal societies, by placing the onus on families who cannot
54 The Early Home Environment in an Unequal Society
access resources and services, children’s life chances are doubly com-
promised. The solution is not binary: either you support families via
financial means or place the onus on parents and expect them to tran-
scend their living circumstances. The solution is complex and involves
the remaking of a strong civic society where civic institutions such as
schools have an important role to play to counteract, through polit-
ical action, negative proximal and distal influences in children’s lives
and support formal education (not only early years’ education), training
opportunities and lifelong learning (see Chapter 9 for a discussion on
the remaking of the family as a civic institution).
In unequal societies, the world is closing down for the average family
and children’s life chances are reduced not because of a decline in par-
enting or children’s poor character and reduced empathy but because
of the growing societal polarisation. The dominant rhetoric that it is
what parents do and not who they are that matters should be chal-
lenged if we are to start tackling the achievement gap and the deleterious
effects of widening inequality. Such views reinforce the idea that par-
ents’ behaviour should change instead of supporting them to engage in
political and collective actions to tackle the challenges they face. The
making of a fairer society is a collective effort, not an atomised act, and
needs political action. It is imperative for governments to find effective
ways to break the intergenerational cycles of poverty instead of focus-
ing on what Lexmond and Reeves called the ‘intergenerational cycles of
poor parenting’ (2009: 12). Tackling poverty is not about remodelling
the interpersonal relationships between parents and children but about
tackling inequality at an institutional and political level.
Although the link between social class and children’s learning and well-
being is well established, there is little on patterns of parenting in
different socio-economic groups. In her study on unequal childhoods,
Lareau (2002) observed parental practices and behaviours and the home
learning environment in diverse socio-economic groups. Lareau coined
the term ‘concerted cultivation’ to describe parental practices that are
conducive to maximising children’s learning and educational oppor-
tunities as a counterpoint to the ‘accomplishment of natural growth’
or catering for children’s basic needs (e.g. food, shelter, taking them
to school). Concerted cultivation was observed mainly in middle-
class families in which parents invested in services and resources for
the purpose of accumulating intellectual and social capital for their
Parenting in an Unequal Society 55
Intensive parenting
Although aspects of concerted cultivation provided by educated parents
in MCS were found to associate with higher teacher ratings of language
Parenting in an Unequal Society 63
and literacy during the first school years, weak links were found
between home learning and children’s social and emotional develop-
ment (Hartas, 2011). In other words, aspects of concerted cultivation,
especially among educated parents, were translated into higher language
and literacy ratings but not into increase in prosocial behaviour or a
reduction in behavioural and emotional difficulties in children (as rated
by their mothers). The limited influence of home learning support on
children’s social and emotional development may be explained by con-
sidering the (unintended) consequences of intensive parenting. Increas-
ingly, in some demographic groups, concerted cultivation is experienced
as intensive parenting, with parents approaching child rearing as a
project with goals and outcomes to be achieved, morphing children into
a specific image and navigating them through life. The term ‘intensive
mothering’ was originally adopted by Hays (1996) to describe a model
of parenting ‘that advises mothers to expend a tremendous amount
of time, energy and money in raising their children’. As such, parents
are ‘expected to acquire a detailed knowledge of what the experts con-
sider proper child development and then spend a good deal of time
and money attempting to foster it’ (Hays, 1996: 8). Children’s child-
hood in concerted-cultivating families tends to be regimented with their
daily life being structured along adult-organised and supervised activi-
ties, organised spaces and choices with less interaction with peers and
members of the extended family. A growing number of studies and social
commentators (Gottlieb, 2011; Marano, 2004) have questioned con-
certed cultivation in the form of intensive parenting, raising concerns
about its impact on children’s well-being in the long run.
Intensive parenting (although likely to maximise language and aca-
demic outcomes in early years) is less conducive to supporting children
to develop agency, a healthy self-esteem (one that comes from accom-
plishment, not inflated by parents), good social skills, resilience and
emotional maturity. It works against children’s evolving capacities to
act with human agency and desire to engage with the social world.
In Lareau’s concerted-cultivating families, the children were trained in
‘the rules of the game’ that govern interactions with institutional repre-
sentatives. However, they were not conversant in other important social
skills and peer interactions and often tended to shift social interac-
tions to ‘suit their preferences’, finding it difficult to organise their time
during weekends and summers or ‘hanging out with adults in a nonob-
trusive, subordinate fashion’ (Lareau, 2003: 6). Because they have too
many choices, children find it difficult to make decisions in case they
make the wrong one and feel helpless dealing with everyday hardships.
64 The Early Home Environment in an Unequal Society
the long term. Moreover, the fact that children’s academic attainments
in concerted-cultivating families are higher does not necessarily mean
that these advantages can be sustained and enable them to cope bet-
ter with the challenges of a future that is not like anything we have
experienced before. Significant challenges related to overpopulation,
resource scarcity and environmental degradation would require peo-
ple with strong problem-solving competence, ability to relate to diverse
groups of people with whom they may have very little in common,
capacity to organise their life (especially as priorities multiply and clash
with each other) and flexibly adapt to rapid technological and societal
changes. Would a sense of entitlement and knowing ‘the rules of the
game’ suffice when the game will be in state of continuous change?
And how would young people fare when they realise that they may not
always be the centre of attention and when interactions with others may
not always suit their preferences? As Lori Gottlieb (2011) argued in an
article titled ‘How to Land Your Kid in Therapy’, an inflated sense of self-
esteem, not related to real achievements, is less likely to benefit young
people when they realise that they are not up to the challenges they face
in the adult world. Perhaps a ‘sense of constraint’ rather than a ‘sense
of entitlement’ is a more valuable attribute to cultivate in children and
young people to encourage them to reflect on their self-interests and
wants and engage meaningfully with their communities.
shaped by the belief that the time put into their children’s rearing is
critical to ensure their future happiness. Although intensive parenting
transcends socio-economic, ethnic and cultural barriers, it is gendered in
that it is women who are overwhelmingly responsible for raising chil-
dren and offering them concerted cultivation. This is likely to increase
the pressure and accentuate gender stereotypes that mothers already
experience, especially those who do not practise intensive parenting
either because they are financially unable or unwilling to adopt it as part
of their parenting (Bernstein, 2011). Indeed, a study based on in-depth
semi-structured interviews with Canadian mothers’ practising intensive
mothering to increase children’s intelligence and achievement illumi-
nated the negative consequences of hyper-mothering: mothers’ feelings
of exhaustion, anxiety and guilt (Wall, 2010).
This does not mean that parents should not support their children to
develop the capacities and sensibilities to live a life they value. But this
can be achieved not through intensive parenting but through parents
and educators exercising the authority to impart knowledge to the next
generation and prepare it to face the challenges of a ‘future that is not
what is used to be’ (Santos, 1995). Most importantly, involved parent-
ing is about challenging prevalent views of young people as a liability
and showing unconditional love, which is not contingent on the talents
and attributes a young person happens to have. Parental love is a balanc-
ing act between accepting and transforming love: accepting love affirms
the being of children, whereas transforming love seeks the well-being of
children (Sandel, 2004). Intensive and overly ambitious parenting exem-
plifies an extreme form of transformative love that can have negative
consequences for both children and parents, especially if good parent-
ing is defined along how rigorously and routinely parents are involved
with the shaping of their children’s lives. Although parents have always
found it difficult to balance accepting and transforming love, recently,
we witness a policy-endorsed drive to make parents responsible for
enhancing their children’s life chances and social mobility. The belief
that parents should morph children’s fragile existence into something
that will bring them social advantage and increase their social mobility
causes havoc in families. Most parents work hard to abide by current
policy standards regarding parenting and, in the process, lose their own
personhood with their parenting becoming a constant exertion, ulti-
mately losing their capacity to enjoy the intimacy of their relationships
with their children. Most importantly, intensive parenting can seri-
ously undermine one of the most important roles of parents, namely,
nurturing independence and separation from parents (Bernstein, 2011).
68 The Early Home Environment in an Unequal Society
The chapters in this part offer an overview of family policy in the United
Kingdom at the start of this century with an emphasis on the coalition
government’s family policy, early intervention in particular, and a cri-
tique of the nature, scope and direction of family policy in neoliberal
societies. The key assumptions that underpin family policy about the
influences that parents exert on their children’s development are exam-
ined, raising issues about family micromanagement and the role of the
state in regulating and remodelling parents.
Historically, the politicisation of parents is not new. At the start of
the 20th century, mothers were seen as causal actors in infant mortality
and, in the 1940s and 1950s, the ‘cold mother syndrome’ was offered as
explanation for childhood autism. In the first decade of this century, we
have witnessed immediacy in family policy developments in the after-
math of high-impact events (such as the tragic deaths of Baby P and
Victoria Climbié) while neuroscience evidence has been used to rede-
fine parents’ role and create a new ‘norm’ to guide policy: policy, which
would have otherwise been targeted to a small number of parents, has
come to apply to nearly every parent. Indeed, a trend has emerged in
family policy to turn exception into rule by focusing on emotionally
charged events in some children’s lives and, based on these, draw pol-
icy directives. Rapid policy development limits the critical space left for
parents to act as citizens and engage with issues that directly affect their
lives. Decontextualised, policy guidelines can easily mutate into moral
absolutes, especially when parents lack confidence in their parenting
and have a limited access to community support. Most worryingly, in
a context of antagonism, public service cuts and limited educational
72 Parenting, Family Policy and Children’s Well-Being in an Unequal Society
The New Labour government developed its family policy along six
main lines: education, care and well-being of children (expanding early
care including universal services for three- and four-year-olds; Educa-
tion Maintenance Allowances – EMA), financial support for families
with children (tax credits), services for families (Sure Start expansion
of services), parental employment (promoting employment among sin-
gle parents through the Welfare to Work strategy), work/family balance
(extension of maternity leave, introduction of paternity leave) and fam-
ily functioning (intervention at a family level; increased emphasis on
parental responsibility to tackle antisocial behaviour) (see a review in
Daly, 2011). A key goal in these policy initiatives was to reduce child
poverty and social exclusion through fiscal changes and access to uni-
versal services. For example, the introduction of universal services of
childcare was particularly important in terms of using education as a
75
76 Neoliberal Family Policy
route out of poverty. Early years’ provision for three- and four-years-
olds, that is, 12.5 hours (15 hours from 2010) of childcare, was an
innovative development considering that in the United Kingdom, ‘a
universal, publicly funded, integrated and equitable childcare uncou-
pled from parental status, family income level and family investment
in care did not exist’ (Lloyd, 2008, p. 483). Also, the EMA (introduced
nationwide in 2004 and abolished in 2011 by the coalition government)
was designed to encourage young people from poor backgrounds to stay
in education longer and was successful in terms of raising staying-on
rates, retention and achievement Chowdry et al. (2007a) as cited in
Chevalier et al. (2010).
Around 2003, parenting became the cornerstone of family policy.
With the Anti-Social Behaviour Act & Criminal Justice Act (2003), the
use of parenting orders was extended (the Crime and Disorder Act
was introduced in 1998) and parenting contracts were introduced. Par-
enting Orders compelled parents whose children’s behaviour brought
them to the attention of the courts to attend parenting classes and
fulfil other requirements deemed necessary by the court. The Respect
Action Plan by Tony Blair was aimed at tackling underlying causes of
antisocial behaviour to build ‘stable families and strong cohesive com-
munities’. In 2004, with the publication of the Every Child Matters
report, the focus on family functioning, and particularly on ‘good’ par-
enting, increased. What parents do to/with their children emerged as a
key factor in mediating the effects of poverty and other social ills on
children’s education and well-being, and parenting was to be evaluated
in terms of children’s behaviour and academic outcomes.
Placing parenting at the heart of family policy meant that ‘the
behaviour of family members, especially parents, could be mobilized
to improve social order and in the process (re)fashion the family
as an agent of social integration and economic responsibility’ (Daly,
2011, p. 441). This was to be achieved by targeting parents’ individual
behaviour and practices (e.g. encouraging parents to become involved
with their children’s learning, encourage an authoritative parenting
style), especially for parents in ‘problem’ families. The policy empha-
sis on parenting propelled a number of national pilots to explore the
ways in which parenting programmes could be rolled out on a large
scale and the cost effectiveness of such practice. In 2006, the Parent
Support Advisors was piloted in 20 LAs; Family Intervention Projects
(FIPs) (50 projects); Parenting Early Intervention Projects (PEIP) pilots
(18 LAs); and the Education and Inspections Act and Police and Justice
Act, extending the scope of parenting orders and parenting contracts.
Family Policy in 21st Century Britain 77
p. 53). Evidence from the United States indicated that intensive home
visiting for the first two years of a child’s life with a focus on offering
health advice and support had beneficial effects for children and fam-
ilies experiencing significant deprivation. This gave rise to the Family
Nurse Partnership (FNP) Programme May 2007 as cited in Barnes et al.
(2011), at which point family policy became interventionist at a family
level, especially for the hard-to-reach families. Having a health focus,
the FNP was found to be moderately successful in supporting families
to access health services fulfilling the need for many families to access
practical services, especially in countries such as the United States where
major health inequalities exist.
Social exclusion is an umbrella term and is not unproblematic
(Axford, 2008). It is about a diminished participation in social life. Being
excluded refers to not been given choices and opportunities through
access to resources and economic productivity to be included. But can
one opt for social exclusion? Does exclusion refer to a diminished par-
ticipation in economic activity? Does tackling social exclusion involve
relocating parents closer to the market to raise their productivity and
encourage them to adopt market values? In UK social policy, three
discourses have dominated social exclusion, namely moral underclass,
social integrationist and redistributionist (Levitas, 2005). The moral
underclass discourse is based on deficit assumptions about people’s val-
ues, behaviour and practices, especially if they are not aligned with
mainstream views about parental responsibility. This perspective is illus-
trated, for example, in the ‘Family Pathfinder’ initiative targeted at the
two per cent most disadvantaged families in the country (SETF, 2008).
The social integrationist discourse defines inclusion as participation in
economically productive activities, whether through paid work or edu-
cation and training (the value of care work is largely ignored due to its
reduced economic benefits) (Axford, 2008). This is reflected in welfare-
to-work policies and in services for young people not in education,
employment or training, whose aim is to reposition them closer to
the market. The redistributionist discourse approaches exclusion as the
outcome of poverty and social disadvantage, reflected in fiscal policies
towards a fairer distribution of resources and services.
Much of the focus in UK social policy has been on the excluded
rather than on the causes and mechanisms for exclusion (Barnes and
Morris, 2008). By focusing on the excluded, it becomes easier to
blame individual parents and families. Increasingly, social exclusion
is about individual choices and not systemic constraints or poverty.
The shift towards parents and children as the root of social exclusion
was exemplified with the objectives of the Children’s Fund which did
Family Policy in 21st Century Britain 81
Under New Labour, the focus of family policy was on tackling social
exclusion. For the coalition government, it is about social mobility
and equalising opportunities for the severely disadvantaged, mainly
through family intervention. The coalition government set out pol-
icy directions with regard to family and parenting. It builds on New
Labour’s interventionist approach towards the hard-to-reach families by
adopting a behavioural and individuated conception of poverty and
social exclusion. Recently, four independent reviews commissioned by
the coalition government have been published. These are The Inde-
pendent Review on Poverty and Life Chances led by Frank Field MP
(December 2010) to recommend actions to reduce poverty and increase
life chances with a particular focus on interventions that do not pro-
mote economic redistribution and other financial schemes for lifting
people out of poverty; Eileen Munro’s review of child protection (Spring
2010); Dame Clare Tickell’s review of the Early Years Foundation Stage
(Spring 2011), with a focus on child development and learning; and an
independent commission into early intervention led by Graham Allen
MP (January 2011).
In his review, Labour MP Graham Allen offers economic arguments
to justify the benefits of early intervention. According to him, ‘by the
time the children concerned were 15, it was estimated to have provided
benefits, in the form of reduced welfare and criminal justice expendi-
tures, higher tax revenues, and improved physical and mental health,
which were over five times greater than the cost of the programme’.
He considers a cost-benefit analysis in which the cost of late interven-
tion and remedial work, such as special-needs teaching, schemes for
job readiness, teenage pregnancy, drink and drug abuse, a lifetime on
benefits (no tax contributions) is much larger than the cost of early
82 Neoliberal Family Policy
Being ‘life ready’ involves ‘having the social and emotional capability to
enter the labour market; understanding the importance and the social,
health and emotional benefits of entering work, the impacts of drug and
84 Neoliberal Family Policy
alcohol misuse, crime and domestic and other violence’ (2011, pp. 2–5).
In Allen’s report, the depiction of a school ready to life ready life course
is linear, overly simplistic and potentially artificial. There is an implicit
assumption here that it is up to the young people and their parents to be
‘life ready’ and ‘enter the labour market’ and that all they need is ‘social
and emotional capacity’ and an understanding of the ‘the importance
and the social, health and emotional benefits of entering work’. What
young people need, however, is jobs that pay a decent wage and oppor-
tunities for education and training, domains that require a political and
an economic intervention.
Fourthly, Field refers to the forces that shape families such as de-
industrialisation, limited employment opportunities for working-class
males and a steady decrease in community networks. However, these
forces go beyond parenting and thus to ensure that poor children do
not take their poverty to adulthood, education, including early years’
education, that can function as a driver for social mobility to halt dis-
advantage and reverse polarisation, is crucial. Field’s review ‘locates the
failure to ensure the country has an adequate skills base’ not, paradox-
ically, in the school system, but ‘in those years before children go to
school’ (2011, p. 24). However, this creates a false dichotomy because
quality early years’ education matters, but so does good primary and sec-
ondary education. Field states that ‘schools can have an impact, albeit
a smaller one, especially where good leadership and teaching provides
an environment for poor children to thrive, but it has generally been
found very difficult to undo the disadvantages carved out in the ear-
liest years’. However, as a study by Dearden and colleagues (2011) has
shown, education explains a sizeable portion (16%) of the achievement
gap between poor and rich children, in fact, the same proportion as par-
enting variables explain. However, Field’s statement begs the question as
to why schools and other civic institutions cannot narrow the achieve-
ment gap. It is fatalistic to assume that disadvantage that originates in
early years’ environments cannot be overcome by civic forces such as
education, rights legislation and families’ capability building.
Finally, research evidence from a plethora of studies (see Chapters 1
and 2) does not support the view that ‘what parents do is more impor-
tant than who parents are’ as stated in Field’s and Allen’s reviews. Nor
does it support the idea that ‘the early home learning environment is
the single biggest influence on a child’s development – more important
than material circumstances or parental income, occupation or edu-
cation’ (Allen, 2011, p. 57). The early home environment is not the
single biggest influence on child well-being and learning (Dearden et al.,
Family Policy in 21st Century Britain 85
decontextualised way which does not address the terrain between equal-
ity of opportunity and equality of outcome. An abstracted notion of
equality of opportunity and the strategies put in place to support it
(e.g. early intervention) are contested. Inequalities of income, resources
and power have redefined the nature and structure of opportunity and
the means through which it is equalised. Access to equal opportuni-
ties alone is not enough for families and young people to achieve equal
outcomes in that it is important to consider what individuals make of
these opportunities. Even when people have access to equal opportu-
nities the outcome may be different because a great deal depends on
what people do with the opportunities afforded to them (issues related
to equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are discussed in
detail in Chapter 8). As the MCS findings have shown, roughly equal
opportunities for concerted cultivation through routine parental sup-
port were not sufficient to narrow the achievement gap in that children’s
outcomes still differed along parents’ social class lines. It appears that
parental involvement alone as a strategy towards increasing relative
intergenerational social mobility is less likely to enhance children’s life
chances.
Finally, even if we accept that relative social mobility can be achieved
through early years’ intervention by equalising opportunities for young
children, without an increase in absolute social mobility (e.g. through
better salaries and increases in the number of parents in higher occupa-
tions), the outcome will be limited. We need social mobility strategies
that are better aligned to social justice as well as ‘economic and labour
market policies that might lead to creation of better-paid jobs and
more “room at the top” in higher occupations, without which rela-
tive social mobility becomes a zero-sum game’ (Pearce, 2011, p. 6).
Social mobility discourses should not be confined within the micro
and meso structures of parents’ and children’s lives. Family policy and
the social mobility strategy operate at micro layers (early intervention,
parent–child relationships, parenting) at the expense of accounting for
the macro influences such as globalisation, structural constraints linked
to power, access to resources and inequality that go beyond individu-
als’ lives. Macro theorisations are needed to address the growing gap
in income, resources and status as a result of an uneven distribution
of economic rewards in Western countries over the last three decades
and the fact that a disproportionate amount of the income growth has
concentrated at the top one per cent of households. Early interven-
tion strategies with an emphasis on parents as ‘the principle architects
of a fairer society’ (Lexmond and Reeves, 2009) should also account
Family Policy in 21st Century Britain 87
for the effects of globalisation, the stagnation of wages and the lim-
ited opportunities that people, including parents, have to move to
higher income/status occupations, the reduction in decent-wage jobs,
the unregulated capacity of the financial sector to capture a big part of
GDP in profits (e.g. through bonuses) and the gradual removal of public
services into private spheres.
As strategies to equalise opportunities, early intervention and parent-
ing do not account for the macro influences felt in terms of marginality
(communities and families not linked to major services), stigmatisation
and lack of trust (displacement of family members, kin or trade unions),
a dissolution of place and a sense of belonging (public places become
increasingly commercialised and not easily accessible by children and
families who cannot afford them) and limited decent-wage jobs. These
trends in global capital cannot be reversed by ‘good’ parenting and early
intervention. Attempts to reduce intergenerational disadvantage with-
out engaging with these trends are bound to be inefficient. Parents’
and children’s agency is ‘a response to and a connection between micro
and macro forces of social change’ (Gardner et al., 2004, p. 11). Par-
ents, families and schools in marginalised areas face many challenges
considering that they are socialised and socialise others through these
structures. Parents and children are both actors and acted upon and thus
narrow conceptions of the ‘good’ parent are irrelevant to their experi-
ences. A cultural disjuncture between parents’ and children’s agency and
mainstream values and practices in schools and other institutions can
partly contribute to the achievement gap. The achievement gap, how-
ever, remains unchallenged even when disadvantaged parents espouse
mainstream values (e.g. high educational aspirations for their children;
frequent engagement with home learning), while resisting the macro
forces of social change. This is because opportunities for social advance-
ment are shaped by global forces and thus they are inaccessible to most
families and young people. This is true considering that the precarious
nature of market forces and the economic uncertainty experienced in
many Western countries work against a fairer access to education to
maximise relative social mobility.
Family policy should engage with the dynamic interplay of micro,
meso and macro influences on parents’ and children’s lives. Children’s
educational and social advancement is affected by global social changes
at a macro level, for example, precarious employment, which cannot be
overcome by changes in parental practices and behaviour, because par-
enting is also shaped by these forces and parenting styles are responses
to their toxicity. Yet, one of the solutions that current family policy
88 Neoliberal Family Policy
of care and education and on the welfare benefits and measures to sup-
port paid employment (Daly, 2011). In 2006–2007 expenditure on child
contingent support and on early years’ education and childcare was
£30.6 billion and £6.4 billion respectively, while the total cost of the
various parenting programmes identified in 2008 was approximately
£50 million (Stewart, 2009 as cited in Churchill and Clarke, 2010).
5
Critical Reflections on Early
Intervention
90
Critical Reflections on Early Intervention 91
manner (Hartas and Lindsay, 2008; Moran et al., 2004). Parents wel-
come services that facilitate access to education and health care services,
which are particularly important in countries with an unequal ser-
vice provision. A key determinant of the modest success of the Perry
Preschool Programme was its focus on quality education provision and
access to health services. Similarly, Sure Start projects led by health
services were slightly more effective than those led by other agencies,
probably because of better access to established health visitor networks
(Welshman, 2010), pointing to families’ preference for practical services.
Also, parents’ views about programmes with a community orientation
tended to be positive in terms of having the opportunity to meet other
parents, feel less socially isolated and exchange advice and information
about child rearing.
Most of the parenting programmes reviewed by Moran and colleagues
(2004) showed that parents would like to receive concrete advice and
information about child-related issues and tips to support their chil-
dren’s behaviour. They felt they gained from professionals who were
authoritative and ‘practical and down to earth’ and willing to under-
stand the circumstances of their family. Results from evaluations on
knowledge-based interventions (e.g. knowledge about inoculations and
other issues related to child development such as information about
ADHD) suggest that a large number of parents would like to access them.
Parent education programmes that aim at providing information on
issues related to child development are perceived by parents as useful
and relevant to their concerns about their children’s well-being. Access
to advice and support regarding universal services is crucial for fami-
lies; however misinformation and ill advice can be harmful to parents.
For example, in a review by Moran and colleagues (2004), some parents
complained about the inadequate and ill-advised approaches that some
health visitors took in their interactions with them. Offering inappropri-
ate advice to disadvantaged families can only exacerbate their difficul-
ties, especially when the focus of intervention is on changing parents’
behaviour instead of tackling structural inequality by facilitating access
to public services.
that ought to frame family policy (see Chapter 8 for a discussion on the
principles for family policy).
The first principle, that is, showing regard for others, refers to the
‘ethics of care’, a moral theory (Held, 2005) and Featherstone’s (2004)
feminist theory on developing the ethics of care when intervening in
people’s life. A key idea in Honneth’s theory of recognition is that
human agency flourishes during social interactions that ‘validate and
acknowledge personal existence’ (Houston and Dolan, 2008, p. 459).
Recognition of and respect for the ‘other’ can be compromised in that
public attitudes towards disadvantaged parents and children tend to
be those of social stigma, personal and moral failure and marginali-
sation (Lister, 2004). Poverty and disadvantage push parents into the
category of ‘other’ and this has significant implications for the ethics
of care. A social-cultural ‘otherness’ is encouraged by supporting the
participatory rights of parents with a market power only. Within mar-
ket structures, human agency mutates into an economic agency within
which individual parents’ and children’s participatory rights are exer-
cised as long as they are compatible with maximising public investment
(Ong, 2006). Approaching children as future investments and not as cit-
izens has implications for their participatory as well as human rights.
In current poverty discourses it is assumed that disadvantaged par-
ents somehow deviate from the dominant morality and market values,
drawing a distinction between suffering that is self-responsible (due to
laziness, lack of morality, recklessness) and suffering from accidental
hardship. As such, the ethics of care are to be applied to parents who
suffer from accidental hardship but not to those who are seen as being
responsible for their disadvantage (see Chapter 8 for a discussion on the
ethics of care).
With regard to the second principle of legal rights, the pursuit of a
just society based on reciprocal social relationships is a fundamental
right. Families’ participative rights are crucial in developing support pro-
grammes to achieve desired outcomes and maximise ownership. People
value opportunities to participate in developing programmes of support
and having a genuine involvement in decision making about matters
that affect their life. Outcome-based parenting programmes have side-
lined parents’ and families’ social and human rights. The economic
justification offered for early intervention has moved the focus away
from rights, entitlements and obligations to parental responsibility to
raise children as a future investment. Within rights discourses, there
has been very little about the actual experiences in parent–child interac-
tions, mainly focusing on the rights of the children and the duties and
Critical Reflections on Early Intervention 111
factors as the side effects and consequences (and not as the causes) of
distal risk factors.
towards pre-specified outcomes are limited to small acts which are less
likely to amount to big societal changes and offer genuine equal oppor-
tunities to those who need them most. It is reductionistic to think
that by modifying certain parenting behaviours and practices we can
tackle socio-economic inequality. Reducing socio-economic inequality
requires collective political and social changes.
As discussed in Chapter 3, poverty has been reconceptualised in pol-
icy discourses as a lifestyle of choice and a moral failing. The working
classes are being demonised as not being willing to do things that their
middle-class counterparts routinely do, such as forming networks or
contributing to a community, and as lacking in culture, aspirations
and emotional intelligence (e.g. soft skills). These discourses, however,
neglect the primary origins of class differences such as poverty, unsafe
living conditions and disintegrating neighbourhoods, crowded schools
and poor-quality education. New Labour policy, and the coalition gov-
ernment’s family policy to a large extent, represents an ambitious
attempt at re-socialisation, introducing a moral agenda to inculcate
middle-class values rather than acknowledging and addressing inequal-
ity as the driving force of societal polarisation (Gewirtz et al., 2005).
Within a moral agenda, poverty and inequality of opportunity are
reframed as the consequences of not abiding by mainstream values, with
lack of material resources becoming a symptom of exclusion rather than
its primary cause. Discourses on inequality and the structural barriers
on children’s life chances have been substituted by moral arguments
that aim at complicity. Policy decisions in this context are condi-
tional and directional, targeting the micro influences in children’s lives.
A moral claim (which permeates state structures such as welfare) is
about a widespread crisis in the private lives of disadvantaged people,
which necessitates the state to respond to alleviate ‘counter-productive
immoral, unhealthy or dangerous forms of intimacy’ (Raynolds, 2010,
p. 39). As such, much of the focus of policy has been on disciplining
the working classes who are seen as being unable to police themselves
while the middle classes exempt themselves from the same systematic
moralisation and regulation of risk.
The culture of state interventionism, including early intervention,
is paradoxical: on the one hand the state is receding from governing
(as evidenced in unregulated markets with public services being moved
into private spheres) and on the other it is heavily involved with micro-
managing family and the daily experiences of children and parents.
A fundamental policy shift is required to ensure that disadvantaged fam-
ilies receive public services and not micromanagement. To meaningfully
120 Neoliberal Family Policy
121
122 Neoliberal Family Policy
make sense of without receiving direct input from family experts. At the
same time, the notion of complexity in ecological models of child devel-
opment, that is, the presence of myriad factors that interact with each
other and shape child development appears to be sidelined in favour of
a single proximal factor, that is, parenting, to explain any substantive
differences in children’s experiences of growing up. As Conroy argues,
the ‘complexification of societal challenges’ is anti-progressive precisely
because such complexification requires consideration of causes and not
just symptoms in search of a solution (Conroy, 2010; Conroy et al.,
2008). Moreover, complexity encourages a form of complicity rather
than reflection and action because we are told that the social and ethi-
cal dilemmas that a diverse world throws up are beyond our capacity to
offer meaningful, relevant and sustainable solutions.
Also, the notion of resilience has been re-coded from being about
human agency into a narrative of complicity. In ecological models of
child development (see Chapter 5), resilience is about acknowledging
existing strengths in families, even when they face adverse circum-
stances by identifying factors that potentially function as ‘buffers’ in
minimising the impact of structural inequality and disadvantage on
their lives. Resilience is, however, no longer about family resource-
fulness but parental responsibility to accept structural inequality as
a given and manage themselves efficiently to compensate for the
misfortune of being poor and disadvantaged rather than contesting
patterns of wealth and status distribution (Andresen, 1999). Likewise,
the terminology about ‘hard-to-reach’ families portrays families who
experience disadvantage as being socially excluded, requiring a spe-
cial type of intervention for them to be reached and become part of
society. The ‘hard-to-reach’ discourse does not engage with the pos-
sibility that some families may disengage from society for a reason,
because there is nothing for them in it (in the form of public ser-
vices or civic institutions for their socialisation). It also offers a narrow
view of social justice because interventions for the hard-to-reach do
not involve society as a whole but focus on the most disadvantaged
groups, for whom equality of opportunity is thought to be achieved
through good parenting and not through structural changes at a societal
level.
The use of moral vocabularies in the public sphere privatises social
problems and shuts down public debates about inequality. For exam-
ple, idioms such as ‘every child matters’ or ‘social inclusion’ and
‘social mobility’ do not promote public debates because they are widely
accepted as legitimate policy goals: who would argue against social
132 Neoliberal Family Policy
inclusion and the view that parents matter? Finally, the use of moral
vocabularies and the subsequent policy actions they invoke are mislead-
ing because they claim that we understand the roots of the challenges
that our society faces by presenting accounts in a realist form: ‘there is
one way to reality, to understand the world, a world that is totalized and
shared by all’ (Rose, 1999, p. 472). The use of a euphemistic language
does not encourage thinking about alternative possibilities that might
exist in tackling social problems. New laws and policy actions articu-
lated in moralising terms create an illusion that we are close to finding a
solution, ‘thereby permitting others to not address it and may produce
subjectivities and conditions which support the exercise and the toler-
ance of the problem on all sides’ (Edelman, 1988, pp. 26–27). Despite
the proliferation of moral vocabularies, as Furedi (2011) argues, political
discourses that explore big issues such as poverty or the meaning of a
good life, in both moral and political terms, are limited.
Since 2005, in the United Kingdom, child protection policies have pro-
liferated. Increasingly, more and more children are considered to be at
∗
risk , being treated as vulnerable and fragile and who require some form
of therapeutic intervention. Although the Every Child Matters report
was drawn upon the Laming report on the abuse and tragic death of
Victoria Climbié, its focus was not on child abuse per se but wider: to
protect children from antisocial behaviour, poor attainment or becom-
ing a poor teenage parent, stressing that risk is all-pervasive and a
potential threat to all children from which no child is immune (every
child is considered to be vulnerable to risk, at any point in their life
within their immediate environments). This heralded a major shift from
focusing on a minority of cases of child neglect and abuse to widening
the definition of ‘children in need’ and introducing vulnerability and
risk as blanket terms in family policy.
Risk has become pervasive: children’s race, gender, religion, social
class, first language or family environment, all target them for the ‘at
risk’ label and its associated interventions. Risk discourses are problem-
atic in that they lack proportionality and give the illusion that risk is
understood (e.g. claims about low social mobility being linked to lack
of breastfeeding) and that causal links can be drawn between the source
of risk and its consequences. Also, the solutions offered to social prob-
lems (e.g. poverty and lack of professional networks and educational
resources) are technical and accept one legitimate way to deal with risk
without accounting for competing views. Bauman (2007) distinguishes
between a ‘primal’ fear and secondary or ‘derivative’ fear. A primal fear
is a response to a direct threat/attack whereas a derivative fear is indi-
rect and more socially and culturally defined and articulated. Because
the direct and derivative fear can be easily decoupled from its source(s),
our reactions to fear and the things we do to lessen its impact may
be incompatible with its source. The sources of fear may be complex
and not easily identified so we may be in a situation in which we
136 Neoliberal Family Policy
experience fear and anxiety but are not sure what the real danger is
(Smeyers, 2010). A diffusion of fear exacerbates parental anxiety (which,
in some parents, mutates into hyper-parenting) but is good for the mar-
kets because markets thrive through the commercialisation of risk, and
our responses to it create a dynamic market of products and services that
offer the illusion that we can regulate against risk.
A view of vulnerability as a private problem (rather than a conse-
quence of poverty) has dangerous implications. First, peoples’ sense
of the self as robust and competent is undermined. Despite that attri-
butions of within-the-individual deficits are morally and intellectually
dubious (Vehmas, 2010), assumptions of deficit have the power to ren-
der children’s rights ineffective by restricting opportunities and posing
obstacles to children’s capability building. Secondly, the discourses of
individuated risk and vulnerability are likely to forge parent–child inter-
actions and relationships as potentially toxic, which in turn justifies the
public scrutiny of families within which parents and children are to be
measured, judged, disciplined and changed. The discourses on pervasive
risk and vulnerability are used to justify behavioural interventions in
place of economic redistribution and access to public services. Thirdly,
because of the increasing numbers of children who are deemed to be at
risk (based on open-ended definitions of vulnerability and need), social
care services are overwhelmed and thus may miss children who suf-
fer or are likely to suffer significant harm. With resources being thinly
spread to the growing numbers of ‘children in need’, identifying those
who truly need support becomes challenging. Child protection services
(a domain in which the state has a legitimate role to play) can be diluted
and their effectiveness reduced as they try to deal with an influx of
cases (Munro, 2010). The open-ended definitions of risk and vulnerabil-
ity do not stop with children. By extending the idea of ‘chaotic’ families
to almost all families who do not appear to function within an eco-
nomic model, the serious difficulties faced by a minority of families are
trivialised and not addressed properly.
Furthermore, a policy focus on individuated crises and risks neglects
the big issues (e.g. limited children’s life chances, inequality, unemploy-
ment) that affect families and society at large. The policy responses to
high-impact, tragic incidences of child abuse and death have a disori-
entating effect because they divert the focus from the real problems to
generic, abstracted and individuated crises in children’s environments.
The real risks in children’s life do not emanate from stranger danger but
from poverty, institutionalised violence, inequality, poor state educa-
tion and decline in social mobility, all structural problems that have the
Neoliberalism and Family Policy in Britain 137
spaces for social justice but in neoliberalism such spaces have shrunk
into a community and thus have become fragmented considering that
diverse communities have diverse understandings of social justice and
fairness. Community and families have become the new social and
political spaces between the state and society (as a national collective)
within which the self-governing of individuals takes place, and tar-
gets for the exercise of political power are set (Rose, 1999). In these
spaces, a polity as a social and political being is transformed into atom-
ised individuals who are responsible to the state without accounting
for the systemic constraints in their life. Citizens are asked to over-
come systemic barriers and effect economic and social advancement on
themselves and are held accountable through the exercise of individual
management and blame. With politics moving in the community, the
neoliberal state as a regulatory state is not retreating; what is retreat-
ing is the state as a guarantor of citizens’ political and social rights,
and of public services and civic institutions. Society in the form of a
welfare state is ‘rolling back’ and instead an ‘enabling’ state emerges
(Donzelot and Estebe, 1994) which is not directly involved in tack-
ling problems related to employment, health, education and social
justice. This is manifested in the diminishing role of the state in
planning, especially with regard to public services and welfare organ-
isation. The receding state does not mean that the ‘technologies of
governing have become superfluous’ (Simons and Masschelein, 2008,
p. 396). On the contrary, these political changes promote forms of gov-
ernment that foster and enforce individual responsibility, privatised
risk-management of ever-emerging crises, empowerment techniques,
regulation and market forces and entrepreneurial models in a variety
of social and interpersonal domains (Cruikshank, 1999; Henman, 2004;
Rose, 1999).
A feature of the neoliberal rationality is to realign the responsible with
the economic-rational individual whose moral quality is based on ratio-
nally assessing the costs and benefits of certain acts. The image of a
worthy citizen as a self-determining individual who accepts their obli-
gation to act morally and responsibly captures the image of the ‘good’
parent who is autonomous and capable of reversing inequality and
responsible for shaping their children’s lives. In a market-driven society,
the transformative power of human agency, as conceptualised within
humanism, is diminishing, having significant implications for citizen-
ship and human rights. Citizenship and political participation are not
a given for some groups; they depend on individuals’ responsiveness
to moralising and willingness to move closer to the market, pointing
Neoliberalism and Family Policy in Britain 139
Final thoughts
13 per cent of children have suffered some form of abuse while 2 per
cent suffer some form of neglect during childhood (Cawson et al., 2000).
The Children in Need Census reported that 377,600 children in England
started an ‘episode of need’ in 2009–2010 and 694,000 were in need at
some point in the year (DfE, 2010). According to the Children Act 1989,
a child in need is defined as a child requiring additional support from a
local authority, if he or she is unlikely to achieve or maintain, or have
the opportunity of achieving or maintaining a reasonable standard of
health and development without support, if his or her development is
likely to be significantly impaired, without support and/or if he or she is
disabled. The category that includes children with any form of disabil-
ity, young carers who care for family members with disability/illness,
excluded children and so on, is very wide. From the 603,700 referrals
made to children’s social care services, 39,100 children were subject to a
child protection plan on 31 March 2010. The most common reason for a
child to be placed on a child protection plan was neglect (43.5%). So in
the year 2009–2010 about 3.14 per cent of the population of children
and young people were regarded as children in need, but only 0.32 per
cent of children were the subject of child protection plans (i.e. substanti-
ated cases of abuse). From the 603,700 referrals made to children’s social
care services in 2010, 395,300 initial assessments were completed within
the year (65.5% of the total referrals in the year) and 137,600 core assess-
ments were completed within the year (22.8% of the total referred).
However, this indicates that over half of the cases received an initial
assessment, which puts children and their families under unnecessary
stress (for families who do not need protection) and is likely to trivialise
concerns by families who are truly in need of support services.
Part III
Parenting, Culture Wars and
Civic Renewal
So far, in light of the MCS findings about the influences of parenting and
social class on children’s learning and well-being, parenting has been
discussed in the context of family policy developments in Britain, high-
lighting early intervention and the evolving effects of neoliberal policies
on families. The nature, scope and paradoxes of family policy and its role
in supporting resilience in parents were examined, as well as assump-
tions about parents’ capacity to transcend their circumstances through
state intervention. Most importantly, parental involvement with chil-
dren’s learning and the role of the home learning environment and
social class in children’s development offered an insight on the extent
to which parenting influences the achievement gap between poor and
wealthier children. Consistently with much current research, social class
emerged as a powerful factor in influencing children’s language, literacy
and social behaviour, questioning the rhetoric that parenting is a key
determinant in shaping children’s life chances.
The disproportionate policy focus on parents to reverse inequal-
ity and narrow the achievement gap is part of a wider culture war
that has been waged on citizens in neoliberal societies, a culture
war that is less about a clash between conservative and liberal ide-
als and more about the governance of parents through the state
scrutiny of intimate family life to an unprecedented degree. The cul-
ture war on parenting is policy-driven and is more about moralising
individuals and promoting new conceptions of diversity and toler-
ance and less about engaging with the social and political forces
that shape families in the 21st century. The culture war on par-
enting can be understood through the lens of growing inequality
and polarisation in society, and the political hypocrisy reflected in
144 Parenting, Family Policy and Children’s Well-Being in an Unequal Society
the paucity of discussions about social class, poverty and the serious
challenges that typical families face.
The MCS findings stimulated a wider discussion on how evidence is
used to promote certain conceptions of the ‘good’ parent within fam-
ily policy. The ‘good’ parent doctrine has corrosive effects on parents’
confidence but also redefines the relationship between individuals and
the state. The move from the big government to the big society should
not be about placing the onus on individuals without accounting for
the social and economic constraints that surround their lives, especially
in countries like Britain or the United States where the inequality gap
is widening. A preoccupation with individual behaviour, be it parents’
or children’s, is less likely to amount to social action. Rather, to support
individual parents and children to develop human agency and live a
life they value, we need new arguments about the renewal of families as
civic institutions and parents’ capability building.
Increasingly, the strong policy focus on individuals has contributed
to shrinkage of civic spaces for families to meet and engage in pub-
lic reasoning for the common good. The remaking of a civic society,
primarily through the renewal of the family as a civic institution, is
discussed here to offer an alternative view of parents and children as
capable of connecting to public life and engaging in moral and politi-
cal debates. Issues bigger than what parents do with their children are
addressed by asking questions, for example, ‘what is possible for par-
ents and children?’, ‘what is good and for whom?’ and ‘what’s good
for society?’ To address these questions, a civic renewal of the family is
needed. The remaking of a civic society involves the consideration of
three overlapping layers: the interpersonal life world (e.g. family); insti-
tutions and services (e.g. education); and collective associations and public
reasoning in the polity (e.g. community groups and associations; repre-
sentation; parent voice). In thinking about the interpersonal life world,
Sen’s capability approach to human well-being contributes to the civic
project by considering families’ living conditions and capabilities for
parents and children to convert opportunities into a valued life. The
capability approach offers an alternative to family micromanagement
and a culture of behavioural modification. At the layer of institutions,
civic education plays an important role in the making of a civic society
in that it complements parents’, teachers’ and children’s responsibility
with that of other civic institutions to promote the common good. Edu-
cating for a civic society should work in tandem with economic changes
and market regulation to tackle inequality and its effects on the ade-
quacy of current education systems. Finally, through the third layer of
Parenting, Culture Wars and Civic Renewal 145
147
148 Parenting, Culture Wars and Civic Renewal
No one today knows enough to raise a child. The world would be con-
siderably better off if we were to stop having children for twenty years
(except for those reared for experimental purposes) and were then to
start again with enough facts to do the job with some degree of skill
and accuracy. Parenthood, instead of being an instinctive art, is a sci-
ence, the detail of which must be worked out by patient laboratory
methods.
(Watson, 1924)
Parenting: A New Culture War 149
In a similar vein, at the start of the 21st century, child rearing is under-
stood as a matter of technique and skill rather than a complex web
of emotive and social experiences and human relationships which are
unpredictable and occasionally messy. Within family policy, child rear-
ing is about making cost-benefit considerations and individual parents,
through nudging, are to be ‘empowered’ to make the right choices to
manage their poverty not by challenging unequal resource distribution
but by saving public resources (Bristow, 2010). Most disturbingly, as
Field’s and Allen’s reviews illustrate, young people’s life’s worth is dis-
cussed in economic terms by calculating input/output ratio in resources:
the money the state spends to provide services for children and the ben-
efits that will be incurred by way of future contributions to a workforce.
The savings on taxpayers’ cost for raising children successfully (reduced
welfare and criminal justice expenditure) is seen as a profit. As such,
parenting has to be monitored and controlled to maximise the benefits
incurred (expressed as the ratio of ‘problem’ to ‘model’ citizens). Within
policy, children are construed, at best, as future citizens and not ‘citi-
zens now’ and, at worst, as a commodity to be acted upon to increase
its bio-value. The instrumentality of child rearing is not confined within
disadvantaged groups only. In policy documents, children are viewed as
a resource or ‘redemptive agents’ (Moss and Petrie, 2002, 2) who are to
make a significant economic contribution to society.
As already discussed in previous chapters, a large number of policy
documents (e.g. Allen’s and Field’s reviews, the CentreForum report
on Parenting Matters: Early Years and Social Mobility) encourage par-
ents to become responsible entrepreneurs to reverse child poverty and
shape their children’s futures. These documents assume that the current
state of parenting in Britain is problematic (with most parents ignor-
ing and maltreating their children) and although the well-established
links between poverty and child development and well-being are pre-
sented, their discussions on parenting do not account for these links.
The authors of these documents take the view that the problems associ-
ated with poor and inadequate parenting are widespread to justify policy
cost-benefit calculations on how to raise children and a national adver-
tising campaign (with 5-a-day messages such as ‘read to your child for
15 minutes’; ‘play with your child on the floor for 10 minutes’) and, most
crucially, early intervention for parents for whom the national campaign
will not work. A technocratic view of parenting within a 5-a-day model
works against the transformative power that parent–child relationships
have for social renewal. In the following sections, the governance of
parenting is discussed through policy constructions of the ‘good’ parent
and the politics of nudge for the remodelling of parents who do not
150 Parenting, Culture Wars and Civic Renewal
role of social class in defining young people’s life chances invoke a new
morality in the political discourses about poverty and child rearing, one
that does not engage with the societal and economic constraints and
affordances in people’s lives. Furthermore, the view that what parents
do makes all the difference in children’s lives invokes hubris and has
negative implications for cultural understandings of parenthood and
childhood.
A state-endorsed view of the ‘good’ parent has corrosive effects on
parents’ confidence. The economic calculations coupled with a lack
of confidence that some parents may have in their parenting can be
disempowering. Conceptions of parenting as another proximal factor
are reductionistic in that they imply that the emotional and intellec-
tual exchanges and experiences between children and parents can be
reduced into a set of variables whose effect on child well-being can be
calculated and appropriately remodelled. ‘Good’ parenting is regarded as
a question of technique instead of being fundamentally about quality of
relationships and affective experiences between parents and children.
Parenting is not a set of skills but an object of care (see the section
The Ethics of Care in Chapter 8). Raising children is not a practical
problem that requires technical or managerial solutions, panic-driven in
most cases, about how to make parenting effective. Increasingly, parents
are under pressure from family gurus and educational institutions (e.g.
schools) to offer concerted cultivation to their children. However, good
parenting is not about moulding children to an image of a child with
a competitive edge but about the richness of relationships with others.
As Sandel argues, children’s qualities are unpredictable and influenced
by many factors, and parents alone cannot be held wholly responsible
for the kind of children they have. Child rearing is an invitation to many
possibilities, an ‘openness to the unbidden’ (Sandel, 2004).
has been transformed into parental capital; learning into human and
intellectual capital; and friendships and social networks into social and
cultural capital. The proliferation of different forms of capital and an
economic rationale to underpin all human activity offer a vision of life
as a means to an end and not as an end in itself. As such, human rela-
tionships are not formed through emotional and affective desires but
through processes whereby adults transmit advantages to children (liv-
ing a life as a project). The family has become a social space characterised
by economic imperatives and the principles of the market, where trust
and affective experiences have an instrumental value. As such, it is an
apolitical space because the emphasis is on maximising economic and
not social advantage by ‘fostering an ethos of human enterprise and
moral responsibility’ (Rose, 1999, p. 484). The growing capitalisation on
human activities offers a new lens through which poverty is not looked
at as the absence of financial capital (material poverty) but as a lack of
other forms of capital which can be accrued if only parents invest their
time and effort to create networks, learn and acquire parenting skills
and become involved with their children’s learning. As such, poverty is
expressed not in political but in cultural and subjective terms.
Parent capital is thought to accumulate through involvement with
prescriptive parenting practices whose goal is to ensure that children’s
lives are managed to avoid becoming a future problem and a drain to
public resources. Prescriptive parenting is thought to maximise chil-
dren’s human capital via the development of soft skills and a good
character: children are to acquire soft skills and emotional literacy as
a means of changing disposition, attitudes and behaviour, to man-
age the self and adapt to the existing social and economic structures.
Despite the impact of the widening inequality on children’s and parents’
life chances and well-being, especially in socially immobile societies,
the importance of parenting in developing children’s soft skills, which
are ‘a key factor in determining young people’s ability to succeed’, is
hardly understated (Lexmond and Reeves, 2009). Social and educational
inequalities have come to be seen through the prism of young people’s
emotional skills, in that a poorly developed character explains poverty
and disadvantage. As such, children’s poor educational outcomes and
lack of social advancement are not related to societal structures but to
‘failures in self-governance, unable or unwilling to appropriately capi-
talise on their lives’ (Gillies, 2005, p. 837). New explanations about the
causes of poverty and inequality are offered: soft skills are a cause and
a solution to poverty. However, to reverse societal polarisation requires
more than building character, empathy and other soft skills in children.
Parenting: A New Culture War 155
166
Family Policy and the Capability Approach 167
processes (see also Bonvin and Farvaque, 2003). Thus, to achieve equal
agency and freedom for men and women, it is necessary to include
diverse voices in the process of defining and selecting functionings.
Unlike Nussbaum (2004), who accepts an Aristotelian conception of
‘valued functionings’, that is, attributes that are common to all and val-
ued by most people across cultures, Sen leaves it to parents to decide
what they value and let their values and beliefs guide their parenting,
while questioning notions of ‘good’ parenting and the ‘right’ way to
parent.
Here, I view parenting and family policy through a capability lens and
argue for the principles of equality, including gender equality, difference
and human agency and the ethics of care to underpin family policy.
Also, abandoning current gender-neutral policy discourses in favour of
a feminist orientation to parenting and family policy is advocated to
support capability building in parents, mothers in particular.
The capability approach offers the tools to evaluate inequality and the
social and economic circumstances that surround people’s development
and well-being. From a capability point of view, poverty is a violation of
human rights and lack of freedom in that for people who face poverty
their chances for living a life they value are reduced. This definition of
poverty is based on the Aristotelian notion that an impoverished life is
a life where one is not free to carry out the important activities one has
reason to choose (Sen, 2000). As stated at the United Nations Devel-
opment Programme (2001), ‘human development and human rights
are mutually reinforcing, helping to secure the wellbeing and dignity
of all people, building self-respect and the respect of others’. As it cur-
rently stands, some family policy initiatives target parents and children
who face severe poverty in ways that suggest that poverty is their fault
and not a violation of their human rights. Family policy should be less
about interventionist attempts to engage the ‘hard to reach’ and more
about finding ways to widen parents’ and children’s choices in polit-
ical, economic, social and cultural spheres. And this requires material
and institutional support to promote a human rights framework and,
most crucially, governmental action to address critical human rights
challenges brought about by inequality. Material resources alone are
not adequate because resources have no value in themselves if dis-
connected from their promotion of human functioning (e.g. education
and subsidised health care can promote longevity better than increased
income). For Nussbaum ‘all rights are understood as entitlements to
capabilities and have material and social preconditions, and all require
government action’ (2007; p. 21). Family policy should thus inquire into
individual parents’ and families’ needs, as expressed by them, and their
diverse abilities to access and convert resources into functionings.
The capability approach has brought to the fore the rights of parents
and children. Building capability means opening up parents’ and chil-
dren’s worlds and ‘producing a world in which all children grow up with
a decent set of opportunities for education, health care, bodily integrity,
political participation, choice, and practical reason’ (Nussbaum, 2007,
p. 22). The interventionist orientation of family policy, as articulated in
Allen’s and Field’s reviews, lacks vision and principles. Family policy dis-
courses should engage directly with what is valuable, for whom, under
what circumstances and whether principles are debated and disagree-
ments are resolved. The prescribed views of good parenting are at odds
with the heterogeneous values that increasingly diverse societies have
Family Policy and the Capability Approach 171
children, are able to do and be. Giddens argues that ‘the protection and
care of children is the single most important thread that should guide
family policy’ (1998; p. 94). For Sen, however, the unit of moral con-
cern is not the individual but the group (e.g. family) in order not to
overlook the dynamics that define a group and any form of inequality
that might be present, and to balance responsibilities and obligations
between political institutions and families. Such orientation can be use-
ful for family policy whose focus tends to be either on parents (what
they do to/with their children) or on children (e.g. child poverty) and
not on parent–child interactions within their wider socio-economic con-
texts. We cannot divorce children’s well-being from parents’ well-being,
especially considering the symbiotic nature of their relationships. The
fragmentation of how we perceive family members and their relation-
ships with each other makes concerns about child well-being sound
void, abstracted and artificial and has implications regarding poverty,
care and capability building.
Gender equality
Gender equality is the third principle to underpin family policy. Fam-
ily policy discourses appear to be progressive in using a gender-neutral
language (e.g. parenting) to discuss parental responsibility and obliga-
tion and avoid gender stereotyping. The use of a gender-free language
however is problematic because it does not acknowledge the fact that
family policy mostly targets mothers and its implications are felt dif-
ferently by fathers and mothers. The negotiation and reconciliation of
forces that affect families and parents’ role in it are, by and large, seen
as women’s issues. Although the balance of the contributions men and
women make to households in the form of paid and unpaid work is
changing, an increasing number of women have added paid work to
their existing care responsibilities at home, whereas men have increased
their care work only relatively slightly (Gershuny, 2000). In the United
Kingdom, as in other developed countries, women do twice as much
domestic work as their male counterparts, and yet the discussion on
parental responsibility and parental involvement in children’s learn-
ing and care at home is not gender explicit. As such, it is meaningless
to explore possibilities for capability building in women, mothers in
particular, without bringing gender equality to the fore.
The gender-neutral language used in family policy conceals gender
inequality and paints a misleading picture that mothers can ‘have it all’
in the same ways that fathers can. However, the reality is very different.
According to the Fawcett Society (2011):
176 Parenting, Culture Wars and Civic Renewal
women in the UK typically earn less, own less and are more likely to
live in poverty than men. They are underrepresented in Parliament,
in public life and in boardrooms across the country. It is women who
make up the majority of low paid workers, women who do the bulk
of unpaid work and women who are most likely to live under the
breadline in their old age.
And this predicament cannot be reconciled with the fact that women in
Western countries are better educated than ever before: they are attend-
ing university in ever increasing numbers and, in many cases, achieve
better degree results than men (Thompson et al., 2009).
In understanding gender inequality and its implications with regard
to capability building in women, we should recognise the existence
of a multifaceted jeopardy that women, mothers in particular, face in
the form of a ‘motherhood penalty’ as well as wage and career gaps;
unemployment/low paid work and poverty; cuts in benefits and public
services with the ‘rolling back’ of the welfare state; increasing pressure
from unpaid care work; individuated, gender-free and child-centred con-
ceptions of parenting; and pressure from clashing ideals, identities and
notions of motherhood.
Motherhood brings economic vulnerability in women because it
reduces their earnings, adding to already existing gender gaps in pay
(Budig and England, 2001; Waldfogel, 1998; Waldfogel and Washbrook,
2008). Economists have coined the phrase ‘motherhood penalty’ to
describe the income gap between mothers and women without chil-
dren. Although the wage gap and the glass ceiling regarding men’s and
women’s employment have been recognised, the motherhood gap has
been documented only recently (Williams, 2006). The motherhood gap
is about the wage penalties that mothers face for child rearing because
they often reduce their hours of paid work or leave employment due
to caregiving responsibilities. As such, men and women have different
career trajectories in that women are more likely to have career interrup-
tions and part-time employment. Relatively few women adhere to the
same patterns of work as men in terms of working from early adulthood
to retirement without interruption, and many mothers work less than
full time, especially in what Williams (2006) calls ‘high human capi-
tal professions’. Although in their 20s and perhaps early 30s women are
level with men, their career trajectory changes dramatically after becom-
ing mothers: some leave the workforce and others stay in positions
below senior management, leaving the higher ranks to be dominated by
men. Mothers are more likely to be in low-paid jobs and this translates
Family Policy and the Capability Approach 177
into mothers’ lifetime earnings being only 38 per cent of men’s (Rose
and Hartman, 2004).
The severe economic hardship for people in the United Kingdom
and other Western countries is having a disproportionate impact on
women. The Sex and Power 2011 report (an index of women in posi-
tions of power and influence), published by the UK Equality and Human
Rights Commission, confirms that ‘the gender balance at the top has
not changed much in three years, despite there being more women
graduating from university and occupying middle management roles.
We had hoped to see an increase in the number of women in posi-
tions of power, however this isn’t happening’. This trend is not abating
and the slow progress towards gender equality is being systematically
destroyed. We seem to move backwards with regard to women’s rights;
however, this is not reflected in family policy. Women are pushed out of
the workplace via unemployment or employment structures that make
it very difficult for them to work and pay for childcare, and this com-
promises their financial independence and reinvigorates stereotypes of
the vulnerable and dependant woman. During the writing of this book,
in the United Kingdom, the number of women unemployed reached
1.09 million as a part of the coalition government’s drive to reduce
deficit. Specifically, the Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that
710,000 public sector jobs will disappear by 2015 (Office for Budget
Responsibility, Autumn 2011). Women make up 65 per cent of the pub-
lic sector workforce (Economic and Social Data Service, Quarterly Labour
Force Survey Household Dataset, April–June, 2010). Unless we address
the gaps related to motherhood and gender, family policy should not
use a gender-free language to describe mothers’ and fathers’ roles in
child rearing because it marginalises and silences women. The gen-
dered nature of inequality and social exclusion does not sit well with
gender-neutral conversations of parenting.
Although women have always faced employment barriers, with the
economic recession, they bear the burden of poverty in ensuring the sur-
vival of their families (Amancio and Olivera, 2006), combining unpaid
domestic work with integration into a labour market that is increas-
ingly precarious and unregulated. The predominantly female workforce
in public-sector services is affected by the privatisation of public services,
removal of subsidies to basic food and disability support and the dis-
integration of employment rights. Public service cuts and the growing
privatisation of health and education further challenge women’s efforts
to balance paid and unpaid work and provide for their children. Many of
the cuts are to the benefits that more women than men rely on and also
178 Parenting, Culture Wars and Civic Renewal
the changes to the tax system will benefit far more men than women.
In the absence of social welfare, the care responsibilities of mothers have
increased to fill the gaps. Women face as many challenges as contradic-
tions: they are encouraged to think that employment opportunities are
there for them and that they can ‘do it all’. Poverty however has become
feminised, especially as women are more likely to lose their job or be
forced into flexible and informal working conditions.
With the current economic downturn and the ‘rolling back’ of the
welfare state, more demands for domestic care are placed on women.
The moral responsibility to care tends to be stronger for women,
accounting for the anxiety that most mothers experience. In a study
by Doucet (2011), women expressed worries about their influence
on children and whether they were being ‘proper mothers’, concerns
largely absent from fathers’ accounts. Although fathers are increas-
ingly involved in childcare (Sullivan, 2006), women are often viewed
as best placed to take care of children, and men and women frequently
approach parenting differently in that traditional constructions of mas-
culinity may discourage the development of empathy whereas women
are more likely to be taught to focus on others and to tune into their
children’s needs and feelings (Knudson-Martin and Huenergardt, 2010).
The conflict between paid and unpaid care work is often viewed as
mothers’ personal problem and not as a collective concern and civic
obligation to support the next generation as an act of solidarity and
citizenship.
Parents are encouraged by the CentreForum report to take up the
5-a-day tips for successful child rearing although we know that women
engage in more than their share in household chores and childcare
and any other form of care. Considering the multiple demands from
unpaid care work, the traditional wage gap between men and women
has a limited use in understanding gender inequality because it does
not account for the different types of work (including unpaid care),
the motherhood gap and the different trajectories in women’s careers.
If we are to assume gender equality in family policy, we must address
childcare, unpaid and paid work, work/life conflict and also acknowl-
edge that these concerns are not (and should not be) mothers’ alone.
Family policy assumes that both fathers and mothers share the role of
a homemaker equally; however the reality is that there is a mismatch
between homemaking and workplace responsibilities and mothers have
a larger slice of this mismatch to deal with. However, fathers can and do
learn to give care and nurture (Coltrane, 1996) and identify their roles as
a provider and parent as equally important. Those who share childcare
Family Policy and the Capability Approach 179
tasks talk about bonding with their children in ways that are similar to
mothers’ (Cowdery and Knudson-Martin, 2005).
Clashing ideals of motherhood and integration into the labour mar-
ket further jeopardise women’s capability building. Mothers in full-time
employment are caught in the middle of two ‘fundamentally inconsis-
tent ideals’: the ideal worker who spends long hours in paid employ-
ment and the intensive parent who puts time and labour into child
rearing (Williams, 2006, p. 5). Mothers, more than fathers, have to
negotiate conflicting demands in the multiple roles they assume: the
ideal worker in a competitive workplace, the ideal caregiver engaged in
unpaid work within the family and the intense parent who is to struc-
ture children’s lives to achieve educational outcomes. Unpaid care work
and intensive parenting clash with the notion of the ideal worker in
market-driven economies who spends long hours at the workplace and
is flexible and responsive to the needs of the market and who (prefer-
ably) does not have any family responsibilities. Parents are said to have
choices; for mothers however the choices are limited. They risk either
economic marginalisation if they undertake unpaid care or blame if they
are seen as failing in their duties as mothers and caregivers.
Despite significant changes in parenting trends and patterns over
the last decades, the identity of mothers and fathers follows different
trajectories. The provider/breadwinner identity for men and the carer
identity for women show intergenerational continuity (Brannen and
Nilsen, 2006). Men’s contribution to domestic life in terms of caring
responsibilities and other unpaid work is still seen as optional although
their contribution to the market and their role as breadwinners are
a manifestation of family commitment (Townsend, 2002). A gender-
neutral model of parenting however cannot account for the differences
in roles, trajectories and identities between mothers and fathers. Cul-
turally embedded notions of the ‘perfect motherhood’ are more likely
to translate into intensive mothering. As discussed in Chapter 3, inten-
sive parenting has negative consequences for children’s well-being and
gender equality. Intensive parenting is felt differently by mothers and
fathers. Contemporary fatherhood is intimate rather than intensive,
given fathers’ prioritisation of forming an emotional relationship with
the child over the quantity of time spent with them (Dermott, 2008),
whereas for mothers the pressure to achieve outcomes (good academic
performance, moral development) is more keenly felt. Through inten-
sive care, mothers believe that they can guard against risk, especially as
they are told that all children are likely to be at risk at some point in their
lives. Feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the task of parenting,
180 Parenting, Culture Wars and Civic Renewal
poverty, we need to talk about mothers’ economic status and shift the
discourses from child poverty to family poverty.
The problem is not with listing important capabilities, but with insist-
ing on one predetermined canonical list of capabilities, chosen by
theorists without any general social discussion or public reasoning.
To have such a fixed list, emanating entirely from pure theory, is to
deny the possibility of fruitful public participation on what should
be included and why public discussion and reasoning can lead to a
better understanding of the role, reach and significance of particular
capabilities.
(2004, pp. 77, 81)
capabilities. She pointed out that most infants have the basic capabil-
ities for practical reason and imagination, though without a good deal
more development and education they cannot use it. Internal capabilities
build on pre-existing basic capabilities by processes such as exercise, edu-
cation and training. Most adults have the internal capabilities of use of
speech, capabilities that would not exist without the informal education
that occurs along with socialisation. Many internal capabilities require
a more structured educational environment. Combined capabilities are
defined as internal capabilities plus the external conditions that make
the exercise of a function an option. Public family policy should pro-
mote combined capabilities; this requires two kinds of effort: the promo-
tion of internal capabilities (by education or training) and access to the
external institutional and material conditions (Nussbaum, 1999, p. 44).
Human agency and well-being rely upon the promotion of combined
capabilities. Recently, however, public discourses reflect an individuated
culture of well-being and happiness. Campaigns in the United Kingdom
by the economist and labour peer Lord Richard Layard have brought
happiness to the forefront of policy debates. Such policy trends con-
flate human well-being with an abstracted (albeit seductive) discourse
on happiness which departs from Sen’s and Nussbaum’s idea of human
well-being because it does not account for the influences of people’s liv-
ing conditions and their capabilities in making sense of these influences.
Social policy trends on happiness differ from the capability approach to
human well-being in that the latter stresses people’s capacity to have
a life they value accompanied with the freedoms to achieve such life.
Within social policy however happiness is discussed as a fixed state,
which does not account for the conditions that surround people’s lives
(e.g. inequality gap, the diminishing of the state as a guarantor of public
services and human rights), conditions that are detrimental to happi-
ness. As such, happiness becomes a void discourse and an insult because,
for families who experience poverty and lack of opportunity, the most
appropriate response is not happiness but discontent upon realising that
the promise of a good life has become remote and that alternative pos-
sibilities are simply not there while they are increasingly asked to be
content with less. Happiness and well-being are not distributed equally
because they are tied to the living conditions and the positive freedoms
people have.
In 2006, David Cameron claimed ‘it’s time we admitted that there’s
more to life than money and it’s time we focused not just on GDP but
on GWB – general well-being’. Although it is widely recognised that
we should not think about quality of life in terms of possessions, we
Family Policy and the Capability Approach 183
their lives as they see it fit (Sevenhuijsen, 2000, p. 28). And unless care
work and gender equality are taken into account, parental responsibility
cannot be theorised adequately.
Family policy, as it currently stands, has posed an interesting conun-
drum with women feeling squeezed between labour and unpaid caring
responsibilities at home while they encounter multiple forms of inequal-
ity (e.g. SES and domestic inequality). The cost-benefit mindset devalues
motherhood and domestic life, making care secondary. Current policy
conceives care not as a human activity but a hurdle to be negotiated to
ensure that it will not affect women’s participation in paid work. In so
doing, care is commodified by paying others (mostly women from devel-
oping countries) to do it. In many Western countries, the care deficit
is growing. The solution to this is to ‘outsource’ care for children and
the elderly by accessing care work that is normally taken up by low-
paid women who leave their own children and families behind to fill
the care gap. Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2003) have coined the phrase
‘emotional imperialism’ to describe the process whereby the market-
orientated developed world does not accommodate care work; instead
it imports it from the developing world which itself experiences a ‘care
drain’.
The family as a civic political institution (not a policy structure that
is open to state scrutiny and intervention) is necessary for mothers to
become political subjects rather than helpers to fill the care gaps left
from reduced public services, with children’s education and care being
outsourced to them. It is important to note that family is inherently a
politicised institution and thus, as it comes under public scrutiny, we
need to distinguish what is personal from what needs to and can only
be accomplished in a public arena. From a feminist perspective, care
is a political issue and should be understood in a concrete, gendered
manner to unpick normative representations of women’s participation
in paid and unpaid work and what this means for women’s rights and
social citizenship and for gender equality.
The assumption of equality in care arrangements renders mothers’ dis-
proportionate unpaid work in the family invisible. Within an economic
model, gender equality is acknowledged in a particular, partial and
instrumental way: in respect of the importance of labour-market par-
ticipation, but not care work (Lewis, 2005). Sen (1992) recognises that
inequalities in resources are a crucial dimension of gender inequalities
but concludes that gender inequality in advanced societies can be under-
stood much better by focusing on women’s opportunities for capability
building and achieving functionings rather than on resources alone.
186 Parenting, Culture Wars and Civic Renewal
188
A New Paradigm for Family Policy 189
Civic education
Education plays a significant role in promoting parents’ and children’s
human agency and a truly human life. To develop human agency, par-
ents require genuine opportunities for education that go beyond skills
(parenting or otherwise) as well as capability building to make the most
of the opportunities available to them. To this end, education, as Neal
Lawson and Ken Spours argue, should be about ‘developing the collec-
tive capacity of people to be able to govern themselves’ and engage in
social change. Civic education is about developing a sense of who we are
as individuals and communities but also about empathy and the com-
mon good. But education can only achieve these goals and promote
democracy when, in itself, it is democratically governed. Within school
effectiveness, for example, accountability is individuated and teachers
are de-professionalised, operating within managerial structures that are
not always democratic. Current market forces have shaped education
by not only altering the processes and mechanisms of teaching and
learning but also setting new norms to frame the purpose of educa-
tion, replacing pedagogy with instrumental and short-term processes
of accumulating human and social capital. Schools and other learning
institutions use the language of ‘value added’, ‘value for money’, cost-
efficiency, target setting, business terms which ‘fail to recognise the rich
unpredictability of learning’ (Nixon, 2004, p. 1). In thinking about civic
education, it is difficult not to be influenced by these terms and the ori-
entation in pedagogy they espouse. A managerialist language has caused
deep ideological shifts in education, questioning its intrinsic value and
reducing education to skill acquisition. However, civic education can
promote skills and much more: it can support parents and children to
become aware of accomplishments and be receptive of knowledge in the
context of their life.
Civic education offers an expansive vision of education at the heart
of a civic society and underpins the politics of the common good.
This is education that operates at both means and ends: instrumental
190 Parenting, Culture Wars and Civic Renewal
and their children to manage limited resources, poor housing and the
social strain from living in run-down neighbourhoods (Lister, 2005).
Children’s social mobility cannot be attained if fathers and mothers
are socially immobile and lose the benefits of employment and educa-
tion. Children’s life chances heavily depend on whether parents are in
a position to access education and employment. Capabilities in moth-
ers may be developed through lifelong educational opportunities but,
unless the gender and motherhood gaps narrow, women will not be
able to retain the benefits accrued. There is little clarity on how family
policy makers interpret the interplay between gender equality and dif-
ference in families. Instead of focusing on the notion that ‘what parents
do matters’, family policy should engage with the reality of these gaps
and the fact that women are ‘missing’ from senior positions, especially
after they become mothers. It is worrying that, with the current eco-
nomic downturn, the reverse is happening: increasingly, women lose
their jobs and undertake a disproportionate amount of unpaid work.
Capability building should be gendered and target both inequality and
the motherhood gap by offering educational opportunities to women
and removing structural and attitudinal barriers while accounting for
the gendered responsibilities of parents. However, as countries oper-
ate under a reduced fiscal space (OECD, 2011), bridging these gaps is
a remote possibility.
the haves and have-nots. Other big forces have also contributed to polar-
isation in society, including the technological revolution which has
created much bigger winners much faster than ever before (Peck, 2011).
Many theories have been brought forward to explain unfair resource
distribution patterns, ranging from a lack of regulation of the finan-
cial institutions to human greed. However, what is missing is a wider
debate about the kind of society we want for ourselves and the next
generations. Very few seem to question the kind of society that offers
exponentially hedge fund managers as well as the continuing rise of
the number of multimillionaires despite the current economic down-
turn. And even attempts have been made to impose a human face on
global capitalism to make it palatable: consumption, as Slavol Zizek
(2011) argues, has been given a ‘redemption spin’ and an ethical orien-
tation through some forms of charitable work operating within market
structures. We still attribute poverty to individual fault and cultural prac-
tices (such as some people are reckless or lazy; certain cultures place a
great emphasis on material possessions) but the hubris that inequality
has brought about has remained largely unexamined. The message that
individuated explanations of poverty sends out is that we need to man-
age our lives in ways that do not cause trouble or waste public resources
or obstruct the flow of capital; in other words, we are asked not to
change the circumstances but to adjust within them and be content
with them.
The growing polarisation in society has created a social apartheid jus-
tified by a dangerous doctrine that those who possess wealth deserve to
do so, regardless of proportionality, and that those who are poor have
chosen to be so. Wealth has become the signifier of personal worth and
poverty is seen as an individual mishap, or worse, an individual choice.
The societal values, set by wealth and consumption, work against a civic
renewal because what means to be a citizen is understood in monetary
terms. Because of uncontrolled capitalism, we have lost the solidity of
civic institutions and public services and the relationships that embody
reciprocity and empathy (Hutton, 2011). Markets’ dominance is incom-
patible with building social relationships because a mere ‘trickle effect’
from the wealth accumulated at the top one per cent cannot reverse
inequality and social immobility. Social class divides persist and families’
socio-economic background matters more than ever before. Thirty-nine
per cent of children born to parents in the top fifth of earners stayed
in that same bracket as adults. Likewise, 42 per cent of those whose
parents were in the bottom fifth remained there themselves. Only 6 per
cent reached the top fifth: ‘rags-to-riches’ stories have become extremely
198 Parenting, Culture Wars and Civic Renewal
rare and if things carry on like this, the class divide will be difficult to
bridge (Peck, 2011).
Tax policy reforms are a direct and powerful instrument for increas-
ing redistributive effects to ensure that ‘low-income households do not
experience further loss in income distribution’ (OECD, 2011, p. 40).
However, redistribution strategies based on income transfers and taxes
alone are less financially sustainable, especially considering the fiscal
reductions experienced by most Western countries and the shrinking of
decent-wage jobs. As the OECD report argues, policies for more and bet-
ter jobs are more important than ever, especially for women who are
hit the hardest by the current economic downturn and especially moth-
ers who are more likely to be in part-time jobs. Many women work in
more than one dead-end job to make ends meet. The best way to escape
poverty and guarantee children’s social mobility is education and jobs
that offer a decent wage. In so doing, as the OECD report states, poli-
cies that invest in increasing the human capital of the workforce are
paramount. Higher educational attainment and lifelong learning have
been important in counteracting the underlying increases in earnings
inequality in the long run. Access to tertiary education improves the
prospects and living standards of lower-skilled people and gives parents
opportunities to acquire the skills needed in the labour market but also
the skills to live a life they value. Educational or learning accounts can
be used as a means to help parents to achieve this objective (OECD,
2005).
What does this mean for family policy? For a start, a new theory of
social justice and equality is needed. Also, renewed debates on social
class and its impact on parenting and children’s well-being and life
chances should re-enter national and global conversations to move
away from cultural and privatised explanations of poverty. Equality
is crucial for human emancipation because a ‘highly unequal society
would harm itself by not making the best use of the talents and capaci-
ties of its citizens’ (Giddens, 1998, p. 42) and by producing a widespread
disaffection and conflict. At the same time we should differentiate equal-
ity in accessing resources and opportunities from equality of outcomes.
Equality of access can prevent imbalances due to differences in having
basic resources. But, as discussed earlier, this alone does not guarantee
equal outcomes and that is not only because individuals make different
uses of the opportunities afforded to them. A just allocation of material
resources can support families’ survival and reduce conflict but, ulti-
mately, we live on a finite planet and the idea that economic growth
can be endless is faulty. Overpopulation and consumption place great
A New Paradigm for Family Policy 199
deliberation between free and equal citizens’ (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005,
p. 152). Within family policy, decision making has moved from the
sphere of democratic deliberation and political rights to offering man-
agerialist solutions to social and political problems. As Alain Badiou
(2003) argues, we live in a social space which is increasingly experienced
as ‘worldless’ in that it sustains a ‘worldless’ ideological framework in
which people are deprived of ways of locating meaning: there is no pub-
lic assembly for citizens to engage in reasoning and deliberative decision
making and as such the only form of protest is acts of violence. The
summer 2011 riots in some English towns showed that young people
who see nothing in society for them can easily engage in lawless acts.
These young people are seen as being ‘disposable’ (Giroux, 2010) and
not ‘hard to reach’ because limited genuine attempts have been made so
far to reach them and support them to become part of networks of social
relationships. The young people who engage in violence or in an apo-
litical mass therapy do so because they have no other ways of engaging
with society. People talk about their frustration due to unequal oppor-
tunities for education and employment, future uncertainty and reduced
public services, all problems that require political solutions. Some young
people use demonstrations as an opportunity for mass therapy to come
together and talk about their helplessness, whereas others engage in
raw violence and destruction. In either case, there are no conversations
about what an alternative future might look like and what counts as
common good and for whom.
As with public spaces, a language that is free from censorship and
moralising to allow reasoned judgements and the creation of an ‘ago-
nistic’ space is increasingly under attack. Despite the enlightenment
emphasis on engaging critically with the world, refraining from mak-
ing judgements has come to be seen as a sign of tolerance and social
inclusion. Furedi (2011) observes that tolerance has become about being
inclusive, being sensitive and politically correct to the point of indiffer-
ence. Understandings of tolerance have changed over time from being
about critically engaging with the world to not being judgemental, not
provoking debates, and this indicates a departure from the enlighten-
ment thinking of tolerance as promoting the clashing of ideas even if
this causes upset. Tolerance has come to be perceived as not saying any-
thing that might hurt another person and is no longer about engaging
with clashing ideas. Not being allowed to make value judgements, how-
ever, shuts down genuine debates and, instead, ‘moral vocabularies’ that
frame social crises as good or evil proliferate. Further, the evidence-based
rhetoric that permeates most of family policy (partly a product of the
202 Parenting, Culture Wars and Civic Renewal
The battle of ideas is, at its heart, a debate about the capability
and potential for ordinary people, especially those living in low-
income communities, to play a direct part in controlling resources
A New Paradigm for Family Policy 203
and exercising power. For those who take the view that such people
represent a liability . . . then Big Society becomes essentially a phil-
anthropic and moralising effort. If so, the Big Society is unlikely to
succeed.
(cited in Rowson et al., 2010, p. 10)
it offers very little for those who think that our present is still
characterized by some rather old forces of injustice, domination,
exploitation, cruelty and indifference, that its practices support and
obscure some fundamental divisions of power and resources between
the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ and that its political language is suffused
with hypocrisy and double-speak.
(1999, p. 474)
argue that the policy focus has been too much on the family and less
on the structure and the presence (or absence) of other civic institutions
to socialise young people. And this trend has to change. Family policy
should challenge the fact that parents’ and children’s worlds are clos-
ing in on them and that the average family finds it increasingly difficult
to cope.
Through capability building in disadvantaged families, engagement in
the public sphere and a fairer distribution of resources, we may reclaim
society as a political space bounded by human rights and social justice.
This is not easy because even as capitalism currently experiences crisis,
it can easily mutate into a sinister socio-political state, especially con-
sidering its capacity to align itself with different political and religious
and cultural places and ideas. Current demographic trends indicate that,
globally, democratic forces are in decline. More and more young people
grow up in non-egalitarian societies and families where the principles
of equality, human agency and the pursuit of true life are under attack.
A large numbers of girls and women live in societies that discriminate
against them and where they have limited rights as citizens. Even within
democratic nations, families and young people in poverty have become
disposable, with no discernable future.
To renew family as a civic institution, I argue for the importance
of civic education with both instrumental and intrinsic goals for par-
ents and children and for a feminist orientation to policy to ensure
that the different roles and contributions of mothers and fathers in
families are acknowledged. For changes at a macro level, I argue for
reversing the shrinking in families’ public and political spaces and for
a fairer distribution model, being aware of the challenges the latter
throws up with regard to the equalisation of opportunity and outcome.
I have drawn upon the capability approach to discuss the principles
that should underpin family policy which, although comprehensive,
is not without drawbacks. But I think a capability approach to family
policy should be emblematic of the types of proposals we will need to
weigh when thinking about supporting families in unequal societies.
Most importantly, we need to re-engage in conversations about social
class and the impact of neoliberal policies on families. Such conversa-
tions may begin with a reassessment of how globalisation is affecting
society, and of what it will take for the average family to thrive in a
rapidly changing world. These are crucial conversations because, as Peck
(2011) argues, in unequal societies built-in advantages and disadvan-
tages are growing and with the concentration of wealth in relatively few
hands there is little hope that much of the next generation’s elite might
A New Paradigm for Family Policy 207
achieve their status through hard or innovative work and not through
inheritance.
Note
∗
Historically, the notion of a civic society has undergone many trans-
formations. In ancient Greece, the concept was used as a synonym for
the good society, operating not separately but within the state. The for-
mation of a civic society relied on citizens engaging with what Socrates
called ‘dialectic’ or the capacity to debate societal issues through public
argument and rational dialogue. Public argument and what Rawls (1999)
later called public reasoning are the cornerstones of a civic society. Civic
society entails collective action guided by shared interests to defend cit-
izens against the state and the market forces, and by the belief that
the state should be influenced by democratic forces. At the start of the
20th century, unlike Marx, Gramsci understood civil society as a domain
within a political superstructure but separate from the socio-economic
structures of the state (Edwards, 2004, p. 10).
Conclusion
The relationship between parenting, social class and child social and
educational outcomes paints a complex picture of the continuity of the
achievement gap in the face of widespread social changes, especially
with regard to increases in parental involvement in children’s learn-
ing. The complexity reflects an inherent difficulty in understanding the
208
Conclusion 209
and relational that reflects power relationships and structures. Policy dis-
courses on good and effective parenting imply that there is a standard
practice whose outcomes can be objectively identified and evaluated and
also enforced if necessary. Such normative understandings of parenting
encourage state intervention because how problems are perceived and
solutions are framed is influenced by dominant discourses. In identify-
ing these issues in family policy and parenting, this book questions the
relationship between the neoliberal state and individual parents and
discusses the policy context within which a culture war is waged on
parents. The book does not advocate a reduced governance or a roman-
ticised past of family and parent empowerment where the family, as an
institution, was not in ‘decline’, but accepts that the renewal of families
as civic institutions is a goal worth pursuing.
Parenting is not something that you either get right or wrong. How-
ever, it is becoming more and more difficult, not because parenting is
an inherently complex task, but because the world, especially for some
social groups, is shrinking. People are told that they have the freedom
of choice and the freedom to own but the freedom to change and
transform society and imagine alternative futures has become elusive.
Also, the role that parents play in supporting their children’s well-being,
as articulated within family policy, is riddled with paradoxes: on the
one hand, parents are omnipotent, capable of shaping their children’s
life chances and future and on the other hand, parents have become
infantilised, incapable of dealing with the task of child rearing with-
out support from family experts. Other paradoxes are equally powerful.
For example, although family policy is presented as evidence based, it
dismisses research findings from studies that have examined the social
ecology of children’s development and delineated the many proximal
and distal influences in children’s life. Instead, it focuses on one proxi-
mal factor only, that is, parenting, to the exclusion of others. Essentially
these paradoxes highlight a neoliberal strategy of leaving parents, in
particular, and citizens, in general, alone to cater for themselves while
they are governed through intervention. There has always been a strug-
gle between parents/families and the state, with the state not trusting
parents to raise their children in ways that offer allegiance to the state
and now to the market. This distrust, fuelled by populist anxiety, has
seen the state increasing control over the spaces of home and family to
the subsequent disempowerment of parents.
Questions as to whether families should be left alone to do what is best
for the children or whether the state should intervene are too generic to
be meaningful (Smeyers, 2010). And so are statements such as ‘what
Conclusion 211
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Index
achievement gap, 2–5, 9–19, 50–4, citizenship, 4, 125, 133–9, 157, 178,
84–7, 161–5 185, 193
Allen, Graham, 23, 81 civic education, 144–6, 188–92, 202–6
austerity, 13 civic institutions, 10, 13, 5–4, 84, 131,
authoritative parenting, 76, 155 138–9, 144, 157, 160, 197, 200,
average family, 54, 127, 190, 206 206
AVON Longitudinal Study, 50, 56 see also social institutions
civic participation, 168, 203
Baby P, 1, 71 civic renewal, 8, 62, 144, 199
behavioural intervention, 14, 75, 77, see also social renewal
123, 136 classless society, 8, 16, 156
Climbié, Victoria, 1, 71
coalition government, 2, 9–15, 72, 74,
capability approach, 144, 166, 167,
81, 85, 101, 151, 177, 183
168, 170, 173, 174, 182, 188, 199,
cognitive stimulation, 21–2
206
common good, 8, 10, 61–2, 144–6,
capital
183, 188–93, 201
cultural capital, 58, 154
concerted cultivation, 54– 68, 86, 152
intellectual capital, 3, 34, 154
corporate society, 123, 128
parent capital, 152, 154
cost-benefit calculations, 5
social capital, 6, 54–5, 189
see also cost-benefit considerations
care work, 80, 175, 183–6, 195
cost-benefit considerations, 78,81,
character development, 5, 88
109, 124, 145, 171, 185, 191
child behaviour, 6, 29, 41, 161
critical periods, 93
child maltreatment, 92, 93, 96–7
criticality, 62, 146, 155, 188, 191, 200
child protection, 81, 135–6, 141
culture of poverty, 11, 34, 51–3, 77,
child-centred policies, 112
158
child poverty, 2, 12, 36, 77–8, 82, 88,
culture war, 14, 124, 143, 147, 164
149, 157, 175, 180, 195
cycles of deprivation, 79
child rearing, 152, 161
child-related characteristics, 18
children’s brain, 1, 91–100, 147, 148, deficit discourses, 3
162, 163 democratic deliberation, 199, 201, 204
children’s life chances, 3, 8–15, 66–8, disadvantaged children, 7, 37, 85, 151,
113, 119, 126, 128, 136, 143, 148, 155
151–7, 190, 196 distal influences, 54, 66
children’s well-being, 17–18, 21–4, diversity, 10, 14, 111, 143, 147, 166,
28–9, 60–8, 82–5, 100, 106, 107, 173–4, 194
112, 114, 121, 123, 127, 133, 143,
144, 145, 149, 152, 154, 156, 161, early childhood, 2, 6, 37, 40, 91–4
166, 167, 168, 170, 175, 179, 182, early home environment, 1, 14,
183, 188, 194, 195, 198, 199 69, 84
238
Index 239
social inclusion, 72, 79, 81, 85, 105, structural inequality, 1, 12, 46–7,
112, 118, 130–1, 171, 184 51–3, 106, 112, 123–6, 145,
social institutions, 92 156–9, 174, 188, 195
social justice, 9, 86, 126–7, 131, Sure Start, 75
137–8, 184, 191, 198, 204 synaptogenesis, 93–4
social mobility, 3, 8–15, 33–6, 43–6, systemic constraints, 12, 72, 80, 111,
72–3, 83–8, 130–6, 151, 153, 162, 138, 172–3
196–8 systemic influences, 53
social networks, 31, 45, 52, 101, 130,
154, 173, 195 tax policies, 4, 46
social policy, 2, 5, 14, 21, 44–5, 122–3, therapeutic culture, 60, 62, 155,
129, 157, 162, 182 194
‘troubled families’, 3, 163
social renewal, 11, 140, 149
societal polarisation, 13, 54, 119, 154,
unpaid care work, 13, 176–9, 183–6
161
socio-economic background, 44, 50,
valued functionings, 166, 173–4,
155, 197
181–3
socio-economic factors, 5, 17, 19, 27, volunteerism, 12
32–8, 40–2, 51, 97, 127 vulnerability, 125, 133–6, 172–6,
see also socio-economic background 191
soft totalitarianism, 171
strengths and difficulties Washington Consensus, 122
questionnaire, 26 welfare state, 11–14, 65–6, 120, 125,
structural constraints, 45, 73, 86, 102, 138, 140, 160, 176–8, 186
108, 166–8, 173, 193 ‘what works’, 91, 104, 107, 146,
see also systemic constraints 160–3, 171