The Emotional Politics of Social Work and Child Protection by Warner Joanne

Author:Warner, Joanne [Warner, Joanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Social Work
ISBN: 9781447318439
Google: 6cN7BgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Policy Press
Published: 2015-01-12T04:29:24+00:00

However, what is shared across this diversity is ‘the privilege and relative power that comes with middle-class identity’ and a shared commitment to cultural reproduction through education (Reay et al, 2013, p 18).

While it is evident that parenting practices vary according to class background, the picture is complex (Sherman and Harris, 2012). What is clear is that important shifts are perceived to have taken place in relation to parenting identities in Western industrialised countries and that these shifts are understood to be the source of considerable anxiety for some parents. The advent of ‘intensive parenting’, for example, has involved a shift from the noun of ‘parent’ to the verb of ‘parenting’ as an idealised occupation and a process of ‘self-making’ (Faircloth, 2010). A climate of ‘inflated risk’ has produced forms of middle-class parenting in which parents attempt to micromanage risk – often only to perpetuate a sense of insecurity (Hoffman, 2010). In a risk-centred society, ‘parents feel an inexorable demand to “parent” as a risk manager’ (Lee et al, 2010, p 299) and, according to Furedi (2002), parenting has become ‘paranoid’. In short, the middle-class ‘us’ location in the ‘us’/’them’ dichotomy appears to be far from stable or secure.

In the burgeoning literature on parenting culture studies (Lee et al, 2014), it is argued that there is a new pervasive form of politicised parental determinism, which, as a form of thinking, is as powerful as economic and genetic determinism (2014, p 217). Parental determinism is defined as ‘a form of deterministic thinking that construes the everyday activities of parents as directly and causally associated with “failing” or harming children and so the wider society’ (2014, p 3). Parental determinism, it is argued, is historically specific, has emerged in a wider cultural context of risk consciousness and involves understanding the socially constructed nature of parenting. Lee et al demonstrate a growing interest in ‘parenting’ as the primary means through which children are brought up, as opposed to responsibility being located in the wider community and society. They do this, for example, by noting the rapid increase in sales of books about parenting (2014, p 5). However, for the purposes of this chapter, this literature needs to be considered critically. While ‘parental determinism’ may be new in the domain of (self)-regulation by middle-class parents, it has long been the fate of poor families, particularly poor mothers, to be subject to deterministic thinking about the threat posed to wider society through the way they bring up their children. The widening of the purview of the state in relation to parenting can be understood as reflecting the shift towards the ‘social investment state’ where even middle-class families are no longer seen as adequate for maximising the potential of their children as ‘future workers’ and law-abiding, productive adults (Gilbert et al, 2011, p 2011). As Featherstone et al (2014) have argued, when parenting is reconstituted as a job involving expert knowledge and skills rather than as an affective bond, there are particular dangers for people living in poverty.

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