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American Anthropological Association Meetings
New Orleans, November 17th- 21st 2010
What’s new about ‘parenting’? Kinship, politics and identity
Organizer: Dr. Charlotte Faircloth, Department of Social Anthropology,
University of Cambridge
Discussant: Professor Diane Hoffman, Curry School of Education,
University of Virginia
Over the last twenty years, ‘parenting’ has emerged as a concept in
both the US and the UK, to characterise the activity that parents do
in raising children. According to Hoffman, ‘parenting’ – the
transformation of the verb ‘to parent’ into the gerund – is a
relatively recent phenomenon that became prominent in the 1950s in
jargon used by psychologists, sociologists and self-help
practitioners, but that has subsequently spread into wider usage.
‘Parenting’ is not just a new word for child rearing, or the care
activities associated with traditional kinship roles. Instead, it
requires a specific skill-set: a certain level of expertise about
children and their care, based on the latest research on child-
development, and an affiliation to a certain way of raising a child,
via any number of available methods (whether ‘Gina Ford,’ ‘Spock’
‘Attachment’ or otherwise). It means ‘being both discursively
positioned by and actively contributing to the networks of idea,
value, practice and social relations that have come to define a
particular form of the politics of parent-child relations within the
domain of the contemporary family’ (Hoffman, AAA 2009).
‘Parenting’ is, of course, heavily gendered. Accordingly, in The
Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, Hays shows how it is mothers
who are now encouraged to parent their children ‘intensively’ (Hays
1996). Writing on the basis of research with working mothers in the
United States, she argues that ‘intensive motherhood’ is an emergent
ideology that urges mothers to ‘spend a tremendous amount of time,
energy and money in raising their children’ (1996:x). Hays suggests
that this injunction remains culturally salient, despite an uneasy
relationship with the logic of the work place, both because it props
up the capitalist infrastructure and because mothering is perceived as
‘the last best defence against what many people see as the
impoverishment of social ties, communal obligations and unremunerated
commitments’ (1996: xiii). Certainly, on a wider political level, the
family is increasingly located as the source of, and solution to, a
whole host of social ills, from poor educational outcome to recidivism
(in the UK, ‘parenting academies’ have recently become a flagship
government initiative).
These changes have, in turn, had a profound impact on the way adults
experience parenthood (Douglas and Michaels 2004; Furedi 2002). Yet
the ways in which parents’ experiences have been affected by an era of
‘intensive’ parenting – in short, the transformation of ‘parent’ from
a noun to a verb – is not a topic, so far, that has been explored
significantly within anthropology. This panel will explore some of the
implications of this wider historical shift. How does ‘parenting’
intersect with anthropological perspectives on kinship? Is this just a
‘circulation’ of old ideas? What happens to kinship or care roles when
they are employed as politicised ‘identities’? We hope that this panel
will lead to an edited volume, appraising the place of parenting in
contemporary anthropological work.
Please email abstracts, of no more than 250 words, to [log in to unmask]
by 15th March 2010
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