Risky investments: Parenting and the production of the ‘resilient child’

Abstract

In recent years, consciousness of high levels of societal and familial risk have made raising a ‘resilient child’ a key theme in parenting culture. Using evidence from the popular literature on parenting resilient children, this interpretive discourse-based critique explores the ways resilience has been conceptualised in the parenting advice literature. It suggests that this literature advocates a ‘resilience pedagogy’ that reflects social class differentials and dramatically expands the possibilities for parental intervention in children's lives. The analysis identifies clear links between resilience pedagogy and an emphasis on parenting strategies focused on fostering children's emotional competencies. While ostensibly legitimising and valuing children's emotional worlds, the underlying message of resilience pedagogy is more one of social control and conformity, in which parents become a primary means for the delivery of rationalised and therapeutic models of parent–child relationships that respond to larger political, cultural, and class-based visions of social order.

Keywords:

• parenting
• risk
• risk perception
• childhood
• resilience

Notes

1. An internet search on resilience and parenting in August 2009 returned over four million hits.

2. See Hoffman (2009) for a more complete discussion of the social emotional learning discourse in parenting.

3. The ‘slippage’ from constructs of resilience to those of emotional intelligence in the parenting literature is itself an interesting phenomenon. This may reflect the dominance of the social emotional theme across multiple fields of enquiry, including education and the workplace. Even recognising that resilience involves emotional dimensions and attitudes, the extent to which emotion is reduced to discussions that center on emotional control is cause for question.