An exploration of the ‘pushy parent’ label in educational discourse

Abstract

This article explores the ideological function of the derogatory label of ‘pushy parent’, which, since the 1980s, has been used considerably in journalistic, popular, political and academic discourses in the UK and the USA. ‘Pushy parent’ is not a descriptive term, but a conceptually vague label implying the existence of antagonistic agents intent on optimising their children's educational attainment. This label, it is argued here, masks structural inequalities in educational opportunities and outcomes by making those inequalities imputable to individual practices. The article first explores the distinction ‘pushy parenting’ sets up between ‘fake’ and ‘real’ intelligence, and ‘deserved’ and ‘undeserved’ educational achievement. However, it is difficult to draw clear boundaries between the behaviours covered by ‘pushy parenting’, and those covered by the ‘ideal’ parenting of neoliberal educational policy. To conclude, the function of the ‘pushy parent’ label as inoculation is explored, as well as its implications for the cultural politics of education.

Keywords:

• parenting
• meritocracy
• giftedness
• education
• equality
• intelligence

Notes

1 I am in this article using examples and texts mostly drawn from the UK and the USA. The ideas developed here might have applicability in other Anglophone Western countries which, like the USA and the UK, have a broadly neoliberal approach to education foregrounding parental choice and involvement.

2 Unlike ‘helicopter parenting’, which has been the object of a recent book chapter by Jennie Bristow (2014).

3 This extract makes lexical allusions to early psychoanalytical writing on parenting. By referring to the child as a distorted mirror of parental ambitions, Freeman echoes the Freudian view, developed in ‘On Narcissism’ (1914), that the child represents for the parent an external object of narcissistic investment. However, for Freud this phenomenon is not restricted to ‘some’ parents, but common to all ‘affectionate’ ones. As such, ‘using children as surrogates for one's own ambitions’, as Freeman puts it, is only ‘normal’. The pathologisation of ‘pushy parenting’ is not justified by the Freudian tradition.

4 This is picked up by Furedi (2001), who, in his study of ‘paranoid parenting’, briefly mentions (without defining it) the ‘archetypal pushy parent’.

5 There are undeniably also gender and ethnic variables at work in the concept, which could be studied with reference to research on mothers’ involvement (Reay, 1998), or on ethnic minorities’ likelihood to engage in intensive parenting practices (Chao, 1994; Leung, Lau, & Lam, 1998). Amy Chua's (2011) controversial book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and the debate surrounding it provide an example of intersection between dynamics of gender, ethnicity and class in the engagement in, and denunciation of, ‘pushy parenting’. It is worth noting that Chua, despite her unashamed reclaiming of intensive parenting, did not use the term ‘pushy’, coining a different term with less obviously negative connotations.

6 See in particular the Harvard Family Research Project, founded in 1983.