FAMILY, SCHOOL AND THE MASS PRODUCTION OF PARENTING ADVICE

ABSTRACT

The underlying thesis of much popular parenting discourse in circulation in western Anglophone countries is that parenting labour has intensified historically, notably in regard to schooling, and that we are witnessing new kinds of parental attitudes and strategies. A related argument holds that parents, especially middle-class parents, have become entrepreneurial agents in their children’s education, and that this activity is a consequence of global neoliberal policy reform. This paper examines the intensification thesis through a study of popular parenting advice in the late pre-neoliberal era, the 1960s and 1970s. It proposes that the rise of intensive school parenting must be understood not only through policy histories of competition, choice and marketisation but also through histories of domestic life, of the material and affective activities of ‘home-making’. The focus is on a collection of parenting advice (including advertisements) published in one mass-market women’s magazine, the Australian Women’s Weekly. Such publications were, the paper argues, significant and exemplary in disseminating forms of advice that encouraged parents, especially mothers, to discover and develop new repertoires of educational child-rearing competencies and to consider themselves as competitors in the educational arena, on behalf of their own children.

Keywords:

• family and school
• parenting intensification
• women’s magazines
• history of parenting
• 1960s
• 1970s

6.

Acknowledgement

The authors thank the members of the international workshop, 'Reshaping parenthood: Risk, responsibility and formal education', Germany 2018, for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

8. Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [FT140100415].