Clients or consumers, commonplace or pioneers? Navigating the contemporary class politics of family, parenting skills and education

Abstract

An explicit linking of the minutiae of everyday parenting practices and the good of society as a whole has been a feature of government policy. The state has taken responsibility for instilling the right parenting skills to deal with what is said to be the societal fall-out of contemporary and family change. ‘Knowledge’ about parenting is seen as a resource that parents must access in order to fulfil their moral duty as good parents. In this policy portrait, caring for children is posed as a classless and gender-neutral activity. A key theme of this article is that parents from different social class groups are positioned and understand themselves in quite distinct ways in relation to parenting skills advice and expert intervention into their family and home lives. We take a ‘relational’ perspective to show how mothers and fathers from different social class groups see themselves, and are located by policy and practice, as clients or consumers, and as commonplace or pioneers, in relation to parenting support for themselves and the education system for their children. We identify the lived gendered and classed disparities of power, and associated moral worth, attached to particular parenting practices.

Keywords:

• parenting
• social class
• gender
• family

Notes

1. See http://www.nclp.org.uk/; http://www.parentinguk.org/; http://www.theparentpractice.com/

2. These include (1) a study of the resources that parents draw on in bringing up their 8–12-year-old children that comprised a national survey of over 1112 parents and in-depth interviews with 25 mothers and 11 fathers from 27 households (Edwards and Gillies 2005); (2) a study of step-families involving in-depth interview with 46 people who were resident parents (largely mothers), step-parents (largely step-fathers) or non-resident parents (largely fathers) of dependent children, involved in 23 ‘step-clusters’ (Ribbens McCarthy et al. 2003); and (3) a study of marginalised mothers parenting outside of conventional nuclear family boundaries involving in-depth interviews with five marginalised mothers (Gillies 2007).

3. Both working-class and middle-class parents thought it legitimate to consult teachers about mainstream educational matters such as choosing a secondary school.