![Sample our Education journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5932/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Education.jpg"})
Abstract
There seems to be an overall agreement that parents qua parents are, almost by definition, in need of support and hence that there is always a ‘parental deficit’. In order to help parents out many initiatives are taken, predominantly drawing from a technical conception of parenting. This particular conception defines the deficit as a shortage of practical and theoretical knowledge, and conceives of the predicament of parenting or upbringing as something that can be successfully dealt with. Two criticisms are developed in this article. First, this conception of parenting (support) is exposed as a ‘frictionless fiction’ that makes a very strong appeal to many of us, inhabitants of late modern Western societies, perhaps because it promises answers where there are none to be given. Second, a different conception of the parental deficit is developed following Ramaekers and Suissa who spelled out a parental hermeneutical-existential deficit drawing upon Cavell. This specific kind of deficit picks out another kind of support. I develop this alternative by sketching a figure of strong engagement that provides parent support.
Notes
1. This could encompass things like policies on better child-care and parental leave, help from friends and family members, etc.
2. I will further refer to it as the ‘parenting (support) account’.
3. Hermanns (Citation2014) deals with the difficulty to give a definition of parenting support.
4. Ramaekers (Citation2010) remarks that often professionals (psychologists) in fact take over or supervise the meeting of parents with each other, which means borders between categories of parenting support are sometimes fuzzy.
5. Cf. Van Bockel (Citation2009), who in her autobiographical account of living with a daughter diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder gives an insight in the daily challenges of a mother.
6. It would require some empirical research to ensure that the second category is not empty. A recent study on ‘parenting support’ in Europe, has the significant and paradoxical title Think parents! Putting parents at the heart of parenting support. (Fukkink, Vink and Bosscher, Citation2014) Underlining mine.).
7. Cf. Ramaekers and Suissa (Citation2012, 36).
8. At the time of writing this, the Brexit vote has just taken place in the UK; in Belgium we are recovering from the 3/22 terrorist attacks in Brussels, and expecting the return of Syria fighters. But this all escapes the parenting focus. Of course, immediately after the terrorist attacks in Brussels on 22 March 2016, parenting experts on TV and in the newspapers were giving advice aimed precisely at keeping parents and children in this sphere safe. It is only in such extreme cases that the ‘real world’ apparently threatens to intrude and accordingly has to be dealt with.
9. Cf. Willingham (Citation2012, 87) who quotes the astronomer Carl Sagan: ‘In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.’
10. Taylor (Citation2016, 7) extensively argues that human beings are language animals and hence cannot be reduced to ‘rats in a maze’. The technical account seems on the other hand to confuse children with non-linguistic animals.
11. Just a randomly taken example of this optimism taken from a website of the Government of South-Australia: ‘Dads are very important in children's lives. Dads can spend time with children, help them to learn about culture [and] have a strong identity as an Aboriginal person. However you were brought up, you can be the kind of dad you want to be for your children.’ (http://www.parenting.sa.gov.au/peg_aboriginal_list.htm#peg190 emphasis mine).
12. At least in the technical parenting (support) account. The idea of becoming a mother as posing a major challenge to one's sense of self and identity is so common as to be almost ubiquitous in both first-person accounts of motherhood, feminist literature, and academic work on parenting identities. (Thanks to Judith Suissa for pointing this out.)
13. See Van den Berge (Citation2013, 398, 399).
14. ‘[T]he existential anxiety, in the face of the enormity of the reality of “being a parent” is broken down into a series of well-defined tasks: establishing sleeping routines, toilet raining, controlling meal-time behaviour, etc., and replaced by focused anxiety over whether one is succeeding at performing these tasks well. Thus, the various techniques of good parenting are offered as “solutions” to reduce parental anxiety. (…) [T]he potential of “perfect parenting” becomes a real vision: If one only can do it right, maybe one can dispel, once and for all, the anxiety.’ (128).
15. They write about ‘parent support’ and not ‘parenting support’!
16. Contrary to how Reece (Citation2013) reads Ramaekers and Suissa, this is not how parents should be, but how parents actually are.
17. Cf. Van den Berge (Citation2012).
18. See for instance the new subtitle of the second edition (2008) of his Paranoid Parenting: ‘Why ignoring the experts may be best for your child.’
19. I do not however agree with the idea that explanation would have to be excluded from an engaged stance completely. For Ricoeur (Thiselton Citation2009, 229), following on this respect Schleiermacher, explanation is an important form of human interpretation.
20. See Polt (Citation1999, 42).
21. Compare this with Dreyfus and Taylor (Citation2015, 125, 126) where, in considering the possibility of intercultural exchange, they refer to Gadamer’s idea of a fusion of horizons. For instance: ‘If understanding the other is to be construed as fusion of horizons and not as possessing a science of the object, then the slogan might be: no understanding the other without a changed understanding of the self.’ (125) or ‘Real understanding always has an identity cost (…). The cost appears as such from the standpoint of the antecedent identity, of course.’ (125, 126)
22. This is of course an empirical point. My professional experience, together with that of many others, teaches us, indeed, that this is the case. No-one can change an interpretation if this interpretation is not allowed to exist first.
23. For instance Van der pas (Citation1993–2008); Remmerswaal and de Gouw (Citation2016).