1st Edition

Parenting in Global Perspective Negotiating Ideologies of Kinship, Self and Politics

280 Pages
by Routledge

280 Pages
by Routledge

280 Pages
by Routledge

Drawing on both sociological and anthropological perspectives, this volume explores cross-national trends and everyday experiences of ‘parenting’. Parenting in Global Perspective examines the significance of ‘parenting’ as a subject of professional expertise, and activity in which adults are increasingly expected to be emotionally absorbed and become personally fulfilled. By focusing the... Read more

Foreword  Frank Furedi  Introduction  Charlotte Faircloth, Diane Hoffman and Linda Layne  Part 1: The Moral Context for Parenting  1. ‘Where Are the Parents?’: Changing Parenting Responsibilities Between the 1960s and the 2010s  Rosalind Edwards and Val Gillies  2. Building a Stable Environment in Scotland: Planning Parenthood in a Time of Ecological Crisis  Katharine Dow  3. Creating Distinction: Middle-Class Viewers of Supernanny in the UK  Tracey Jensen  4. Negotiating (Un)healthy Lifestyles in an Era of ‘Intensive’ Parenting: Ethnographic Case Studies from North West England, UK  Denise Hinton, Louise Laverty and Jude Robinson  Part 2: Power and Inequality: the Structural Constraints to ‘Good’ Parenting  5. Problem Parents? Undocumented Migrants in America’s New South and the Power Dynamics of Parenting Advice  Nicole Berry  6. Nurturing Sudanese, Producing Americans: Refugee Parents and Personhood  Anna Jaysane-Darr  Part 3: Negotiating Parenting Culture  7. ‘Intensive Motherhood’ in Comparative Perspective: Feminism, Full-term Breastfeeding and Attachment Parenting in London and Paris  Charlotte Faircloth  8. Intensive Mothering of Ethiopian Adoptive Children in Flanders, Belgium Katrien De Graeve and Chia Longman  9. ‘Staying With the Baby’: Intensive Mothering and Social Mobility in Santiago de Chile  Marjorie Murray  Part 4: Parenting and/as Identity  10. "Spanish People Don’t Know How to Rear their Children!" Dominican Women’s Resistance to Intensive Mothering in Madrid  Livia Jiménez  11. Becoming a Mother Through Postpartum Depression: Narratives from Brazil  Maureen O’Dougherty  12. Sacrificial Mothering of IVF-pursuing Mothers in Turkey  A. Merve Göknar  13. Intensive Parenting Alone: Negotiating the Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood as a Single Mother by Choice  Linda Layne  14. Power Struggles: The Paradoxes of Emotion and Control Among Child-Centred Mothers in Privileged America  Diane Hoffman Afterword  Ellie Lee 

Biography

Charlotte Faircloth is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, based in the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent, where her research explores parenting, gender, intimacy and equality. Based on her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, her book Militant Lactivism? was recently published by Berghahn Books.

Diane M. Hoffman is an Associate Professor of Anthropology of Education and International Comparative Education at the Curry School of Education, University of Virginia. She received her PhD from Stanford University and her MA and BA from Brown University. Her work is situated at the intersection of anthropological understandings of childhood, parenting and education.

Linda L. Layne is Hale Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, currently on loan to the National Science Foundation as program officer for Science and Technology Studies. Her current research explores the management of absent presences in several alternative family forms: single mothers by choice, two-mum and two-dad families, as well as families who claim miscarried or stillborn babies as family members.

'this book suggests an important consideration about the tensions recognizable in the contemporary era between what an intensive parenting culture prescribes (that means also to some extent what science experts say and suggest,) and what and how it is realistically possible in the capitalist neoliberal societies.'- Rosy Musumeci, University of Turin, Sociologica, February 2014