An International Perspective on Parenting: Social Change and Social Constructs

Abstract

In this article, three general areas of research and social concern pertaining to parenting are discussed within an international perspective focusing on recent social changes as well as on constructs of parenting. First, the combined example of the Western emphasis on mothering and on intense emotional bonding between parents and children is utilized to illustrate how the biases arising out of particular Western constructs affect research paradigms. In a second step, this critical analysis is expanded by linking it to social changes that are taking place internationally in order to offer a glimpse into areas of parenting that beg to be addressed empirically and within a less ethnocentric framework. And, third, I illustrate how current socioeconomic changes and upheavals affect the experience of parenting, which may became a more difficult enterprise in the near future in most countries of the world. These particular areas of concern were selected because they are relevant to international developments that can be presumed to affect not only the parenting role but research paradigms as well (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Elder, Modell, & Parke, 1993). The discussion is informed by a critical perspective viewing both childhood and parenting as social constructs that evolve with sociohistorical changes. Although my focus here is on parenting, discussions of parenting cannot be divorced from perspectives on the of childhood. Historically and cross-culturally, the debate about the of childhood has raged from times immemorial (Colin, 1986; Hughes, 1989). Each age (Aries, 1962), each society reinvents or rediscovers childhood within its own sociohistorical framework (Wartofsky, 1983). The of childhood is fluid, anchored as it is in the prevailing world views supporting societies and created by societies (Hendrick, 1990; Jenks, 1982; Kessen, 1979, 1983; Prout & James, 1990). In most societies, children and early adolescents are viewed within the context of the family (Oldman, 1991). Consequently, as one cohort or one culture defines what childhood is, parenting is constructed, whether explicitly or implicitly. What constitutes parenting is as much a cultural invention as what constitutes childhood (Pomerleau, Malcuit, & Sabatier, 1991; Whiting & Whiting, 1960) and, in this century, adolescence (Hurrelmann, 1989; Sebald, 1992). It is an ideology (Heyns, 1991, p. 9). As a socially defined phenomenon, the requisites and boundaries of parenting will differ by historical period, culture, class, and ethnicity or race (see also Gergen, 1973). The bulk of the relevant behavioral and social sciences are the product of American and European masculine knowledge. Moreover, English has become the international language of scientific exchange. Consequently, the of parenting, it can be argued, is becoming the of North American parenting with hues of Western European influence. Within such a potential for homogeneity, and under the current Western monopoly on knowledge (see also Freidson, 1986; Schroyer, 1970) in the behavioral and social sciences, there is a danger that one can fail to carry on a discourse on parenting as an evolving construct, as opposed to a fixed entity that is viewed as bound within one particularly dominant type of society. Yet, obviously, the social definition of nature itself shifts, even though each new definition is believed to be the definitive one. In the past century, under Western masculine hegemony, parenting has been successively encoded in religious strictures, then moralized, medicalized, psychologized, psychiatrized, and more recently legalized (Hendrick, 1990; see also Morgan, 1985; Schutze, 1987)--frequently all of these together in the past decade, in what Habermas (1987) would call the colonization of parents' lifeworld. Parenting is constantly being constructed according to the ideologies and the paradigms of those sciences and professions that happen to dominate at any point in time in terms of dictating what is good for children. …