Being a parent and being a child in Chile today: the relational construction of subject positions in a neoliberal context

Abstract

In this article, we discuss the social demands on parents and children in a context of growing neoliberalisation and sociocultural change. Borrowing from the notion of intensive parenting, and extending it to children’s experience, we conceive of the parent–child link as a social relationship in which the participants relationally configure heterogeneous and dynamic subject positions. Based on the results of a discursive study conducted in Chile, we also describe some of the positions that parents and children adopt in the contemporary context. In this study, the almost claustrophobic and over-attentive tone through which parents and children describe their relationship is remarkable, as is the painful and emotionally taxing nature of the reciprocal care they have for one another, and the profoundly moral nature of the positions they adhere to.