Parenting the crisis: The cultural politics of parent‐blame Tracey Jensen Bristol: Policy Press, March 2018, ISBN:978‐1447325062, 216 pages, £20.79 pbk

Abstract

There is a long and ignoble trend within British social policy making of blaming parents for social problems—particularly when the problem is poverty, and the parents are impoverished. But by the end of the 20th century, parent blaming was assuming a new cultural form. The problem was not framed ‘only’ in terms of those parents who failed to shoulder their responsibilities, such as ‘feckless’ fathers or ‘unfit’ mothers, but in terms of a deficit on the part of all mothers and fathers, who were seen to require official training in the art and (pseudo)science of child rearing. Thus, the New Labour government placed ‘supporting families’ at the heart of its policy agenda, a therapeutic mission that aimed to instruct all parents in the appropriate ways to feel about their children and behave towards them. The Coalition government led by David Cameron picked up the baton, by promoting the adoption of particular parenting styles and practices as a resolution to the problems of poverty and inequality. ‘What matters most to a child's life chances is not the wealth of their upbringing but the warmth of their parenting,’ he told the think-tank Demos in 2010 (in Jensen, 2018, p. 116). Jensen's original account situates the new ‘politics of parent blame’ within a wider ‘cultural industry’ of media and social networks promoting a fashionable ‘parent pedagogy’. Inspired by Stuart Hall's classic 1978 study Policing the Crisis, which charted the construction of the ‘mugger’ as ‘a new cultural figure, upon whom street crime is racialised and against whom social anxieties around youth, urban space and control become projected’ (Jensen, 2018, p. 8), Parenting the Crisis maps the construction of mothers, in particular, as a deficient figure against whom anxieties about social inequality and disorder are projected. The ubiquity of a culture that demands the performance of an ‘intensive’ parenting style—one that is ‘reflexive, intensive, expert-guided, thoughtful and self-scrutinising’ (Hays, 1996)—results in mothers becoming invested and subjected ‘by the norms and rules of such parenting regimes and by their dividing practices’ (Jensen, 2018, p. 101). In the insecurity generated by such a parenting culture, mothers practise self-surveillance and judgement on themselves and each other. Thus, policy that projects maternal emotion and behaviour as both a cause and solution to socioeconomic equalities—‘warmth’ not ‘wealth’—gains implicit affirmation. The strength of Parenting the Crisis lies in the way it reveals this complex interaction between these cultural norms and constructions, and the politics of parent blame, engaging the question of why parents (and particularly, mothers) are receptive to policies that seek to train them to be ‘better parents’. Later chapters explore the ‘weaponisation’ of parent blame in the context of austerity and ‘post-welfare’. Here, the focus is on the families culturally demonised by ‘poverty porn’ and targeted by policies such as the Troubled Families initiative, where familiar tropes of ‘welfare scrounging’ and the ‘underclass’ are recycled through the image of the deficient parent. Although this is true, it is hardly new; arguably, a more novel and insidious development is the way that parenting practices culturally associated with the ‘respectable’ working class—for example, with regard to food, discipline and relations between home and school—have been problematised through the mobilisation of intensive parenting as a cultural norm. The degree to which ‘dividing practices’ operate against parents whose practices imply resistance to the tenets of the new parent pedagogy would be worthy of further study.