‘Transform Your Child's Behaviour Now’: Parent Education as Self-Help Culture and Lifelong Learning

Abstract

Parents in the Western world today are often said to feel unsure and inadequate and as a consequence there are a plethora of self-help products on the market as well as parent education programmes. This article explores the kinds of research questions that are raised by this state of affairs. The discussion is mainly based on existing studies of self-help culture as well as other studies of parents and families. One argument is that parent education, which is aimed at supporting parents to improve their parenting skills, is part of a governing strategy in a learning society. The Swedish government has an ongoing investment in parent education. This community support for parents is used as a reference point to study the ways in which parents are governed and how discourses on what constitutes a good parent or child at a government level are transformed into parent education advice and programmes. Other issues consider the importance of studies regarding how parents interpret these discourses and focus on the processes of inclusion and exclusion and the ways that some parents and children become problematic and hard to reach with regard to, for example, issues around gender, social class and ethnicity.