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

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 significance of parenting as a form of relationship and as mediated by family relationships across time and space, the book explores the points of accommodation and points of tension between parenting as defined by professionals, and those experienced by parents themselves. Specific themes include:

• the ways in which the moral context for parenting is negotiated and sustained

• the structural constraints to ‘good’ parenting (particularly in cases of immigration or reproductive technologies)

• the relationship between intimate family life and broader cultural trends, parenting culture, policy making and nationhood

• parenting and/as adult ‘identity-work’.

Including contributions on parenting from a range of ethnographic locales – from Europe, Canada and the US, to non-Euro-American settings such as Turkey, Chile and Brazil, this volume presents a uniquely critical and international perspective, which positions parenting as a global ideology that intersects in a variety of ways with the political, social, cultural, and economic positions of parents and families.

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.