Parenting, Family Policy and Children's Well-Being in An Unequal Society Parenting, Family Policy and Children's Well-Being in An Unequal Society

PALGRAVE
PALGRAVEMACMILLAN
MACMILLANSTUDIES
STUDIESININFAMILY
FAMILYAND
ANDINTIMATE
INTIMATELIFE
LIFE
Parenting,
Parenting,
Family
Family Policy
Policy
and
and Children's
Children's
Well-Being
Well-Being in
in an
an
Unequal
Unequal Society
Society
AANew
NewCulture
CultureWar
Warfor
forParents
Parents
Dimitra
DimitraHartas
Hartas
Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life
Titles include:
Graham Allan, Graham Crow and Sheila Hawker

STEPFAMILIES
Harriet Becher
FAMILY PRACTICES IN SOUTH ASIAN MUSLIM FAMILIES
Parenting in a Multi-Faith Britain
Elisa Rose Birch, Anh T. Le and Paul W. Miller
HOUSEHOLD DIVISIONS OF LABOUR
Teamwork, Gender and Time
Ann Buchanan and Anna Rotkirch
FERTILITY RATES AND POPULATION DECLINE
No Time for Children?
Deborah Chambers
SOCIAL MEDIA AND PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS
Online Intimacies and Networked Friendship
Robbie Duschinsky and Leon Antonio Rocha (editors)
FOUCAULT, THE FAMILY AND POLITICS
Jacqui Gabb
RESEARCHING INTIMACY IN FAMILIES
Dimitra Hartas
PARENTING, FAMILY POLICY AND CHILDREN’S WELL-BEING IN AN
UNEQUAL SOCIETY
A New Culture War for Parents
Stephen Hicks
LESBIAN, GAY AND QUEER PARENTING
Families, Intimacies, Genealogies
Clare Holdsworth
FAMILY AND INTIMATE MOBILITIES
Rachel Hurdley
HOME, MATERIALITY, MEMORY AND BELONGING
Keeping Culture
Peter Jackson (editor)
CHANGING FAMILIES, CHANGING FOOD
Riitta Jallinoja and Eric Widmer (editors)
FAMILIES AND KINSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE
Rules and Practices of Relatedness
Lynn Jamieson and Roona Simpson (editors)
LIVING ALONE
Globalization, Identity and Belonging
Lynn Jamieson, Ruth Lewis and Roona Simpson (editors)
RESEARCHING FAMILIES AND RELATIONSHIPS
Reflections on Process
David Morgan
RETHINKING FAMILY PRACTICES
Petra Nordqvist and Carol Smart
RELATIVE STRANGERS
Family Life, Genes and Donor Conception
Eriikka Oinonen
FAMILIES IN CONVERGING EUROPE
A Comparison of Forms, Structures and Ideals
Róisín Ryan-Flood
LESBIAN MOTHERHOOD
Gender, Families and Sexual Citizenship
Sally Sales
ADOPTION, FAMILY AND THE PARADOX OF ORIGINS
A Foucauldian History
Tam Sanger
TRANS PEOPLE’S PARTNERSHIPS
Towards an Ethics of Intimacy
Tam Sanger and Yvette Taylor (editors)
MAPPING INTIMACIES
Relations, Exchanges, Affects
Elizabeth B. Silva
TECHNOLOGY, CULTURE, FAMILY
Influences on Home Life
Lisa Smyth
THE DEMANDS OF MOTHERHOOD
Agents, Roles and Recognitions
Yvette Taylor
EDUCATIONAL DIVERSITY
The Subject of Difference and Different Subjects
Katherine Twamley
LOVE, MARRIAGE AND INTIMACY AMONG GUJARATI INDIANS
A Suitable Match
Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life

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Parenting, Family Policy
and Children’s Well-Being
in an Unequal Society
A New Culture War for Parents
Dimitra Hartas
University of Warwick, UK
© Dimitra Hartas 2014
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Contents
Series Editors’ Preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
The parenting doctrine 2
About this book 5
The structure of this book 14
Note 16
Part I The Early Home Environment in an Unequal

Society: Do Parents Matter?
1 Home Learning Environment and Children’s Learning
and Well-Being 21
Home learning and child outcomes 24
Parent–child interactions and child outcomes 28
Parental behaviour and aspirations and child outcomes 31
2 Parents’ Social Class Still Matters . . . 36

Parents’ socio-economic status and child language and
literacy 37
Parents’ socio-economic status and children’s social
behaviour 41
Parenting, class and the achievement gap 42
3 Parenting in an Unequal Society 48

Cultural trends in parenting in diverse families 48
Parenting and a ‘culture of poverty’ 51
Patterns of parenting and social class 54
Part II Neoliberal Family Policy: Early Intervention

and Parent Remodelling
4 Family Policy in 21st Century Britain 75
New Labour family policy 75
The coalition government’s family policy: Early
intervention 81
v
vi Contents
5 Critical Reflections on Early Intervention 90

The scientific rationale for early intervention 91
The pragmatic rationale for early intervention 100
The ethical rationale for early intervention 109
Paradoxes and tensions in early intervention 112
6 Neoliberalism and Family Policy in Britain 121

Etho-politics: The ethological governance of parents and
children 126
The end of privacy in family life 132
Individuated risks and neglect of the big issues 135
A departure from humanism and egalitarianism 137
Final thoughts 140
Note: Statistics on risk and ‘children in need’ 140
Part III Parenting, Culture Wars and Civic Renewal

7 Parenting: A New Culture War 147
The making of the ‘good’ parent in late modernity 150
Nudge and the remodelling of parents 157
The science of parenting: ‘what works?’ 162
8 Family Policy and the Capability Approach to Parents’

and Children’s Well-Being 166
A capability approach to parenting 167
Family policy through a capability lens 170
9 A New Paradigm for Family Policy: Civic Education,

Equality and Public Reasoning 188
Families’ capability building 188
The family in a civic society 202
Note 207
Conclusion 208
The achievement gap is political 208
A new culture war on parents 209
References 214
Index 238
Series Editors’ Preface
The remit of the Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life
series is to publish major texts, monographs and edited collections
focusing broadly on the sociological exploration of intimate relation-
ships and family organisation. As editors we think such a series is timely.
Expectations, commitments and practices have changed significantly
in intimate relationship and family life in recent decades. This is very
apparent in patterns of family formation and dissolution, demonstrated
by trends in cohabitation, marriage and divorce. Changes in house-
hold living patterns over the last 20 years have also been marked, with
more people living alone, adult children living longer in the parental
home and more ‘non-family’ households being formed. Furthermore,
there have been important shifts in the ways people construct inti-
mate relationships. There are few comfortable certainties about the best
ways of being a family man or woman, with once conventional gen-
der roles no longer being widely accepted. The normative connection
between sexual relationships and marriage or marriage-like relationships
is also less powerful than it once was. Not only is greater sexual exper-
imentation accepted, but it is now accepted at an earlier age. Moreover
heterosexuality is no longer the only mode of sexual relationship given
legitimacy. In Britain as elsewhere, gay male and lesbian partnerships are
now socially and legally endorsed to a degree hardly imaginable in the
mid-20th century. Increases in lone-parent families, the rapid growth
of different types of stepfamily, the de-stigmatisation of births outside
marriage and the rise in couples ‘living-apart-together’ (LAT) all provide
further examples of the ways that ‘being a couple’, ‘being a parent’ and
‘being a family’ have diversified in recent years.
The fact that change in family life and intimate relationships has
been so pervasive has resulted in renewed research interest from soci-
ologists and other scholars. Increasing amounts of public funding have
been directed to family research in recent years, in terms of both indi-
vidual projects and the creation of family research centres of different
hues. This research activity has been accompanied by the publication of
some very important and influential books exploring different aspects
of shifting family experience, in Britain and elsewhere. The Palgrave
Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life series hopes to add to this
vii
viii Series Editors’ Preface
list of influential research-based texts, thereby contributing to existing

knowledge and informing current debates. Our main audience consists
of academics and advanced students, though we intend that the books
in the series will be accessible to a more general readership who wish to
understand better the changing nature of contemporary family life and
personal relationships.
We see the remit of the series as wide. The concept of ‘family and inti-
mate life’ will be interpreted in a broad fashion. While the focus of the
series will clearly be sociological, we take family and intimacy as being
inclusive rather than exclusive. The series will cover a range of topics
concerned with family practices and experiences, including, for exam-
ple, partnership, marriage, parenting, domestic arrangements, kinship,
demographic change, intergenerational ties, life course transitions, step-
families, gay and lesbian relationships, lone-parent households and also
non-familial intimate relationships such as friendships. We also wish to
foster comparative research, as well as research on understudied popu-
lations. The series will include different forms of books. Most will be
theoretical or empirical monographs on particular substantive topics,
though some may also have a strong methodological focus. In addition,
we see edited collections as also falling within the series’ remit, as well
as translations of significant publications in other languages. Finally we
intend that the series has an international appeal, in terms of both top-
ics covered and authorship. Our goal is for the series to provide a forum
for family sociologists conducting research in various societies, and not
solely in Britain.
Graham Allan, Lynn Jamieson and David Morgan

Acknowledgements
This book was written at a time marked by unprecedented changes in

family policy in Britain and other Western countries. On both sides
of the Atlantic, parents have been given disproportionate attention by
the media and the government. As inequality rises and public spending
cuts deepen, policy initiatives are rolled out nationally to teach parents
how to parent. The disproportionate policy focus on parents to reverse
inequality and reduce the achievement gap is part of a wider culture
war waged on intimate family life, where parents and young people’s
well-being is precarious. This context has given rise to interesting con-
versations which I am very grateful to have taken part in. The research
upon which this book was based has been presented at the London
Institute of Ideas, at the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies, University
of Kent, Canterbury, and at annual meetings of the British Educational
Research Association, as well as at the Centre for European Policy, Czech
Republic. I would like to thank my colleagues in these places for their
feedback and thought-provoking contributions to my work. Their sup-
port was essential to the writing of this book. I am also grateful to the
UK Data Archive for allowing me to access the Millennium Cohort Study
datasets and for their continuing support. Last, but not least, I would like
to thank my two boys, Pavlos and Victor, for the beauty and joy they
have brought to my life and the hope that their generation will bring
new possibilities and dreams for the future.
ix
Introduction
Ellen Key, a Swedish reformer, proclaimed the 20th century to be the

‘Century of the Child’. With a deluge of family policy initiatives and
proclamations about how much parents matter when it comes to chil-
dren’s development and well-being, the 21st century may well be the
century of the parent. Parenthood and childhood have been separate
domains of social science research, especially in early years, and thus
there is little scholarship on their interaction. Traditionally, the focus
of social science scholarship has been on families within which chil-
dren had a limited presence, voice and influence. Over the last decades,
however, the focus has shifted to childhood, slowly moving towards
parent–child interactions by considering children and parents to be in
a dynamic symbiosis. From the late 1990s onwards, a growing num-
ber of sociological studies (e.g. Brannen et al., 2000; Ribbens McCarthy
et al., 2003; Soloman et al., 2002) have examined parent–child inter-
actions, although most have focused on divorce, step-parenting and
teenage children, with fewer studies involving young children. The
limited scholarship on the interactions between parents and young chil-
dren has important implications in that structural inequality, parents’
capability, family protective factors (e.g. resilience) and their influ-
ence in early years have been under-researched and under-theorised.
This gap has been filled with policy based on tragic, high-impact inci-
dences of child abuse and death (e.g. Victoria Climbié and Baby P) and
with neuroscientific evidence haphazardly used to draw links between
early home environments and children’s developing brain to offer nor-
mative explanations regarding parental influences and child-rearing
practices.
1
2 Parenting, Family Policy and Children’s Well-Being in an Unequal Society
The parenting doctrine
On both sides of the Atlantic, parents have been given dispropor-

tionate attention by the media and the ruling elite. In the United
Kingdom over the last decade, what parents do has become a hugely
exaggerated concern of the government’s social policy, with fami-
lies increasingly coming under public scrutiny. Both the New Labour
and the coalition governments claim direct and causal links between
parental involvement and children’s learning and well-being, approach-
ing parenting as a key mechanism to reducing the achievement
gap. In a speech delivered by Gordon Brown in 2007, responsibility
for children’s educational outcomes was placed entirely on individual
parents:
Now just consider the evidence. We now know the level of parental
engagement in learning is actually more important in determining
a child’s educational achievement than the social class background,
the size of the family or the parent’s own educational attainment.
A child with a stimulating home environment does better on all the
scores of early childhood development.
For Nick Clegg, ‘parents hold the fortunes of the children they bring
into this world in their hands’ and parenting matters more than parents’
socio-economic status (2010). Frank Field, the coalition government’s
poverty adviser, considers that focusing on parenting and the early years
up to the age of 3 will ‘prevent poor children becoming poor adults’,
offering a rather different approach to tackle child poverty that mainly
considers financial means and opportunities for alleviating structural
inequality. ‘While money is important’, Field (2011, 18–19) said,
I will be arguing in the report that there are other circumstances

which, the research shows, are as important as money in determining
outcomes: the interest you take in your children, how you bond with
them, whether you read to them, the interest you show in what they
are doing at school.
As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, the discourses on

‘children in crisis’ and ‘toxic childhood’ have expanded to include con-
cerns about ‘toxic’ parenting, with parental behaviour and practices
becoming the target of the new politics of ‘nudging’. Within family
policy, parents are seen as the key influence in their children’s life,
Introduction 3
an influence that cannot be left to chance. As the term ‘parenting’

suggests, being a parent is about action and skills acquisition rather than
a complex web of relationships between adults and children and their
communities. This notion of parenting is, however, riddled with para-
doxes. On the one hand, parenting has become an all-encompassing act
in the political sphere where parents are to tackle underachievement
and raise children to become model citizens. On the other hand, what
parents do has been undermined through overregulation and deficit per-
ceptions about some parents as being vulnerable and fragile at best,
or ignorant and potentially dangerous at worst. The coalition govern-
ment’s concerns about the 120,000 ‘troubled’ families promote such
deficit discourses within public policy. The same paradox applies to chil-
dren who, despite much policy emphasis on their agency, have come
to occupy a limited space and exert little influence on the making
of ‘child-centred’ policies. Finally, what emerges from this is an abso-
lute notion of ‘good’ parenthood which, ultimately, denies parents the
chance to experience parenthood within their own moral framework
without being subjected to moralising.
Since the 1970s, parents have increasingly become involved with their
children’s education. Questions remain, however, as to the effectiveness
of parental support, given that the achievement gap between disadvan-
taged children and their wealthier peers is as wide as ever. A growing
body of research has shown that the frequency with which parents
encourage learning at home is not the whole story of how poverty trans-
lates into the achievement gap. Far more relevant to whether young
children fall behind in their language, literacy and social development
is their parents’ income and educational qualifications (Hartas, 2011,
2012). In disadvantaged families, especially those in which parents lack
education and the intellectual capital that comes with it, the impact of
supporting their children’s learning tends to be weak. The stresses and
strains of coping with poverty undermine their efforts in that although
they are as likely to help as wealthier parents, the help they offer tends
to be of limited educational value. Parents, it seems, matter mostly for
who they are (e.g., educated, capable of accessing networks, resources
and services) rather than for what they do. Within family policy in
many Western countries (e.g. United States, Canada, United Kingdom),
parenting has come to be viewed as a way of compensating for social
and economic disadvantage. But parents alone, no matter how good or
effective they are, cannot overcome structural problems of poverty to
maximise their children’s educational opportunities and life chances.
Equality of opportunity and social mobility require political and not
individual solutions to be enacted through income redistribution and

tax policies and through capability building in families.
This is not to suggest that parents should not support their children’s
learning. Reading to young children, supporting them with their home-
work and being emotionally close to them are important as ends in
themselves and not because such practices may tackle structural disad-
vantage and inequality. Parental learning support does matter, but is
less likely to level the playing field, especially for disadvantaged chil-
dren. It is deterministic and exploitative to place the onus on parents to
reverse inequality. Parents, especially educated ones, can offer an expan-
sive vision of learning and what it means to be educated, but cannot
and should not be expected to transcend their circumstances; we need
political action for this to happen. Moreover, even though educated par-
ents possess intellectual and human capital, which tends to translate
into their children’s social advantage, we should question the notion
of ‘capital’, especially in the context of human relationships, because
it reduces what parenting is all about, being understood in economic
terms as a financial asset or a commodity, meaningful only because it
can be exploited for economic benefits. The discourses on capital and
its many forms resonate with the values of a consumerist culture which
approaches parenting and child rearing as a means to an end rather than
as acts of citizenship.
Across generations and cultures, parents are anxious to ensure that
their children grow up to be happy adults who live a good life. However,
what has changed now is how we understand happiness for ourselves,
our children and other people’s children. Happiness has become a goal
and not a by-product of living life in ways that make sense to par-
ents and families. Happiness is seen in instrumental terms: children
can achieve good outcomes and be happy if their parents follow expert
advice about child rearing. Parents have always been given advice on
child rearing that differs diametrically, ranging from being stern with
children and warning against indulging them to very strong views about
the importance of breast feeding and the state of being emotionally
attuned with them. In her book Raising America: Experts, Parents, and
a Century of Advice About Children, Ann Hulbert recounts how there
has always been a tension among the various recommended parenting
styles – the bonders versus the disciplinarians, the child-centred ver-
sus the parent-centred – with the pendulum constantly swinging back
and forth between them. This fluidity in public perceptions of parent-
ing reflects societal changes, particularly the influences of free-market
societies in which economic activity and profit are the ultimate arbiter
of a successful family life.
Introduction 5
In considering key debates in social policy at the start of this century,

a pronounced trend emerges, that of placing the onus on individuals
to achieve policy-pre-specified outcomes. We seem to be moving from
examining the legal, social and economic rights afforded to citizens
and the political and institutional structures that surround their life
to focusing on individual characteristics and dispositions as pathways
to social advancement. Within family policy, this trend translates into
focusing on individual parents and their capacity to support their chil-
dren’s learning and character development (e.g. self-control, resilience)
to reduce the achievement gap and raise children as model citizens
and not as burdens on taxpayers. Although supporting children to
develop a sense of identity through resilience and self-control is cru-
cial to withstand the impact of events over which we have limited
control, individual dispositions alone cannot reverse inequality. Such
views about the all-importance of children’s character are misleading
and likely to promote complacency in the political sphere and an
anti-humanistic account of social progress.
Over the last decade, family policy has adopted a psycho-medical ori-
entation in which parents’ and children’s subjective experiences are to
be controlled and morphed towards pre-specified outcomes. The state
has changed from being a guarantor of human and economic rights and
a defender of public services to affecting the values and behaviour of
its citizens. Cost–benefit calculations in family policy (e.g. views about
investing £1 during the early years to save £5 later) have taken prece-
dence over socio-economic factors such as family income or parental
education and employment, which are no longer considered to be cru-
cial determinants of children’s life chances. Economic redistribution and
the delivery of public services are domains in which the state has a legit-
imate role to play rather than focusing on what parents do to develop
their children’s character and learning (unless parents’ or children’s
safety is under threat and their human rights are violated, in which case
the state has a role to play).
About this book
The research basis of the book

This book explores the social ecology of parenthood by addressing
the influences that parental behaviour and practices and the early
home environment exert on children’s learning and well-being within
their wider socio-economic, cultural and political contexts. Specifically,
parental involvement with children’s learning, its relationship to chil-
dren’s academic and social outcomes and the socio-economic context
within which parents support their children were examined. To this

end, a series of secondary analyses of the Millennium Cohort Study
(MCS) have been conducted. The MCS offers a large-scale study about
the ‘New Century’s Children’ in the United Kingdom, following the
lives of around 19,000 children born in 2000–2001. The MCS is the
most recent of Britain’s national longitudinal birth cohort studies, with
the remit to track the Millennium children through their early child-
hood years and into adulthood. It collects information on the children’s
siblings and parents within different social contexts (e.g. family, early
years’ settings, school). Its field of enquiry covers such diverse topics as
parenting, childcare, child behaviour and cognitive development, child
academic outcomes, child and parental health, parents’ employment
and education, income and poverty, and social capital and ethnicity.
Ethical approval for the MCS was gained and parents gave informed
consent before interviews took place and a written consent for children’s
cognitive assessments.
The MCS was deemed appropriate to provide the research basis for
this book in that it offers data on a wide range of factors that are promi-
nent when examining the social ecology of parenting and children’s
learning, such as parental learning support and aspirations, children’s
attitudes to learning and schooling, parent–child affective interactions,
children’s cognitive, behavioural and academic outcomes and parents’
social class. The four surveys of MCS cohort members carried out so far –
at ages 9 months, 3, 5 and 7 years – have helped build up a uniquely
detailed portrait of the children of the new century. The data used for
this book came from the second, third and fourth surveys which were
carried out when the cohort children reached the ages of 3, 5 and 7
respectively, achieving response rates of 78 per cent, 79 per cent and
72.2 per cent of the target sample (around 97% of the parents inter-
viewed were mothers). The findings that emerged from analyses of the
MCS are presented in the first part of this book. The longitudinal design
of the MCS enabled an examination of child development over time
and the children’s outcomes at a given age in the light of circumstances
and characteristics at earlier points in time. Most importantly, with the
MCS, the social conditions that surround early childhood in Britain at
the start of the 21st century were examined by taking an ecological per-
spective towards children’s learning and well-being and the role that
parents and the socio-economic context play in shaping it.
Further strengths of the MCS analyses lie in the use of a population-
based representative sample which enabled replication of other studies
with fairly small samples to explore the contribution of children’s
Introduction 7
characteristics, home learning environment and socio-economic back-

ground to their language and literacy during their first years in formal
education in the United Kingdom. The MCS offered data on multiple
informants (parents, teachers and children) and opportunities to delin-
eate relative contextual influences on children’s school outcomes. Most
importantly, the MCS provided data on children’s views about matters
that affect them. Ensuring that children have a research platform to
voice their concerns regarding family, school and peers, and talk about
learning experiences outside a school context, has important ethical and
practical implications, especially for disadvantaged children who do not
have many opportunities to represent their views. Moreover, the sample
design allowed for over-representation of families living in areas with a
high rate of socio-economic disadvantage, which increased the power
of the study to analyse socio-economic effects. The families considered
to be in poverty are estimated to be living on less than 60 per cent of
the average national household income. The poverty line calculation
takes into account the number of people in a household. To ensure that
the study is representative, the data were weighted to account for over-
representation, non-response in the recruitment of the original sample
and sample attrition.
A limitation in the MCS was its reliance on parents’ self-completed
reports (mothers mainly) to obtain measures regarding the frequency of
home learning, mothers’ reading habits and educational qualifications
and mother–child closeness due to the potential bias and also the inde-
pendence of data. The possibility of a discrepancy between mothers’
self-reports and their actual behaviour exists and thus we need to exer-
cise caution when we interpret the results regarding mothers’ subjective
views about learning support at home and emotional warmth towards
their children (although the data were collected via the use of comput-
ers to minimise social desirability effects). Finally, doing secondary data
analyses has pros and cons. The technical expertise involved in MCS in
terms of developing surveys and using independently validated instru-
ments is high, ensuring data of the highest quality (Hansen, 2008).
Also, doing secondary analyses has the benefit of being an unobtru-
sive process. However, this may affect the analysts’ considerations of the
dynamics of the research context, which are useful in taking a nuanced
approach to data analysis and interpretation.
What this research challenges

The research evidence presented in this book challenges Nick Clegg’s
view that ‘bad parenting does more to hold back poor children than
poverty’ (as stated in the Daily Telegraph, 19 August 2010). Current

research, including my analyses of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS),
asserts a link between parenting, social class and children’s language,
literacy and behaviour. The MCS findings showed that what differ-
entiates poor from wealthier children is not different conceptions of
child rearing, aspirations and levels of parental involvement but their
parents’ social class. Consistently, the MCS findings showed that par-
ents’ social class still matters and shapes child developmental outcomes
and life opportunities considerably. Although the links between poverty
and child outcomes have been well established through a plethora
of social science research, this book contributes by examining the
effects of parents’ social class on young children’s development at the
start of this century in Britain amidst policy drives to eradicate child
poverty and increase social mobility. This is an important contribu-
tion for two reasons. First, in political discourses, there appears to be
a decline in references to poverty and inequality as causal factors that
influence children’s trajectories despite rising inequality. Instead, the
policy focus has been on individuals’ character and dispositions, such
as resilience in the face of adversity, which, although important in
their own right, are increasingly seen as ways of transcending struc-
tural constraints. Secondly, in some policy circles, making references
to social class is unfashionable in that, across the political spectrum,
the rhetoric has been about the 21st-century Britain being a classless
society.
However, ignoring the well-established links between poverty and
children’s learning and well-being and placing the onus on individ-
ual parents’ behaviour rather than on their political arrangements and
the opportunities they engender has serious consequences for the next
generation’s social mobility, especially in unequal societies. At the same
time, although family finances influence how parents interact with and
relate to their children, this book does not propose a market solution
to the impact of poverty and social class on children’s and parents’
life chances, in that generating more (unequally distributed) cash sub-
verts the values that a civic society should aspire to. The hope that
the effects of a market growth will ‘trickle down’ to families who need
financial support most has not materialised as the current economic
downturn shows. With this in mind, this book considers the wider
forces that shape parenthood and the gradual narrowing of parents’
and children’s worlds to understand what it means to be a parent in
an unequal society, and what it takes to work towards a civic renewal
and the common good.
Introduction 9
Current family policy seems to entertain a socially accepted yet

mistaken belief that parents in poverty are less involved with their chil-
dren’s learning, and that they lack aspirations and other middle-class
values thought to promote social mobility. Despite the fact that most
parents have emulated middle-class practices, manifested in routine
engagement with their children’s learning and acceptance of main-
stream aspirations (as the MCS findings showed), the achievement gap
remains as wide as ever. This raises the need to understand parent-
ing within its socio-economic milieu and rejuvenate debates about
social class and social justice to tackle the factors that shape chil-
dren’s life chances. In this book, I argue for a family-centric rather than
a child-centric approach to parenting and for situating parenting in
its socio-economic context to account for families’ living conditions.
A faulty logic has permeated much current family policy: parenting
styles being the causes of disadvantage and reduced life chances as
opposed to being embedded in or resulting from families’ structural con-
straints and affordances and parents’ social class. It is overly simplistic
to consider the relationship between parental involvement, academic
achievement and upward social mobility as being direct and causal and
divorced from the big issues such as neoliberalism and globalisation that
influence the lives of both parents and children. The book presents two
key contentions in this regard: the first is about parental involvement
with children’s education being a panacea to reducing the achievement
gap and reversing polarisation in society and the second is about the
state’s interventionist (and often punitive) role manifested in the micro-
management of family intimate life, which raises important issues about
the politics and ethics of placing families under state scrutiny.
This book offers research evidence and a timely critique of parent-
ing and parenthood in the 21st-century Britain by examining parental
influences on children’s learning and well-being; challenging views of
disadvantaged parents as being uninvolved with their children or ‘vul-
nerable’ (vulnerability as individual pathology rather than an aspect
of the human condition); delineating the effects of parental learn-
ing support and parents’ social class on young children’s learning and
well-being; and proposing capability building in families, underpinned
by the principles of equality (including gender equality), human agency
and the ethics of care, to support families in unequal societies. More-
over, UK family policy and the coalition government’s emphasis on early
intervention and parenting are critiqued, raising issues about family pri-
vacy and autonomy, the relationship between the state and individuals
and what all these mean for the remaking of a civic society.
The book challenges anti-humanist views of children and parents as

being fragile, and the notion of a ‘right’ way to parent. Policy attempts
to model parents along state-endorsed views of the ‘good’ parent have
taken place despite the increasing diversity in the type, size and manner
with which families are constructed. Most crucially, this book ques-
tions the role of the state as a management/regulatory body rather than
a governing body and offers an alternative view of parents and chil-
dren as human agents and authors of their own lives achieved through
capability building. Finally, it argues for a new conceptualisation of the
common good to tackle the widening inequality gap and its deleteri-
ous impact on families as civic institutions and proposes a revival of
humanist sensibilities to guide the civic project of building capability in
families as an antidote to views of parents and children as vulnerable.
To address these issues is not a small undertaking and neither is their sig-
nificance for raising children in the new century and the role of parents
in this endeavour.
It is hoped that this book will contribute to debates about modern
parenthood by questioning policy expectations for parents to transcend
their material and social circumstances; the narrowness in defining early
home environments along parental learning support and emotional
bonding; the scope and goals of early intervention and its key principles;
the role of family policy in supporting resilience and autonomy in par-
ents; and attempts to remodel parents through intervention to achieve
social changes (e.g. reducing the achievement gap). Most crucially, this
book hopes to reinvigorate debates on social class as an antidote to cur-
rent perspectives on poverty and inequality as problems of culture and
not structure, and to contest the limited consideration given by both
New Labour and coalition governments to decades of research on the
links between children’s outcomes and poverty. Ultimately, this book
argues for the renewal of families as civic institutions through civic
education that espouses both instrumental and intrinsic goals and a
feminist orientation to family policy to ensure that the different roles
and contributions of mothers and fathers in families are acknowledged.
The making of a civic society cannot materialise without reversing fam-
ilies’ shrinking public and political spaces, supporting a fairer resource
distribution to tackle the achievement gap and ensuring that children’s
life chances are not constrained by their parents’ social class.
Helene Guldberg, in her book Reclaiming Childhood, argued for
reclaiming childhood from a safety-obsessed culture. This book is about
reclaiming parenthood from politicisation and a culture of moralising,
and from the anxiety, paranoia and deficit assumptions that such culture
Introduction 11
engenders. Parents matter (although such statement is irrelevant when it

comes to tackling the achievement gap and equalising opportunities for
children), but not as causal agents whose behaviour and practices have
a direct impact on their children’s development and learning. Parents
make a considerable contribution to their children’s socialisation and
well-being, but their influences are determined by the social, political
and cultural circumstances and institutional arrangements that sur-
round their life. To understand parental influences requires a nuanced
approach to addressing questions such as ‘what support parents need to
maximise the impact of their involvement in children’s learning’, ‘under
what circumstances parental involvement is effective’ and for ‘whom’.
The political and social backdrop of this book

Western societies face many challenges. The growing inequality and the
diminishing role of the welfare state and the rapid accumulation of the
resources of a finite planet at the top 1 per cent have made the world an
inhospitable place to many families. Parents are increasingly left alone
to deal with big societal problems and alleviate their impact on their
children’s life chances at the expense of questioning, through demo-
cratic deliberation, the living conditions and the gradual narrowing of
their world. The foundations of a civic society have been shaken and yet
modern politics is less about competing visions of different kinds of a
society and more about how best to manage existing managerial struc-
tures and failed economic systems. There seems to be little contestation
about how things are and little interest in social change and even less
faith in the existence of other possibilities for social renewal.
The immediate political backdrop of this book is the deepening pub-
lic service cuts of £1.89 billion in ‘service redesign’ for the care of
the old and disabled in Britain, whereas, at the same time, parent-
ing programmes are being rolled out nationally to teach disadvantaged
parents how to parent. Parents, especially mothers, on low wages are
hit the hardest by cuts in services, depressed incomes and childcare
costs, being blamed for their children’s reduced life chances and the
persistence of the achievement gap. In public discourses, inequality
has been recast as lack of ambition and aspiration, a decline in fam-
ily and parenting styles and a culture of poverty rather than a culture
of reduced opportunities and stagnant social mobility. The presumed
‘decline’ in the quality of parenting and family life in particular has
become an all-encompassing explanation of a range of society’s ills,
from the achievement gap to antisocial behaviour and mental health
problems in young people (Ambert, 2006; DfES, 2006). In explaining
societal ills, factors proximal to children’s lives have gained prominence

over old-fashioned arguments about structural inequality, precipitated
by dramatic changes in the family, as a civic institution, over the last
decades. Within a generation, the size and patterns of formation of
families and parents’ working arrangements have changed consider-
ably. However, these changes are not indicative of a decline in family
relationships and child-rearing practices. Contrary to popular beliefs,
parenting has not deteriorated: a number of mainstream indicators of
‘good’ parenting such as child monitoring and involvement with chil-
dren’s learning show improvement, especially with regard to the time
parents spend with their children’s education (as the MCS has shown)
despite increasing work commitments and rising social and economic
inequality (Hartas, 2011; Peters et al., 2008).
Parents and the family in general have long been an economic cat-
egory of interest to policy makers. The current emphasis on parents
as solely responsible for their children’s well-being and social mobility
should be seen within a wider political movement to replace signifi-
cant parts of the welfare state with forms of volunteerism and private
enterprise. In this context, good parenting becomes an economic oppor-
tunity, a way of reducing money on tax payers by outsourcing education
and care to parents. Parental responsibility translates into action taken
by parents towards reducing the state’s financial commitment in the
form of education and public services. In the current financial climate
and with the increasing dissolution of public services, such proposition
is hard to resist. At the same time, research that explores the influences
of factors beyond parenting such as poverty, educational opportuni-
ties, safety of neighbourhoods and young people’s participation in their
communities (Leventhal and Brookes-Gunn, 2000; Beyers et al., 2003) is
systematically neglected.
The political rhetoric about ‘hard working families’ (as an antipode to
the ‘hard to reach’ families who are presumed not to work hard) being
the bedrock of society is hypocritical because the average working fam-
ily is sliding down the social ladder. Child poverty has risen markedly
between 1970s and 2000s and inequality continues to rise (Office for
National Statistics, 2008). Today’s poverty figures in Britain show that
one in five children live in families on around £251 a week (many on
a lot less) (Toynbee, 2012). Oxfam reported that food prices have risen
by almost a third in five years as incomes fell, with the minimum wage
going back to its 2004 value. The goal to eradicate child poverty by 2020
is clearly out of reach and the political responses to it have been to
move the goalposts instead of acknowledging the systemic constraints
Introduction 13
and structural inequalities in people’s lives. Whether we set new goal-

posts or remove them altogether, as Polly Toynbee (2012) argues, the
figures from the Office of National Statistics ‘will still doggedly measure
how many people fall far below the norm, the median earnings line’.
Debates on social class and poverty resonate little with politicians
and the public not only because they are abstracted but also because
the poor have been painted as being on benefits, unwilling to work,
addicts or otherwise undeserving. There is a growing awareness, how-
ever, that unequal opportunities and reduced living conditions are no
longer about ‘others’ or the ‘undeserving’ but also affect the ‘squeezed
middle’ who increasingly find themselves in situations of precarious
employment, reduced opportunities and disappearing public services.
And yet, there is little contestation about the fact that over 60 per cent of
people living in poverty are in work, and most of those who are not (e.g.
parents who cannot afford childcare or parents with disabled children
or disabled parents) are most likely involved in unpaid care work. Care
is now emerging as a key economic issue, with the coalition government
proposing to fund care by selling older people’s houses or by reducing
opportunities for independent living for individuals with disabilities.
Care has been framed as economically unproductive and undervalued,
an obstacle to women’s participation in the market (mainly because
women do most of the unpaid care work).
These challenges are not unique to the United Kingdom. Austerity,
severe public cuts, high rates of unemployment especially among young
people and the crumbling of the welfare state are difficulties many
European countries, the United States and Canada face. The effects
of the rising inequality and the accumulation of most of the planet’s
resources at the top 1 per cent can no longer be contained within nation
states. There is little disagreement among Western countries about the
deleterious effects of inequality on people’s well-being. However, there
are political differences about the solutions offered, ranging from aus-
terity to placing the onus on individuals to manage their lives in ways
that do not burden taxpayers to promoting volunteerism to make up
for public service cuts. The MCS findings about the strong and per-
sisting influences of social class on children’s learning and well-being
and the widening achievement gap between poor and wealthier chil-
dren despite their parents’ efforts resonate with findings from research
in other developed countries. In many parts of the world, civic insti-
tutions such as families or voluntary organisations are under attack
and no longer able to lessen the effects of poverty, and parents are
left alone to tackle societal polarisation. Inequality and the crumbling
welfare state have undermined the strength and diversity of social insti-
tutions, and parents’ and young people’s lives have become disposable,
in line with neoliberal working conditions. Self-interest and the pursuit
of profit have commodified the inherently social relationships between
organisations and individuals.
The structure of this book
This book is structured in three parts. The first part examines the role
of the early home environment in an unequal society, specifically the
role that parents play in their children’s development and learning
within their wider socio-economic context. The second part examines
neoliberal family policies in Britain by offering a detailed overview of
family policy in the 21st-century Britain with an emphasis on early
intervention. This part locates the MCS findings in the wider politi-
cal and policy context to understand important shifts in family policy
from fiscal to behavioural interventions to support parents and children,
especially the disproportionate focus on parenting as a mechanism to
alleviate disadvantage and promote children’s learning and life chances
and also the diminished references to social class in political discourses.
In the third part, in light of evidence that social class matters and a grow-
ing awareness that neoliberal policies can no longer guarantee families’
economic and social rights, I propose a new paradigm for family policy
to renew families as civic spaces and build capabilities in parents and
children. The notion of parenting determinism in terms of focusing on
parents to narrow the achievement gap is also discussed here. Finally,
patterns of parenting in unequal societies are discussed and compared
with the MCS findings. What emerges is that parents do not need per-
suading to engage with their children; they are already heavily involved
in supporting their learning and well-being. The unprecedented policy
emphasis on intimate family life however resonates with the demise of
class debates and the wider culture war that is being waged on citizens,
including parents, in neoliberal societies.
The book structure allowed me to draw links between quantitative
research findings on patterns of parenting, social class and their influ-
ence on children’s development and learning and qualitative research
on diverse experiences of parenthood amidst policy initiatives to inter-
vene in family life. Bringing together qualitative and quantitative evi-
dence offers a rigorous and unique perspective to examine parenting,
social class and children’s well-being and dispel myths related to the
evidence base of social policy. The misalignment between what research
Introduction 15
tells us and the current orientation of family policy raises the need for
a new paradigm, a new lens through which to examine the effects of
social class on child outcomes and the widening achievement gap in
unequal societies.
A critique on the neoliberal orientation of current family policy
is timely, considering the MCS evidence that the achievement gap
between poor and wealthier children is as wide as ever despite the fact
that most parents support their children’s learning. This disjunction
prompts questions not so much about the limits of policy but more
about its unequivocal focus on parenting. This is not an isolated phe-
nomenon. As globalisation and neoliberal economic restructuring poli-
cies advance discourses of individual governance and self-responsibility,
parents, mothers in particular, are held accountable for their children’s
success or failure with regard to academic achievement, social mobility
and in becoming ‘good citizens’. As it currently stands, family policy
reflects neoliberal goals in accepting market logic and values and apply-
ing them to family life. This relocates public debates from social class
and inequality to economic justifications for intervening with fami-
lies, and shifts our understanding about the sources of social risk from
poverty and inequality to individuated crises and personal failure.
I would like to finish this introduction with an observation by
Wilkinson and Pickett (2009) that, for many years, progressive politics
have been devoid of any concept of a better society and that much
policy emphasis has been on ‘piecemeal improvements’ rather than
on what makes the good society. With growing inequality and social
upheaval, however, the pendulum swings back and forth and people
have become increasingly aware of their and the next generation’s lim-
ited life chances and access to genuine opportunities for education and
employment. As class becomes ever more important as a determinant
of outcomes in Western societies, more so than race or ethnicity, class
differences are observed in children early on. There is an increasing
acceptance about the need for social change, for how to make soci-
ety a substantially better place to live for the vast majority. I would
like to think that there is a wind of change. Social movements such as
Occupy have started to question mainstream politics and the belief that
unregulated markets will deliver the public good. Class politics is no
longer dismissed as an old-fashioned concept but is gradually coming
back into focus because the economic crisis affects people in different
ways and because the coalition government’s mantra that ‘we’re all in
this together’ and belief that parents are solely responsible for their
children’s life chances and social mobility are offensive and ludicrous.
We can no longer argue that we live in a classless society, especially as

it becomes clear that most of the government’s reforms are class based
and affect poor working people disproportionately.
Note
The Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) was commissioned by the Eco-

nomic and Social Research Council, whose funding has been supple-
mented by a consortium of government departments. Full details about
the origins and objectives of the MCS can be obtained from the UK Data
Archive at Essex University (Hansen, 2008).
Part I
The Early Home Environment in
an Unequal Society: Do Parents
Matter?
The role that parents play in their children’s development and learning
has attracted heated debates, with emotive views expressed about par-
ents as lacking in competence and willingness to support their chil-
dren’s learning, to views that some parents may actually hamper their
children’s development through poor parenting and low educational
aspirations. Within family policy, parenting is conceived as the most
important influence on young children’s academic achievement and
well-being, more important than poverty, school environment and
peers. The research discussed in this part contests this position and pro-
vides evidence on the powerful ways in which socio-economic factors
or, simply, social class, impact on young children’s academic, linguistic
and social development.
Parents have long heeded the call to get involved in their children’s
learning. However, few questions have been asked about how effective
their support is and whether disadvantaged parents stand a chance of
narrowing the United Kingdom’s notorious achievement gap between
their children and the offspring of wealthier families. In the United
Kingdom, at the start of the 21st century, by using a representative
sample from the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), I examined whether
parental support is the key to language, literacy and social develop-
ment of three-, five- and seven-year-olds (or whether other factors are of
greater importance). Specifically, I examined the influences of parental
behaviour, aspirations and educational practices and parents’ social
class on children’s learning and well-being. Drawing upon the MCS
findings, the links between young children’s language, learning and
well-being and (i) parental learning support, emotional responsiveness
and behaviour and aspirations at home (see Chapter 1) and (ii) parents’
social class (see Chapter 2) were discussed.
The research in this part examined the social ecology of early home
environments to shed light on the ‘how’, ‘under what socio-economic
and family circumstances’ and for ‘whom’ parenting takes place and to
delineate the factors that mediate its contribution to child outcomes.
The ‘how’ refers to the parenting practices and behaviours such as
home learning, parental warmth and sensitivity, discipline and aspira-
tions that have been found to contribute to the effectiveness of parental
involvement (Grolnick, 2003; Pomerantz et al., 2005). Parenting occurs
within diverse socio-economic contexts and is influenced by material
resources and the human and intellectual capabilities that parents bring
into family interactions. The influence of parents’ social class on child
development was examined amidst policy initiatives in Britain to lift
children out of poverty. Children who face socio-economic disadvan-
tage have been found to fare less well academically (Burchinal et al.,
2002; Gutman et al., 2010; Rouse and Fantuzzo, 2009) and socially
(Foster et al., 2005). For ‘whom’ parenting takes place refers to child
characteristics, behaviour and attributes (e.g. attitudes towards school,
cognitive and linguistic abilities) which are likely to influence parenting
considering that parent–child interactions are symbiotic (Collins et al.,
2000). Parental practices and behaviours, child characteristics and fam-
ily income and parental education can function as risk or protective
factors in explaining children’s cognitive, social and academic out-
comes individually and cumulatively (Mistry et al., 2010). Examining
the interplay of these factors is invaluable because parenting and child
development are dynamic processes shaped by a myriad of influences.
An ecological approach to understanding family processes and the
home learning environment means that influences, both proximal
and distal to children’s life, are accounted for. To this end, the influ-
ences of the immediate family context and parents’ social class on
child outcomes as well as the wider social, ideological and cultural cir-
cumstances that surround parents’ and children’s life were examined.
Ecological perspectives regarding the trajectories of academic, linguistic
and social development in children have identified a complex pattern
of child-related characteristics such as cognitive and language skills
(Ayoub et al., 2009); parenting practices, parent–child relationships
(Campbell, 2002; Keenan and Wakschlag, 2000) and parental psycholog-
ical well-being (NICHED Early Child Care Research Network, 1999); and
family income and parental employment and education (Dearing et al.,
2001). The knowledge of either parental or socio-economic influences
The Early Home Environment in an Unequal Society 19
alone is not sufficient to understand children’s experiences of grow-

ing up and the role that parents play in shaping them. To capture
this dynamic interaction, factors such as children’s cognition, language
and behaviour; the physical, emotional and social aspects of the child’s
early years’ environment (e.g. parent–child interactions, home learn-
ing, parental affection and discipline); and socio-economic factors such
as parental employment, maternal education and family income, were
examined.
The MCS findings illuminated the impact of social class on child
development and offered evidence regarding the number of parents
from diverse socio-economic and ethnic groups and the frequency with
which they engaged with their children’s learning during preschool and
the first years in formal education. The findings revealed family income
and mother’s education and reading habits to be the strongest indicators
of five- and seven-year-olds’ language and literacy. There was no sig-
nificant association between parental support for learning at home and
young children’s language, literacy and social behaviour. Moreover, over
three-quarters of parents, from all socio-economic and ethnic groups,
routinely helped their children with their schoolwork. Yet, the achieve-
ment gap was not challenged. These findings paint a complex picture of
parental behaviour and practices, social class and child development at
the start of this century. While they pointed to a form of intensive par-
enting, which was practised irrespective of socio-economic status and
ethnicity, the impact of home learning on children’s language, academic
and social outcomes was found to be negligible. The achievement gap
between poor and wealthier young children was not challenged but
widened as children moved through the first three years of primary
school, suggesting that home learning and parental behaviours are not
significant pathways through which poverty affects children’s language,
literacy and social development. Most crucially, parents’ social class was
found to have a moderate to strong impact on children’s cognitive and
language skills as well as academic and social outcomes. Among all
socio-economic factors, mothers’ educational qualifications made the
largest contribution to children’s outcomes. While contesting deficit
assumptions about parenting and questioning the effectiveness of home
learning as a mechanism to reduce the achievement gap, the MCS find-
ings showed that social class still matters and influences parenting and
children’s outcomes.
1
Home Learning Environment and
Children’s Learning and Well-Being
Researchers in child development and other related disciplines have

long been concerned with factors, both proximal and distal, that pro-
mote good developmental, social and educational outcomes in children.
Building on the traditions of Vygotsky (1978) and Bruner (1983) with
their focus on the social nature of children’s learning and well-being,
I examined parent–child interactions (e.g. reading, homework support,
emotional closeness), especially with young children, and the parental
influences on children’s language, literacy and social behaviour at home.
How parents interact with their children forms a complex social and
cultural ecology and attempts to examine their interactions from a
single-discipline perspective are often misguided. Considering the inter-
disciplinary nature of scholarship on child–parent interactions, the MCS
analyses presented in this chapter have drawn on both qualitative and
quantitative studies from diverse fields such as social policy, psychology,
education and sociology.
Most qualitative studies on parents’ interactions with children and
their influences on children’s life have focused on school-age children
with fewer studies involving preschool children. There is however a
growing body of quantitative research that has filled this gap and com-
plemented important qualitative findings on the experiences of children
and parents in diverse families. In quantitative studies, parent–child
interactions are conceived along typologies of parenting (e.g. authori-
tative or authoritarian parenting) that consist of parenting dimensions
such as sensitivity, emotional closeness, affection or parental learn-
ing support. Parental sensitivity, cognitive stimulation and warmth
have been seen as crucial elements in the interactions between par-
ents and young children. Specifically, parenting sensitivity refers to
parents’ responsiveness to their children’s cues, emotions, interests and
21
22 The Early Home Environment in an Unequal Society
capabilities in ways that balance children’s needs for support with their
needs for autonomy. Cognitive stimulation refers to parents’ efforts to
enrich their children’s cognitive and language development by engag-
ing children in activities that are thought to promote learning. Parents’
warmth refers to parents’ expressions of affection and respect towards
their children to support their evolving sense of the self and feel-
ings of belonging (Barnett et al., 2010; Lugo-Gil and Tamis-LeMonda,
2008).
In the literature on parental influences on children’s learning, the
capabilities that parents bring into supporting their children’s learning
and education are thought to exist in three forms: personal disposi-
tions (e.g. attitudes towards learning, aspirations, willingness to provide
learning support); access to education resources and services; and access
to education-related institutions (Lee and Bowen, 2006). With regard
to parental involvement in children’s education, a broad distinction
has been made between parental involvement with learning at home
and at school. Home learning involves interactions between parents
and children that focus on learning activities such as reading, talking
about school issues (e.g. course selection, exams), homework support or
engagement in intellectual pursuits not directly related to school (e.g.
visits to museums, reading books, going to the library). In general, stud-
ies have shown that parental involvement with children’s education
and learning has positive effects, being associated with children’s early
linguistic and cognitive development and emergent literacy (Dickinson
and Tabors, 2001). However, there is a lack of consensus with regard to
the effectiveness of parental learning support at home, and questions
are often raised as to whether more parental support is always better
for children. Literacy-rich family contexts, where preschool children
have access to books and other print materials and parents engage with
them in age-appropriate learning opportunities, contribute positively to
child literacy and language and well-being (Pomerantz, Moorman and
Litwack, 2007). However, as discussed later in this chapter, literacy-rich
homes should not only be equated with the frequency of home learning
but also with its quality. The quality of home learning is a fluid concept,
shaped by many factors and thus it is not simply a question of the more
learning support the better.
Moreover, although the notion that socialisation is a parent-to-child
process has been challenged long ago (Bell, 1968), there is still little
research on the reciprocity in parent–child interactions, especially in the
early years. Children’s characteristics and dispositions exert a significant
influence on parents in that they evoke different responses in parents,
Home Learning Environment and Children’s Well-Being 23
which feed back into their reciprocal relationships. And the responses
children evoke are also affected by parents’ well-being. For example,
research has shown that mothers who experience depression (usually as
a side effect of the toxicity of poverty and disadvantage) have more diffi-
culties in interacting with their children (e.g. being less responsive) and
are more likely to find child-rearing a challenge (Kiernan and Huerta,
2008). These studies highlight the importance of not only examining
parenting dimensions but also focusing on children’s characteristics and
views and parental well-being to understand the symbiotic nature of
parent–child interactions.
In these studies on parenting, different models of child–parent
interactions tend to converge into three central dimensions: parental
involvement with children’s education and learning (e.g. home learn-
ing); parent–child affective experiences and parents’ emotional respon-
siveness (e.g. sensitivity, warmth, parental well-being; Lugo-Gil and
Tamis-LeMonda, 2008); and behaviour control and modelling (e.g. disci-
pline, expectations regarding behaviour and learning, maternal reading
habits and aspirations; Barber et al., 2005). These theoretical models
guided a large-scale examination of parent–child interactions by focus-
ing on specific aspects such as parental warmth, parental support with
reading and homework, parental aspirations and parental well-being.
Although the quality of the home environment in terms of reading to
children, helping with homework, being attuned to their emotions and
bonding with them and having high educational aspirations for them
has been defined narrowly, the MCS analyses illuminated interesting
relationships between aspects of parenting and child outcomes and their
wider socio-economic context.
While parenting is heralded as a key influence regarding children’s
learning and well-being, not many studies have examined parenting
within its wider social and economic context, especially in light of the
widening inequality gap in the United Kingdom and other Western
countries. In family policy discourses (a detailed discussion about Frank
Field’s and Graham Allen’s reports is in Chapter 5), a disproportionate
emphasis has been placed on parental learning support, behaviour, atti-
tudes and aspirations as key mechanisms for reducing the achievement
gap between poor and economically better-off young children. However,
although literacy-rich home environments have been found to asso-
ciate with positive educational outcomes in children, there is ambiguity
with regard to the effects of parental learning support on children’s lit-
eracy, language and social competence. Parenting is only a small part of
the story of widening inequality and the achievement gap, prompting
debates about the role of social class in children’s development and life
chances.
This chapter presents research based on MCS analyses on the links
between aspects of parenting (i.e. home learning support, parental
well-being, parents’ emotional responsiveness, parental educational
aspirations and reading habits) and language, literacy and social compe-
tence in three-, five- and seven-year-olds. Parent–children interactions
have been examined within their social ecology, drawing upon the
Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Model (1986a). This is to pro-
vide a theoretical lens to examine the influence of the home learn-
ing environment, parental behaviour and practices in particular, on
young children’s social competence, language and academic outcomes.
Parental learning support and sensitivity and children’s learning and
well-being are dynamic processes whereby child characteristics, atti-
tudes and behaviour; parental behaviour and practices; and the social
and economic circumstances that surround them vary over time and
influence both parenting and young children’s learning and social and
emotional competence. Much scholarship in family and childhood
studies has focused on either children or parents; however, we know
little about parent–child interdependence within its social and cul-
tural context to delineate the myriad of factors that shape children’s
well-being and the role of parents and children in mediating these fac-
tors. In their interactions, parents and children are active agents who
influence each other and whose symbiotic relationship changes over
time. Factors that promote or hinder children’s learning and social and
emotional well-being are examined within these different social systems
(e.g. individual child factors, parent–child interactions, socio-economic
context) by also considering the current political and cultural climate
to understand family policy and the relationship between the state and
individual parents and children.
Home learning and child outcomes
Educators and family policy makers consider parents to play a key role
in children’s acquisition of literacy and numeracy skills and social com-
petence. It is often assumed that the link between parental learning
support and children’s school performance is direct and causal, with
the view that the more frequent the parental learning support is, the
better children will perform at school. However, what is the evidence
that involving parents in home learning, especially in early years, is
associated with better academic and social outcomes for their children?
And if parents’ involvement matters in this way, what kinds of home

learning activities are associated with positive academic outcomes for
children? Does the effectiveness of parent involvement with home
learning depend upon: who the parents are, who the children are, how
the parents get involved and what the social and family circumstances
that surround parenting are? Although research on the effects of school-
based parents’ involvement is fairly consistent in suggesting an overall
positive contribution to children’s achievement, research on parental
involvement with home learning yields less consistent findings, espe-
cially with regard to the effects of home learning that is directly related
to school (see Pomerantz et al., 2007 for a comprehensive review).
On both sides of the Atlantic, there is little evidence to support
the links between home learning and children’s academic functioning
(Halle et al., 1997; Hill and Craft, 2003) and less consistent conclu-
sions are drawn regarding the effectiveness of home learning support
as a tool to reduce underachievement (Hartas, 2011; Lee and Bowen,
2006; Dearing et al., 2006; Hill and Taylor, 2004; Pezdek et al., 2002;
Shumow and Lomax, 2002). Further, there has been little research on
the contribution of routine home learning to young children’s social
and emotional competence (Pomerantz et al., 2006). Although parents’
involvement with activities that promote children’s overall intellectual
development (not directly related to school) has been linked with school
achievement (Dickinson and Tabors, 2001), assistance with homework
does not always appear to have such benefits. In fact, several studies of
families from diverse backgrounds have revealed that parental involve-
ment with homework is associated with poor performance in school in
that parental assistance with homework is often a reaction to children’s
low academic performance (Cooper et al., 2000). The lack of definitive
conclusions about the effectiveness of parental involvement with home
learning raises concerns, especially among low-income families because,
for them, home learning is the most frequent form of involvement
(Ritblatt et al., 2002).
In examining the relationship between home learning support and
children’s outcomes through the analyses of the MCS, an important
question was whether children’s language, literacy and social compe-
tence at ages three, five and seven were differentiated along routine
learning support at home. Home learning activities included enrich-
ment activities and those that were directly related to school to distin-
guish home learning for the purpose of creating a culture of learning at
home from home learning as a reaction to school demands, with the lat-
ter having implications about parents’ and teachers’ roles. Specifically,
home learning referred to parental support with emergent literacy (i.e.

learning the alphabet, songs/rhymes, book reading) at age three; and
support with homework (i.e. help with reading and writing) and enrich-
ment activities (i.e. book reading, playing music, storytelling) at ages five
and seven. Parental learning support was expressed in terms of the fre-
quency of involvement which was rated by using a Likert scale, ranging
from ‘every day’ to ‘not at all’.
The MCS children’s outcomes included measures of language, literacy
and social competence obtained at ages three, five and seven. Children’s
language measures were based on standardised scores obtained from
sub-tests (i.e. Vocabulary Naming from the British Ability Scales II –
BAS II) at ages three and five and teachers’ assessment of Speaking and
Listening at age seven. Children’s literacy scores were based on teach-
ers’ measures collected via the Communication Language and Literacy
(CLL) component of the Foundation Stage Profile (FSP) assessment of
children’s progress over the first year of formal education in England
(age five), and teachers’ assessment of reading and writing plus a stan-
dardised reading score (i.e. Word reading from the BAS II) at age seven.
The CLL contains Language for Communication and Thinking; Link-
ing Sounds and Letters; Reading; and Writing. The FSP is thought to
provide a more developmentally appropriate picture of social and aca-
demic progress within the school context for children of all abilities
and children with English as an additional language (Qualifications and
Curriculum Authority, 2000).
Finally, measures of social competence were obtained from teacher
and parent ratings of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ)
which included measures of positive/prosocial and negative behaviour
at ages three, five and seven. The SDQ (Goodman, Meltzer and Bailey,
1998), consisting of five scales with five items each, Emotional Symp-
toms, Conduct Problems, Hyperactivity, Peer Problems and Pro-social,
was employed. In each subscale, scores for each of the five items were
summed, giving a range of 0–10, and the total difficulties score, which
is the sum of all problem SDQ domains (i.e. Emotional Symptoms,
Conduct Problems, Hyperactivity and Peer Problems), had a range of
0–40. Further behaviour measures were obtained via teacher ratings
of Personal, Social and Emotional (PSE) development (i.e. Dispositions
and Attitudes; Social Development; and Emotional Development) of
the FSP.
The findings on parental learning support and its links with children’s
outcomes (i.e. language, literacy and behaviour) paint an interesting
picture. Specifically, the effects of the frequency of parental support
with enrichment activities and homework were not found to be signif-

icant for many learning activities, for example, help with the alphabet
and writing, signing songs/rhymes, telling stories and playing music.
Whether parents engaged daily or less often (e.g. once a week) with these
activities did not make any difference in their three- and five-year-olds’
language, literacy (including emergent literacy) and social competence.
The frequency with which parents read to their children and supported
them with reading homework had a weak effect on their language, liter-
acy and social competence as rated by their teachers at the end of their
first year in formal education (Hartas, 2011). Likewise, the frequency of
parental learning support was not found to contribute to teacher rat-
ings of seven-year-olds’ language (Speaking and Listening) and literacy
(Reading and Writing) despite the fact that a large number of parents
from diverse socioeconomic and ethnic groups offered frequent learn-
ing support (every day/several times a week) to their children (Hartas,
2012).
In probing further the relationship between the frequency of parental
learning support at home (i.e. every day, several times a week, once or
twice a week) and seven-year-olds’ word reading, a standardised mea-
sure of reading (i.e. word recognition) was employed. This complements
other analyses on the relationship between parental reading support
and children’s literacy (reading and writing scores as rated by their
teachers) in that word reading is a standardised measure, independent
of teachers’ assessment. Consistently with previous analyses, whether
parents offered help with reading every day or once a week made a neg-
ligible difference to children’s word reading scores. This is true for all
socio-economic groups. Specifically, for parents in the bottom-income
quintile, helping with reading every day was associated with a mean
reading score of 101, compared to 98 for reading once a week; for the
second from the bottom quintile the mean reading score was 104 (for
every day) compared to 103 (once a week); and for the top quintile the
mean reading score was the same (115) whether reading every day or
once a week. However, the differences observed are socio-economic (see
Chapter 2 for the findings on the link between socio-economic factors
and children’s language, literacy and social behaviour).
In examining children’s behaviour, parental learning support was
found to link to mothers’ and teachers’ ratings of behaviour difficul-
ties and prosocial behaviour for three-, five- and seven-year-olds. Home
learning in the form of reading books made a modest contribution to
children’s prosocial behaviour at age five (as rated by parents), whereas
homework support made a contribution to five-year-olds’ behaviour as
rated by their teachers. For teachers, parental education and homework

support made a modest contribution to their perceptions of children’s
behaviour, possibly because teachers tend to rate children’s behaviour
positively in light of good homework habits. Interestingly, parental
learning support was not found to relate to ratings of children’s emo-
tional difficulties, such as anxiety. This is consistent with a study
by McLeod et al. (2007) in which meta-analyses of 47 studies were
conducted to explore the link between parental styles and childhood
anxiety. Across these studies, parenting accounted for only 4 per cent of
the variance in child anxiety. The weak association between parenting
and child anxiety suggests that the origins of children’s anxiety may lie
with factors other than parenting.
Collectively, what these findings show is that young children’s lan-
guage, literacy and social competence are not differentiated along
the frequency with which parents engage with home learning (with
the exception of the modest contribution of book reading to chil-
dren’s prosocial behaviour). Routine parental learning support, for either
enrichment or homework, did not translate into higher teacher ratings
of children’s language and literacy during the first three years of their
formal education. In similar MCS analyses by Dearden et al. (2011),
the home-learning environment (reading in particular) was found to
explain about 16 per cent of the achievement gap in three-year-olds’
cognitive scores but was not found to explain any variance in the gap
of five-year-olds’ cognitive scores. Most crucially, the influence of chil-
dren’s early home learning environment was found to be no longer
visible during primary school. One may argue that the contribution
of parental learning support is indirect, and whose impact takes time
to materialise; however, we should exercise caution when approaching
home learning and parental involvement in education as causal factors
that shape children’s language and academic performance in a direct
and unmediated manner.
Parent–child interactions and child outcomes
The quality of parents’ interactions with their children (e.g. parental

affection and parents’ psychological well-being) contributes to chil-
dren’s evolving social relatedness, empathy and prosocial behaviour
(Knafo and Plomin, 2006b). Parental sensitivity, affection and respect
towards children influence child development and learning (Barnett
et al., 2010; Lugo-Gil and Tamis-LeMonda, 2008). Positive and warm
parenting supports children’s well-being by offering them a safe
platform to moderate emotional responses and associated behaviours

and manage stress and relationships (Power, 2004), whereas reduced
parental sensitivity and emotional responsiveness have been linked to
internalising (Barnett et al., 2010) and externalising behavioural difficul-
ties (Campbell, 2002). When parents are warm, responsive and sensitive
to their children’s needs, prosocial behaviour has been found to increase
(Campbell, 2002).
In the MCS, the quality of parent–child interactions and relationships
was examined for children at ages three, five and seven by asking par-
ents questions such as ‘How often do you enjoy listening and doing
things with your child?’; ‘How often do you express affection by hug-
ging, kissing?’; and ‘Overall, how close would you say you are to your
child?’ Maternal affection and emotional responsiveness were rated on a
Likert scale, ranging from 1 = ‘never’ to 5 = ‘always’ (for ‘how often . . . ’
questions) and 1 = ‘not very close’ to 4 = ‘extremely close’ (for ‘how
close...’ questions). Parents (97% were mothers) were also asked to rate
statements such as: ‘Child’s feeling can be unpredictable towards me’;
‘Child is sneaky/manipulative with me’; ‘Child is in bad mood for the
whole day’ or ‘Child spontaneously shares information with me’; ‘Child
openly shares feelings/experiences’ to obtain information on a range of
negative and positive interactions between parents and children. Mea-
sures of parents’ psychological well-being were obtained via questions
such as ‘How often the mother felt hopeless’; ‘How often felt worth-
less’; or ‘How often felt depressed’ to examine perceptions of children’s
behaviour from parents who experienced psychological distress such as
depression or anxiety, considering that they have been found to perceive
their children’s behaviour negatively (Foster et al., 2005).
Although these measures reflect a narrow conception of parent–child
interactions, the findings illuminated the dynamic interdependence
between parents and children. The analyses revealed that parent–child
positive and negative interactions and parental well-being made a sig-
nificant contribution to three- and five-year-olds’ behaviour as perceived
at home. Specifically, maternal sensitivity and warmth significantly
contributed to child prosocial behaviour whereas maternal negative
feelings and mental health difficulties (e.g. depression, anxiety) were
linked to child behavioural, social and emotional difficulties (Hartas,
2011). In other words, mothers’ emotional closeness to their chil-
dren affected their perceptions of their children’s behaviour at home,
in that the closer they were to their children the higher they rated
their prosocial behaviour. In contrast, the emotional closeness between
parents and children did not appear to influence teachers’ ratings
of five-year-olds’ behaviour and seven-year-olds’ language and literacy

(Hartas, 2011, 2012). Rather, teachers’ ratings of children’s literacy and
language were influenced by how well the children behaved in class.
Children’s cognitive and linguistic characteristics, social behaviour
and attitudes shape their interactions with parents at home and teach-
ers’ perceptions of their learning and behaviour at school. Children’s
cognitive characteristics were measured through the Bracken School
Readiness Assessment (BSRA) at age three and the BAS II at ages five and
seven; their language was measured through the Naming Vocabulary
and Word Reading of the BAS II; their behaviour through the SDQ; and
their attitudes to learning and school through self-completed reports.
Specifically, children’s attitudes to school were obtained through ques-
tions such as ‘How often is school interesting?’; ‘How much do you like
school?’; and ‘How much do you like answering questions in class?’
Children’s behaviour was rated through questions such as ‘How often
do you behave well in class?’, ‘How often are you horrible to other chil-
dren at school?’, ‘How often do you talk to your friends during tasks?’,
whereas measures of internalising behaviour included statements such
as ‘How often do you feel sad?’ or ‘How often do you get worried?’ The
MCS findings showed that seven-year-olds’ behaviour and attitudes to
school correlated with their teachers’ ratings of language and literacy.
Children who regulated their behaviour in ways that were consistent
with school rules and expectations were likely to attract higher literacy
ratings, in that teachers’ perceptions of children’s school performance
tends to be affected by children’s behaviour (Hartas, 2012).
Parent–child interactions are bidirectional and symbiotic in that par-
ents’ affection and sensitivity towards their children are influenced by
children’s dispositions and behaviour and vice versa. Combs-Ronto et al.
(2009) showed cyclical interactions between children’s behaviour diffi-
culties and negative parenting across time for both boys and girls: neg-
ative parenting in the form of negative feelings and non-responsiveness
was found to predict children’s inappropriate behaviour. Conversely,
children’s lack of self-regulation was found to contribute to negative
parenting. These findings showed that children also shape their interac-
tions with parents, emerging as active agents whose behaviour changes
over time. A peak of socially inappropriate behaviours, aggression in
particular, has been shown in three-year-olds (Egger and Angold, 2006),
followed by a decline in behaviour difficulties between the ages of three
and five years (Lavigne et al., 1996) when most children start school.
Among preschool children with concerns of inappropriate behaviour,
approximately 50 per cent will cease to display these concerns by school
entry (Campbell 2000; Keenan and Wakchhlag, 2000). This suggests

that for most young children, concerns with their behaviour are tran-
sient, a phase of development within which they test boundaries and
develop, through trial and error, self-control and autonomy. It also con-
firms that not only parents but also the wider socialisation context
(e.g. school, peers, role models in communities) influence how children
see themselves in relation to others and understand their place in the
world.
Parent–child interactions are relational and affected by contextual fac-
tors such as the nature of the communities in which parenting occurs
(Kotchick and Forehand, 2002). Parents socialise their children to func-
tion congruently within the various social networks that comprise their
family’s world (Lewis and Lamb, 2007). Parents in impoverished or dan-
gerous neighbourhoods are more likely to monitor their children and
expect obedience and respect for authority in order to keep children safe
(Kotchick and Forehand, 2002). In such contexts, high parental control
has been associated with good parenting (Lamborn et al., 1996), whereas
in middle-class families and neighbourhoods, fostering autonomy and
self-directed behaviour are valued. Parenting is embedded into its cul-
tural and socio-economic context and parent–child interactions are ‘fit
for purpose’ as a means of adapting to a given context.
Parental behaviour and aspirations and child outcomes
In models of parenting, parental behaviours with regard to reading

habits and educational aspirations are thought to influence child out-
comes. In this section, the links between these parental behaviours and
five- and seven-year-olds’ language and literacy were examined. A range
of MCS measures on mothers’ reading habits and educational aspira-
tions were obtained during interviews. Specifically, mothers’ frequency
of reading for enjoyment ranged from 1= ‘every day’ to 7 = ‘less often or
never’, and mothers’ educational aspirations were measures along state-
ments such as ‘Would you like your child to stay on at school post 16?’
and ‘Would you like your child to attend university?’
Maternal reading habits were strongly linked with teachers’ ratings of
language and literacy in seven-year-olds across income groups. Within
the bottom-income quintile, children of mothers who read every day for
pleasure scored higher in reading (standard score of 111) than children
of mothers who read once a week (101). Similarly, in the top quintile,
children of mothers who read for enjoyment every day scored higher
(124) compared to those reading once a week (113). Similar patterns
emerged when the effects of maternal reading habits on seven-year-olds’

reading were examined in light of mothers’ educational qualifications.
Children of mothers without any educational qualifications who read
for enjoyment once a week scored significantly lower (98) in reading
than those whose mothers were reading every day (108). Similarly, for
mothers with qualifications at a degree level, reading every day for
enjoyment was associated with a much higher score in their children’s
reading (123) compared to the score (110) obtained by children whose
mothers read once a week. These findings showed that the frequency
with which mothers read for pleasure is strongly related with their chil-
dren’s reading scores, and this is the case across family income and
education groups. Consistently, across socio-economic groups, there was
a difference of around 1 Standard Deviation (SD) in seven-year-olds’
reading scores between mothers who read for pleasure daily and those
who read once a week. Family income and maternal education played
a significant role in that they accentuated the positive effects of mater-
nal reading habits. Children of mothers who were educated and at the
top-income quintile performed much better with reading than children
whose mothers had no qualifications and were at the bottom quintile
(even though they all read for enjoyment daily) (see Chapter 2 for a
detailed discussion on the links between socio-economic factors and
child outcomes).
The MCS findings showed mothers’ reading habits and the quality of
the reading experience, likely to be magnified in educated mothers, to
influence children’s literacy. In contrast to the weak impact of routine
home learning support, mothers’ routine reading for enjoyment had a
significant impact on their children’s reading. This suggests that moth-
ers’ engagement with reading and other literacy activities is a better
barometer of the extent to which the home environment is literacy-
rich. Maternal reading habits are likely to reinforce the intrinsic value
of reading and learning in contrast to homework activities that mainly
serve an instrumental purpose (a response to school demands). These
findings highlight the importance of home learning not necessarily as
an extension of school learning but as a way of creating literacy-rich
homes characterised by a relaxed exploration of ideas to help children
to internalise the value of learning (Hartas, 2011).
Regarding parental educational aspirations, the MCS findings showed
that most parents, irrespective of socio-economic status and ethnicity,
expressed high educational aspirations for their children. Almost all
parents in the bottom-income quintile (97%); the second from bottom
(96%); the third from the bottom (98%); the fourth (98%); and the top
quintile (99%) reported that they would like their children to stay on
in education. Roughly the same percentage of parents, that is, 97 per
cent in the bottom, 96 per cent in the second from bottom, 97 per
cent in the third, 97 per cent in the fourth and 98 per cent in the top
quintile, would like their children to attend university. Parental aspi-
rations regarding their children’s education was also found to be high
across ethnic groups. Compared to White parents (97.9%), 100 per cent
of parents of Indian and Black African backgrounds reported that they
would like their children to stay on at school and attend university.
A roughly equal percentage of parents with (99%) and without (96%)
educational qualifications expressed high educational aspirations. Thus,
irrespective of income, education and ethnicity, most parents would like
their children to pursue further and higher education.
As with earlier research (Compton-Lilly, 2003; Gorski, 2008; Lareau
and Horvat, 1999; Leichter, 1978), what the MCS findings tell us is that
parents who live in poverty have similar attitudes towards educational
aspirations and learning as their middle-class counterparts. Johnson and
colleagues (2008) and Gutman and Akerman (2008) also found that dis-
advantaged parents have the same aspirations as their wealthier peers
to support their children’s learning and academic progress, challeng-
ing deficit assumptions of low aspirations and lack of engagement with
children’s education in disadvantaged families. Such assumptions mis-
recognise and misrepresent parents who are blamed for the unequal
outcomes in their children’s school performance. Policy discussions on
parental involvement and educational aspirations tend to construe aspi-
rations as a process that ‘occurs outside of social relations and the
micro-politics of educational organisations’ (Morley, 1999: 722). Aspi-
rations, however, do not materialise in a vacuum but within a context
where inequality is actively tackled and genuine educational opportuni-
ties for both children and adults are available and likely to drive upward
social mobility.
Many myths surround disadvantaged parents, especially about their
work ethic and motivation to support their children’s learning. It is true
that low-income parents are less likely to attend school functions or
volunteer in their children’s classrooms (US National Center for Educa-
tion Statistics, 2005), not because they care less about education but
because they do not have the time and the capacity to easily access
schools. In the United States, according to the Economic Policy Insti-
tute (2002), poor working adults spend more hours working each week
than their wealthier peers: 83 per cent of children from low-income fam-
ilies have at least one employed parent and around 60 per cent have
at least one parent who works full-time and year-round (US National
Center for Children in Poverty, 2004). The severe shortage of living-
wage jobs means that many low-income parents work multiple jobs,
work evenings, have jobs without paid leave and cannot afford child-
care and public transportation (Gorski, 2008). This evidence paints a
picture that is very different from that of the idle poor. The fallacy of
the idle poor was first challenged by Seebohm Rowntree who, in 1899,
undertook his famous survey in York, England, to explore the ‘minimum
necessaries for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency’. Rowntree
found that the key factor in explaining poverty was that the wage of the
wage earner in the family was ‘insufficient to maintain a moderate fam-
ily in a state of physical efficiency’ despite the fact that the wage earner
was in regular work. Yet, a century later, we witness a resurfacing of the
discourses of a culture of poverty and the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’
poor amidst rising inequality.
As discussed in Chapter 3, despite the increasing pressures on work-
ing parents’ time, as the MCS findings showed, most of them routinely
support their children’s learning at home and have high educational
aspirations for them. However, it may be the quality and orientation,
rather than lack of parental support that works against bridging the
achievement gap. Educated and financially secure parents are better
placed to invest in their children’s learning. For example, in a study
by Bennett et al. (2012), working- and middle-class children’s intensity
and type of participation in extra-curricular activities varied. Middle-
class parents were more likely to ‘customise’ children’s involvement in
activities whereas working-class parents were concerned with safety and
wanted to ensure that participation in activities is somehow linked to
social mobility or results in some form of social advantage for their
children. Most crucially, some working-class children were less likely
to participate, not because their parents did not value extra-curricular
activities but because such activities were not available to them. Increas-
ingly, parents are left alone to generate the intellectual capital necessary
for their children to access opportunities, and are blamed for their
‘low aspirations’ if opportunities do not materialise. Genuine education
opportunities, especially for economically deprived parents, are crucial
to promoting learning at home by enhancing parents’ education and
learning habits. Government policy does not need to persuade par-
ents to get involved, but should support them in tackling the structural
constraints that poverty imposes on their life.
Nick Clegg proclaimed that ‘parents hold the fortunes of the chil-
dren they bring into this world in their hands’ and that ‘the evidence
is unambiguous: if we give them that kind of attention and support

when they are young, they will feel the benefits for the rest of their
lives’ (2010). However, the research presented in this chapter shows
that the evidence about the benefits accrued from parental learning
support is indeed ambiguous, and that although most parents across
diverse groups had high educational aspirations for their children and
routinely offered learning and emotional support, children’s learning
and well-being were not primarily influenced by parenting. The achieve-
ment gap remained as wide as ever and, as discussed in the next chapter,
the influences of socio-economic factors are stronger and far more per-
vasive than parenting and the home learning environment in shaping
children’s life.
2
Parents’ Social Class Still Matters . . .
Since 1997, major anti-poverty policy initiatives have been introduced

in the United Kingdom to ‘lift’ children out of poverty. The targets set
by the then New Labour government were to reduce child poverty by
25 per cent by 2005, halving it by 2010 and eventually eradicating
child poverty by 2020. In 2005, the United Kingdom scored close to
bottom (20th place out of 26) in the child poverty league among the
world’s richest countries (UNICEF, 2005). Despite many policy initia-
tives, poverty remains the reality for a large number of UK children
born at the start of this century. In actual numbers, between 2.9 and
3.9 million children in the United Kingdom today are measured as poor,
with the two figures representing the number of poor children before
and after housing costs are considered (Nyhagen Predelli et al., 2008).
Recent findings on the persistence of child poverty after the publication
of the 2012 UNICEF report have highlighted the unattainability of the
goal to eradicate child poverty by 2020. Some argue that the indicators
used for child poverty require rethinking where others point to stag-
nant social mobility and growing inequality to explain policy failure to
tackle child poverty. Child poverty has important implications consider-
ing that the effects of socio-economic disadvantage are stronger in early
childhood (Yeung et al., 2002) and are linked to reduced educational
opportunities (Horgan, 2009) and social adjustment problems in later
life (Tremblay, 2000).
While there is no single definition of poverty and socio-economic dis-
advantage, there is a consensus that family income, parental education
and occupational status, parents’ social class in other words, represent
poverty best because they capture children’s socio-economic context
and daily experiences (Ayoub et al., 2009; Nyhagen Predelli et al.,
2008). Maternal educational qualifications and parental employment
are important proxy measures of poverty because, in addition to income,
36
Parents’ Social Class Still Matters . . . 37
they relate to increases in human and intellectual capabilities (Hoff

et al., 2002; Duncan and Magusson, 2002) which have been linked to
young children’s vocabulary and reading (Scheffner et al., 2010). Mater-
nal education in particular is an important socio-economic indicator,
considering that family income and parental employment can vary tem-
porally, whereas maternal education is less varied over time (McLoyd,
1989). The human and intellectual resources accumulated through edu-
cational qualifications influence the ways in which parents interact with
their children, the type of activities they promote and the attitudes,
beliefs and values they express towards learning, as well as their views
about child development and the capabilities they wish to develop in
their children (Hoff et al., 2002). Finally, in low-income families, par-
ents with some educational qualifications tend to be more resourceful
in making ends meet.
Impoverished family environments are likely to impact on chil-
dren’s cognitive skills and language (Bradley and Corwyn, 2002; Linver
et al., 2002). Beginning in early childhood, disadvantaged children, on
average, do not gain cognitive skills as rapidly as their economically
well-off peers, resulting in a substantial difference already evidenced at
age three, with three-year-olds performing in language and cognitive
skills significantly below the national norms (Ayoub et al., 2009; Black
et al., 2000; Hills et al., 2010). Language, including vocabulary, syn-
tactic ability and phonological awareness, has been found to associate
with socio-economic factors (Whitehurst and Lonigan, 1998). Data from
the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the National House-
hold Education Survey (Bradley et al., 2001) indicated that mothers
who live in poverty are less likely (mainly due to time constraints
and lack of education) than wealthier mothers to engage in extended
verbal interactions with their children. As a study by Hart and Risley
(1995) demonstrated, on average, children in poverty enter preschool
with a vocabulary of about 5000 words as compared to 20,000 words
for children from higher-income families. Moreover, children’s liter-
acy is strongly related to parents’ education, with children of parents
with reading difficulties being at a greater risk for literacy difficulties
(National Institute for Literacy, 1997).
Parents’ socio-economic status and child language and

literacy
The link between poverty and children’s cognitive abilities and lan-
guage has been well documented (Ayoub et al., 2009; Dahl and
Lochner, 2005). While the size of the socio-economic impact on

child outcomes has been debated (Mayer, 1997, 2002), there is com-
pelling evidence that poverty has deleterious effects on child develop-
ment, language and literacy in particular (Brookes-Gunn and Duncan,
1997; Feinstein, 2003; Hartas, 2011, 2012). Young children’s under-
performance in language and cognitive skills has significant impli-
cations because these skills predict long-term educational attainment
(Alexander and Entwisle, 1988). Language is the main medium for
instruction in literacy and mathematics and for children’s knowledge
organisation (Hindman et al., 2010). Consequently, young children with
language difficulties are likely to struggle with literacy (Catts et al., 2002;
Skibbe et al., 2008). Literacy is the most fundamental academic task
of children’s early years and can be very challenging (Hindman et al.,
2010). Young children are expected to learn how to decode or recog-
nise the letters that comprise words and relate each to the sound(s)
it represents, and ultimately extract meaning. Considering that cog-
nitive and language gains in young children are linked with gains in
literacy (Pasnak et al., 2008), we still know little about the impact of
socio-economic disadvantage on cognitive development, language and
literacy during preschool and the first years of primary school and the
extent to which socio-economic factors are associated with variation in
young children’s language and literacy. Examining the socio-economic
gaps in literacy prior to and during the first three years in primary
school has important implications in that literacy has received sig-
nificant attention in the early years’ curriculum (Pianta et al., 2007)
and forms the foundation for later school attainment (Duncan et al.,
2007).
Although there are numerous studies on the effects of poverty on chil-
dren’s cognitive and social development (Ayoub et al., 2009; Dahl and
Lochner, 2005), the impact of poverty on school readiness and emergent
literacy for preschool children and those at the start of formal education
has been under-researched. With the exception of the EPPE study and
initial analyses of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) by Hills and col-
leagues (2010), most research in the United Kingdom on the effects of
poverty on children’s outcomes tends to focus on older children (i.e.
Key Stages 2 and 3) and uses Free School Meals (FSM) as a proxy poverty
indicator (DENI, 2001; Department for Education and Skills, 2002; Social
Exclusion Unit (SEU), 2004). Utilising the MCS, the effects of family
income, parental employment and maternal educational qualification
on child outcomes were examined during the toddler years (age three),
at the start of formal education (age five) and the end of Key Stage 1 (age
seven) to investigate the size of the socio-economic impact at different

trajectories of children’s development and learning.
The MCS findings consistently showed that parental employment and
maternal educational qualifications yielded strong effects on children’s
language and cognitive skills at ages three, five and seven; emergent lit-
eracy at age three; and literacy at ages five and seven (Hartas, 2011).
The size of the socio-economic differences in child outcomes was found
to vary. Family income yielded moderate effects on vocabulary, emer-
gent literacy and literacy, whereas parental employment and maternal
educational qualifications had strong effects. For seven-year-olds, when
measures of social class were considered, family income and maternal
educational qualifications contributed best to children’s language and
literacy (Hartas, 2011, 2012). Specifically, family income made a signifi-
cant difference (i.e. one standard deviation) between poor and wealthier
seven-year-olds’ reading scores, with an average standard score of 100
for children in the bottom-income quintile compared to a score of 115
for children in the top quintile. The odds of being rated below average
by teachers for speaking and listening, reading and writing at the end
of Key Stage 1 were reduced as family income and maternal education
increased, with the odds dropping dramatically as income moved from
the bottom fifth to the second from the bottom quintile.
Further, the relationship between seven-year-olds’ reading scores and
the frequency of parental support with reading and maternal educa-
tional qualifications was examined. As with family income, for moth-
ers with limited educational qualifications, whether they helped their
seven-year-olds with reading every day (101) or once a week (103) made
a negligible difference in their reading scores. Similarly, for mothers with
educational qualifications at degree level, whether they offered learning
support every day or once a week made no difference in their chil-
dren’s reading scores, whereas seven-year-olds’ reading scores differed
as a function of maternal education (children’s average reading score of
98 for mothers without any qualifications compared to a score of 113
for mothers with a degree – a difference of 1 standard deviation or 15
points). This is not surprising in that a large body of research (Gutman
and Feinsten, 2010; Shonkoff and Phillips, 2000) points to the substan-
tive contribution of maternal education and reading habits to children’s
language, literacy and social development. Consistently, analyses of the
Avon study by Gregg and Washbrook (2011) showed that parental edu-
cation explained a sizeable part of the achievement gap in primary years.
Educated parents provide their children with cognitively stimulating
experiences and interactions such as going on museum and theatre trips,
engaging in conversations, reading books and teaching school-related

concepts (Bradley et al., 2001; Shonkoff and Phillips, 2000). In the Avon
analyses by Gutman and Feinsten (2010), mothers with higher educa-
tion and income levels provided more interactive, involved parenting
(e.g. playing with toys, showing picture books) for their children from
infancy to early childhood than mothers with lower education and
income.
Consistently with previous research, maternal educational qualifica-
tions yielded stronger effects on vocabulary and literacy skills than
did family income alone (Yeung et al., 2002). Income has been found
to make modest contributions to child outcomes in that much of its
influence is through parents’ investment in educational resources and
services (Linver et al., 2002; Yeung et al., 2002). Compared to educated
mothers, mothers with fewer school years interacted with their children
differently in that they used less advanced vocabulary, had limited liter-
acy skills themselves (Rowe et al., 2005) and were less likely to access
educational services that benefit their children (Foster et al., 2005).
Compared to their better-off peers, children living in poverty were less
equipped with these skills, and fared less well academically during the
first years of primary school. Further, these results show that socio-
economic factors affected certain aspects of child development (i.e.
vocabulary, school readiness, literacy) more than others (i.e. cognitive
skills), suggesting that language and literacy are more malleable than
are cognitive skills such as non-verbal reasoning when socio-economic
circumstances change (Yeung et al., 2002). Compared to language and
school performance, which are affected by families’ social and economic
milieu (Foster et al., 2005), visual/spatial skills, for example, have been
found to be less influenced by environmental factors (Pike et al., 2006).
The MCS findings also confirmed that children’s language and liter-
acy are affected primarily by parental education and income. This has
important policy implications considering that the socio-economic gap
is still wide, especially in the midst of many anti-poverty policies in
Britain during the first decade of this century. Although anti-poverty
policies resulted in a decrease by around two-thirds of that required to
meet the target in 2005, the figure begun to rise again after 2004–2005,
with poverty figures having come down from 34.1 per cent of chil-
dren in 1996/97 to 28.4 per cent, rising to 29.8 per cent in 2005–2006
(Morgan, 2007). To improve young children’s cognitive and language
skills, family literacy and genuine educational opportunities for parents
are crucial for providing stimulating early years’ learning. These should
be augmented by initiatives that support families as a whole to reduce

economic strain and improve the quality of parenting.
Optimal child development occurs within a context of adequate
resources, family support and parenting that is not strained by poverty
(Foster et al., 2005). Economic resources and parents’ capabilities are not
independent of each other but neither are they monotonic. Although
family income, parental employment and education are inter-related in
that income in workless households with uneducated parents is likely
to be low, these factors affect child development and school perfor-
mance differently. Increases in material investment, particularly among
poor families, make educational resources and services more accessible
which have a positive impact on child development (Gershoff et al.,
2007; Pike et al., 2006). However, income alone is not enough to reduce
socio-economic differences in children’s cognitive, language skills and
school performance, especially as the inequality gap widens. Maximis-
ing parents’ capabilities through education and training, access to public
services and equal opportunities for decent-wage jobs are crucial to ‘lift’
children out of poverty. Most importantly, capability building in parents
(see Chapter 8 for a detailed discussion on capability building) can be
achieved by supporting parents’ autonomy and resilience and by shift-
ing the discourses on poverty as a cultural practice to examining the
political and institutional arrangements that reproduce disadvantage.
Parents’ socio-economic status and children’s social

behaviour
In general, socio-economic factors have been found to be more strongly

associated with children’s long-term cognitive and language than with
their social behaviour (Aber et al., 2000; Duncan and Brooks-Gunn,
1997; Duncan et al., 1998), although links between poverty and chil-
dren’s behaviour have also been established (Dearing et al., 2001).
In delineating the pathways through which poverty affects children’s
behaviour, the family processes model has been employed in which
poverty is thought to have an indirect effect on young children’s
behaviour by impacting on parents’ well-being and behaviour (Bor
et al., 1997). Parenting behaviour and practices are strongly influ-
enced by parents’ psychological well-being. Disadvantaged parents’
well-being (e.g. mothers in poverty are likely to suffer from post-
natal depression (Gregg and Washbrook, 2011) due to daily hard-
ships) mediates the effects of poverty on child behaviour. As such,
the quality of parents’ interactions and communications with their
children and their perceptions of their behaviour is affected by par-

ents’ psychological well-being (Hobcraft and Kiernan, 2010). The MCS
findings showed specifically that, maternal psychological distress (e.g.
anxiety, depression) was a good predictor for three- and five-year-
olds’ behavioural difficulties (Hartas, 2011). Consistently with previous
research (Foster et al., 2005), mothers who experienced psychological
distress such as depression or anxiety rated their children’s behaviour
more negatively.
Three explanations have been offered to understand the ways in
which maternal depression in disadvantaged mothers is associated
with inflated ratings of children’s negative behaviours. First, cognitive
distortions due to mothers’ tendency towards pessimistic views may
contribute to perceiving children’s behaviour as unduly inappropri-
ate. Secondly, psychological difficulties are likely to pose a significant
stress on parenting, resulting in reduced tolerance of children’s age-
appropriate misbehaviour and, eventually, children may develop inap-
propriate behaviours as a reaction to an intolerant parenting. Thirdly,
depression and anxiety may heighten mothers’ sensitivity to nega-
tive behaviour resulting in increased ratings of problem behaviour in
children (Campbell, 2002).
Consistently with previous research (Foster et al., 2005; Lugo-Gil
and Tamis-LeMonda, 2008), the MCS findings showed that the effects
of family income, parental employment and maternal education
on children’s behaviour at ages three, five and seven were mod-
est for behavioural difficulties (e.g. hyperactivity, conduct difficul-
ties, peer problems) and weak for prosocial behaviour (measures of
child behaviour were obtained from the SDQ and PSE; see Chapter 1
for information). Other studies have also shown weak associations
between socio-economic factors and prosocial behaviour in four-
to-five-year-old Australian children (Edwards and Broomfield, 2008)
and among two-to-eleven-year-old Canadian children (Romano et al.,
2005). In other words, positive behaviour, such as being helpful and
cooperative and showing empathy, is not affected by parents’ socio-
economic circumstances as much as ratings of negative behaviour (e.g.
hyperactivity) are.
Parenting, class and the achievement gap
Consistently with the Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK report

by Hills and colleagues (2010), the MCS analyses by Hartas (2011,
2012) and Sullivan and colleagues (2010) showed that socio-economic
inequality has a significant impact on language, literacy and social

behaviour during the toddler years, which also persists into the first
years of formal school. Young children in poor households were already
disadvantaged before they started formal schooling despite their par-
ents’ efforts to support their learning at home. This trend is less likely to
be reversed as children in poverty go through education (see Hills et al.,
2010 for evidence on the long-term educational outcomes of children
in poverty). In the MCS analyses by Sullivan and colleagues, parents’
social class emerged as the biggest influence on children’s school out-
comes compared to the influence of parenting strategies such as book
reading or homework support. Specifically, social class, based on the
highest parental occupation by age three, was a stronger predictor of
school progress between the ages five and seven than a range of parent-
ing variables (Sullivan et al., 2010). These results point to the importance
of redistributive economic policies and educational opportunities rather
than parenting policies to support children from disadvantaged back-
grounds. They also have significant implications for social mobility
considering that around 38 per cent of intergenerational social mobil-
ity can be explained by observable educational factors (Blanden et al.,
2007). And, taking into account the current economic downturn, the
targets set by existing anti-poverty policies may not be materialised if
social class influences on children’s chances for education and social
development are not accounted for.
The MCS findings offer evidence that social class, paternal educa-
tion, in particular, strongly relates to children’s cognitive, language and
academic performance. What the findings show is that educational aspi-
rations, parental involvement with learning and conceptions of child
rearing do not differ along social class lines but children’s outcomes
in language and literacy do. The primary mechanisms through which
family income and parental education and employment affect child out-
comes are not differences in parents’ conceptions of childhood, nor are
differences in cultural norms, educational aspirations and involvement
with learning, but the quality of parenting strategies that educated par-
ents are more likely to deploy. And although educated parents are likely
to offer effective cultivation (through a mix of accessing resources, edu-
cational services, parental position in social hierarchy, a general culture
of learning at home and an intrinsic interest in intellectual pursuits),
they are not more aspirational, nor are they more concerned with their
children’s learning than mothers of a lower socio-economic status.
There is not a single pathway through which poverty affects chil-
dren’s development and learning (Foster et al., 2005; Yeung et al., 2002)
and parenting alone, as an environmental factor, has a small influence

on child outcomes. Factors such as routine home learning or parents’
educational aspirations that vary little with socio-economic position, as
shown in the MCS analyses, cannot play an important role in generat-
ing the social gradient observed in child language and literacy outcomes
(Gregg and Washbrook, 2011; Hartas, 2011, 2012). In contrast, fami-
lies’ socio-economic background such as income and parental education
explains a much bigger proportion of the variance in young children’s
language/literacy and social development at school entry and during the
primary school years (Hartas, 2011, 2012). Clearly, policies that focus on
the home learning environment and parenting alone ‘cannot possibly
eliminate the cognitive skill gaps between rich and poor young people
although they may reduce it’ (Dearden et al., 2011: 35).
Rising inequality creates economic, social and political challenges.
It poses obstacles to upward social mobility, making it harder for peo-
ple to access education and employment opportunities and advance
socially. Drawing on the OECD’s Divided We Stand report, the gap
between the income of the top 10 per cent and the bottom 10 per
cent in the United Kingdom and the United States has multiplied by
14 in the last 25 years (2011). As the report showed, in countries
with high inequality such as the United States and United Kingdom,
intergenerational mobility is low because young people’s fate is fixed
by their parents’ fortunes, reinforcing the vicious circle of disadvan-
tage. Inequality has a toxic influence on parents manifested in lacking
resources, increased psychological stress (e.g. maternal depression) and
a limited capacity to accumulate advantage for their children. Most
crucially, inequality violates parents’ human rights, mainly through
state surveillance, scrutiny and intervention in intimate family life
which further accentuate feelings of inadequacy in their parenting.
Inequality destroys the fabric of society not only because it breeds
resentment but also because it promotes individuated explanations
for poverty, and thus public policy is less likely to address inequality
and deal with it directly. Although several structural explanations have
been offered for growing inequality, such as globalisation, changes in
family and household structures and the proliferation of technology
and digitalisation (or a combination of all these), ‘culture of poverty’
discourses dominate social policy which hinder the testing and imple-
mentation of political solutions to tackle poverty. As such, the inter-
generational transmission of poverty is not addressed as a structural
issue but as an individual failure resorting in blaming individuals for
being poor.
There have always been debates as to the extent to which cultural

practices and structural differences shape parenting, but we still do not
know the exact mechanisms through which social class impacts on par-
enting and child outcomes. There is lack of consensus in the literature
as to the pathways through which parental education and employment
translate into parenting behaviours that are conducive to maximis-
ing children’s educational and social advantage. Observed parenting
differences are due, primarily, to disparities in resources and cultural
capital between middle-class and low-income families (Coontz, 1992;
Edin and Lein, 1997; Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2002; Newman, 1999),
which are likely to reproduce disadvantage (Bourdieu, 1994). A body
of research points to resource levels (e.g. money, educational services,
social networks) that educated parents in employment are more likely to
possess and invest in their children’s development. However, it is impor-
tant to differentiate between causes and effects of poverty and inequality
in that, although parents’ cultural norms and practices are affected by
structures, they do not cause them.
Parents’ cultural practices and parenting behaviour and aspirations
do not reproduce the achievement gap. The values of low-income par-
ents are similar in orientation to those of middle-class parents, thus
challenging the argument that poor families are lacking in mainstream
values. They have similar orientations towards work (Edin and Lein,
1997) and family (Coontz, 1992; Edin and Lein, 1997; Stack, 1974),
pointing to structural constraints rather than cultural values that keep
low-income parents from achieving middle-class outcomes for their
children. Clearly, disparities in resources explain the quality and effec-
tiveness of parental practices in terms of how well they translate into
children’s academic advantage. As such, social policy should not focus
on the value systems and aspirations of disadvantaged parents as an
explanation of the achievement gap. Rather, policy should be more
concerned about the fact that the ‘average’ family finds it increasingly
difficult to cope in unequal societies. Unequal school outcomes and
reduced opportunities cannot be tackled by encouraging (or even coerc-
ing) parents to internalise middle-class values of parenting. In fact, as
the MCS findings pointed out, most parents have done it and it has not
worked with regard to their children’s academic progress!
Parents’ social class still matters and yet family policy considers
parental involvement with children’s learning and parental behaviour
and practices (irrespective of parents’ socio-economic circumstances) to
be the primary mechanism for tackling inequality and reduced opportu-
nities. The achievement gap, however, is political and parents’ routine
learning support is less likely to close it. Despite growing evidence that
parental involvement with children’s learning explains a far smaller
proportion of the variance in child outcomes than do socio-economic
factors, parenting, often defined in narrow terms (e.g. reading to the
child, bonding with the child, having high educational aspirations), is
used to explain the achievement gap and other social problems. Parental
involvement with children’s learning matters, but what matters most are
parents’ social class and its influences on child development and learn-
ing. Whether we see parental input with home learning as an extension
of the school input with parents transmitting literacy and numeracy
skills down to their children, or as a culture of learning and motivational
experiences at home, the powerful influences that socio-economic fac-
tors, maternal education in particular, exert on children’s well-being and
academic achievement should be acknowledged and accounted for.
The findings that social class is a much stronger predictor of dif-
ferences in cognitive, social and educational outcomes of three-, five-
and seven-year-olds than a range of parenting measures are not surpris-
ing in light of social science research evidence, accumulated over the
last decades. While parenting is important, a policy focus on parenting
alone is insufficient to tackle the impact of social inequalities on chil-
dren (Gillies, 2007; Hartas, 2011; Kiernan, 2010; Sullivan et al., 2010).
Deploying parental involvement with children’s learning as a key strat-
egy to tackle the achievement gap in families in poverty is ineffective
not because parental involvement with their children’s learning is lim-
ited or their educational aspirations are low, but because of inequality
in opportunities for parents to access education and build capability to
support their children’s learning effectively (Hartas, 2011, 2012). The
shift from social class to poor parenting in public discourses reflects a
wider trend of not considering class and other group identities as impor-
tant in understanding inequality. Prominent sociological theories in the
1990s (for example, by Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck) questioned
whether old conceptions of class are relevant to a post-industrial society
characterised by individuated lifestyles and uncertainty and shaped by
global market forces (Gillies, 2007).
The research presented in this chapter does not suggest that read-
ing and talking and showing warmth to children do not matter. They
do matter but not in a way that family policy makers would like
them to: as mechanisms to overcome structural inequality and equalise
opportunity for young children. Social mobility and equalisation of
opportunities require not individuated but political action, likely to be
achieved through income redistribution and tax policies, and open and
honest debates about structural inequality. Problems of structure (such

as poverty and disadvantage) should not be translated into parenting
solutions. The direct and robust link between social class and children’s
cognitive and educational outcomes does not lead to easy answers for
policy makers, but does point out the importance of recognising the
social and structural context of childhood inequalities. As Sullivan and
colleagues argue, since ‘policymakers have limited leverage on parent-
ing, policy attention would be better focussed elsewhere’ (Sullivan et al.,
2010: 34). And, as discussed in Chapter 9, reforming tax and benefit
policies and promoting a fairer resource distribution model are impor-
tant steps towards tackling inequalities in children’s outcomes. Most
crucially, building capability in parents through access to genuine edu-
cation and training opportunities and the availability of decent-wage
jobs are needed to halt inequality.
3
Parenting in an Unequal Society
Socio-economic and class differences are enacted in families and schools

and children’s childhoods differ along social class lines. The home lives
of children are unequal and this inequality is translated into educa-
tional inequality, a part of larger systemic patterns of inequality that
persist across generations. The interplay between social class, parent-
ing, education and social policy has had an interesting trajectory in
the United Kingdom. In the 1960s, debates on the influence of social
class on education raised awareness of unequal school success. Then the
public discourse moved on to accountability in the 1970s and marketi-
sation during the Thatcher years in the 1980s, performativity and school
improvement during the Blair years to parenting and early intervention
at the start of the 21st century (Bridges, 2010). Partnership, as a theme,
has run through these policy trends with its focus shifting from schools
and teachers to parents (conceived as edu-parents) to tackle unequal
school success. To understand the interplay of social class and parenting,
however, we should consider the wider cultural and social trends and
the changing face of parenting, poverty and public policy in Western
societies.
Cultural trends in parenting in diverse families
The time parents spend with their children has increased steadily since
the 1970s (Gershuny, 2000). Analyses of time diaries from 1975 to 2000
have shown that parent time, across all social groups, has increased and
that the gap between fathers’ and mothers’ time spent has narrowed
(Bianchi et al., 2007). During the same time, parents work longer hours
and most women (70% in 2000s compared to 20% in the 1970s) return
to work within the first year of their child’s birth. Parents exert effort
48
Parenting in an Unequal Society 49
to ensure that other responsibilities or engagements do not get in the

way of being with their children. As a result, most parents experience
a ‘time squeeze’ in terms of prioritising time spent with their chil-
dren over other activities (e.g. housework, adult relationships, personal
hobbies, community engagement; Craig, 2006). The intensification of
family time is not confined to the middle classes alone. According to
Bianchi, Robinson and Milkie who examined US statistical data com-
piled at the Changing Rhythms of American Family Life, found that fathers
and mothers spend more time today with their children than they did
in 1975, in spite of the increasing numbers of women in the American
workforce. Today’s married mothers have less leisure time (5.4 fewer
hours per week) and 71 per cent would like to have more time for them-
selves as do 57 per cent of married fathers. Yet, 85 per cent of all parents
still think they do not spend enough time with their children. Parental
involvement with children’s learning (i.e. the number of parents who
read daily to their children) has also been on the rise: 53 per cent in
1993 to 60 per cent in 2005 (Federal Interagency Forum on Child and
Family Statistics, 2006).
In the United Kingdom, similar trends in parenting have emerged.
Over the last decades, there has been a significant rise in the number
of parents who are frequently involved with their children’s learn-
ing and other activities at home. In 2007, a large-scale survey on
parental involvement in children’s education, commissioned by the
then Department for Children, Schools and Families in England, showed
a significant increase in the number of parents involved with their chil-
dren’s learning during the first decade of this century, with the largest
increase being in the percentage of parents who read frequently with
their children reaching 79 per cent (Peters et al., 2008). Consistently, in
the MCS, the frequency of parental involvement with home learning
support was found to be high for parents of three-, five- and seven-year-
olds (Hartas, 2011, 2012). Specifically, over three-quarters of parents
reported that they were routinely involved (daily or several times a
week) with learning activities at home such as reading books, teaching
the alphabet, telling stories and helping their children with homework.
Among these, over half the parents responded that they engage with
these activities daily (around 2% of parents in the MCS reported not to
read to their children at all).
Although the time parents spend with their children playing or doing
homework and other activities such as book reading has increased sig-
nificantly over the years, we have little information about the number
of parents from diverse socio-economic and ethnic groups and the
frequency with which they engage with their children at the start of
this century in Britain. The MCS analyses examined income and eth-
nic differences with regard to the percentage of parents involved with
homework support and enrichment activities. Across socio-economic
and ethnic groups, relatively small differences were found in the number
of parents involved daily with home learning with their three-, five- and
seven-year-olds. Small differences were found, for example, with regard
to book reading and homework reading, showing that a higher percent-
age of parents living above the poverty line (54% and 61%) read books to
their five-year-olds and helped them with their homework daily, com-
pared to the number of less well-off parents (38% and 55%) (Hartas,
2011). Consistently, the findings from the Avon Longitudinal Study of
Parents and Children showed that educational interactions such as read-
ing, helping with homework, drawing and painting between parents
and their nine-year-olds did not differ by socio-economic background,
and thus home learning support does not appear to ‘form a major
part of the story of educational inequality’ (Gregg and Washbrook,
2011).
Consistently with previous research (Lee and Bowen, 2006; Peters
et al., 2008), what the MCS findings show is that most parents are
frequently involved with their children’s learning at home and this
is irrespective of their socio-economic status and ethnicity. In fact, in
the study by Peters and colleagues (2008), parents from minority eth-
nic backgrounds were more positively predisposed towards involvement
with their children’s learning, compared to White parents. Generally,
and consistently with a study by Siraj-Blatchford (2010), the findings
suggest that parents, especially those living in poverty, do not need
to be persuaded to become involved with their children’s education
and learning. Middle-class parents have always been prompt to fol-
low professionals’ advice about child rearing (Lareau, 2003). Recently,
however, more and more parents, from all socio-economic and ethnic
groups, appear to have internalised what Lareau described as ‘domi-
nant sets of cultural repertoires’ and practise them by engaging with
their children’s learning. Yet, despite routine parental learning support,
the achievement gap between poor and economically better-off five-
and seven-year-olds remained unchallenged, and, as children moved
through schooling, the gap widened (Hills et al., 2010). These find-
ings raise questions as to whether routine parental learning support
alone can influence the pathways through which poverty translates into
underachievement. To approach parental learning support as a key strat-
egy to reducing underachievement without considering families’ social
ecology is overly simplistic and potentially ineffective. In light of these

trends, deficit assumptions regarding parenting, especially for parents
who live in poverty, are contested. Although poverty makes it harder to
be a ‘good enough’ parent in terms of investing in resources and time
and accessing educational opportunities, the assumption that disadvan-
taged parents are not sufficiently involved with their children’s learning
is a myth.
Parenting and a ‘culture of poverty’
The heterogeneous distribution of parental involvement leads to an

important distinction between poverty as a cultural practice and poverty
as a structural inequality and reduced opportunities that reproduce the
achievement gap. Although a clash between parenting practices and
institutional arrangements can be a source of inequality, approach-
ing inequality as entirely the outcome of cultural practices that differ
from dominant or mainstream practices goes against research evidence
regarding the strong contribution of socio-economic factors to chil-
dren’s language and literacy. Parent deficit, typically discussed as a
lack of involvement with children’s learning and low educational aspi-
rations, has become a common explanation for the academic and
developmental difficulties some children face despite evidence to the
contrary. In 2006, in the speech ‘Our Nation’s Future – Social Exclu-
sion’, Tony Blair spoke about ‘not just poverty of income, but poverty
of aspiration, of opportunity, of prospects of advancement . . . for some
families, their problems are more multiple, more deep and more per-
vasive than simply low income. The barriers to opportunity are about
their social and human capital as much as financial.’ However, a dis-
tinction should be made between ‘poverty of aspiration’ and ‘poverty of
opportunity’. Parents living in poverty do not display poverty of aspi-
ration; rather, they experience poverty of opportunity in the form of
limited education and training prospects and living-wage jobs. Poverty
of opportunity, and not lack of aspiration, is primarily responsible for
precipitating the cycle of deprivation.
In New Labour social policies (see Chapter 4 for a discussion on family
policy) the focus was on inclusion and exclusion, as distinct categories
of social class and disadvantage, marginalising discourses on inequality
and fairness. With the focus on inclusion, one may ask whether inequal-
ity can be experienced by the included or whether it is a property of the
excluded only. Policy discourses on inclusion and exclusion construe
exclusion as an individual failure: people are excluded because they lack
the necessary self-governance to be part of society (Rose, 1999). The

rhetoric of inclusion/exclusion masks structural inequality and makes
disadvantage an individuated concern, a failure to capitalise on soci-
ety and its institutions, or, even, a personal choice (a decision not to
be part of society). Poverty has become about poor self-management
and not being able to emulate normative middle-class practices and
develop individual responsibility. Poverty and marginalisation (and not
poor parenting) place parents, single mothers in particular, at the centre
of society’s ills. Working-class mothers who do not conform to middle-
class values are likely to be vilified and blamed for their children’s poor
outcomes. Social class has been transformed from a structural category
into a form of subjectivity or individual lifestyles (Gillies, 2005, 2007).
As such, despite the widening inequality gap, public conversations are
silenced on the subject of social class (Savage, 2000). In policy docu-
ments such as Field’s and Allen’s government reviews and the DEMOS
report by Lexmond and Reeves (2009), any acknowledgement of mate-
rial or financial capital as being significant in shaping children’s life
chances is conspicuously absent. Instead, conversations focus on chil-
dren’s self-esteem and good character and parents’ role in developing it.
Social class has been obscured in these conversations and is even consid-
ered to be irrelevant in that being excluded or included is about whether
parents harbour mainstream values and aspirations, capitalise on society
and manage risk in their life effectively.
A ‘culture of poverty’ orientation is strong in policy conversations
and has influenced family policy over the last decades (Hays, 2003;
Jennings, 2004). Parents’ cultural practices, norms and aspirations are
seen as key mechanisms that sustain the achievement gap. Historically,
Oscar Lewis’ work on cultures of poverty took the view that common
values, principles, aspirations and ideologies are experienced differently
by socio-economically diverse groups. For Lewis, people who are poor
lack a sense of history, of community and class consciousness and as
such poverty is about culture and not structural inequalities. However,
social class differences are not reproduced through attitudes, norms,
aspirations, or what Bourdieu termed ‘habitus’ (individual dispositions)
but by not attaining the ‘field’, that is institutional and civic arrange-
ments, social networks and resources (including income) that sustain
social advantage. Although aspirations and ways of cultivating children
and engaging with their education can be influenced by parents’ poverty
and its toxic effects, it is important to draw a clear distinction between
explanations based on a culture of poverty and explanations based on
structural inequality.
The culture of poverty discourses distract policy makers from the real
issues, of what Gorski refers to a ‘culture of classism’ and its implica-
tions in posing obstacles to poor people exercising their basic human
rights. As the wealth gap has grown and opportunities for closing the
achievement gap have diminished, parenting has become the key deter-
minant of children’s life chances and social mobility. But the evidence
regarding a link between poor parenting and structural disadvantage,
simply, is not there. Poor parenting does not cause structural disadvan-
tage. Although poverty makes it harder to parent well, most parents
across demographic groups have educational aspirations and are rou-
tinely involved with their children’s education. A culture of classism
thrives on deficit assumptions presented as evidence, and by focusing on
individual factors and ignoring important systemic influences. Narrow
understandings of parental influences favour a relocation of political
and social problems from the public sphere into intimate family life.
Considering parents to be solely responsible for hampering or remedy-
ing their children’s development represents a shift from understanding
poverty and inequality as political issues to approaching them as cul-
tural practices and parents’ lifestyle choices. Deficit assumptions make
policy makers complicit because instead of addressing gross inequalities,
educational inequalities in particular, and the fact that education is no
longer a driver for social mobility, they focus on individual parents and
what they do with their children within a context where health care,
living-wage jobs, safe and affordable housing, clean air and water are
compromised (Books, 2004; Gorski, 2008).
In family policy, parents have been redefined as causal agents, and
parenting as a causal mechanism to explain political and social phe-
nomena. To view parental learning support as the sole causal factor
that directly affects children’s learning outcomes and as a panacea for
reducing the achievement gap is simplistic. Structural inequality and
reduced opportunities are the driving forces behind the achievement
gap. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds have worse achieve-
ment outcomes because poverty shapes their learning within their
immediate environments. The effects of home learning are weak because
of inequalities in the opportunities for and benefits of parental involve-
ment in disadvantaged groups, and because coping with poverty can be
taxing on parenting resources. But this is part of the story of educational
inequality. Children in poverty also fare less well because the social
and civic institutions (e.g. schools, job apprenticeships) have ceased to
function as places for youth socialisation and drivers for social mobil-
ity. In unequal societies, by placing the onus on families who cannot
access resources and services, children’s life chances are doubly com-
promised. The solution is not binary: either you support families via
financial means or place the onus on parents and expect them to tran-
scend their living circumstances. The solution is complex and involves
the remaking of a strong civic society where civic institutions such as
schools have an important role to play to counteract, through polit-
ical action, negative proximal and distal influences in children’s lives
and support formal education (not only early years’ education), training
opportunities and lifelong learning (see Chapter 9 for a discussion on
the remaking of the family as a civic institution).
In unequal societies, the world is closing down for the average family
and children’s life chances are reduced not because of a decline in par-
enting or children’s poor character and reduced empathy but because
of the growing societal polarisation. The dominant rhetoric that it is
what parents do and not who they are that matters should be chal-
lenged if we are to start tackling the achievement gap and the deleterious
effects of widening inequality. Such views reinforce the idea that par-
ents’ behaviour should change instead of supporting them to engage in
political and collective actions to tackle the challenges they face. The
making of a fairer society is a collective effort, not an atomised act, and
needs political action. It is imperative for governments to find effective
ways to break the intergenerational cycles of poverty instead of focus-
ing on what Lexmond and Reeves called the ‘intergenerational cycles of
poor parenting’ (2009: 12). Tackling poverty is not about remodelling
the interpersonal relationships between parents and children but about
tackling inequality at an institutional and political level.
Patterns of parenting and social class
Although the link between social class and children’s learning and well-
being is well established, there is little on patterns of parenting in
different socio-economic groups. In her study on unequal childhoods,
Lareau (2002) observed parental practices and behaviours and the home
learning environment in diverse socio-economic groups. Lareau coined
the term ‘concerted cultivation’ to describe parental practices that are
conducive to maximising children’s learning and educational oppor-
tunities as a counterpoint to the ‘accomplishment of natural growth’
or catering for children’s basic needs (e.g. food, shelter, taking them
to school). Concerted cultivation was observed mainly in middle-
class families in which parents invested in services and resources for
the purpose of accumulating intellectual and social capital for their
children’s social advancement. In contrast, parents in working-class

families were observed to work towards the accomplishment of their
children’s natural growth. The notion of concerted cultivation aligns
closely with the family investment model, the idea that parents invest
in educational services and resources to give their children a head start.
Concerted cultivation encompasses parental involvement of varying
intensity, including instrumental learning support in which the learning
activities and educational services and resources are geared to achiev-
ing specific educational outcomes. As such, it depends on the financial
as well as human and social capital that families have and is shaped
by parents’ desire to expand ‘dominant sets of cultural repertoires’ or
practices that are commonly accepted as important in magnifying chil-
dren’s academic and cultural experiences (professionals generally agree
that parental involvement with children’s education is desirable).
Lareau’s distinction between concerted cultivation and natural
growth along social class lines offers a theoretical framework to under-
stand parenting in unequal societies. There are four elements that
differentiate concerted cultivation from natural growth. These are par-
ents’ use of language; relationship with institutions; organisation of
daily life in terms of structured/unstructured time; and the nature and
intensity of social links (weak/strong family connections; horizontal
networks) (Lareau, 2003). Compared to parents who worked towards
achieving natural growth for their children, those who offered con-
certed cultivation were more likely to use language in a non-directive
manner and engage in reasoning and negotiation with their chil-
dren, offering them choices and encouraging them to express their
views. Concerted-cultivating parents’ relationships with institutions
were found to be proactive rather than reactive or passive. They felt
confident in approaching and developing partnerships with profes-
sionals and organisations and were able and willing to ‘play with the
rules’ as required. They understood the importance of developing syn-
chronicity between family and educational institutions as a means of
preparing young people to make sense of institutional arrangements for
self-promotion and successfully enter the job market.
The organisation of daily life was also observed to differ between
middle-class and working-class parents. Children in families practising
concerted cultivation were observed to engage in various extracurricu-
lar activities. Children in middle-class families had access to educational
resources (books, tutoring) and participated in a range of extra-curricular
activities (adult-organised and supervised) to extend their learning and
develop wide-ranging interests. Children in working-class families were
less likely to engage in extra-curricular activities and spent most of their

time interacting with peers and family members. Compared to what
would be considered the regimented childhood of their middle-class
counterparts, children in working-class families had a more carefree and
peer-centred childhood. Finally, the nature and intensity of social net-
works and bonds were found to differ: concerted-cultivating families
spent less time with family members and were more likely to network
with other parents and establish horizontal types of networks with
professionals and organisations. In contrast, children in working-class
families spent more time with family members.
Concerted cultivation of different kinds

The MCS and the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children
findings showed that most parents practised concerted cultivation rou-
tinely (at least in the form of organised learning activities). The fact that
a roughly equal percentage of parents from all groups supported their
children’s learning and cultivation by organising learning activities (e.g.
book reading and homework support, trips to library) and having high
educational aspirations (see Chapter 2) suggests that concerted cultiva-
tion is distributed more heterogeneously across diverse socio-economic
and ethnic groups than was previously thought. In considering this,
Lareau’s dichotomous differentiation between concerted cultivation and
the accomplishment of natural growth was partly supported by the
MCS findings. Parents, across diverse groups, were involved with their
children’s learning and expressed high aspirations, blurring the bound-
aries between concerted cultivation and natural growth. Also, in a study
by Chin and Phillips (2004), parents from different socio-economic
backgrounds were found to endorse parenting strategies that were simi-
lar and not polarised along concerted cultivation and natural growth,
pointing to a continuum of parenting practices. Yet, their parenting
did not always translate into higher language and literacy scores for
their children. As the MCS findings showed, the link between parental
learning support and teachers’ higher ratings of children’s literacy and
language was supported only in parents of a higher socio-economic sta-
tus (i.e. educated mothers, parents with income above the poverty line).
Teachers’ ratings increased particularly for children of educated mothers
who were more likely to offer concerted cultivation to promote chil-
dren’s social readiness for school and their performance at the end of
Key Stage 1.
Different kinds of concerted cultivation seem to be in operation across
diverse parent groups. Although concerted cultivation in the form of
learning activities appears to be widespread and not clustered within

middle-class practices, some aspects of it were more powerful than
others in shaping children’s literacy and language. For example, the
concerted cultivation offered by educated mothers and mothers with
good reading habits translated into better achievement outcomes for
their children, as the MCS findings showed. Also, the strong impact of
maternal reading habits on children’s language and literacy (in contrast
to the weak impact of homework support) suggests a kind of concerted
cultivation that is less instrumental and didactic, one that does not
restrict learning to a mere transmission of literacy skills but promotes a
general culture of learning and congruence in the attitudes, behaviours
and expectations governing home and school settings. Educated parents
who read often are more likely to convey a sense of learning as pleasure,
experimentation and intellectual exploration and encourage their chil-
dren’s evolving intellectual capacities. However, little is known about
the role that social class plays in converting parental involvement into
positive children’s learning and social outcomes. As the MCS findings
showed, certain forms of concerted cultivation, those that come from
a general culture of learning at home typically supported by educated
parents, were registered by teachers in their assessment of children’s lit-
eracy and behaviour during the first years of formal education. On the
other hand, parental involvement in the form of learning activities and
direct support with homework was found to have a small effect on child
outcomes.
Concerted cultivation is multifaceted and is not only about organising
learning activities but also having the confidence to actively engage with
organisations and professionals and access educational resources and
services, parental practices that are influenced by social class. In Lareau’s
observations, middle-class children were involved in adult-structured
activities not only with their parents but also with educators (e.g. music
teachers) and other educational service providers. Although the MCS
findings did not support a clear distinction between concerted cul-
tivation and the accomplishment of natural growth (with regard to
involvement with learning activities), the nature of cultivation and the
socio-economic context within which it took place may explain its
varied impact. Although desired and practised across socio-economic
divides, the effectiveness of concerted cultivation may be compromised
due to the lack of resources, education and access to educational insti-
tutions in disadvantaged parents. In the MCS, the concerted cultivation
offered was qualitatively different (although equally intense) between
educated and less-educated parents and along income differentials.
Educated and economically better-off parents tend to have a wider

repertoire of capabilities but also their relationships with institutions
are of a different kind. As civic institutions are rolling back and market-
driven institutions take their place for which membership is directly
related to social class, disadvantaged parents are less likely to access and
benefit from them. The congruence between educational institutions
and parenting is threatened not because parents in diverse groups have
different values or conceptions about childhood (nor are they insuffi-
ciently involved) but because of differentials in education and resource
levels. For Bourdieu, a source of inequality in accessing resources and
generating cultural capital is the clash between ‘habitus’ and ‘field’, or
between the dispositions and culture of individuals and the culture of
the institutions of society. Habitus can be thought of as a disposition or
a way of thinking pertaining to an individual, whereas the field refers
to institutions in society (Grenfell and James, 1998), and congruence
between individuals’ habitus and the field in which they operate is
likely to maximise their social advantage. As the MCS findings showed,
parents’ habitus (e.g. routine home learning support, high educational
aspirations) did not differ along social class. Parents, irrespective of
socio-economic and ethnic grouping, engaged in aspects of concerted
cultivation and had high educational aspirations. Considering that the
habitus is about a ‘system of dispositions’ or dispositions to ‘act in a cer-
tain way, to grasp experience in certain way and think in a certain way’
(Grenfell and James, 1998: 15), most parents thought and acted in ways
(i.e. offering frequent home learning support) that were considered to
be beneficial to their children’s education and learning, achieving con-
gruence between individual parents’ frequent home learning support
(habitus) and mainstream values about parental involvement (field). Yet,
despite the consistency between habitus and field, the achievement gap
remained unchallenged, in that five- and seven-year-olds’ language and
literacy differed markedly across social class. Parents’ habitus alone did
not explain the reproduction of the achievement gap and inequality.
Poverty affects the quality and effectiveness of concerted cultiva-
tion (not the willingness to offer it) and the extent to which edu-
cational aspirations become reality. Yet despite evidence that a lack
of resources, rather than cultural deviance, is responsible for many
parenting practices associated with low-income families, family policy
blames the parents (Sherman and Harris, 2012). Parenting practices in
an unequal society are examined separately from their socio-economic
context while parents are expected to be remodelled to emulate middle-
class practices towards child rearing. Family policy has taken a critical
stand towards parenting practices in disadvantaged parents and aimed

to tackle the social problems of disadvantage by inculcating middle-
class values with regard to parenting (Gewirtz, 2001). In the name of
safeguarding children, disadvantaged parents are expected to become
resocialised through parenting classes to emulate middle-class practices
of parenting. And for those parents who fail to do this, intervention is
justified.
What most parents did in the MCS study to support their children’s
learning reflects mainstream ideals of parenting and cultures of institu-
tions in society. The widespread practices of concerted cultivation show
the extent to which parents have internalised practices of parenting
that are typically seen as middle class to maximise their children’s edu-
cational opportunities and social advancement rather than confining
themselves within natural growth patterns of child rearing. However,
while aspects of concerted cultivation appeared to be widespread in
diverse parent groups, their nature and effectiveness varied along social
class lines. The limited effects of concerted cultivation in the MCS may
be due to the fact that for many families the field has become unattain-
able. The social class gaps found in children’s educational investments
and outcomes stem from lower levels of resources and parental edu-
cation, rather than from different conceptions of child rearing in
parents living above/below the poverty line. Also, a concerted cultiva-
tion is influenced by parents’ educational qualifications and habits. And
although some parents are in a position to support learning at home,
education should not be outsourced to them. To rely on parents to
deliver key elements of education is to exacerbate disadvantages and
to limit equality of opportunity.
The limits and consequences of concerted cultivation

In general, the contribution of concerted cultivation to children’s aca-
demic and social advantage has been found to be modest, offering a
partial explanation of the achievement gap. During the first years in
formal education, children in concerted-cultivating families get mod-
est returns from their parents’ educational investment, which appear
to decrease as children age (Cheadle, 2008). The family learning envi-
ronment is not strongly related to children’s achievement after school
entry. Education reflects both nature and nurture or, in other words,
children’s cognitive capacity and school-readiness skills they acquire
in their family environments. And although nurture matters, nature’s
role is significant and children who are in the same nurturing environ-
ment will follow different developmental trajectories and develop into
different adults. Further, as Cheadle argues, the effects of concerted cul-

tivation may decrease because academic demands change as children
move through schooling. For example, children’s head start in reading
and maths (as a result of concerted cultivation) peters out as the nature
of these subjects changes. Maths becomes increasingly complex after
the basic mechanics are learnt, and also reading goes through different
phases of development. Concerted cultivation may support the devel-
opment of the skills required for word decoding but not necessarily the
capacity to read in order to learn.
Concerted cultivation has brought up unintended consequences with
regard to the roles of educators and parents, the promotion of a ther-
apeutic culture in schools and, most importantly, the rise of intensive
parenting which further accentuates the gap between disadvantaged
children and their wealthier peers. The boundaries between family and
school, especially with regard to parents’ and teachers’ roles in promot-
ing educational advantage in children, have been blurred. What used
to be distinctive about schooling and parenting was the clear bound-
aries between what parents and teachers do and their responsibilities
regarding child development and learning. Parents were responsible for
providing their children with food, shelter and a sense of community,
whereas the teachers’ role was to educate children by offering them an
intellectually stimulating environment and helping them to develop the
capacity to engage with society as active citizens. However, over the last
decade, the roles have been reversed. The 2004 Children’s Act put the
responsibility for children’s happiness and emotional well-being with
teachers, while home/school contracts are used to encourage parents to
read with their children and help them with homework.
The blurring of home–school boundaries undermines the confi-
dence of both teachers and parents but also magnifies the effects of
poverty on children’s academic attainment. Teachers have become de-
professionalised and their confidence has been undermined because
they are increasingly expected to promote a therapeutic culture in
schools rather than engage intellectually with children. Teachers are
no longer authority figures in a sense of imparting knowledge and
conveying culture to the next generation; instead, they are expected
to deal with self-esteem, nutrition and feeding problems in children.
Teachers increasingly rely on parents to help them with discipline,
school-readiness skills, good behaviour and fundraising at schools. Par-
ents are expected to be behind them every step of the way and when this
does not happen parents are seen as negligent and potentially neglectful
of their children’s needs.
Although over three-quarters of parents do their best to offer con-

certed cultivation, they are increasingly anxious that their parenting is
not sufficient to promote their children’s educational advancement. Par-
ents feel the burden of their children’s education being outsourced to
them and from being told that their children’s social mobility depends
on them. As such, home–school partnerships are questioned as to
whether they are genuine and capable of promoting democratic par-
ticipation in the form of consent and understanding of processes, roles
and obligations. Although the rhetoric that frames home–school part-
nerships and mutual accountability is strong, democratic participation,
responsive dialogue, willingness to share power and true collaboration
are not always evident in these partnerships; often, they are mechanisms
for outsourcing education to parents (Bridges, 2010) while parents are
held responsible for their children’s educational failure. It appears that
we have moved from explanations of structural inequality as the main
cause of the achievement gap to parenting inadequacies. The notion
that children’s educational failure can be blamed on parents is attrac-
tive to some schools which are exempted from part of the blame. At the
same time, in a market-driven education, parents are consumers who
exercise choice and expect to receive the services they are entitled to.
Parents exercise the power of a consumer of education services but not
the power of a joint decision maker who participates actively with a
collective endeavour to support all children regardless of their market
position. Such partnerships are not oriented towards the common good
but advancing individualistic self-interests with outsourcing being their
primary mechanism. However, outsourcing differs along resource lev-
els and not parenting and exacerbates unequal provision: parents who
are in a position to promote their children’s interests and positional
advantage do so (at the expense of other children’s advantage), whereas
parents who cannot are stigmatised as neglectful.
Widespread practices of concerted cultivation reflect parental anxi-
ety to do what schools and policy makers consider the ‘right’ thing
despite the fact that it is labour intense, especially for busy parents,
and not always effective. Guidance from family experts or representa-
tives of institutions (teachers, counsellors) regarding child rearing has
come to supersede parents’. Schools increasingly see their role as safe-
guarding children from parents who neglect them (and neglect is often
defined as not offering their children what family experts consider to
be proper education, typically provided in the form of outsourcing).
Essentially, parental neglect has come to signify the extent to which
parents are involved with outsourcing and investing in their children’s
education. This is troubling because institutions should have a civic and

not an authoritarian influence on families and young people by plac-
ing the onus on parents and cultivating individual blame. Moreover, the
stress on parents to support their children’s literacy and numeracy is also
likely to promote instrumental views towards learning, that is, learning
as a reaction to school demands. Generally, at home, a wider culture of
learning and inquisitiveness is promoted whereas, at school, the empha-
sis is on transmitting literacy and numeracy skills, especially in light of
the progressive hollowing-out of the curriculum. To approach concerted
cultivation as a process of accumulating skills works against the univer-
sal purpose of education, which is to expand young people’s horizons
and help them develop criticality, empathy and capacity for reflection.
Intense concerted cultivation has redefined the purpose of education:
from humanising to accumulating capital and positional advantage,
education as a means to an end (an end that increasingly becomes
desirable in light of economic crises and uncertainty about the future).
Finally, children are compromised because they are increasingly seen
as the ‘diminished subject’ (Ecclestone and Hays, 2009), the fragile child
who cannot cope without constant support and monitoring from adults.
With education being an individualistic pursuit rather than a collective
endeavour for the common good, a therapeutic culture in schools is
on the rise where the goal of education is to make children always feel
happy and ensure their self-esteem remains high at any cost. A ther-
apeutic culture and the sense of entitlement that it promotes diverts
education and learning from its original humanistic purpose: education
for developing a vision for the good society and our place in it and
education for civic renewal through knowledge and intellectual author-
ity accumulated and evolved over time and across cultures. Although
a culture of learning and intellectual exploration at home can have a
humanistic influence, concerted cultivation can easily mutate into an
authoritarian and intensive parenting within which children’s learn-
ing and well-being are constantly monitored. Concerted cultivation is
not a ‘silver bullet’ that promotes learning and social development in
children, and growing evidence questions the extent to which it con-
tributes to children’s resilience, capacity for social relatedness, empathy
and agency, especially within the context of intensive and monitoring
parenting.
Intensive parenting
Although aspects of concerted cultivation provided by educated parents
in MCS were found to associate with higher teacher ratings of language
and literacy during the first school years, weak links were found
between home learning and children’s social and emotional develop-
ment (Hartas, 2011). In other words, aspects of concerted cultivation,
especially among educated parents, were translated into higher language
and literacy ratings but not into increase in prosocial behaviour or a
reduction in behavioural and emotional difficulties in children (as rated
by their mothers). The limited influence of home learning support on
children’s social and emotional development may be explained by con-
sidering the (unintended) consequences of intensive parenting. Increas-
ingly, in some demographic groups, concerted cultivation is experienced
as intensive parenting, with parents approaching child rearing as a
project with goals and outcomes to be achieved, morphing children into
a specific image and navigating them through life. The term ‘intensive
mothering’ was originally adopted by Hays (1996) to describe a model
of parenting ‘that advises mothers to expend a tremendous amount
of time, energy and money in raising their children’. As such, parents
are ‘expected to acquire a detailed knowledge of what the experts con-
sider proper child development and then spend a good deal of time
and money attempting to foster it’ (Hays, 1996: 8). Children’s child-
hood in concerted-cultivating families tends to be regimented with their
daily life being structured along adult-organised and supervised activi-
ties, organised spaces and choices with less interaction with peers and
members of the extended family. A growing number of studies and social
commentators (Gottlieb, 2011; Marano, 2004) have questioned con-
certed cultivation in the form of intensive parenting, raising concerns
about its impact on children’s well-being in the long run.
Intensive parenting (although likely to maximise language and aca-
demic outcomes in early years) is less conducive to supporting children
to develop agency, a healthy self-esteem (one that comes from accom-
plishment, not inflated by parents), good social skills, resilience and
emotional maturity. It works against children’s evolving capacities to
act with human agency and desire to engage with the social world.
In Lareau’s concerted-cultivating families, the children were trained in
‘the rules of the game’ that govern interactions with institutional repre-
sentatives. However, they were not conversant in other important social
skills and peer interactions and often tended to shift social interac-
tions to ‘suit their preferences’, finding it difficult to organise their time
during weekends and summers or ‘hanging out with adults in a nonob-
trusive, subordinate fashion’ (Lareau, 2003: 6). Because they have too
many choices, children find it difficult to make decisions in case they
make the wrong one and feel helpless dealing with everyday hardships.
Intensive parenting undermines children in other ways too. Being under

scrutiny all the time makes children extremely self-conscious. As a result
they become less willing to engage in trial and error in their learning and
social interactions. Most of all, self-consciousness removes the safety to
be experimental and playful, both crucial pathways to learning. Intense
parenting does not offer opportunities for children to figure things out
for themselves, experiment with ideas and situations and even expe-
rience some floundering along the way in order to develop appropriate
coping mechanisms (Marano, 2004). And intensive parenting is not con-
fined within childhood. Increasingly, parents become involved in areas
such as university and employment and are ready to ‘bail out’ their chil-
dren. Intensive parenting offers a distorting picture of the social world
in which children consider themselves to be the centre of attention
and rely on adults to tackle even minor obstacles in their everyday life.
As such, it infantilises them and poses obstacles to developing problem
solving and resilience to tackle future challenges.
Clearly, intensive parenting does not cultivate attributes in children
that are conducive to developing resilience, social skills and empathy.
Resilience and human agency develop through interactions with peers
that are not always organised by adults and in social spaces where chil-
dren are confronted with reality in the form of everyday challenges
that they are expected to resolve by themselves. Children in fami-
lies that practise natural growth experience a more natural childhood
in terms of less adult-organised activities and more time to interact
with peers and family members. In considering the unintended conse-
quences of concerted cultivation, natural growth may be more valuable
when it comes to children’s well-being in the long term. Although
natural growth in families where parents have limited education and
resources may not bring the same academic outcomes as does par-
ents’ educational investment during concerted cultivation, we should
not underestimate its importance nor the importance of ‘good enough’
parenting (as a counter-response to intensive parenting). Yet, the old-
fashioned parental support towards natural growth is increasingly seen
as parenting lacking in its capacity to offer concerted cultivation.
Lareau argued that children raised according to the logic of con-
certed cultivation can gain advantages in the form of an emerging
‘sense of entitlement’, while children raised according to the logic
of natural growth tend to develop an emerging ‘sense of constraint’
(2003; 11). Aside from the advantages related to social class, concerted
cultivation within intensive parenting is less likely to be beneficial for
children’s social and emotional development and capability building in
the long term. Moreover, the fact that children’s academic attainments
in concerted-cultivating families are higher does not necessarily mean
that these advantages can be sustained and enable them to cope bet-
ter with the challenges of a future that is not like anything we have
experienced before. Significant challenges related to overpopulation,
resource scarcity and environmental degradation would require peo-
ple with strong problem-solving competence, ability to relate to diverse
groups of people with whom they may have very little in common,
capacity to organise their life (especially as priorities multiply and clash
with each other) and flexibly adapt to rapid technological and societal
changes. Would a sense of entitlement and knowing ‘the rules of the
game’ suffice when the game will be in state of continuous change?
And how would young people fare when they realise that they may not
always be the centre of attention and when interactions with others may
not always suit their preferences? As Lori Gottlieb (2011) argued in an
article titled ‘How to Land Your Kid in Therapy’, an inflated sense of self-
esteem, not related to real achievements, is less likely to benefit young
people when they realise that they are not up to the challenges they face
in the adult world. Perhaps a ‘sense of constraint’ rather than a ‘sense
of entitlement’ is a more valuable attribute to cultivate in children and
young people to encourage them to reflect on their self-interests and
wants and engage meaningfully with their communities.
Parenting as an ‘act of perfection’

Parents are anxious to give their children a happy childhood and believe
that they can achieve this goal by intervening in every minute aspect
of their children’s life, from having trouble with peers to difficulties
with homework. There is a misguided notion that if parents do all the
right things in raising a child, the child will grow to be a happy adult
and, as policy makers claim, a socially mobile adult too. For working-
class parents, children’s natural growth is indeed an accomplishment
which reflects ‘good enough’ parenting. In families whose focus is on
natural growth, children’s language and literacy may be rated lower by
their teachers not because parental support is not adequate but because,
increasingly, parents are left alone to maximise young people’s educa-
tional and social advantage without accounting for the powerful impact
of social class on shaping parenting and children’s life. With the decline
of a civic society, the shrinking of the welfare state and the current eco-
nomic trends in many Western countries where the economic activity
is moving east, socialising the next generation has become a private
matter and not a collective concern. Middle-class parents have shifted
their parenting to become responsive to the new professional and pol-

icy standards that place parents at the centre of their children’s social
advancement and well-being. However, for most disadvantaged parents,
promoting natural growth is all they can do.
Intensive parenting is fuelled by parenting determinism which under-
mines distal influences and construes parenting as an ‘act of perfection’
at the expense of engaging with social change. As Sandel (2004) argues,
intensive parenting has become a Promethean task in seeking perfec-
tion in children’s cognitive and social functioning, and is destructive
because it does not allow for the development of human sympathies
and relationships. It is also destructive because parents put much energy
into being perfect, instead of promoting political changes that would
make family life better as Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness:
Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, has argued. Even if we assume that
parents should and can embrace intense concerted cultivation, there is
something particularly sinister and troubling about parents’ mastering
of their children’s capacities to achieve specific ends, such as com-
petitiveness in the future job market. Intensive parenting is morally
dubious because it subjects children into complicity to improve their
performance not for their and their community’s benefit but for the
benefit of the market. Intensive parenting is a class act and part of
the neoliberal project (Henwood et al., 2010), in which parenting
makes up for the diminishing welfare state. The demise of the civic
project has left the family to be the only civic institution (although
undermined) to cater for young people. The process of ‘making’ the
child through ‘concerted cultivation’ (Vincent and Ball, 2007) is about
placing the onus on individual parents to manage risk and reverse
inequality through attentive parenting. It wrongly assumes that par-
ents (particularly mothers) can control and shape the lives of children
(Wall, 2010) so that children are turned into responsible citizens (Lister,
2006).
In neoliberal constructions of proper parenting, intensive parenting
comes ‘disturbingly close to eugenics’ (Sandel, 2004: 7). As I discuss in
Chapter 7, intensive parenting emerges as a form of ‘back door’ eugen-
ics although, this time, it is not genes but parenting that determines
children’s well-being and life chances. It is not surprising that over
three-quarters of parents routinely support their children’s learning and
approach parenting as the most important task whose success cannot
be left to chance. By providing intensive care to their children, par-
ents believe that they can guard against undesirable future outcomes.
For mothers in particular, intensive parenting offers a moral identity
shaped by the belief that the time put into their children’s rearing is
critical to ensure their future happiness. Although intensive parenting
transcends socio-economic, ethnic and cultural barriers, it is gendered in
that it is women who are overwhelmingly responsible for raising chil-
dren and offering them concerted cultivation. This is likely to increase
the pressure and accentuate gender stereotypes that mothers already
experience, especially those who do not practise intensive parenting
either because they are financially unable or unwilling to adopt it as part
of their parenting (Bernstein, 2011). Indeed, a study based on in-depth
semi-structured interviews with Canadian mothers’ practising intensive
mothering to increase children’s intelligence and achievement illumi-
nated the negative consequences of hyper-mothering: mothers’ feelings
of exhaustion, anxiety and guilt (Wall, 2010).
This does not mean that parents should not support their children to
develop the capacities and sensibilities to live a life they value. But this
can be achieved not through intensive parenting but through parents
and educators exercising the authority to impart knowledge to the next
generation and prepare it to face the challenges of a ‘future that is not
what is used to be’ (Santos, 1995). Most importantly, involved parent-
ing is about challenging prevalent views of young people as a liability
and showing unconditional love, which is not contingent on the talents
and attributes a young person happens to have. Parental love is a balanc-
ing act between accepting and transforming love: accepting love affirms
the being of children, whereas transforming love seeks the well-being of
children (Sandel, 2004). Intensive and overly ambitious parenting exem-
plifies an extreme form of transformative love that can have negative
consequences for both children and parents, especially if good parent-
ing is defined along how rigorously and routinely parents are involved
with the shaping of their children’s lives. Although parents have always
found it difficult to balance accepting and transforming love, recently,
we witness a policy-endorsed drive to make parents responsible for
enhancing their children’s life chances and social mobility. The belief
that parents should morph children’s fragile existence into something
that will bring them social advantage and increase their social mobility
causes havoc in families. Most parents work hard to abide by current
policy standards regarding parenting and, in the process, lose their own
personhood with their parenting becoming a constant exertion, ulti-
mately losing their capacity to enjoy the intimacy of their relationships
with their children. Most importantly, intensive parenting can seri-
ously undermine one of the most important roles of parents, namely,
nurturing independence and separation from parents (Bernstein, 2011).
The early years’ home environment defined along parental practices

and behaviours, has been heralded as the main causal factor that shapes
children’s learning and well-being. Being a parent has been elevated to
an all-encompassing act that determines children’s life chances. This
form of parental determinism has become an influential doctrine within
policy circles and is shaping family life and the implementation of
family policy initiatives. Parents are routinely fed on a media diet of
fear with stories about neglectful and abusive parents, stranger danger
and lack of trust in adults who have not undergone a Criminal Record
Bureau check. They are often blamed for their children lacking in lan-
guage and social skills when they start school as well as for depression
and destructive behaviour in adolescence. Parents are told that they do
not talk to their children as much as they should, do not praise them
enough and are not involved in their learning in a systematic way,
and all these in an era where large numbers of parents have become
‘helicopter’ parents, hovering over their children and monitoring their
every move. The politics of scaremongering and individual blame are
partly responsible for diverting thinking from the real problems: the
creation of a generation of wasted and, as Giroux (2010) argues, ‘dis-
posable’ youth, on the one hand, and a generation of ‘battery’ children
on the other, morphed and produced by hyper-parenting, inequality
and the havoc that neoliberalism has wrecked on society and its insti-
tutions. Young people are raised feeling a deep social mistrust while fear
and uncertainty have transformed parenting into a complex and impos-
sible task to tackle alone, with parents increasingly relying on family
experts. As such, parents (teachers and other adults) are being infan-
tilised while children’s egos and sense of self-worth are inflated and
possibly crushed when they realise that they cannot live up to their
parents’ praise.
Despite a widespread concerted cultivation, the achievement gap
between poor children and their wealthier peers persists. Widespread
concerted cultivation shows that most parents have internalised policy-
endorsed views such as ‘what parents do matters’. Considering that the
effectiveness of intensive cultivation varies along social class lines, the
children of disadvantaged parents are likely to be doubly disadvantaged.
The achievement gap is political and this raises questions about the
efficacy of parental learning support as a mechanism to tackle educa-
tional inequality. Considering that socio-economically diverse groups
of parents are involved equally frequently with their children’s learn-
ing at home (Hartas, 2011; Gregg and Washbrook, 2010; Lee and
Bowen, 2006), there must be other pathways through which poverty
contributes to children’s cognitive and achievement gap such as par-

ents’ educational qualifications and habits that are likely to magnify
the quality of the learning support offered at home. Factors beyond
parental involvement, such as access to better schools and educational
services and resources, the possession of intellectual resources in families
with educated parents and parents’ capability to mobilise social net-
works contribute to children’s achievement more than the frequency
with which parents read to their children and help them with their
homework. Reduced financial resources and low educational qualifica-
tions are likely to limit parents’ ability to provide educational materials
and opportunities and may influence their educational expectations for
their children and their familiarity with educational resources available
in the community (De Civita et al., 2004). Such factors exert primary
and significant influences on the quality of early home environments,
challenging dominant views that what parents do, regardless of their
socio-economic circumstances, can reduce the achievement gap and
reverse inequality.
Part II
Neoliberal Family Policy: Early
Intervention and Parent
Remodelling
The chapters in this part offer an overview of family policy in the United
Kingdom at the start of this century with an emphasis on the coalition
government’s family policy, early intervention in particular, and a cri-
tique of the nature, scope and direction of family policy in neoliberal
societies. The key assumptions that underpin family policy about the
influences that parents exert on their children’s development are exam-
ined, raising issues about family micromanagement and the role of the
state in regulating and remodelling parents.
Historically, the politicisation of parents is not new. At the start of
the 20th century, mothers were seen as causal actors in infant mortality
and, in the 1940s and 1950s, the ‘cold mother syndrome’ was offered as
explanation for childhood autism. In the first decade of this century, we
have witnessed immediacy in family policy developments in the after-
math of high-impact events (such as the tragic deaths of Baby P and
Victoria Climbié) while neuroscience evidence has been used to rede-
fine parents’ role and create a new ‘norm’ to guide policy: policy, which
would have otherwise been targeted to a small number of parents, has
come to apply to nearly every parent. Indeed, a trend has emerged in
family policy to turn exception into rule by focusing on emotionally
charged events in some children’s lives and, based on these, draw pol-
icy directives. Rapid policy development limits the critical space left for
parents to act as citizens and engage with issues that directly affect their
lives. Decontextualised, policy guidelines can easily mutate into moral
absolutes, especially when parents lack confidence in their parenting
and have a limited access to community support. Most worryingly, in
a context of antagonism, public service cuts and limited educational
resources, socially isolated parents seek confirmation in policy rather

than in the relationships with one another.
Around 2003, a significant shift took place in family policy in Britain:
with the introduction of the Anti-Social Behaviour Act & Criminal
Justice Act (2003) and the extended use of parenting orders and parent-
ing contracts, the status of parents in mediating the effects of poverty
and other social ills on their children’s education and well-being was
elevated to an unprecedented degree. New Labour policies such as
Every Child Matters, the National Academy for Parenting Practitioners
and Parenting Early Intervention Pilot, and the Family Nurse Part-
nership health visiting programmes illustrated the shift from fiscal to
behavioural management. The move from fiscal policies to behavioural
interventions was intended to tackle social exclusion and promote social
mobility. Parents were to be evaluated in terms of children’s behaviour
and academic outcomes and future social mobility. Fiscal policy ini-
tiatives such as financial support for families, parent employment and
access to public services were no longer given a priority in that individ-
ual responsibility and behaviour came to explain poverty and limited
intergenerational opportunities for social advantage.
Much focus of the New Labour social policy was on social exclusion
but not in terms of the causes of and the mechanisms for exclusion;
rather, the focus was on the excluded, whose exclusion was explained
by references to individual responsibility and individual choices and not
to systemic constraints or poverty. Social inclusion, as conceived within
both New Labour and the coalition government, is not about the quality
of social ties and relationships in communities but about individuals’
capacity to be economically productive. In a similar vein, much focus
of the coalition government’s policy has been on social mobility by
placing the onus on parents to maximise their children’s life chances.
The coalition government’s efforts to increase intergenerational relative
social mobility by ‘breaking the transmission of disadvantage from one
generation to the next’ is to be achieved through a targeted intervention
in early years amidst significant public spending cuts.
Early intervention has been argued as a mechanism for preventing
social problems before they happen and breaking the intergenerational
cycle of poor parenting, antisocial behaviour and underachievement.
Early intervention at a family level, however, prompts questions about
its nature, aims and scope. Is early intervention about offering access
to public services for families who need them most or a means of reg-
ulating disadvantaged families to ensure that they act in ways deemed
acceptable by family ‘experts’ and policy makers? It is questionable as to
Neoliberal Family Policy 73
whether early intervention is about access to public services, consider-

ing the gradual removal of public services (e.g. education, health) from
public to private spheres and the severe spending cuts (likely to affect
mothers and children with disabilities most) that have recently come to
the fore.
Critical reflections are offered regarding the scientific, pragmatic and
ethical justification for early intervention programmes. As it currently
stands, early intervention is riddled with paradoxes about the extent
to which it is informed by ecological models of child development,
especially considering its focus on parenting as a sole determinant of
children’s development; its efficacy with regard to building resilience
and autonomy in parents; the extent to which it is child-centred; and
where it fits as a public service when welfare structures are crumbling
and public spending cuts are deeply felt by parents who need public
services most. Evaluation studies have shown that even successful early
intervention programmes yield short-term and modest impacts, raising
significant issues about the relationship between policy and practice and
its impact on people’s lives. In general, community-based family services
have been found to be more useful in building solidarity and mutual
support and more effective than targeting individual parents. Interven-
tion programmes with a strong community ethos and professionals who
are knowledgeable and capable of relating to diverse groups of people
with compassion and rapport can be useful to families who experience
multiple forms of disadvantage. However, although conversations about
the effectiveness of early intervention abound, there are fewer debates
about its moral orientation, especially in an unequal society.
Across political divides, family policy has not engaged with the funda-
mental causes of inequality and the structural constraints in children’s
and parents’ lives. The goals of early intervention and social mobility
can easily become void if inequality is not tackled. The implementation
of a family interventionist framework is likely to pathologise certain par-
enting practices and behaviours rather than understand them within
a traditional, social and moral framework. Moreover, the therapeutic
orientation of parenting and family intervention is likely to promote
dependency and work against the development of resilience in parents
and, most crucially, trivialise the challenges that some families face.
Unless their goals are clear and parent-driven, interventionist practices
can easily promote a deficit model of families and parenthood in which
parents (especially single mothers) and children are perceived as either
vulnerable and fragile or ignorant and dangerous, and exploit the lack of
confidence that parents feel in their humanity when they are told that
their parenting cannot be trusted to offer children a cohesive experience

of growing up (Gillies, 2007).
This part concludes with a general critique of family policy through
neoliberal economic structures to understand the nature and scope of
New Labour and the coalition governments’ policies for parents and
children. As is typical with social policy during periods of economic
crises, we witness a strengthening in notions of individual responsi-
bility and an emphasis on cultural rather than structural explanations
of poverty and disadvantage. Neoliberal family policy has a direct and
evolving impact on parenting through an unequivocal acceptance of
market values (e.g. commodification of care) and the rolling back of the
welfare state with new markets (e.g. parenting skills services) to fill the
gaps; the relocation of public debates from the politics of rights, social
class and equality to debates that frame social problems as individual
concerns; and the increasing powers of an interventionist state, a com-
plex mix of less government (in terms of regulation and provision of
public services) and more state intervention (in terms of surveillance).
4
Family Policy in 21st Century
Britain
At the start of this century, there has been an unprecedented flurry

of family policy development, with parents occupying centre stage.
Increasingly, parents are expected to maximise their children’s educa-
tional experiences, control their children’s behaviour, engage in parental
contracts and receive parental orders if they fail to manage their
children’s social contact. However, what is the impact of all these
parent-focused initiatives? And are they likely to undermine parental
autonomy, confidence and, ultimately, responsibility? In this chapter,
I offer an overview of family policy in Britain at the start of the 21st cen-
tury, highlighting the trajectory of fiscal and behavioural intervention
policy.
New Labour family policy
The New Labour government developed its family policy along six
main lines: education, care and well-being of children (expanding early
care including universal services for three- and four-year-olds; Educa-
tion Maintenance Allowances – EMA), financial support for families
with children (tax credits), services for families (Sure Start expansion
of services), parental employment (promoting employment among sin-
gle parents through the Welfare to Work strategy), work/family balance
(extension of maternity leave, introduction of paternity leave) and fam-
ily functioning (intervention at a family level; increased emphasis on
parental responsibility to tackle antisocial behaviour) (see a review in
Daly, 2011). A key goal in these policy initiatives was to reduce child
poverty and social exclusion through fiscal changes and access to uni-
versal services. For example, the introduction of universal services of
childcare was particularly important in terms of using education as a
75
76 Neoliberal Family Policy
route out of poverty. Early years’ provision for three- and four-years-
olds, that is, 12.5 hours (15 hours from 2010) of childcare, was an
innovative development considering that in the United Kingdom, ‘a
universal, publicly funded, integrated and equitable childcare uncou-
pled from parental status, family income level and family investment
in care did not exist’ (Lloyd, 2008, p. 483). Also, the EMA (introduced
nationwide in 2004 and abolished in 2011 by the coalition government)
was designed to encourage young people from poor backgrounds to stay
in education longer and was successful in terms of raising staying-on
rates, retention and achievement Chowdry et al. (2007a) as cited in
Chevalier et al. (2010).
Around 2003, parenting became the cornerstone of family policy.
With the Anti-Social Behaviour Act & Criminal Justice Act (2003), the
use of parenting orders was extended (the Crime and Disorder Act
was introduced in 1998) and parenting contracts were introduced. Par-
enting Orders compelled parents whose children’s behaviour brought
them to the attention of the courts to attend parenting classes and
fulfil other requirements deemed necessary by the court. The Respect
Action Plan by Tony Blair was aimed at tackling underlying causes of
antisocial behaviour to build ‘stable families and strong cohesive com-
munities’. In 2004, with the publication of the Every Child Matters
report, the focus on family functioning, and particularly on ‘good’ par-
enting, increased. What parents do to/with their children emerged as a
key factor in mediating the effects of poverty and other social ills on
children’s education and well-being, and parenting was to be evaluated
in terms of children’s behaviour and academic outcomes.
Placing parenting at the heart of family policy meant that ‘the
behaviour of family members, especially parents, could be mobilized
to improve social order and in the process (re)fashion the family
as an agent of social integration and economic responsibility’ (Daly,
2011, p. 441). This was to be achieved by targeting parents’ individual
behaviour and practices (e.g. encouraging parents to become involved
with their children’s learning, encourage an authoritative parenting
style), especially for parents in ‘problem’ families. The policy empha-
sis on parenting propelled a number of national pilots to explore the
ways in which parenting programmes could be rolled out on a large
scale and the cost effectiveness of such practice. In 2006, the Parent
Support Advisors was piloted in 20 LAs; Family Intervention Projects
(FIPs) (50 projects); Parenting Early Intervention Projects (PEIP) pilots
(18 LAs); and the Education and Inspections Act and Police and Justice
Act, extending the scope of parenting orders and parenting contracts.
Family Policy in 21st Century Britain 77
In 2007, pilots of the Family–Nurse Partnership (FNP) in 10 LAs and of

the Respect Parenting Practitioners in 77 LAs took place. All LAs must
have a parenting commissioner and a parenting support strategy as part
of the Children and Young People’s Plan. In 2007 the National Academy
of Parenting Practitioners (NAPP) was set up by the then DCSF to train
practitioners to provide support to parents and also to evaluate the
effectiveness of parenting programmes.
In 2008, the NAPP-established DCSF, Parent Know How, launched two
parenting experts to be appointed in all LAs. Through the develop-
ment of the NAPP to train a workforce of parenting practitioners and by
assigning more responsibility to parents (e.g. parent–schools contracts,
parenting orders, respect strategy), intensive support to families was pro-
vided but also sanctions as a means of reducing antisocial behaviour
were introduced, moving family policy into the sphere of justice policy
(Lister, 2006). With these initiatives in place, parents were to be remod-
elled to abide by mainstream values and relocate themselves closer to
the market to reduce their children’s future social exclusion.
From fiscal policies to behavioural interventions

Labour’s earlier policies (e.g. tax credits system; parental employment)
had an economic orientation to reducing child poverty, approaching
social exclusion as an outcome of structural disadvantage. In around
2003, with the introduction of parenting contracts and an extension
of the use of parenting orders (Anti-Social Behaviour Act & Criminal
Justice Act), the policies targeted a mix of structural and behavioural
constraints, gradually introducing policy conceptualised along notions
of parental responsibility and, to an extent, a culture of poverty. Fam-
ily interventions moved from the economic, practical and educational
to the behavioural aspects of families’ functioning, with parenting
being conceived as a key mechanism to narrowing the achievement
gap and breaking the intergenerational cycle of deprivation and social
exclusion.
Under New Labour, the goal of UK family policy was twofold: social
and economic. Family was seen as having an economic but also a
social function in terms of contributing to social cohesion and inclusion
through family stability and responsible parenting. Parents emerged as
key agents in improving their children’s life chances. Placing the onus
on individual parents and stressing individual responsibility were partly
a response to the realisation that economic investment in the form of
Sure Start initiatives did not bear the results the Labour government had
hoped for, especially for the worst-off families (Ormerod, 2005), and
partly a paradoxical attempt to bring back a sense of collective life to

counteract social exclusion. The economic and the social role of the fam-
ily was reflected, for example, in the expanded role of Sure Start in terms
of reaching out to the most disadvantaged families to offer good-quality
early care and education for children and employment encouragement
for adults (Welshman, 2010). Although the initial aim of Sure Start was
to offer quality early education to enable the best start in life, its remit
expanded to supporting parents to seek employment and training (HM
Treasury, 2004, para 5.4). Its twofold goal was to reduce unemployment
and child poverty, but also to maximise the human capital incurred
from employed parents. Gradually, Sure Start had changed from being
an early years’ education and childcare initiative to one that was meant
to address the government’s ‘Welfare to Work’ strategy (Glass, 2005).
A national evaluation of Sure Start had been set up shortly after the
initiative had been established to examine the conditions under which
the local programmes proved most effective in enhancing child, family
and community functioning (Welshman, 2010). The overall evalua-
tion of Sure Start, which followed a quasi-experimental, cross-sectional
design, addressed key issues within the following areas: implementa-
tion evaluation, impact evaluation, local community context analysis,
cost-benefit analysis and support for local evaluations. The outcome
measures derived from mothers’ reports of community services and local
area, family functioning and parenting skills, child health and devel-
opment and verbal ability at 36 months. The evaluation showed that
Sure Start had beneficial effects on non-teenage mothers in terms of bet-
ter parenting and better functioning in children but adverse effects on
children of teenage mothers (poorer social functioning) and children of
single parents or parents who did not work (lower verbal ability). More-
over, the National Audit Office claimed subsequently that fewer than a
third of the Children’s Centres were identifying the most disadvantaged
families in their areas to offer them support. Overall, the Sure Start pro-
grammes seemed to have beneficial effects for the least socially deprived
parents and an adverse effect for the most disadvantaged families (Belsky
et al., 2007).
The fact that Sure Start benefited the better-off families suggests that
quality early years’ education has beneficial effects if operated not in
isolation but in conjunction with protective systemic factors such as
parental education and employment, stressing the importance of bal-
ancing the remit of early intervention programmes such as Sure Start
with systemic interventions (e.g. employment opportunities, training
and education schemes for parents). However, although in theory, Sure
Start was drawn upon ecological theories of child development, little

attention was paid to the multiplicity of proximal and distal factors
that affect child development and learning, ultimately having a nar-
row interventionist focus in terms of relocating parents closer to the
market through the ‘Welfare to Work’ strategy. By simply encouraging
parents to seek employment when living-wage jobs and opportunities
for education and training are scarce does not address distal risk factors
that influence parents’ and children’s lives. Good-quality early years’
education is crucial but in order to benefit children who experience mul-
tiple forms of disadvantage the balance between proximal and distal
influences should be redressed through interventions with a systemic
orientation. To meet parents’ self-identified needs, a synergy of eco-
nomic and family support through the provision of both universal and
targeted services is needed.
Social inclusion: Intervening to normalise the excluded

The New Labour strategy ‘Reaching out: An Action Plan on Social Exclu-
sion’, published in September 2006, was to consider why ‘a 2.5% of
every generation seems to be stuck in a lifetime of disadvantage’ and
experience problems that are ‘multiple, entrenched and often passed
down through the generations’ (HM Government, 2000, p.3, n64), with
the policy taking an interventionist stand for the hard-to-reach families.
Having implemented a large number of family-based initiatives, hard-to-
reach families are no longer families whom the state did not manage to
reach; they are families who are hard to engage, who require a tougher
approach in terms of tougher policies and practices than a mere reaching
out (Parton, 2008). The government’s Action Plan on Social Exclusion
took an interventionist turn. Its key argument was that through early
identification, support and preventative action, problems could be tack-
led before they became entrenched and deep-seated, having a significant
impact on the individual and society as a whole.
Policy discourses on social exclusion and disadvantage began to
resemble Sir Keith Joseph’s views about ‘cycles of deprivation’ in the
1970s in that social exclusion and the intergenerational transmission
of disadvantage were reconceptualised through the lens of ‘problem’
families (Welshman, 2010). This view precipitated policies aimed at the
‘high harm, high risk and high lifetime cost families’, with the goal to
intervene as soon as they appear at risk of exclusion, breakdown or crim-
inal behaviour (Wintour, 2006). Thus, universal services such as Sure
Start were to be complemented with more targeted interventions, such
as the ‘Incredible Years’ parenting programme (HM Government, 2006,
p. 53). Evidence from the United States indicated that intensive home
visiting for the first two years of a child’s life with a focus on offering
health advice and support had beneficial effects for children and fam-
ilies experiencing significant deprivation. This gave rise to the Family
Nurse Partnership (FNP) Programme May 2007 as cited in Barnes et al.
(2011), at which point family policy became interventionist at a family
level, especially for the hard-to-reach families. Having a health focus,
the FNP was found to be moderately successful in supporting families
to access health services fulfilling the need for many families to access
practical services, especially in countries such as the United States where
major health inequalities exist.
Social exclusion is an umbrella term and is not unproblematic
(Axford, 2008). It is about a diminished participation in social life. Being
excluded refers to not been given choices and opportunities through
access to resources and economic productivity to be included. But can
one opt for social exclusion? Does exclusion refer to a diminished par-
ticipation in economic activity? Does tackling social exclusion involve
relocating parents closer to the market to raise their productivity and
encourage them to adopt market values? In UK social policy, three
discourses have dominated social exclusion, namely moral underclass,
social integrationist and redistributionist (Levitas, 2005). The moral
underclass discourse is based on deficit assumptions about people’s val-
ues, behaviour and practices, especially if they are not aligned with
mainstream views about parental responsibility. This perspective is illus-
trated, for example, in the ‘Family Pathfinder’ initiative targeted at the
two per cent most disadvantaged families in the country (SETF, 2008).
The social integrationist discourse defines inclusion as participation in
economically productive activities, whether through paid work or edu-
cation and training (the value of care work is largely ignored due to its
reduced economic benefits) (Axford, 2008). This is reflected in welfare-
to-work policies and in services for young people not in education,
employment or training, whose aim is to reposition them closer to
the market. The redistributionist discourse approaches exclusion as the
outcome of poverty and social disadvantage, reflected in fiscal policies
towards a fairer distribution of resources and services.
Much of the focus in UK social policy has been on the excluded
rather than on the causes and mechanisms for exclusion (Barnes and
Morris, 2008). By focusing on the excluded, it becomes easier to
blame individual parents and families. Increasingly, social exclusion
is about individual choices and not systemic constraints or poverty.
The shift towards parents and children as the root of social exclusion
was exemplified with the objectives of the Children’s Fund which did
not specifically address the material dimensions of exclusion and the

‘socio-economic circumstances that underpin much of the experience
of exclusion’ (Barnes and Morris, 2008, p. 266); rather its focus was on
individual child objectives (Axford, 2008, p. 744). Social inclusion, as
conceived within government policy, has not been about the quality
of social ties and relationships in a community but about individu-
als’ capacity to be economically productive. However, one may argue
that economic productivity is not the only route to social inclusion.
Although unemployment has a severe impact on people’s sense of self
and their place in the world, unemployed people are not necessarily
excluded.
The coalition government’s family policy: Early intervention
Under New Labour, the focus of family policy was on tackling social
exclusion. For the coalition government, it is about social mobility
and equalising opportunities for the severely disadvantaged, mainly
through family intervention. The coalition government set out pol-
icy directions with regard to family and parenting. It builds on New
Labour’s interventionist approach towards the hard-to-reach families by
adopting a behavioural and individuated conception of poverty and
social exclusion. Recently, four independent reviews commissioned by
the coalition government have been published. These are The Inde-
pendent Review on Poverty and Life Chances led by Frank Field MP
(December 2010) to recommend actions to reduce poverty and increase
life chances with a particular focus on interventions that do not pro-
mote economic redistribution and other financial schemes for lifting
people out of poverty; Eileen Munro’s review of child protection (Spring
2010); Dame Clare Tickell’s review of the Early Years Foundation Stage
(Spring 2011), with a focus on child development and learning; and an
independent commission into early intervention led by Graham Allen
MP (January 2011).
In his review, Labour MP Graham Allen offers economic arguments
to justify the benefits of early intervention. According to him, ‘by the
time the children concerned were 15, it was estimated to have provided
benefits, in the form of reduced welfare and criminal justice expendi-
tures, higher tax revenues, and improved physical and mental health,
which were over five times greater than the cost of the programme’.
He considers a cost-benefit analysis in which the cost of late interven-
tion and remedial work, such as special-needs teaching, schemes for
job readiness, teenage pregnancy, drink and drug abuse, a lifetime on
benefits (no tax contributions) is much larger than the cost of early
intervention. The idea is that, through early intervention, the indi-

vidual is put on a developmental trajectory that is most beneficial to
the taxpayer. Inaction, on the other hand, has significant economic
implications. In Allen’s report, some commentators have tried to quan-
tify the total cost of inaction. For example, Action for Children and the
New Economics Foundation have estimated that without their proposed
additional early investment the economy could miss out on returns of
£486 billion over 20 years (Action for Children and New Economics
Foundation, 2009), which is £24 billion a year, equivalent to around
one-fifth of projected health spending for 2010–2011 (HM Treasury,
2010).
Frank Field’s review also supports early intervention and, although
the well-established link between poverty and children’s development
is acknowledged in the report, he proposes a non-financial way to abol-
ish child poverty in light of New Labour’s earlier ‘failure’ to reduce
child poverty through financial schemes (e.g. income redistribution).
Fiscal policies are no longer cost effective and sustainable and, as such,
Field proposes to abolish child policy through the provision of sup-
port during the early years, with parents occupying a central position in
this endeavour. Several assumptions relating to the positioning of par-
ents require closer examination in Field’s report. First, the report states
that ‘the Department for Education should continue to publish and
promote clear evidence on what is successful in encouraging parental
engagement in their children’s learning’ (2011, p. 8). However, it is
not clear why parents require encouragement considering longitudinal
evidence (including MCS findings) about the large numbers of parents
who, irrespective of socio-economic status and ethnicity, are frequently
involved with their children’s learning. There is no evidence that parent-
ing involvement and parental responsiveness have declined, especially
in families who face poverty and disadvantage. In contrast, a large num-
ber of parents are routinely involved with their children’s learning and
well-being, pointing to a form of intensive parenting in some demo-
graphic groups (Hartas, 2011; Peters et al., 2008; Siraj-Blatchford, 2010).
Considering that most parents are already involved with their children’s
education, the focus of policy should be, for example, on supporting
parents to enhance their educational qualifications to maximise the
quality of the learning support they already provide to their children.
Secondly, Field claims that ‘something more fundamental than the
scarcity of money is adversely dominating the lives of these children’
(2010, p. 16), having witnessed a reduction in parents’ capacity to meet
their children’s basic needs. Despite public concerns about a decline in
family life, research funded by the Nuffield Foundation based on avail-

able youth and parent self-reported data has found no evidence of a
decline in parenting in the last decades (Hagell, 2009). There is no evi-
dence that parents have become more selfish about how they use their
time or that they neglect children’s supervision and control. In many
ways, the data suggest improvement in aspects of parenting including
involvement with home learning (book reading and homework) during
preschool and the primary school years and monitoring during adoles-
cence (Hagell, 2009). However, what appears to be in decline over the
same period is social mobility, with a widening income inequality being
the reality for many families. And although most parents appear to be
adapting well to the many pressures on their lives (e.g. increases in time
spent in jobs, poor-quality education, social marginalisation), parent-
ing in disadvantaged families has become more stressful and taxing on
family resources.
Thirdly, Field talks about how to ‘ensure that parents from poor fam-
ilies know how best to extend the life opportunities of their children’
(2010, p.12). However, to extend children’s life opportunities is not
an atomised act that can be achieved by parents alone. Life opportu-
nities are interlinked with social class in terms of parental education,
access to good-quality education and educational resources, as well as
structural and systemic processes (within and outside the family) that
buffer the impact of poverty on parents’ mental health and well-being.
In Field’s review, it is not clear under what circumstances parents can
transcend their living conditions and remove the systemic barriers to
extend their children’s life chances. Likewise, in Allen’s review, parents
occupy a central position in supporting their children to develop social
and emotional skills to grow up to be model citizens. To achieve this,
parents should ensure their children are ‘school ready’ and ‘life ready’.
Being ‘school ready’ involves
having the social and emotional foundation skills to progress in

speech, perception, ability to understand numbers and quantities,
motor skills, attitude to work, concentration, memory and social
conduct; having the ability to engage positively and without aggres-
sion with other children and the ability to respond appropriately to
requests from teachers.
Being ‘life ready’ involves ‘having the social and emotional capability to
enter the labour market; understanding the importance and the social,
health and emotional benefits of entering work, the impacts of drug and
alcohol misuse, crime and domestic and other violence’ (2011, pp. 2–5).
In Allen’s report, the depiction of a school ready to life ready life course
is linear, overly simplistic and potentially artificial. There is an implicit
assumption here that it is up to the young people and their parents to be
‘life ready’ and ‘enter the labour market’ and that all they need is ‘social
and emotional capacity’ and an understanding of the ‘the importance
and the social, health and emotional benefits of entering work’. What
young people need, however, is jobs that pay a decent wage and oppor-
tunities for education and training, domains that require a political and
an economic intervention.
Fourthly, Field refers to the forces that shape families such as de-
industrialisation, limited employment opportunities for working-class
males and a steady decrease in community networks. However, these
forces go beyond parenting and thus to ensure that poor children do
not take their poverty to adulthood, education, including early years’
education, that can function as a driver for social mobility to halt dis-
advantage and reverse polarisation, is crucial. Field’s review ‘locates the
failure to ensure the country has an adequate skills base’ not, paradox-
ically, in the school system, but ‘in those years before children go to
school’ (2011, p. 24). However, this creates a false dichotomy because
quality early years’ education matters, but so does good primary and sec-
ondary education. Field states that ‘schools can have an impact, albeit
a smaller one, especially where good leadership and teaching provides
an environment for poor children to thrive, but it has generally been
found very difficult to undo the disadvantages carved out in the ear-
liest years’. However, as a study by Dearden and colleagues (2011) has
shown, education explains a sizeable portion (16%) of the achievement
gap between poor and rich children, in fact, the same proportion as par-
enting variables explain. However, Field’s statement begs the question as
to why schools and other civic institutions cannot narrow the achieve-
ment gap. It is fatalistic to assume that disadvantage that originates in
early years’ environments cannot be overcome by civic forces such as
education, rights legislation and families’ capability building.
Finally, research evidence from a plethora of studies (see Chapters 1
and 2) does not support the view that ‘what parents do is more impor-
tant than who parents are’ as stated in Field’s and Allen’s reviews. Nor
does it support the idea that ‘the early home learning environment is
the single biggest influence on a child’s development – more important
than material circumstances or parental income, occupation or edu-
cation’ (Allen, 2011, p. 57). The early home environment is not the
single biggest influence on child well-being and learning (Dearden et al.,
2011; Hartas, 2011; Sullivan et al., 2010). The findings presented in

Chapters 1 and 2 support the reverse statement that who the parents
are is more important than what parents do, or perhaps, what parents do
is heavily influenced by who they are, in that young children’s outcomes
(i.e. language, literacy) were found to associate with family income and
parents’ education whereas the association between home learning sup-
port and child outcomes were found to be negligible (e.g. Hartas, 2011,
2012; Sullivan et al., 2010).
From social inclusion to social mobility

The coalition government’s goal to increase intergenerational relative
social mobility by ‘breaking the transmission of disadvantage from one
generation to the next’ is to be achieved through targeted intervention
in early years. An increase in the educational achievement of children
and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds is the indicator of
success of early intervention with ‘good’ parenting being at the heart of
this policy. Indeed, parents are thought to play a pivotal role in break-
ing intergenerational disadvantage and increasing their children’s life
chances. Educational advancement, understood in the form of parental
involvement with children’s learning and the creation of rich home-
learning environments during the early years, is thought to link to
increases in relative social mobility. However, there are several caveats
with this line of thought: First, the MCS evidence points to the lim-
ited impact of parental learning support on young children’s language
and literacy (as rated by teachers) while social class (maternal education
and parental employment, family income) continues to exert substan-
tial influences on children’s learning and well-being (see Chapters 1
and 2). Secondly, while reducing educational inequality and improving
the educational attainment of disadvantaged children are crucial policy
targets, they are less likely to be met without tackling the fundamen-
tal causes of inequality such as wage polarisation, lack of fairness in
the distribution of resources and services and limited access to genuine
opportunities for education and training. Thirdly, focusing on educa-
tional advancement as an explicit social mobility strategy reflects ‘the
limits of modern statecraft: governments have not gone beyond the sup-
ply of skills into the deeper terrain of political economy’ (Pearce, 2011,
p. 8). Education alone as a driver for social mobility cannot address
the conditions that are necessary to reduce the achievement gap and
promote a fairer society.
Fourthly, for the government’s social mobility strategy, fairness
is understood as equality of opportunity in an abstracted and
decontextualised way which does not address the terrain between equal-
ity of opportunity and equality of outcome. An abstracted notion of
equality of opportunity and the strategies put in place to support it
(e.g. early intervention) are contested. Inequalities of income, resources
and power have redefined the nature and structure of opportunity and
the means through which it is equalised. Access to equal opportuni-
ties alone is not enough for families and young people to achieve equal
outcomes in that it is important to consider what individuals make of
these opportunities. Even when people have access to equal opportu-
nities the outcome may be different because a great deal depends on
what people do with the opportunities afforded to them (issues related
to equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are discussed in
detail in Chapter 8). As the MCS findings have shown, roughly equal
opportunities for concerted cultivation through routine parental sup-
port were not sufficient to narrow the achievement gap in that children’s
outcomes still differed along parents’ social class lines. It appears that
parental involvement alone as a strategy towards increasing relative
intergenerational social mobility is less likely to enhance children’s life
chances.
Finally, even if we accept that relative social mobility can be achieved
through early years’ intervention by equalising opportunities for young
children, without an increase in absolute social mobility (e.g. through
better salaries and increases in the number of parents in higher occupa-
tions), the outcome will be limited. We need social mobility strategies
that are better aligned to social justice as well as ‘economic and labour
market policies that might lead to creation of better-paid jobs and
more “room at the top” in higher occupations, without which rela-
tive social mobility becomes a zero-sum game’ (Pearce, 2011, p. 6).
Social mobility discourses should not be confined within the micro
and meso structures of parents’ and children’s lives. Family policy and
the social mobility strategy operate at micro layers (early intervention,
parent–child relationships, parenting) at the expense of accounting for
the macro influences such as globalisation, structural constraints linked
to power, access to resources and inequality that go beyond individu-
als’ lives. Macro theorisations are needed to address the growing gap
in income, resources and status as a result of an uneven distribution
of economic rewards in Western countries over the last three decades
and the fact that a disproportionate amount of the income growth has
concentrated at the top one per cent of households. Early interven-
tion strategies with an emphasis on parents as ‘the principle architects
of a fairer society’ (Lexmond and Reeves, 2009) should also account
for the effects of globalisation, the stagnation of wages and the lim-
ited opportunities that people, including parents, have to move to
higher income/status occupations, the reduction in decent-wage jobs,
the unregulated capacity of the financial sector to capture a big part of
GDP in profits (e.g. through bonuses) and the gradual removal of public
services into private spheres.
As strategies to equalise opportunities, early intervention and parent-
ing do not account for the macro influences felt in terms of marginality
(communities and families not linked to major services), stigmatisation
and lack of trust (displacement of family members, kin or trade unions),
a dissolution of place and a sense of belonging (public places become
increasingly commercialised and not easily accessible by children and
families who cannot afford them) and limited decent-wage jobs. These
trends in global capital cannot be reversed by ‘good’ parenting and early
intervention. Attempts to reduce intergenerational disadvantage with-
out engaging with these trends are bound to be inefficient. Parents’
and children’s agency is ‘a response to and a connection between micro
and macro forces of social change’ (Gardner et al., 2004, p. 11). Par-
ents, families and schools in marginalised areas face many challenges
considering that they are socialised and socialise others through these
structures. Parents and children are both actors and acted upon and thus
narrow conceptions of the ‘good’ parent are irrelevant to their experi-
ences. A cultural disjuncture between parents’ and children’s agency and
mainstream values and practices in schools and other institutions can
partly contribute to the achievement gap. The achievement gap, how-
ever, remains unchallenged even when disadvantaged parents espouse
mainstream values (e.g. high educational aspirations for their children;
frequent engagement with home learning), while resisting the macro
forces of social change. This is because opportunities for social advance-
ment are shaped by global forces and thus they are inaccessible to most
families and young people. This is true considering that the precarious
nature of market forces and the economic uncertainty experienced in
many Western countries work against a fairer access to education to
maximise relative social mobility.
Family policy should engage with the dynamic interplay of micro,
meso and macro influences on parents’ and children’s lives. Children’s
educational and social advancement is affected by global social changes
at a macro level, for example, precarious employment, which cannot be
overcome by changes in parental practices and behaviour, because par-
enting is also shaped by these forces and parenting styles are responses
to their toxicity. Yet, one of the solutions that current family policy
offers is soft skills and character development in children, stressing the

important role that parents play in it. Although soft skills are important
for employment, children need the intellectual tools, acquired through
good-quality early years’ education and lifelong learning, to expand
their life chances. The interplay of macro–micro factors stresses the
need for family policy to promote income distributive practices and
reconsider the growing inequality in wealth and power. Family policy
should not be about compensating but contesting wealth inequality and
the non-attainability of educational and social advancement in most
families. As Brady (2009) and Raffo (2011) argue, inequality can be tack-
led through structural improvements in employment and education
(including lifelong education for adults) and neighbourhood renewal.
This is about investing in education (not just early years’ education)
by offering educational opportunities to parents (considering the strong
impact of parental education on child social and academic outcomes)
and public services (e.g. health and transportation) and opening up
opportunities through a combination of welfare and tax reforms. It is
also about acknowledging the toxic effects of poverty on children and
their families and not stigmatising them if their behaviour and practices
reflect this toxicity.
Finally, in considering the direct influences of the macro economy
on children’s education, social mobility and life chances, family policy
should be examined through a macro prism and its remit rethought:
why is there so much emphasis on the first three years considering that
poverty affects individuals throughout their life span? And why does
policy target parents’ responses to the toxicity of the macro influences
on their life, and not the toxicity itself? Although, in the indepen-
dent government reviews, the link between poverty and life chances
was acknowledged, there is little articulation of these effects in early
intervention which seems to be more about interfering with family inti-
mate life and less about individual parents’ confidence in raising their
children. It is not clear how systemic improvements (e.g. enhancing
life chances, social mobility) will be made without a concerted effort
to tackle the big issues such as inequality. The pressing need to tackle
income disparities and narrow the inequality gap does not make the
government’s work easy in that to reduce child poverty through finan-
cial means requires money which, considering the current economic
downturn, simply is not available. Economic redistribution is thought of
as less sustainable compared to one which aims to ‘reduce the “supply”
of poor families’ through parenting (Field, 2011, p. 32). Expenditure on
parenting programmes remains small compared to that on the provision
of care and education and on the welfare benefits and measures to sup-
port paid employment (Daly, 2011). In 2006–2007 expenditure on child
contingent support and on early years’ education and childcare was
£30.6 billion and £6.4 billion respectively, while the total cost of the
various parenting programmes identified in 2008 was approximately
£50 million (Stewart, 2009 as cited in Churchill and Clarke, 2010).
5
Critical Reflections on Early
Intervention
Amidst significant public spending cuts announced by the coalition

government in the United Kingdom, early intervention has been pop-
ular with policy makers across the political divide. Early intervention
is intended to prevent social problems before they happen to save tax-
payers’ money in the long term by tackling problem citizens early and
reducing the need for costly solutions such as prisons, policing, drug
rehabilitation and benefits. Despite a wide acceptance of early interven-
tion as a way forward in supporting children and their parents, there is
a lack of transparency and clarity in its scope and goals and the princi-
ples that should guide family policy in general and early intervention
in particular. This prompts a key question: is the aim of early inter-
vention to offer access to public services for families who need them
most or is it to regulate disadvantaged families to ensure that they act
in ways deemed acceptable by family ‘experts’ and policy makers? Early
intervention as a means of providing access to public services for fam-
ilies who need them and choose to use them is certainly a positive
step, considering the gradual removal of public services (e.g. education,
health) from public to private spheres. However, early intervention in
the form of family regulation and control with the state being overly
concerned about what disadvantaged parents do with their children at
home is morally dubious and politically exploitative, and has impli-
cations regarding the relationship between the state and individuals,
and the extent to which parents can function as a buffer between their
children and the state. In this chapter, a critique on early intervention
is offered by discussing its scientific, pragmatic and ethical rationale,
examining particularly the contribution of neuroscience research and
evaluation studies on the scope and effectiveness of early intervention
programmes.
90
Critical Reflections on Early Intervention 91
The scientific rationale for early intervention
Much discussion on early intervention has been about research evi-

dence and ‘what works’, mainly referring to neuroscience to back up
interventions during the early years of children’s lives. The technolog-
ical advances in brain-scanning techniques (Giedd et al., 2006) and a
growing understanding about how the human brain changes with its
interaction with the environment during the early years and through-
out the lifespan have stimulated an interest in applying neuroscience
to understand child development within naturally occurring family
contexts and relationships. Although knowledge from neuroscience dis-
ciplines has only recently begun to be used to understand how adverse
early childhood experiences put children at risk of physical and mental
health problems, children’s early experiences and their impact on the
developing brain have been a key focus of family policy. The formative
years in children’s lives are thought to be years of rapid development
during which severe neglect and abuse impact negatively on child devel-
opment and well-being. However, as neuroscience evidence has shown,
human development and the effects of learning and experience do not
stop at the first years of children’s lives. It is thus important to look closer
at what neuroscience tells us about human development and environ-
mental influences and consider whether this knowledge is relevant and
appropriate to guide family policy.
The view of the human brain as an organ that is modified by expe-
rience not only during infancy and childhood but throughout life is
firmly supported by research and is becoming increasingly integrated
into social science disciplines (Baltes et al., 2006; Grossman et al., 2002;
Rioult-Pedotti and Donoghue, 2003). Research findings agree that the
structure and function of the human brain are determined by three
processes, namely genetic, epigenetic and lifelong adaptations to expe-
riences. Specifically, the genetic processes (genetic make-up) provide the
instructions for the general layout of the brain; the epigenetic shap-
ing of connections helps the brain to adapt to its environment during
development (which takes place during childhood and early adulthood);
and the lifelong adaptation involves responses to cumulative learning
and experiences throughout the lifespan. Neuroscience evidence shows
that the human brain is shaped by a constellation of factors throughout
life and not by a single factor during a certain period of development.
However, in the scientific rationale offered for early intervention, the
contribution of a single factor, that is, parenting, and its impact on
the developing brain during the early stages of development (0–3 years)
have been highlighted at the expense of other epigenetic influences,

such as education and learning (including lifelong learning) that have
the potential to modify the human brain throughout life.
Genetic and epigenetic influences

A key premise that underpins epigenetic processes is that the human
brain adapts to its environment, and this adaptation takes place
throughout life. Risk and protective or promotive factors affect child
developmental outcomes by altering the species-expectant environ-
ment, which involves a range of structures and processes such as
nurturance, protection and opportunities to learn and explore the
environment, that support typical human development. Adverse expe-
riences during early childhood potentially lead to differences in brain
anatomy and functioning. Child maltreatment, for example, alters the
species-expectant environment and is likely to produce deviant develop-
mental outcomes, and this process is mediated by children’s interactions
with the family, peers, social institutions and the wider culture. In a
study by Teicher and colleagues (2004), a group of pre-adolescent chil-
dren with histories of severe neglect or physical, sexual or psychological
abuse had significant reductions in specific areas of the corpus callosum
(nerve fibres that connect the left and right hemispheres of the cortex to
unify perceptions and memories can result from the somewhat different
functions performed by each side of the brain) compared with a contrast
group of children who were admitted for psychiatric evaluation without
such histories and a control group of healthy children. Moreover, the
absence of adequate social and linguistic experiences early in life as well
as during adolescence is likely to affect the development of areas in the
brain that are wired for modulating emotional responses. Some aspects
of language and social development are characterised by sensitive peri-
ods, although the precise mechanisms by which experience-expectant
development occurs are not well understood (Twardosz and Lutzker,
2010). For children who have experienced prolonged neglect, stress, fear
and deprivation (sensory, social or linguistic) at specific times of their
development (sensitive periods), their brain’s anatomy, organisation and
function are likely to be affected (see Cicchetti and Valentino, 2006, for
a review of the relationship of child maltreatment to language, play and
representational thought).
The effects of child maltreatment and neglect on the developing brain
in terms of function and implications for development and learning
have been examined via case studies of children (e.g. institution-
alised children) who have experienced severe and prolonged physical
punishment, food deprivation, isolation and sexual abuse, as well as

children who are born with significant physical problems, for exam-
ple, sensory organs not functioning properly (Ponton, 2006). In these
case studies, neglect is defined as ‘the absence of critical organizing
experiences at key times during development’ (Perry, 2002, p. 88), typ-
ically experienced by institutionalised children in the form of lack of
social interactions and exposure to prolonged stress, and is linked with
damages in the limbic system which includes the amygdala, hippocam-
pus and hypothalamus, all involved in the regulation of emotional
responses and brain’s responses to stress. Also, in cases of malfunc-
tioning sensory organs, extreme sensory deprivation (e.g. with hearing
sounds, seeing/handling objects) can affect the development of the
brain systems that support basic sensory and motor functions. What
this evidence indicates is that for children to experience significant dif-
ficulties capable of changing the anatomy and function of their brains,
their early environment has to be very aberrant. There is, however, a
dearth of research on the prevalence and effects of child neglect within
naturally occurring relationships in families who face socio-economic
adversity. This raises important questions as to whether we can rely on
a traumatology framework (however useful and relevant it might be for
cases of severe child maltreatment) to understand the experiences of
children living in poverty and make decisions regarding family policy.
One of the arguments for early intervention (0–3 years) and the role of
parents in children’s brain development is that early childhood stimula-
tion and enriched family environments are linked with developmental
synaptogenesis. However, this is a flawed argument for many reasons.
First, the developmental synaptogenesis is not confined in the first three
years of children’s lives. The period of synaptic genesis in terms of cre-
ating a high synaptic density extends to puberty and even beyond for
some areas of the human brain (Bruer, 2011). Critical periods (the peri-
ods within which certain kinds of experience have profound effects on
aspects of development) are not restricted within the first three years.
As Bauer stated, ‘even for a single system like vision, each function –
acuity, color, vision, motion vision, depth perception binocular vision –
has its own critical (or sensitive) period, some stretching to the teenage
years’ (2011, p. 6). Shonkoff (2010) has also raised concerns about the
over generalisation of research findings on critical periods that offer
erroneous views that human brain development is effectively solidified
by the age of three, despite the fact that critical periods in the matura-
tion of the human brain are the exceptions and not the rule. Secondly,
there is no conclusive evidence that parental stimulation influences
synaptogenesis which appears to be mainly under genetic and not envi-

ronmental control (see Goldman-Rakic and Selemon, 1997). Moreover,
there is an inverse relationship between high synaptic density and learn-
ing: as synaptic density increases, learning deteriorates (as evidenced
in a study examining learning and frontal lobe glucose uptake) and as
synaptic density falls, learning improves and continues to improve until
early adulthood. For memory and spatial learning tasks, as Bruer (2011)
argues, the period of peak synaptic density is not the period of easy
and efficient learning. Thirdly, most neuroscience research on ‘enriched
environments’, essentially, refers to enriched lab environments (e.g. the
presence of certain features in the cages in which rodents are kept) and
thus the findings cannot be extrapolated into real-life family environ-
ments and be used to determine the degree to which their features are
enriched (Rosenzeig et al., 1972 as cited in Bruer, 2011).
Lifelong adaptation and learning

Although by early adulthood, pruning in the cerebral cortex is complete,
brain responses to experience and the modification and generation of
new connections as a response to experience occur throughout life. Dif-
ferent areas and circuits in the human brain reach maturity at different
ages, with important consequences for the development of individual
cognitive functions and with many regions, such as prefrontal grey
matter and white matter tracts, undergoing considerable and often
non-linear changes throughout adolescence and beyond (Lebel et al.,
2008; Lenroot and Giedd, 2006; Shaw et al., 2008). This evidence
points to the importance of positive life experiences and opportunities
for advancement not only during the early years but throughout the
lifespan.
A key concept in understanding how the environment influences
human brain development is plasticity. Brain plasticity is a lifelong abil-
ity of the brain to respond to environmental influences and experiences
by modifying its structure and function. In the human brain, the con-
nections that neurons form with each other are strengthened when
simultaneously activated. In other words, ‘neurons that fire together
wire together’; this effect is known as ‘experience-dependent plastic-
ity’ and is present throughout life (Lovden et al., 2010). Although
plasticity decreases with age, especially with regard to language learn-
ing, experience-dependant plasticity allows the brain to be influenced
by the environment and, through learning, accumulate experience.
As Rutter (2002) argues, in considering how early childhood experiences
influence brain function it is important to draw a distinction between
experience-expectant and experience-dependant plasticity and not to

overstate experience-expectant plasticity (and its critical period con-
straints) at the expense of experience-dependant plasticity and lifelong
learning.
Experience-expectant plasticity refers to changes in brain organs
or functions that occur as a result of encountering (or expecting
to encounter) environmental stimuli and fine-tune their performance
accordingly. For example, the development of the visual system relies on
experience-expectant changes and thus severe deprivation in environ-
mental stimuli is likely to result in abnormal development. Fortunately,
the kind of stimuli that are needed for a child to develop are widely
available even in the most atypical family environments (unless sen-
sory deprivation and neglect are severe and prolonged). On the other
hand, experience-dependent plasticity accounts for changes brought by
learning and is retained throughout our lifetime. Education (and not
just early years’ education) is the ‘best cognitive enhancer’ (according to
a recent report from the Royal Society): experience and learning accu-
mulated throughout life have the potential to change the human brain
(Bostrom and Sandberg, 2009).
A growing number of studies on the changes of the human brain
as a result of learning a specific skill point to the important role of
experience-dependant plasticity. Learning has been found to associate
with changes in certain areas of the human brain. Jacobs, Schall and
Scheibel (1993) found that attaining higher levels of education was cor-
related with changes in the Wernicke’s area, which is heavily involved in
language comprehension. In another study, participants were asked to
learn certain patterns while performing some movements. Compared
with the control participants who performed similar movements but
did not learn the patterns, learning the patterns produced changes in
their cortical maps (Karni et al., 1995; Robertson et al., 2003). Further,
the acquisition of literacy and numeracy skills change the human brain
(Dehaene, 2009) and can build up an individual’s cognitive reserve and
resilience to ensure long-term health benefits. According to this body of
neuroscience evidence, a case can be made for the importance of life-
long education and the quality of children’s and adolescents’ learning
experiences. Education enhances the capacity for abstract thought and
mental flexibility in applying ideas in different contexts (Bostrom and
Sandberg, 2009). As such, in intervening with families, policy makers
should think about offering quality education and learning opportuni-
ties to both parents and children because such intervention is likely to
bring long-lasting positive effects.
Neuroscience evidence on the influence of learning, education and

experience on the human brain has the potential to inform family
and educational policy in ways that bring long-term benefits. However,
neuroscience evidence on the impact of prolonged adverse childhood
experiences taken from case studies of institutionalised children (e.g.
Romanian orphanages, children in care) is less relevant to the experi-
ences of most children and parents. This is because their conclusions
are drawn from a small number of cases of extreme deprivation which,
although useful in delineating the epigenetic influences on the human
brain, are not relevant to the experiences of growing up in most fami-
lies (however atypical they might be). Moreover, they are not relevant
because they tend to be devoid of the social context that surrounds
them. For example, in examining the consequences of maltreatment
for children’s development, factors such as societal organisation, fam-
ily dynamics and intergenerational transmission of poverty should also
be considered.
Without a doubt, neuroscience research has made important con-
tributions to understanding the interaction between the environment
and the human brain. In developing a bio-developmental framework
for social policy, however, we need to account for the social and
cultural ecology of children and families (not just intra-family rela-
tionships or parenting but also peers and other factors that are distal
to children’s life such as poverty); the physical and built environ-
ment (quality of neighbourhood experience); and parents’ education
and access to jobs (resources and human capital) (Shonkoff, 2010).
Neuroscience offers a systems approach to child development by focus-
ing on a multitude of risk and protective factors and their impact
on children’s developmental trajectories (Cicchetti and Lynch, 1993).
A systems approach challenges current policy focus on a single fac-
tor, that is, parenting or home learning. It is reductionistic to focus
on a single environmental factor and not consider both risk and pro-
tective influences on children’s interactions and relationships in their
proximal and distal environments. Resilience as a protective factor,
for example, offers a guiding framework about child maltreatment by
acknowledging the mechanisms, mostly proximal to children’s envi-
ronment, that support children who face adversity to develop into
well-adjusted adults (Houshyar and Kaufman, 2005). Taking a systems
approach, however, throws up the challenge of delineating risk and pro-
tective factors and deciding what factors to focus on when designing
family policy.
So, what is the neuroscience evidence for early intervention?

Neuroscience research offers some insights regarding child develop-
ment. First, the effects of child maltreatment are mediated by both
environmental, including the protective factors in the child’s environ-
ment (Houshyar and Kaufman, 2005), and genetic factors (Caspi et al.,
2002). In a longitudinal study conducted in New Zealand, boys who
were maltreated were more likely to develop conduct disorders and
become violent offenders in later life if they were genetically susceptible,
that is, if they possessed a gene variant that resulted in low amounts of
an enzyme that helps to inactivate neurotransmitters, the substances by
which neurons communicate with one another (Twardosz and Lutzker,
2010). Other studies have also examined the contribution of gene fac-
tors to the link between maltreatment and depression in children and
have concluded that this link is moderated by genotype (Kaufman,
2008).
Secondly, neuroscience confirms the existence of disparities in neu-
rocognitive function in diverse socio-economic groups and provides
direct evidence of the involvement of the prefrontal cortex (the area
involved in language functioning) in observed socio-economic dispar-
ities (Hackman and Farah, 2009). While earlier behavioural studies
inferred a strong link between socio-economic factors and child devel-
opmental outcomes (see Chapter 2), neuroscience research has traced
the socio-economic influences on children’s brain function in modu-
lating responses to stimuli as diverse as letter strings, spoken words
and emotional faces (Hackman and Farah, 2009). Two areas in par-
ticular, language and executive functioning (e.g. the capacity to plan
and organise thoughts), have been found to differ as a function of
socio-economic status. This is explained by the long developmental
trajectory of the prefrontal regions which renders them particularly sus-
ceptible to environmental influences such as poverty. Indeed, prolonged
poverty and disadvantage form an experience-dependant environment
whose impact is stronger on the cognitive domains that take longer to
mature.
Thirdly, findings from neuroscience research indicate that changes in
the brain’s structure and connectivity occur throughout the lifespan
and that sensitive periods in brain development extend beyond child-
hood into adolescence and adulthood (Andresen, 2003; Knudsen,
2004; Johnson, 2001; Thomas and Knowland, 2009). While the evi-
dence supports that sensitive periods for primary function (e.g. vision,
movement, memory) occur very early in life, there is now increasing
evidence that further brain development in adolescents and adults

is possible. Indeed, important changes in certain parts of the brain
occur during adolescence, especially with regard to the development of
empathy, perspective taking, capacity for introspection and control of
emotions and thoughts, including capacity for complex feelings such
as guilt or embarrassment (Blakemore, 2008). The brain regions that
are involved in inhibition, the prefrontal cortex in particular, continue
to change in structure and function throughout adolescence and into
the early adulthood. Thus the capacity to exercise self-control by way
of inhibiting inappropriate behaviours develops relatively slowly dur-
ing childhood and continues to improve during adolescence and early
adulthood (Blakemore and Choudhury, 2006). The neural basis of self-
control and how to maximise it are not clear, making it harder to devise
interventions to support children to control emotions and monitor their
behaviour. As such, the view by Lexmond and Reeves (2009) in the
DEMOS report that parents play a key role in developing self-control
in their children during the early years is questionable.
It is important to remember that most neuroscience studies do
not consider or measure neural function in terms of linking learning
behaviour or other environmental influences to the anatomy of the
human brain. Thus we cannot draw direct links between brain func-
tioning and children’s experiences of growing up. This is not surprising
considering that children’s development is not the outcome of direct
and unmediated gene expressions where correspondences can be drawn
between brain anatomy and function and human behaviour. As stated
earlier, neuroscience evidence indicates that ‘sensitive’ periods are not
restricted in early years but also operate throughout childhood and ado-
lescence, questioning the fatalism inherent in the ‘0–3’ focus of family
policy. The human brain has the capacity to adapt to learning and expe-
rience throughout life in that learning, memory and accumulation of
experience contribute to changes in the human brain. Education and
learning have been shown to associate with changes in certain aspects
of the human brain, offering a strong argument for the provision of
quality education not only during the early years but throughout life.
Also, the evidence on the significant epigenetic influences of poverty
on child development is crucial, especially considering its persistent
nature: the experience of living in poverty between the prenatal period
and age five has a strong association with child development (Duncan
et al., 2010; Shonkoff, 2010). And yet, the rhetoric of brain research that
has framed family policy and early interventions does not reflect these
insights. Thus the neuromyths that underpin early intervention such as
the assumption that specific brain functions relate to human behaviour

(parenting in particular) should be challenged.
With regard to family policy, neuroscience evidence points to the
need to move from the risk factors, be they parenting, genes or poverty,
to the experience of stress and adversity itself. The US National Scien-
tific Council on the Developing Child (2005) has proposed a taxonomy
based on three categories of stress experience, that is, positive, tolerable
and toxic to differentiate typical life challenges that promote growth
from challenges that have severe consequences with regard to chil-
dren’s physical and mental health. A bio-developmental framework of
child development should focus on: (i) the interactions of children with
adults not only within the family but also in the context of neigh-
bourhood and peer relationships; (ii) the physical, chemical and built
environments in which the child and family live – requires protection
from neurotoxic exposures such as lead, mercury and organophosphate
insecticides; safeguards against injury, safety of neighbourhoods, access
to nutrition; and (iii) parents education and access to job opportuni-
ties and employment (Shonkoff, 2010). Such framework supports family
intervention to be enacted in the form of public services (e.g. health,
education, community services) rather than focusing on parenting as
a key risk factor in child development. The neuroscience rationale
for early intervention offered in Allen’s report is unclear as to how
neuroscience relates to the economic arguments presented in his report,
unless we take the view that a healthy developing mind has an eco-
nomic value as a future investment. And even if we take this view, as
the Royal Society report stated, it is quality education that is the best
cognitive enhancer, and thus our efforts should be directed to offering
parents and children genuine educational opportunities.
There is nothing wrong with trying to improve the experience of
being a parent and creating optimal conditions for children to grow
up. But these goals can be achieved through universal childcare and
early years’ education; lifelong education and opportunities for social
advancement; a civic platform to expand children’s experiences; access
to public services and respect for intimate family life; and by acknowl-
edging the role that poverty plays in making parenting taxing. The idea
that parenting alone has direct, long-term effects on child develop-
ment goes against decades of research into ecological approaches to
child development, within which risk and protective factors inter-
act with each other and influence development in a multitude of
ways. In some cases, what happens in children aged between zero
and three is critical and irrevocably shapes their life chances. However,
this argument should not be used to offer normative explanations

about parental influences on children’s well-being. For most children,
such explanations are inaccurate, deterministic and potentially fatalis-
tic because they (a) are out of proportion, in that, thankfully, a very
small number of children experience severe neglect and abuse at home
(in which cases the state has a legitimate reason to intervene); (b) reduce
the role of education in influencing young people’s life and reversing
disadvantage, and this goes against the view of education as a ‘cogni-
tive enhancer’; (c) do not acknowledge the influences of a multitude
of proximal and distal factors on children’s well-being; (d) misinter-
pret neuroscience findings by assuming the existence of direct links
between human behaviour (e.g. parenting practices) and aspects of chil-
dren’s brain anatomy and functioning; and (e) work against the belief
that children are strong and resilient. Misinterpreting and misapplying
neuroscience evidence regarding children’s experiences of growing up
may encourage moral absolutes in understanding human development.
The pragmatic rationale for early intervention
A large number of experimental studies and evaluation programmes

have taken place to justify investment in early intervention on both
sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, experimental studies
such as the Carolina Abecedarian programme (Ramey et al., 2000),
the High/Scope Perry Preschool Programme (Schweinhart, 2005), the
Chicago Parent Child Programme (Reynolds et al., 2001) and the Nurse–
Family Partnership (Olds, 2006) have long been used to offer evidence
about the effectiveness of early intervention programmes. The main
argument for the effectiveness of such programmes has been that the
individual, social and economic benefits incurred from their implemen-
tation outweigh the economic investment. In economic terms, the ratio
of money spent to money gained (e.g. from cutting welfare bills) justifies
their existence (Karoly et al., 2005).
For many intervention programmes, an evaluation of their effective-
ness has focused on short-term impact, with very few evaluation studies
having examined medium- and long-term impacts. And among those
whose impact has been evaluated long term, the evidence is not encour-
aging. The Infant Health and Development Programme, designed to
provide 0–3 support was found to have few long-term positive effects
on children’s behavioural, cognitive and academic outcomes at ages 8
and 18 (Goldman et al., 2006). The impact of some of the most success-
ful intervention programmes on child academic and social outcomes
has been found to be modest (Shonkoff, 2010), mainly because the

inequality gap has not been addressed. For example, the Perry Preschool
Programme (PPP), an early intervention programme for children liv-
ing in poverty, produced modest effects across domains (Schweinhart
et al., 1993; Shonkoff, 2010). Begun in the 1960s, its original goal
was to provide high-quality preschool support to three- and four-year-
old low-income African-American children. Through a combination
of classroom work with children, group meetings with parents and
home visits from teachers spread over two years, the programme man-
aged to impact on several educational outcomes for children, including
improvements in intellectual and language tests at preschool age and
up to age seven years. At age 14 years, participants scored higher in
tests of reading, language and mathematics than non-participants. At 19
years, their general literacy skills were higher than non-participants,
while at 27 years, they had higher earnings, higher educational achieve-
ments and fewer arrests throughout adolescence and young adulthood
(Schweinhart et al., 1993). This is perhaps best illustrated in a 40-year
follow-up data which reported higher rates of high school graduation
(from 45% to 66%) and lower rates of arrest for violent crime (from
48% to 32%) for programme participants compared with a randomised
control group (Schweinhart, 2005). However, although 20 per cent more
children graduated from high school and around 15 per cent of children
in the Perry Preschool Programme were not arrested, its effectiveness
was modest, pointing to the need to rethink the structure and aims of
these programmes.
In the United Kingdom, the ministerial Childhood and Families Task
Force has been set up to ‘identify and prioritise . . . policy proposals that
will make the biggest difference to children and families’. The Health
Secretary Andrew Lansley announced that the coalition government
will increase access to the FNP health visiting programme, for fami-
lies defined as disadvantaged. The FNP involves intensive home visiting
that provides ‘vulnerable’ first-time mothers with 50 visits by a specially
trained nurse from the antenatal period until the child is two years old
with the aim to improve parenting and access to health care. Access to
children’s health care services is much needed considering the growing
hollowing-out of public services. Support from health visitors is posi-
tive as long as they are able to provide expert advice on how to access
services, form social networks within the local community as well as
networks that bridge across communities, children’s health care and
childcare. This requires proper investment in staff training and develop-
ment to ensure that ‘experts’ have a robust knowledge on issues of child
development and social structures as well as the capacity to offer ser-

vices of a practical nature. Lack of knowledge and understanding of the
multitude of factors that influence families can easily lead to moral abso-
lutes and inappropriate advice. However, elements in the FNP such as
access to comprehensive health services do not seem realistic especially
as public cuts deepen.
Longitudinal follow-up data from the United States on the effective-
ness of home visiting services through the FNP Program (a programme
targeted ‘at-risk’ families by supporting parental behaviour to foster
emotional attunement and confident, non-violent parenting) has also
produced modest results (Olds, 2006). The FNP was deemed to be suc-
cessful for high-risk groups only, defined as unmarried teenage mothers
on welfare who were at risk for substance abuse and violence, and did
not bring any economic benefits for individuals not in the high-risk
groups. In economic terms, it was estimated that the programme pro-
vided savings for high-risk families by the time their children were aged
15, which were reported to be over five times greater than the cost of
the programme. These savings came in the form of reduced welfare and
criminal justice expenditures and higher tax revenues and improved
physical and mental health (Karoly et al., 2005). The effectiveness of
the FNP was found to depend upon its receptiveness from the commu-
nity and, most crucially, on the training and capacity of staff nurses to
provide advice on medical issues and practical services (Olds, 2006). Key
determinants of success were the training and professional expertise of
the nurses to offer clinical advice with regard to childhood diseases and
access to health services, as well as adherence to carefully constructed
home-visit guidelines designed to offer opportunities to parents to bet-
ter themselves through training and access to resources and socialisation
through the development of community networks. New studies how-
ever have led to doubt the effectiveness of the FNP home-visitation
programmes, especially those that do not include well-trained staff and
do not offer parents alternative options for training and employment.
Olds urges policy makers and practitioners to pause and think about
investing in home visitation without giving a careful consideration to
the programme structure, content and overall orientation (2006).
Theoretically, the design of these intervention programmes draws
upon ecological understandings of human development and the
dynamic interaction of individuals within their contexts and the cir-
cumstances that surround their life. For these programmes to be
effective in supporting parents and children, they should account for
the structural constraints that parents living in poverty face, rather
than taking an individuated approach to what parents need, and offer

prescriptive advice on how parents should nurture their children. Fam-
ilies who face exceedingly complex social and economic deprivation
have not been found to benefit from certain family programmes because
‘good’ or ‘bad’ parenting is a side effect of their toxic circumstances
(MacMillan et al., 2007; Shonkoff, 2010). As Shonkoff (2010) points
out, information on child development and advice on parenting are not
sufficient for mothers and fathers with low income and limited edu-
cation if they themselves are having considerable difficulty in coping
with the stresses of poverty, depression, substance abuse, food insecurity,
homelessness and/or neighbourhood violence. By focusing on individ-
uals, what these programmes do not address is the growing disparity
in income and thus their outcomes are bound to be modest and short
term at best (Shonkoff, 2010). Considerable financial burdens on fam-
ilies reduce the effectiveness of intervention programmes because the
effects of persistent poverty are entrenched, especially in light of evi-
dence that poverty between the prenatal period and age five appears to
have a strong association with subsequent adult earnings (Duncan et al.,
2010).
In the United Kingdom, Law et al. (2009) conducted a systematic
review of parenting programmes and held a series of focus groups with
parents and professionals working within three agencies, that is, health,
education and social work. The review brought together parenting inter-
ventions targeting a wide range of issues such as disability, mental
health difficulties and abuse/neglect. Overall, the review offered little
evidence to support the impact of parenting intervention in alleviat-
ing neglect. Also, the evidence relating to abuse was mixed. Moreover,
there was limited evidence on the role and training of paraprofession-
als in supporting parents and their long-term impact on child health
status. Also, family and parenting approaches such as multi-systemic
therapy have been found to have a limited positive impact on par-
enting, parental mental health, family functioning, child academic
performance, employment and peer relations in economically deprived
families (Woolfenden et al., 2001). The review concluded that it is
not possible from the existing research literature to ascertain which
groups benefit the most from which interventions and whether the
services offered are responsive to changing familial circumstances and
challenges (Law et al., 2009).
An earlier systematic review by Kolko (1996) on the effectiveness
of parenting programmes in reducing instances of physical abuse and
neglect in children also found limited evidence to support the use of
these programmes. However, some parenting programmes may be effec-

tive in improving outcomes associated with physically abusive parent-
ing in terms of helping parents develop appropriate discipline practices
(Barlow et al., 2006). This is corroborated by a meta-analysis of parent
training programmes aimed at preventing child abuse (Lundahl et al.,
2006) which indicated that parent training is effective in reducing the
risk of a parent abusing or neglecting a child as long as it targets specific
aspects of abusive parenting (e.g. parental anger) as well as its source
(e.g. unemployment, poverty).
By and large, parent training programmes tend to be effective for
about six months after a programme has ended (Moran et al., 2004).
With regard to their effects on developing capabilities in parents to
enhance child developmental outcomes, even in the most promising
‘empirically supported’ programmes, as many as two-fifths of parents
will continue to experience problems with their children after the pro-
gramme has ended (especially for children with severe behavioural diffi-
culties) (Ghate and Ramella, 2002; Barlow and Stewart-Brown, 2001).
Politically, the evaluation of the effectiveness of such programmes
generates a great deal of controversy. Programmes that show positive
outcomes tend to be selectively chosen to avoid a political backlash,
considering the pressure to identify what works and draw examples of
good practice (Moran et al., 2004).
Programmes that are parent-driven and offer practical and authori-
tative services to alleviate the systemic barriers in parents’ lives tend
to be successful (albeit modestly). Parents who find parenting training
programmes to be useful are less likely to drop out. However, evalua-
tions of parenting training programmes have identified a high dropout
rate, with as many as half of all parents referred dropping out prema-
turely from these programmes (Assemany and McIntosh, 2002). There
are many reasons for the high rates of attrition (e.g. parents move or
cannot be located), but a crucial factor is parents’ perceptions of the
value and usefulness of the programme, especially programmes that
focus on changing parental behaviour. Also, a key assumption in early
intervention is that children of parents who do not engage with parent-
ing programmes are likely to face more challenges than those of parents
who do (Moran et al., 2004). However, there is little evidence to support
this. As Staudt (2007) points out, parents who drop out from parent-
ing programmes may be involved with another provider or have made
well-informed decisions that the services they receive are not useful, or
perhaps they have found alternative sources of help outside of a formal
service delivery system.
Across evaluation studies, a number of indicators of success have

emerged.
Parent-identified needs and parent-driven services

Evaluation studies of various family policy initiatives agree that pro-
grammes that address parents’ self-identified needs and offer them
opportunities to become involved in their development and imple-
mentation are comparatively more successful. The notion of need is
a slippery concept, however, in terms of ‘whose need it is’ and ‘who
defines it’. Need is a contested concept and not easily defined but
Bradshaw (1972) distinguishes between four types of need: felt need
(what individuals want), expressed need (based on the demand for ser-
vices), comparative need (based on extrapolating the socio-demographic
characteristics of service users for the whole population in question)
and normative need (based on the requirements to address health and
development deficits) (Axford, 2008, p. 738). The effectiveness of a pro-
gramme depends on how well customised it is to support particular
needs as articulated by the family.
However, understanding individual needs is not as straightforward
as it might seem because, within family policy, discourses of need and
social exclusion are intermixed. One may be socially excluded but does
not exhibit any needs, whereas a person with needs (e.g. developmen-
tal difficulties) may be excluded as a result of his or her needs. Unmet
needs may reduce people’s participation in aspects of society such as
employment but not being economically active does not (and should
not) equate with social exclusion. Thus, family intervention as a way
of meeting the needs of those who are perceived as being socially
excluded requires a nuanced approach to disentangle what Barnes and
Morris (2008, p. 267) called the ‘normalising tendencies of the social
inclusion discourse’ from genuinely addressing families’ self-identified
needs. Parents can benefit from services that are relevant to their needs
(to what parents identify as a need). Most crucially, they benefit from
services that promote the protective factors and strengths that already
exist in families. Otherwise, services may compromise families who
already operate under difficult circumstances and teach parents to avoid
‘helping’ agencies (Ghate and Hazel, 2002).
Practical and authoritative services

A common theme that emerges from evaluation studies of family pro-
grammes is the need for services that are practical and community
orientated in nature and delivered in a professional and authoritative
manner (Hartas and Lindsay, 2008; Moran et al., 2004). Parents wel-
come services that facilitate access to education and health care services,
which are particularly important in countries with an unequal ser-
vice provision. A key determinant of the modest success of the Perry
Preschool Programme was its focus on quality education provision and
access to health services. Similarly, Sure Start projects led by health
services were slightly more effective than those led by other agencies,
probably because of better access to established health visitor networks
(Welshman, 2010), pointing to families’ preference for practical services.
Also, parents’ views about programmes with a community orientation
tended to be positive in terms of having the opportunity to meet other
parents, feel less socially isolated and exchange advice and information
about child rearing.
Most of the parenting programmes reviewed by Moran and colleagues
(2004) showed that parents would like to receive concrete advice and
information about child-related issues and tips to support their chil-
dren’s behaviour. They felt they gained from professionals who were
authoritative and ‘practical and down to earth’ and willing to under-
stand the circumstances of their family. Results from evaluations on
knowledge-based interventions (e.g. knowledge about inoculations and
other issues related to child development such as information about
ADHD) suggest that a large number of parents would like to access them.
Parent education programmes that aim at providing information on
issues related to child development are perceived by parents as useful
and relevant to their concerns about their children’s well-being. Access
to advice and support regarding universal services is crucial for fami-
lies; however misinformation and ill advice can be harmful to parents.
For example, in a review by Moran and colleagues (2004), some parents
complained about the inadequate and ill-advised approaches that some
health visitors took in their interactions with them. Offering inappropri-
ate advice to disadvantaged families can only exacerbate their difficul-
ties, especially when the focus of intervention is on changing parents’
behaviour instead of tackling structural inequality by facilitating access
to public services.
Programmes on transmission mechanisms: What about systemic

barriers?
Parenting programmes that attempt to change parents’ attitudes and
beliefs do not bring positive outcomes for children, suggesting that
by targeting the transmission mechanisms alone (e.g. parenting) the
root of the problem remains unchallenged. In such programmes, the
mechanisms of change are delineated in a linear manner: parenting

knowledge leads to attitude change, then to behaviour change and
finally to outcomes for children. However, this is problematic because
such programmes do not account for the systemic barriers and tend to
consider the link between parental functionality and child outcomes
as being direct and causal. We cannot make meaningful predictions
about how a child will turn out by solely examining the transmission
mechanisms of risk factors in families.
Family programmes of limited success tend to involve parents living
in poverty who are less educated, parents of young children and parents
of children with severe behavioural or language difficulties. Although
these programmes influence some aspects of parenting, they do not
seem to affect child outcomes. With regard to parents of children with
learning or behavioural difficulties, despite the fact that some parents
find these programmes useful, around 40 per cent continue to report
problems with their children’s behaviour after the programme is over
(Moran et al., 2004). Garbarino et al. (2002) remind us that risks to par-
enting arise not only from direct threats but also from ‘the absence of
normal, expectable opportunities’, pointing to the need to expand the
remit of family support to address the impact of reduced socio-economic
and educational opportunities on parents and children, and take into
account their subjective experiences of how disadvantage narrows their
world. As Moran and colleagues concluded in their review, a message for
family policy is that ‘in addition to beginning to have a much clearer
(if still partial) picture of “what works” at the micro level in parenting
support programmes, we also know that outcomes for children will be
enhanced if macro policy effectively addresses social inequalities in the
broader context of parents’ lives’ (2004, p. 131).
As stated earlier, family programmes that parents find useful are those
that offer practical services (e.g. health care); are delivered in an author-
itative manner; do not focus on transmission mechanisms exclusively
but also consider systemic barriers; and are truly ecological in their
approach to children’s well-being. The success of parenting programmes
is influenced by the ecology of parenting in terms of the dynamic inter-
actions between factors (proximal and distal) that surround families.
Consistent with the findings from the evaluation studies discussed here,
Kotchick and Forehand (2002) identified four groups of factors – practi-
cal, relational, cultural and contextual, that make the implementation
of family support effective. Practical refers to the type of support that
meets parents’ practical needs such as paid transportation or childcare.
Relational involves professional development and rapport-building with
parents during culturally sensitive interactions where the participants

are not ‘talked down to’ and their strengths as individuals and as par-
ents are acknowledged by professionals who are authoritative and able
to offer advice about issues that parents have identified as important
(e.g. medical support and services available in the community, how to
support children with a difficult temperament, information on child
health and childcare provision). Cultural, contextual and situational
issues such as socio-economic stress, cultural views of disability and
parental mental health need to be acknowledged because the notion
of good parenting is culture- and social class-specific and affected by
the social positioning of children and the relationships between family
members.
There is a degree of certitude in family policy about the effectiveness
of early intervention in terms of long-term, substantive impact, and yet
there is little evidence to support this. By and large, parents are active
in seeking advice and support and enjoy access to services of a practi-
cal nature as to how to handle their children’s behaviour and support
their learning (Moran et al., 2004). Consistent with the MCS evidence
in Part I, most parents are active in reaching out and becoming involved
with their children’s learning. However, family programmes tend to
be less effective for the hard-to-reach and the hard-to-engage par-
ents because the complex challenges they face require approaches that
target structural constraints to support them to develop effective parent-
ing strategies. Families with multiple and deeply entrenched problems
require political solutions that can propel social changes rather than
changes in parental behaviour and practices. Family policy should focus
on the sources of the problems (such as lack of income or education) and
not on the transmission mechanisms (parental involvement with home
learning). Most crucially, family programmes should expand opportuni-
ties and support individual parents to convert these opportunities into
what they value. For this to be effective, intervention needs to be truly
ecological and long term with a clear political vision.
The state has a triple role to play in supporting families that need
most support: develop a legislative framework for parental responsibility
and aspects of childcare; influence, through public services – univer-
sal or targeted – how parents who experience difficult circumstances
offer positive experiences to their children; and become a guarantor
of parents’ and children’s economic, political and human rights. The
last point is particularly important considering the widening inequality
gap and the legitimate role the state should play in reducing inequal-
ity through investment in lifelong education and training, appropriate
housing and employment opportunities. Worryingly, Frank’s and Allen’s

reviews focus exclusively on parenting because, as they argue, attempt-
ing to reduce inequality through monetary policies is neither feasible
(due to lack of money) nor sustainable.
The ethical rationale for early intervention
The New Labour’s early strategic document Supporting Families stated:
Governments have to be wary about intervening in areas of private

life and intimate emotion. We in government we need to approach
family policy with a strong dose of humility. We must not preach and
we must not give the impression that members of the government are
any better than the rest of the population in meeting the challenge
of family life. They are not. (1998)
However, as Parton argues ‘what we witness is the emergence of a

preventive–surveillance state, where the role of the state is becoming
broader, more interventive and regulatory at the same time’ (2008,
p. 166). The increasing regulation and scrutiny of families have huge
implications for civil liberties and human rights for all citizens but espe-
cially for parents and children who live in poverty. Despite the plethora
of evaluation studies on the effectiveness of intervening with parents
and families, the moral dimensions of social support for families have
been under-theorised and almost eclipsed by dominant economic argu-
ments and cost-benefit discourses. Even in the most recent independent
reports (see Field’s and Allen’s reviews), an economic rather than an
ethical rationale for early intervention has been advanced.
Houston and Dolan (2008) employed Honneth’s recognition theory
to discuss the role of the state in supporting families. Honneth (1995)
thought of social recognition of the ‘other’ as the cornerstone of social
justice but also the basis for self-realisation in day-to-day relationships.
Recognition of the ‘other’ involves recognition of the subject’s right to
be treated with positive regard or affectionate care; recognition of the
subject’s entitlement to a wide-ranging body of legal rights; and recog-
nition of the subject’s attributes or strengths by a community of interest
(Houston and Dolan, 2008, p. 460). The notion of a ‘community of
interest’ is important in that ‘a politics of recognition . . . protects the
integrity of the individual in the life contexts in which his or her iden-
tity is formed’ (Habermas, 1994, p. 125, cited in Nihei, 2010). This offers
a useful framework to consider the ethics of care and human agency
that ought to frame family policy (see Chapter 8 for a discussion on the
principles for family policy).
The first principle, that is, showing regard for others, refers to the
‘ethics of care’, a moral theory (Held, 2005) and Featherstone’s (2004)
feminist theory on developing the ethics of care when intervening in
people’s life. A key idea in Honneth’s theory of recognition is that
human agency flourishes during social interactions that ‘validate and
acknowledge personal existence’ (Houston and Dolan, 2008, p. 459).
Recognition of and respect for the ‘other’ can be compromised in that
public attitudes towards disadvantaged parents and children tend to
be those of social stigma, personal and moral failure and marginali-
sation (Lister, 2004). Poverty and disadvantage push parents into the
category of ‘other’ and this has significant implications for the ethics
of care. A social-cultural ‘otherness’ is encouraged by supporting the
participatory rights of parents with a market power only. Within mar-
ket structures, human agency mutates into an economic agency within
which individual parents’ and children’s participatory rights are exer-
cised as long as they are compatible with maximising public investment
(Ong, 2006). Approaching children as future investments and not as cit-
izens has implications for their participatory as well as human rights.
In current poverty discourses it is assumed that disadvantaged par-
ents somehow deviate from the dominant morality and market values,
drawing a distinction between suffering that is self-responsible (due to
laziness, lack of morality, recklessness) and suffering from accidental
hardship. As such, the ethics of care are to be applied to parents who
suffer from accidental hardship but not to those who are seen as being
responsible for their disadvantage (see Chapter 8 for a discussion on the
ethics of care).
With regard to the second principle of legal rights, the pursuit of a
just society based on reciprocal social relationships is a fundamental
right. Families’ participative rights are crucial in developing support pro-
grammes to achieve desired outcomes and maximise ownership. People
value opportunities to participate in developing programmes of support
and having a genuine involvement in decision making about matters
that affect their life. Outcome-based parenting programmes have side-
lined parents’ and families’ social and human rights. The economic
justification offered for early intervention has moved the focus away
from rights, entitlements and obligations to parental responsibility to
raise children as a future investment. Within rights discourses, there
has been very little about the actual experiences in parent–child interac-
tions, mainly focusing on the rights of the children and the duties and
obligations of the parents. To offer an ethical rationale, family support

should be linked to international human rights protection to draw onto
international accountability and responsibility regarding global poverty
(Vizard, 2006). Family support should not operate outside the context
of human rights but develop a public orientation by focusing on the
systemic constraints that are likely to reduce people’s human rights.
As Lewis-Anthony, Ruxton and Karim (2001) argue, with regard to the
Human Rights Act, there is a reluctance to move beyond civil rights into
the economic and social rights. As it currently stands, the act assumes
the existence of a social contract to stress individual parental responsi-
bility. However, the balance between rights, obligation and entitlement
needs to be redressed. Nussbaum (2004) considers the social contract
condition to be fundamentally flawed because the reciprocity it implies
assumes equality among those who enter the contract, and may consider
those who cannot enter the contract as lesser citizens (Hartas, 2008).
In an interventionist context, parents’ rights and their corresponding
duties have an instrumental value, and become a rule to follow irre-
spective of human differences and diverse living conditions. The social
contract approach to parents’ rights may imply that parents who cannot
fulfil their responsibilities towards their children should not be afforded
social and economic rights. Discussions about personal responsibility
have permeated social policy and welfare since the Victorian Poor Law,
contributing to the debates on the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor.
The third principle refers to recognising existing family strengths and
the families’ relational context in their communities. Social support for
families should account for the plurality and diversity in communi-
ties to avoid potential misrecognition and misrepresentation of parents.
Community-based family services are important to build solidarity and
mutual support, which are more effective than targeting individual
parents (Hess et al., 2002). As discussed earlier, effective intervention
programmes tend to have a strong community ethos, with professionals
who are knowledgeable and capable of relating to diverse groups of peo-
ple with compassion and rapport (Moran et al., 2004). Further, as studies
with an ecological approach to child development have shown, families
respond to poverty differently due to the diversity of the systemic sup-
port they may already have in a variety of arrangements, for example,
family ties or friendships.
Although a human rights framework is necessary to guide interven-
tion in family intimate life, a rights approach alone is not sufficient
to capture the complexity of the dilemmas that parents experience
and the external influences on their parenting. In the current climate
of public spending cuts, to ensure that family interventions are not a

waste of taxpayers’ money, they need to become family- and parent-
driven and acknowledge the ways in which institutional and cultural
arrangements collectively contribute to the achievement gap and chil-
dren’s development and well-being. To differentiate political thinking
from prescriptive state intervention and family micromanagement, fam-
ily policy should acknowledge poverty as a structural inequality rather
than a cultural practice and support parents to explore alternatives that
are real to their life. Most importantly, transparency in the scope and
aims of early intervention is needed so that the line between early inter-
vention as an instrument for social control and early intervention as
a means of providing practical solutions to the practical problems that
some families face is not blurred. Finally, family policy should widen
its scope from making individual parents responsible to developing a
political agenda to tackle both poverty and inequality.
It is not easy for any government to steer their way through creating
a nanny state on the one hand and failing their duties on the other.
Democratic governance however amounts to more than attempts to
change individuals’ behaviour; it involves seeking distributive justice,
building solidarity and treating individuals as citizens. The cornucopia
of family policies have been brought together haphazardly without a
clear articulation of the relationship between the individual citizen and
the state and the roots of disadvantage and toxicity in children’s lives.
Social policy that focuses on the consequences and not the causes of
poverty is not new. However, over the last decade, different and occa-
sionally conflicting ideological strands such as social inclusion, respect
agenda, children’s voice, child-centred policies, human rights and cit-
izenship and parental obligation have run through policy, creating a
confused ideological landscape of family policy riddled with paradoxes.
Paradoxes and tensions in early intervention
As currently conceptualised, the scope and aims of early intervention

are riddled with paradoxes about parental autonomy, the relationship
between the state and the individual, the ecological nature of early
intervention and how well it aligns with child development research
and the policy obsession with the proximal aspects of children’s envi-
ronment, parenting in particular. By exploring these paradoxes, we can
better understand the assumptions that underpin family policy in gen-
eral and early intervention in particular and delineate the principles that
should guide family policy.
Risk and resilience: A truly ecological approach to intervention?

Bronfenbrenner’s (1989) ecological model of child development places
parents and children at the centre of multiple social interactions that
influence child development. There seems to be a dissonance, how-
ever, between ecological theories of human development and the scope
of family intervention programmes. Recent governmental reviews of
children’s service provision have concluded that the focus of any inter-
vention should be on proximal factors, that is, parenting, to achieve
social change. At an operational level, most family support programmes
focus on individual parents (a micro level of the ecological model) and
not on the distal factors where the roots of disadvantage often lie.
Increasingly, fewer services tackle the effects of distal factors such as
poverty, community disintegration, degraded physical environments,
lack of employment, inadequate education or poor housing. Many ser-
vices concentrate instead on micro layers: how often parents interact
with their child (reading, taking them to the library), the quality of
parent–child interactions (warmth, responsiveness), parenting style (e.g.
discipline), how much parents know about child development, how
they view themselves as parents and the mental health difficulties they
may face because these factors lend to an easier manipulation (e.g.
Moran et al., 2004).
The proximal orientation of such programmes limits their effective-
ness. Considering the modest impact of even successful family pro-
grammes and the evidence (see Part I) that proximal factors (e.g. home
learning) account for small changes in children’s developmental out-
comes, a focus on parenting is less likely to narrow the achievement
gap and increase children’s life chances. Even with modification, that
is, maximising the frequency with which parents read to their chil-
dren and helping them with homework or intervention in the form of
home learning did not appear to reduce the achievement gap. And this
is because (i) parent–child interactions, no matter how positive they are,
cannot remove structural disadvantage and (ii) poverty does not result
from poor parenting, though poverty makes it harder for parents to
parent well. Most crucially, an exclusive focus on proximal factors and
family micromanagement is problematic because it shifts policy think-
ing from the wider forces that shape families to obsessing about whether
parents read to their children.
Although the ecological theory of human development offers a theo-
retical lens through which to view the dynamic nature of child develop-
ment, we should exercise caution when examining proximal and distal
factors. For example, we tend to consider family income as a distal fac-

tor whose effects on child development are diffused and indirect because
its impact works through proximal factors such as parenting. However,
this can be misleading because parental learning support, for exam-
ple, does not exert a direct influence on child outcomes given that its
effects are likely to be mediated by other factors such as maternal read-
ing habits, child temperament (dispositions and attitudes to learning),
school (physical and virtual boundaries of learning) or peer influences
(social networking, virtual friendships) or even wider social and cul-
tural influences in a globalised society. As such, we cannot approach
proximal factors, such as parenting, as transmission mechanisms in a
vacuum. The cultural and structural explanations regarding the influ-
ences of distal and proximal factors should be nuanced in that the
mechanisms of transmission are cyclical: distal factors (e.g. material
resources, parental education) affect proximal ones (e.g. parenting, ade-
quate nutrition, parental health) which in turn affect child development
(e.g. language, cognition). Conversely, children’s characteristics, dispo-
sitions and attitudes affect parents and the ways in which they respond
to poverty. Parent–child interactions are shaped by ‘aspects of [parental]
history together with characteristics of the child such as age or temper-
ament . . . [social] class, culture and neighbourhood or community, and
the [historical] era’ (Waylen and Stewart-Brown, 2008, p. 4).
With this in mind, it is potentially misleading to consider par-
ents as the sole causal environmental influence on children without
acknowledging the ways in which other layers of families’ social ecol-
ogy influence what parents do with their children. Parenting styles, the
intergenerational transmission of advantage or disadvantage and the
home learning environment are important factors in children’s lives.
However, there is a misconception about the causal nature, magni-
tude and direction of their effects and the links between these factors
and child outcomes. In much developmental psychology research, the
pathways through which poverty affects children’s outcomes are delin-
eated by considering both distal and proximal factors. However, this
should not translate into proximal factors being central in alleviating
distal effects. Poverty, a distal factor, has deleterious effects on parental
well-being, maternal depression in particular. However, the direction
of this pathway has been well established: depression does not cause
poverty. And although some parents with depression may also experi-
ence poverty due to their difficulties accessing training and employment
opportunities, depression is not the primary cause of unemployment
and poverty. Naturalising poverty as the outcome of parental practices
and behaviour and not of structural inequalities goes against ecological

theories of child development.
Child development is a dynamic process that occurs within interactive
contexts characterised by reciprocal child–adult interactions, pointing
to a view of children as active agents. Poverty does not affect all children
equally. Variation in language, cognitive skills and school performance
among children in poverty suggests differences in the ways in which risk
and protective factors operate and affect child development (Gutman
et al., 2003). To understand this variation, the concept of resilience is
useful. Resilience, examined by Garmezy and Rutter (1983) and Rutter
(2000), explains the extent to which child outcomes are influenced by
the interplay between cumulative risk factors and the buffering effects
of protective factors in families. Much research has examined the con-
tribution of proximal factors, for example, home learning and book
reading, and distal factors, such as parental employment and educa-
tion, to children’s developmental outcomes to identify the protective
factors or ‘buffers’ that support resilience in children living in poverty.
Research on risk and resilience has shown that there is a substantial
intergenerational continuity in the problems faced by families who
experience deep-seated poverty and extreme living conditions. But there
is also discontinuity which points to the presence of resilience as a
synergy between individual dispositions and structure. Such a body of
research is particularly important considering the current focus on par-
enting as a key transmission mechanism of disadvantage. Support from
an extended family and community and access to public services may
function as buffers in shielding parents and children from the effects
of poverty and help them to deal with the systemic barriers in their
lives. However these protective systems, although important in their
own right, can hardly reverse polarisation and inequality.
Family policy needs a comprehensive theoretical framework to cap-
ture these synergistic interactions between individual, structure and
culture. By focusing on one proximal factor to the exclusion of the
other layers of children’s social ecology, family policy not only works
against ecological theories of human development but also misconstrues
the function of resilience which, increasingly, is seen as a solution to
structural problems. The development of capability in parents through
access to education and employment opportunities (considering that
these have been found to exert a significant impact on child outcomes)
should be a priority in family policy to cultivate resilience in families
who face socio-economic adversity. Most crucially, family policy should
never lose sight of the effects of poverty and approach proximal risk
factors as the side effects and consequences (and not as the causes) of
distal risk factors.
The autonomy–intervention continuum

What seems to define current family policy is a dual ethos of con-
trol and protection, surveillance and privacy, family autonomy and
the obligation of the state to intervene to save ‘vulnerable’ children
from their parents. Such an ethos can be particularly damaging for
families because it implies that disadvantaged parents are not to be
trusted to follow policy-endorsed views of ‘good’ parenting. The gov-
ernance of parents and their relationship with an interventionist state
are not inconsequential in that parents are forced to construct them-
selves within certain disciplinary frameworks and internalise aspects
of control. If the goal of early intervention, however, is to enhance
resilience and autonomy in parents, then generic views about parents
as dangerous and toxic and children as fragile and in need are unhelp-
ful. Problematising parents works against building resilience and reduces
their confidence in their capacity to parent well because it damages their
internal barometer.
State intervention usurps the autonomy and confidence of parents but
also shows hubris by interfering with the intimate life of families in ways
that do not respect their human rights. Parents should be able to feel
confident to engage with their children and enjoy the experience of rear-
ing them outside formal institutions and policy dictates. It is potentially
corrosive to frame everyday parenting practices and behaviour as poten-
tially risky whose impact on child development can only be ameliorated
through early intervention. Parents used to be the ‘buffers’ between
children and the state, but now the state, through early intervention,
functions as the ‘buffer’ between children and toxic influences, that
is, poor parenting, in their immediate family environments. And yet,
important questions are rarely asked about whether we have the right
to intervene into people’s lives. How then is parental autonomy recon-
ciled with family intervention? In an interventionist context, parental
autonomy becomes a problem, an unhelpful attribute and not an asset
towards building resilience. It seems that the impetus behind early inter-
vention is to lift people to the norm, so that they become responsive to
the market forces; however, do people have the right to decide whether
they should be raised to the norm? Perhaps, for some families, auton-
omy and confidence may be more important than a norm that does not
reflect the realities of their lives.
Child-centred intervention: An oxymoron?

In Allen’s and Field’s reviews, early intervention is discussed as being
child-centred and capable of offering child-initiated services. However,
there is limited evidence in family programme evaluations about the
children’s views of the impact of these programmes on their life (Moran
et al., 2004). Much family policy aspires to an image of parents and
children as resources and family intervention programmes are evalu-
ated along these lines. Successful programmes are considered to be those
which produce outcomes for children (e.g. stay at school longer, not to
become a burden on taxpayers) that policy makers desire rather than
taking on board children’s views about what is important in their life
and their vision of themselves and the society they want to live in.
Rarely are children’s views sought about what makes a good family
service provision and little attention has been paid to the quality of
children’s daily life and the ‘living in the moment’ attitude that defines
children’s worldview. And when their views are sought, children tend to
express scepticism as to why their involvement is sought and what pur-
poses it might serve. Some children also share a defeatist attitude with
regard to their power for representation and decision making, feeling
less confident that their input would stimulate any substantive changes
in their daily life (Hartas, 2011). In a study by Ghate and Ramella
(2002), where young people’s views about family services were reported,
children were less positive than their parents about interventions, espe-
cially those related to improving children’s monitoring and supervision,
because they felt that such interventions did not make a useful contribu-
tion to their lives. Young people value the capacity to access services of a
practical nature such as learning, transportation and access to physical
spaces in their communities, disability support, improved leisure and
sports facilities within their locality and access to physical environment
(e.g. parks) in their neighbourhood where they feel safe (Borland et al.,
2001; Hartas, 2011).
The limited children’s contribution to family services is further com-
pounded by paradoxes in conceptions of what a child is. For example,
within the EYFS, children are presented as competent and capable as
illustrated in this quotation: ‘A Unique Child recognizes that every child
is a competent learner from birth who can be resilient, capable, confi-
dent and self-assured’ (DCSF, 2007, p. 9). At the same time, the state
takes a severely punitive stand towards young people who are con-
sidered to display antisocial behaviour, lowering the age of criminal
responsibility to ten (which means that a ten-year-old has the same
understanding about what constitutes a criminal behaviour as an adult).

Further, within family policy (see Allen’s and Field’s reviews), children
are construed as a future workforce to contribute to country’s compet-
itiveness and social stability, offering a view of children as a resource
and a commodity for those who can participate in economic activities,
and as a problem citizen for those who cannot. Such marginalisation
discourses construe young people as being voiceless and powerless,
pushed to the margins of society, and do not capture forms of social
participation that young people display by favouring informal modes
of participation and challenging institutional barriers towards a more
rewarding life.
Young people who do not operate within social inclusion models tend
to be ascribed with the identity of the disaffected, an identity that does
not account for the contextual parameters such as a mismatch between
young people’s aspirations and the social structures in their lives. Lim-
ited educational opportunities and training are beyond young people’s
control and do not result from their opposition to mainstream values
and social disengagement (MacDonald and Marsh, 2001; McKendrick
et al., 2007). In a context of reduced opportunities, disaffection may
be an adaptive response to what society offers to young people, and a
criticism towards the lack of educational provision from a demographic
group who are generally aware of what is available to them. Systemic
constraints have the potential to divert thinking from treating young
people as citizens with a right to education and training to cultivat-
ing disaffection as an internal failure rather than a response to a policy
failure.
Intervention as a public service or a moral agenda

Although much has been written about early intervention, there is less
clarity about its nature and scope. In policy debates, there seems to be
a conflation between early intervention and provision of global public
services (e.g. clear water, health services). Early intervention is discussed
along offering targeted support to citizens who experience significant
disadvantage through family experts and involvement with family life.
Early intervention as a means of providing public services to those who
need them and choose to use them is certainly a positive step. However,
early intervention in the form of family regulation is problematic. A key
goal behind early intervention is to tackle social problems early enough
to support the development of children fit for the future. Even if we
assume for a moment that this is a legitimate goal and that we know
what the future would look like, attempts to change parents’ behaviour
towards pre-specified outcomes are limited to small acts which are less
likely to amount to big societal changes and offer genuine equal oppor-
tunities to those who need them most. It is reductionistic to think
that by modifying certain parenting behaviours and practices we can
tackle socio-economic inequality. Reducing socio-economic inequality
requires collective political and social changes.
As discussed in Chapter 3, poverty has been reconceptualised in pol-
icy discourses as a lifestyle of choice and a moral failing. The working
classes are being demonised as not being willing to do things that their
middle-class counterparts routinely do, such as forming networks or
contributing to a community, and as lacking in culture, aspirations
and emotional intelligence (e.g. soft skills). These discourses, however,
neglect the primary origins of class differences such as poverty, unsafe
living conditions and disintegrating neighbourhoods, crowded schools
and poor-quality education. New Labour policy, and the coalition gov-
ernment’s family policy to a large extent, represents an ambitious
attempt at re-socialisation, introducing a moral agenda to inculcate
middle-class values rather than acknowledging and addressing inequal-
ity as the driving force of societal polarisation (Gewirtz et al., 2005).
Within a moral agenda, poverty and inequality of opportunity are
reframed as the consequences of not abiding by mainstream values, with
lack of material resources becoming a symptom of exclusion rather than
its primary cause. Discourses on inequality and the structural barriers
on children’s life chances have been substituted by moral arguments
that aim at complicity. Policy decisions in this context are condi-
tional and directional, targeting the micro influences in children’s lives.
A moral claim (which permeates state structures such as welfare) is
about a widespread crisis in the private lives of disadvantaged people,
which necessitates the state to respond to alleviate ‘counter-productive
immoral, unhealthy or dangerous forms of intimacy’ (Raynolds, 2010,
p. 39). As such, much of the focus of policy has been on disciplining
the working classes who are seen as being unable to police themselves
while the middle classes exempt themselves from the same systematic
moralisation and regulation of risk.
The culture of state interventionism, including early intervention,
is paradoxical: on the one hand the state is receding from governing
(as evidenced in unregulated markets with public services being moved
into private spheres) and on the other it is heavily involved with micro-
managing family and the daily experiences of children and parents.
A fundamental policy shift is required to ensure that disadvantaged fam-
ilies receive public services and not micromanagement. To meaningfully
engage with disadvantaged families, professionals should educate them-

selves about class and poverty and their real impact on people’s life
chances; move away from deficit assumptions about poverty and indi-
vidual capability; better understand why hard-to-reach families are hard
to reach and unresponsive to different forms of state involvement;
be proactive and respond to the stereotyping of disadvantaged young
people and their families; challenge the easily made links between
poverty, lack of ability and capacity for learning; validate and legit-
imise the experiences and intelligences of young people; and last, but
not least, question corporate partnerships in which for-profit compa-
nies and organisations take on the role of ‘reforming’ or re-educating
young people. Family intervention in the form of accessing public ser-
vices and equalising opportunities is paramount as the welfare state is
crumbling. However, demonising disadvantaged parents and interven-
ing in their lives to moralise them divert policy from addressing the big
problems that the global world faces and their potential for narrowing
people’s lives.
6
Neoliberalism and Family Policy
in Britain
UK family policy, with parenting and early intervention as its central

features, has been influenced by the principles of neoliberalism, an
economic and political doctrine that focuses on the promotion of tech-
niques for social and individual governance. It proposes that ‘human
well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial
freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by
strong private property rights, free markets and free trade’ (Harvey, 2005,
p. 2). Neoliberalism involves the extension of economy into the domain
of politics, where market processes escape the political regulations of the
nation state. The role of the state is limited with regard to intervening
into socio-economic domains for the purpose of enacting fiscal poli-
cies and tackling inequality; instead, its role is to guarantee the proper
functioning of the markets. According to the neoliberal doctrine:
state intervention in the markets has to be kept to the minimum,

especially in democratic societies where strong interest groups may
sway the market interests to their own benefit. If markets do not exist
(in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security,
or environmental pollution), they must be created, by state action if
necessary.
(Harvey, 2005, p. 2)
Neoliberalism is malleable and adaptable to different political and

national systems, being taken up in different ways in different polit-
ical regimes (e.g. in China, by creating market spaces within socialist
structures) (Ong, 2006). The neoliberal fundamentals, principles and
practices are imposed upon and embedded within established governing
processes and political spaces and ways of life. This is achieved through
121
the management of public services in accordance with market logic and

the focus of social policy, including family policy, on micromanagement
and regulation at an individual/family level.
Reinforced by the so-called Washington Consensus in the 1980s,
neoliberal globalism has promoted privatisation, trade liberalisation,
deregulation, public sector reduction and social policy reform. Market
logic and values are prioritised above other goals and institutions of
governance and are woven into social policy structures, including fam-
ily policy, having a significant impact on democratic debates and public
infrastructure because governance has become about running a nation
as a company with its key goal being to maximise profit. The pressures
on governments to deregulate and compete at a global level are felt in
economic and social policies in which the state can no longer func-
tion as a buffer to protect people from market pressures; instead, the
state has assumed an interventionist role to ensure that people move
closer to the market. As such, national economic policies are unlikely
to tackle inequality and unemployment and the reduction of public
services.
Neoliberalism is a ‘class project’, disguised by ‘rhetoric about individ-
ual freedom, liberty, personal responsibility, privatisation and the free
market’ (Harvey, 2005, p. 37). The marketisation of everyday life, where
the focus of an interventionist state is on individual behaviour and
not on market structures, is a ‘consolidation of class power’ (Harvey,
2005, p. 38). With the removal of obstacles to the accumulation and
free movement of capital and, most importantly, the transformation
of the public domain into a quasi-market, various forms of ‘the social’
(e.g. education, family) are dismantled and reconstructed in the image
of the market (Sakai, 2001, pp. 88–112 in Nihei, 2010). Family policy,
among other domains, is drawn into the market and is subjected to mar-
ket metrics and other forms of market authority. The marketisation of
the family is to be achieved by locating parents closer to the market
and, for ‘problem families’, through state intervention. Family relation-
ships, and parent–child interactions in particular, are to be reconfigured
and remodelled in accordance with the market principles of efficiency,
self-governance, regulation and responsibilisation.
The politicisation of parenting is not new, neither is the position of
the family as a central feature of social policy in Britain (Daly, 2011;
Welshman, 2008) and nor is the notion of problem families. For at
least the last two centuries, family as an institution has been thought
to be on a downward trend, to be failing in its civic duties. A range
of political, social and religious forces have intervened to guide and
help families reach the political and social ideals bestowed on them.
Neoliberalism and Family Policy in Britain 123
Although in the mid-2000s a gradual shift of family policies from

economic to behavioural interventions occurred, a policy focus on par-
enting and early intervention does not constitute a paradigmatic shift in
terms of changing the intellectual and social landscape of family policy.
Rather, these changes are a rearrangement of policy goals with regard
to the place and function of the family. Although a policy preoccupa-
tion with the family is not new, the neoliberal turn in family policy
with its tendency to normalise poverty and disadvantage and consider
extreme instances of child neglect and abuse as the norm (mostly evi-
dence based) are new and offer a lens through which to examine the
rapidly shifting relationships between parents and children in particu-
lar, and individuals and the state in general. With the gradual turning of
a civic into a corporate society, neoliberalism offers a new vantage point
from which to witness the processes whereby the breadth and depth
of human experience are reduced to a profit/loss calculus which has
permeated intimate aspects of family life and all manner of exchanges
between parents and children (from the frequency with which parents
talk to their children and read to them to intervening in disadvantaged
families to save money).
Neoliberalism makes parenting harder because the legitimacy of the
state to tackle structural inequality and promote social mobility is
warped by the market. Families’ social problems become privatised and
the onus is on individual parents to overcome structural problems and
inequality and tackle child poverty. Further, the neoliberal influences of
consumerism, commodification and competitiveness on the parenting
culture have given rise to a new moral order. Family policy approaches
to child rearing as a cost/benefit exercise and the narrowing of parents’
lives have been normalised through the transformation of ‘the merciless
logic of corporate profit-making and political power into a normal state
of affairs’ (Said, 2002, p. 32). Parents’ and children’s freedom and well-
being are rationalised in ways that promote new types of self-governance
through the tools of individual responsibility, individualised risk man-
agement, surveillance and accountability, parenting determinism and
overregulation. Clearly, in late capitalism, the values of the unregulated
market and respect for parents’ and children’s rights and well-being are
incompatible.
As is typical with neoliberal social policy, and especially during
periods of economic crises, we observe a strengthened focus on the indi-
vidual (Grace, 1984; Raffo, 2011); an emphasis on cultural rather than
structural explanations of poverty and disadvantage and a policy focus
on the micro contexts of people’s lives without accounting for macro
influences; an inadequate sense of the historical in understanding the
effects of poverty and disadvantage on child development and educa-

tion (e.g. a return to the discourses of ‘deserving and undeserving poor’
and ‘cycle of deprivation’); a tendency to offer technical, prescriptive
and managerialist solutions (e.g. 5-a-day campaign for child develop-
ment) to complex problems that require political and economic action
at a macro level; and a limited engagement with issues of distribu-
tive justice, power, opportunity and resource allocation. Above all, we
witness a culture war being waged on parents: cultural discourses on
parenting are manipulated to elevate the status of parents as economic
subjects consistent with the objectives of regulation and risk manage-
ment. Parents are to ensure that their children function effectively as
economic subjects and a flexible future workforce.
The micromanagement of intimate family life has created a culture
in which public governance has been replaced with the social control
of disadvantaged parents via the tools of regulation, nudging and inter-
vention. Regulation and management of family intimate life have been
assisted by the application of Foucauldian ‘governmental technologies’
which involve a complex of practical mechanisms, procedures, instru-
ments and calculations through which the state seeks to guide and
shape the conduct and decisions of citizens in order to achieve specific
objectives (Lemke, 2007). Governmental technologies offer techniques
for self-governance that replace the duty of care and human relation-
ships with a notion that parents and children are to be processed and
managed to achieve certain outcomes. In family policy, we witness a
proliferation of governmental technologies including methods of exam-
ination and evaluation of individuals’ functioning within private and
public spheres through ethological governance, regulation, individua-
tion of crises and cost-benefit considerations; an overreliance on expert
opinion and the use of pseudo-scientific vocabularies; a culture of audit
and accountability; the use of nudge to affect citizens’ behaviour; regu-
lation of public spaces to be used mainly for commercial purposes; and
intervention in the private sphere in the form of pedagogic, therapeu-
tic and punitive techniques of reformulation (Inda, 2005, p. 9; Miller
and Rose, 1990, p. 8). The application of these governmental technolo-
gies has deleterious effects on individuals and the society as a whole
because the state has changed from being a defender of public services
to affecting the values and behaviour of its citizens.
With regard to family policy, neoliberalism has direct and evolving
effects on parenting and child rearing articulated as:
• an unequivocal acceptance of and commitment to the market logic

and values (e.g. individuation, responsibilisation) and the rise of a
new form of self-governance (etho-politics) by displacing established

models of welfare provision and state regulation through policies of
privatisation and de-regulation. The welfare state is ‘rolling back’
and a ‘socioeconomically skewed interventionist (and even puni-
tive) state’ expands and merges with the market (Giroux, 2010). The
privatisation of public assets and services, the creation of new mar-
kets (e.g. parenting experts) and the commodification of care are
examples of this process (Clarke, 2008);
• a preoccupation with calculating efficiencies (e.g. child as a resource
and a future investment; money saved through early intervention;
human life as a means to an end), primarily understood as being eco-
nomic and the proliferation of many forms of capital (e.g. parental,
social, human). The social, the moral and the historical are subjected
to administration and cost effectiveness, with the value of life being
reduced in the language of economic efficiency, rapidly moving away
from the principles of egalitarianism and humanism;
• a relocation of public debates from the politics of rights, equality and
social class, and a separation of social/educational inequality from
structural inequality along with a growing marginalisation of debates
on the common good in favour of those on corporate profit. Within
family policy discourses, a lingua franca is used to frame social prob-
lems by offering claims and presuming agreements on the values and
orientation they evoke;
• a redefinition of family privacy as a lack of state interference (or less
government) which is decided and practised along socio-economic
lines (state intervention is more likely to take place for families in
poverty). Increasingly, family intimate life has come under policy
scrutiny and state surveillance;
• a reduction of society, with community being the new social space,
and citizenship conceived along individuals’ marketability that deter-
mines the extent to which rights and benefits are distributed to them.
Citizenship is no longer advocated within national structures but in
corporate spaces and this is likely to violate the human rights of
those excluded by neoliberal measures of human value and worth
(Ong, 2006). The fluidity in citizenship (citizenship is relocated from
the nation state into the market), coupled with notions of individ-
ual vulnerability as a psychological mishap, offers a vision of life for
disadvantaged people as ‘bare’ life, a struggle for sheer survival.
In the following sections, the impact of neoliberal policies on parent-

ing is discussed through an examination of etho-politics, individual
self-governance and family private life; the use of a lingua franca that
articulates and frames important social issues such as inequality and

social exclusion as individual concerns; and an emphasis on privatised
risks and their contribution to a systematic neglect of the big issues such
as inequality.
Etho-politics: The ethological governance of parents and

children
The social management of families, especially those living in poverty,

takes the form of individual self-governance or what Rose (1999a)
calls etho-politics. Ethological governance involves a range of ‘self-
techniques necessary for responsible government and the relations
between one’s obligation to oneself and to one’s obligations to others’
(Rose, 1999, p. 188). Ethological governance aims to ‘harness character
as a tool for social and political transformation’, and in doing so, places
the onus on the individual to develop a good character ‘through disci-
plined self-governance’ (White, 2005, p. 475). Etho-politics is about the
governance of people’s values, beliefs and intimate lives and the reduc-
tion of politics into a lifestyle and identity politics, with governments
becoming involved more with individual lifestyle and behaviour and
less with structural inequality and social justice.
With regard to parent–child relationships, ethological governance
refers to the self-governance of parents and children through a micro-
management of their intimate lives (e.g. how many pieces of fruit and
vegetables children have every day; how often parents read to/with their
children; whether mothers breastfeed their babies) and an emphasis on
good character as a means of achieving economic prosperity and social
stability. The ethological governance of parents involves ‘objectifica-
tion and instrumentalisation’ of their intimate emotional bonds and
relationships. Individuals, families and organisations (teachers, schools)
have become ‘partners’ and are responsible for resolving otherwise struc-
tural problems, through what Rose describes a ‘double movement of
autonomisation and responsibilation’ (1999, p. 476). Parents are seen at
once as autonomous in terms of carving out a destiny for themselves
and living their lives as a project (a project of self-actualisation) and
responsible for managing their lives in ways that do not generate risk to
themselves and their communities. Parents are primarily held respon-
sible for their children’s development and life chances, even for child
poverty, amidst a paucity of political reforms to adequately deal with
the economic and employment problems that affect families’ ability to
attend to children’s needs. This stance towards families is particularly
poignant considering that the effects of neoliberalism and globalisa-

tion – marginalised jobs; feminisation of poverty; criminalisation of the
poor and welfare poor; and difficulties in securing income or good jobs,
education and training opportunities, childcare, housing, and so on –
have severely diminished the resources to which the average family has
access (Robson, 2010).
Over the last decade, family policy has adopted a psycho-social
orientation and parents’ and children’s subjective experiences are to
be controlled and morphed towards pre-specified desired outcomes.
Increasingly, the policy interest is in the theoretical, political and ped-
agogical dimensions of children’s and parents’ character (Eberly, 1995;
Hutcheon, 1999; Lickona, 1991; Sennett, 1998), or as Melanie White
(2005) argues, a trend to ‘harness character as a tool for social and
political transformation’ and a ‘test of citizenly competence’. Across the
political spectrum, the importance of good character in children and
their parents’ responsibility to cultivate it has been championed mainly
for instrumental purposes, that is, to create model citizens who will
not require rehabilitation or welfare support and to maximise children’s
future market potential (via the development of soft skills). An exam-
ple of this trend is the policy focus on parents and their capacity to
engage with their children’s learning and social well-being to help them
to develop attributes such as character, self-control and resilience as a
means of reducing the achievement gap.
Parents’ skills and children’s character have come to explain soci-
ety’s ills. As such, poverty, the achievement gap and reduced social
mobility are considered to have their source in individuals’ poor char-
acter (e.g. laziness, recklessness) and not in structures that perpetuate
racism, institutionalised violence, low-quality education and reduction
in decent-wage jobs. The responsibilisation of individuals (and also col-
lectives, such as families, schools, etc.) shifts our understanding of the
sources of social risks such as illness, unemployment, poverty or poor
education, which are then transformed into problems of self-care, char-
acter and self-determination. We no longer examine the legal, social
and economic rights afforded to citizens and the political and institu-
tional structures in their lives but rely upon individual characteristics
and dispositions for social advancement and social justice. And when
individual governance fails to bring the expected outcomes, the role of
the state is, through intervention, to ‘enable’ (or even coerce) family or
community members to ensure that they accept their responsibilities.
While discussions about children’s character proliferate, there is very lit-
tle on inequality and social class. Socio-economic factors such as family
income or parental education and employment are no longer considered

to be crucial determinants of children’s life chances whereas parental
influences on children’s learning and developing character and self-
control are. Although supporting children to develop a strong sense of
identity through resilience and self-control is crucial to withstand the
impact of events for which we have limited control, approaching these
individual capacities as sufficient to reversing inequality is misleading
and likely to promote complacency in the political sphere. Tackling
structural problems should be preceded by efforts to understand and
ameliorate the impact of social and economic inequality more so than
efforts to develop good character.
The focus of family policy on individual parents resembles school-
improvement policies whose aim was to regulate and manage schools’
internal processes as a strategy to tackle educational inequality. Over the
last decade, policy responses to endemic educational inequalities were
to focus on individual schools and teachers, in that the assumption was
that through managerialist solutions, educational institutions will nar-
row the achievement gap. However, as Power and Frandji argue, schools’
internal processes have a limited impact on achievement, and that if we
are interested in ‘equalising achievement gaps, political solutions will
need to be focused on what is going on outside the school’ (2010, p. 392).
Likewise, family policy should focus on what is going on outside the
family, on the wider societal and economic constraints and affordances
that shape parents’ and children’s lives. Bernstein’s (1970) dictum was
that education cannot compensate for society; equally, parenting as
a strategy to narrow the achievement gap and increase children’s life
chances cannot compensate for the paucity of institutional and political
solutions.
The etho-governance of parents and families, collectively, can erode
the foundations of a civic society built upon respect for difference and
private family life. Family micromanagement through policies (e.g. early
years’ intervention) that target disadvantaged parents and children has
the potential to alter the relationship between the individual and the
state and accentuate inequality by posing obstacles to children and par-
ents exercising their rights. The regulation of individual subjectivities
has been particularly damaging for young people who are increasingly
seen as a liability, the epitome of failed policies in a corporate society
(Giroux, 2010). Society’s attitudes towards young people have always
been ambivalent. Young people are either vulnerable or dangerous – in
a cycle of risk, risk towards themselves and others. This creates a space
where the state does not engage with them as rational beings capable of
making their own decisions but rather as individuals in need of remod-

elling. As Giroux (2010) argues, young people are a symbol, an ‘index’
of investing long term which presupposes authority in the older gen-
erations to impart knowledge and prepare them for the future. With
the demise of adult authority (adults are no longer seen in the position
to nurture young people), however, and the short-term and quick-profit
mentality of neoliberal institutions, young people remind us of the ways
in which society has failed them.
The lingua franca of family policy

Language is not a neutral, transparent tool used to transmit informa-
tion about absolute truths and the ‘world out there’. Rather, it is an
integral component of the social, political and cultural context within
which it is used, being defined by its use. Societal and institutional
processes and structures shape discourse which, ultimately, explain and
legitimise our understanding of the social world. A discourse, according
to Worrall, ‘embraces all aspects of communication – not only its con-
tent, but its author (who says it?), its authority (on what grounds?), its
audience (to whom?), its objective (in order to achieve what?)’ (1990,
p. 8). It also embraces implicit and explicit ideological positions and
power structures. A communicative interaction not only describes social
experiences and events but also shapes the knowledge that is derived
from them by creating cultural codes. The use of language is relational
and thus political, in that language in itself becomes a form of political
action. Language is central as ‘both carrier and creator of a culture’s epis-
temological codes’ (Punch, 2005, p. 140). And as such, how language is
used in family policy should be explored and explained.
In social policy and the media, particular terms emerge and become
influential in how we conceptualise and articulate our place in the world
and the problems we experience. Such words or phrases enter the public
sphere and without questioning them we allow them to shape public
policy discourses and meanings. These terms are to help us conceive
ourselves and the social world to specific predetermined ends (Furedi,
2008, 2011). In family policy, a lingua franca that relies on ‘rhetorical
idioms’ (Ibarra and Kitsuse, 2003, pp. 25–27), ‘gestures’ (Edelman, 1989)
and euphemisms (or Orwellian ‘double speak’ at times) is often used.
Idioms and euphemisms offer distinctive ways in which a problem and
its solutions are thought out, and which encourage us to think about
certain issues in some ways and not in others. They also invoke causal
understandings about the roots of a problem and may offer an illusion
that a solution is underway. They are ‘moral vocabularies’ in a sense that
they presume a certain degree of familiarity and agreement upon the

importance of the values they evoke (who would argue against the con-
cept of social inclusion or good parenting?) and elicit a ‘single, strong,
fairly uniform emotional response and does not have an adversarial
quality’ (Nelson, 1986, p. 27). The use of a lingua franca in social pol-
icy (i.e. a language of choice, flexibility, excellence and progress, social
inclusion) is seductive and capable of affecting individual subjectivities
and morality because it makes allusions to the values of freedom, lib-
erty and inclusion. Such language use has gained prominence as the
political sphere has imploded and political and social problems such
as poverty, disadvantaged families, disability, parents’ choices and the
way they relate to their children have come increasingly to be under-
stood in moral terms. Moral claims about individuals are problematic
because they do not reflect the structure of society and do not account
for diverse living conditions and thus do not promote genuine debates.
Essentially, moralising about people’s behaviour conceals class wars and
the growing polarisation in society.
In family policy, certain ‘rhetorical idioms’ are used to re-code mech-
anisms of exploitation and the roots of social disadvantage on the basis
of a new topography of the social, the moral and the historical. In con-
sidering parenting in an unequal society, ideological arguments have
been replaced with the language of responsibilisation and moralisation.
As such, social inclusion and social mobility have been re-articulated
in terms of culture and not structure. Social exclusion is understood
as an outcome of individual cultural practices (e.g. not possessing soft
skills or emotional literacy or a good character). The root causes of
social exclusion and the limited opportunities in families who simply do
not have access to social networks or financial capital are left unexam-
ined. Being socially included is no longer about being socialised within
relations of trust in families and communities but about being man-
aged to maximise human capital (and take responsibility in doing so).
Equally, being socially mobile is about managing parents and children
to increase their capital. Clearly, social inclusion and social mobility dis-
courses are divorced from questions of distributive justice and the ways
in which unequal patterns of distribution of resources, opportunities
and power influence the lives of parents and children.
Other examples of the use of a lingua franca in family policy include
terms such as complexity, resilience or ‘hard-to-reach’ families that
describe the challenges that parents and children face. We are contin-
ually told that we live in an increasingly complex world. Family life is
discussed as an incredibly complex project which some parents cannot
make sense of without receiving direct input from family experts. At the
same time, the notion of complexity in ecological models of child devel-
opment, that is, the presence of myriad factors that interact with each
other and shape child development appears to be sidelined in favour of
a single proximal factor, that is, parenting, to explain any substantive
differences in children’s experiences of growing up. As Conroy argues,
the ‘complexification of societal challenges’ is anti-progressive precisely
because such complexification requires consideration of causes and not
just symptoms in search of a solution (Conroy, 2010; Conroy et al.,
2008). Moreover, complexity encourages a form of complicity rather
than reflection and action because we are told that the social and ethi-
cal dilemmas that a diverse world throws up are beyond our capacity to
offer meaningful, relevant and sustainable solutions.
Also, the notion of resilience has been re-coded from being about
human agency into a narrative of complicity. In ecological models of
child development (see Chapter 5), resilience is about acknowledging
existing strengths in families, even when they face adverse circum-
stances by identifying factors that potentially function as ‘buffers’ in
minimising the impact of structural inequality and disadvantage on
their lives. Resilience is, however, no longer about family resource-
fulness but parental responsibility to accept structural inequality as
a given and manage themselves efficiently to compensate for the
misfortune of being poor and disadvantaged rather than contesting
patterns of wealth and status distribution (Andresen, 1999). Likewise,
the terminology about ‘hard-to-reach’ families portrays families who
experience disadvantage as being socially excluded, requiring a spe-
cial type of intervention for them to be reached and become part of
society. The ‘hard-to-reach’ discourse does not engage with the pos-
sibility that some families may disengage from society for a reason,
because there is nothing for them in it (in the form of public ser-
vices or civic institutions for their socialisation). It also offers a narrow
view of social justice because interventions for the hard-to-reach do
not involve society as a whole but focus on the most disadvantaged
groups, for whom equality of opportunity is thought to be achieved
through good parenting and not through structural changes at a societal
level.
The use of moral vocabularies in the public sphere privatises social
problems and shuts down public debates about inequality. For exam-
ple, idioms such as ‘every child matters’ or ‘social inclusion’ and
‘social mobility’ do not promote public debates because they are widely
accepted as legitimate policy goals: who would argue against social
inclusion and the view that parents matter? Finally, the use of moral
vocabularies and the subsequent policy actions they invoke are mislead-
ing because they claim that we understand the roots of the challenges
that our society faces by presenting accounts in a realist form: ‘there is
one way to reality, to understand the world, a world that is totalized and
shared by all’ (Rose, 1999, p. 472). The use of a euphemistic language
does not encourage thinking about alternative possibilities that might
exist in tackling social problems. New laws and policy actions articu-
lated in moralising terms create an illusion that we are close to finding a
solution, ‘thereby permitting others to not address it and may produce
subjectivities and conditions which support the exercise and the toler-
ance of the problem on all sides’ (Edelman, 1988, pp. 26–27). Despite
the proliferation of moral vocabularies, as Furedi (2011) argues, political
discourses that explore big issues such as poverty or the meaning of a
good life, in both moral and political terms, are limited.
The end of privacy in family life
Debates about the private/public boundaries of family life have been

featured in philosophical discourses as far back as Aristotle’s (1995)
distinction between polis and oikos, which is essentially a distinction
between the ‘common’ or communal and the ‘household’ or intimate.
However, in family policy, limited consideration has been given to the
ethical implications of intervening in people’s intimate lives. Family pol-
icy defines the relationship between parents and the state along privacy
(as lack of intervention) and punishment (as intervention). Privacy is
about the state ‘rolling back’ in terms of providing parents with support
and access to public services. Parents are seen as solely responsible not
only for their children’s upbringing but also for mitigating against child
poverty and maximising their children’s social mobility. However, when
parents fail to meet these responsibilities and become hard to reach,
the remit of policy is to punish them. The choice between privacy and
punishment and the privatisation of risk have gendered effects. It hurts
mothers, who tend to be the primary caregivers for children, the most
and helps to reinforce their unequal status in the market and at home.
The shift in emphasis from systemic to individuated risk factors offers
an ‘investigative advantage’ (Sen, 2000, p. 9) and encourages the expan-
sion of the surveillance state, bearing significant implications for family
privacy. Surveillance is justified by perceptions that more and more chil-
dren are in danger due to the toxicity in their immediate environment
(e.g. stranger danger, neglectful parents). Section 12 of the Children’s
Act (2004), for example, required LAs to operate a national Information

Sharing Index (ISI) for the purpose of supporting practitioners to share
information about particular children to assist them in delivering the
five outcomes of Every Child Matters (i.e. being healthy, staying safe,
enjoying and achieving, making a positive contribution and achieving
economic well-being). During the passage of the Children Bill in the
House of Lords, Earl Howe expressed concerns about the potential of
state intrusion into families’ and children’s private lives. Similarly, the
House of Commons Education and Skills Committee expressed reserva-
tions about the security, confidentiality and access arrangements put in
place for gathering so much information about children and families
(Axford, 2008).
At the same time, contemporary sociocultural shifts such as infor-
mation and communication technologies; new intersections between
private and public spaces and institutions, such as the media; and the
emergence of diverse identities, selfhoods and relationships in public
spaces, have eroded the divide between private and public domains
(Plummer, 2003). As a result, new forms of intimate life (what Plummer
calls intimate citizenship), not constrained within private spheres, have
emerged, creating a public, democratic and plural intimacy. The increas-
ing scrutiny on family life however differs from Plummer’s notion of
intimate citizenship on three counts. First, within family intervention,
disadvantaged parents and children are construed as being vulnerable
and at risk by professionals and family experts, being ascribed a forged
identity that is externally imposed and has little to do with how par-
ents and children view themselves. As such, intimacy is mediated by
others (e.g. family experts) and parents and children have little control
over disclosure in terms of what can remain confided within specific
relations and what is to be shared with others.
A public display of vulnerability as an individual pathology is
voyeuristic and exploitative and does not promote an intimate citizen-
ship. Moreover, the intimate relationships between parents and children
are moved into a policy rather than a public space to guide policy deci-
sion making. For some family members, public intimacy can become
liberating if the emotional elements of the relationships between par-
ents and children are approached as part of the human condition and
not objectified as a private problem. The decision to engage in ‘pub-
lic intimacy’, however, should be left to parents and children alone.
In some cases, public intimacy can be empowering in that individu-
als’ disclosure about private aspects of their life (e.g. sexual traumas)
within a chosen public space becomes collective and may offer a sense
of solidarity and opportunities for catharsis. Civic society is an inher-

ently public space, but when a civic society is replaced by the market,
human vulnerability is brought into the public domain as a psycholog-
ical mishap to be acted upon and managed. Under these circumstances,
the further families are removed into public scrutiny the less of a refuge
parents and children have from state surveillance.
Secondly, the blurring of the private/public divide in people’s lives
appears to fulfil a regulatory purpose: family life, especially for parents
and children who face severe poverty, has been brought into the public
domain for scrutiny and social control and not for creating an intimate
citizenship. Brought in a market-orientated public, parents’ and chil-
dren’s affective experiences do not carry any meaning unless they are
aligned with market priorities towards acquisition and profit. Intimacy
is not respected in poverty-stricken contexts. For disadvantaged parents,
the growing regulation of their intimate relations and affective experi-
ences is likely to alienate them from their sense of self; it becomes a
process of othering by subjecting their intimate relationships with their
children into the orthodoxy of ‘good’ parenting. In the current polit-
ical climate, otherness is either feared or forced to become sameness,
prompting action in policy circles because, as Allen (2011) stated in his
review, inaction can be an economically disastrous option for taxpayers.
Considering the prevalence of economic arguments, respect for intimate
family life tends to be sidelined and this has consequences for misrecog-
nition, especially considering that some parents’ voices are not heard
beyond the boundaries of their family.
Thirdly, despite its public exposure, the public orientation of the
family as a civic institution has been removed. Family has been sani-
tised and depoliticised mainly because its societal context has been
stripped away, and with it, the political voice of parents and children.
As Ramaekers and Suissa (2012) argue, family is no longer a civic insti-
tution with a public orientation but has become a policy-driven field.
The space of family intervention is not a socially and culturally rel-
evant space chosen by parents and children themselves, but a policy
space that is artificially constructed around them. Exposure within a
policy space is likely to limit parents’ control over their private lives and
their capacity to balance contingency and constraint in exercising their
rights (Raynolds, 2010). Family is a political institution, a web of inter-
dependent relationships that are not static but influenced by societal
structures. Nussbaum (2000, 2002) sees potential in the state to restruc-
ture the family in ways that promote equality between family members,
for example, give women basic opportunities and freedom to develop a
morally autonomous ‘self’, support her determining her responsibilities

as a free individual and forming her own conceptions of what to value
in life. However, in a surveillance society in which the state is reced-
ing from its obligation to the polity, the privacy of family life should be
guarded because it may be the last refuge where parents and other family
members can still function as a ‘buffer’ (when needed) between children
and the state to protect them from exploitation and oppression.
Individuated risks and neglect of the big issues
Since 2005, in the United Kingdom, child protection policies have pro-
liferated. Increasingly, more and more children are considered to be at
∗
risk , being treated as vulnerable and fragile and who require some form
of therapeutic intervention. Although the Every Child Matters report
was drawn upon the Laming report on the abuse and tragic death of
Victoria Climbié, its focus was not on child abuse per se but wider: to
protect children from antisocial behaviour, poor attainment or becom-
ing a poor teenage parent, stressing that risk is all-pervasive and a
potential threat to all children from which no child is immune (every
child is considered to be vulnerable to risk, at any point in their life
within their immediate environments). This heralded a major shift from
focusing on a minority of cases of child neglect and abuse to widening
the definition of ‘children in need’ and introducing vulnerability and
risk as blanket terms in family policy.
Risk has become pervasive: children’s race, gender, religion, social
class, first language or family environment, all target them for the ‘at
risk’ label and its associated interventions. Risk discourses are problem-
atic in that they lack proportionality and give the illusion that risk is
understood (e.g. claims about low social mobility being linked to lack
of breastfeeding) and that causal links can be drawn between the source
of risk and its consequences. Also, the solutions offered to social prob-
lems (e.g. poverty and lack of professional networks and educational
resources) are technical and accept one legitimate way to deal with risk
without accounting for competing views. Bauman (2007) distinguishes
between a ‘primal’ fear and secondary or ‘derivative’ fear. A primal fear
is a response to a direct threat/attack whereas a derivative fear is indi-
rect and more socially and culturally defined and articulated. Because
the direct and derivative fear can be easily decoupled from its source(s),
our reactions to fear and the things we do to lessen its impact may
be incompatible with its source. The sources of fear may be complex
and not easily identified so we may be in a situation in which we
experience fear and anxiety but are not sure what the real danger is
(Smeyers, 2010). A diffusion of fear exacerbates parental anxiety (which,
in some parents, mutates into hyper-parenting) but is good for the mar-
kets because markets thrive through the commercialisation of risk, and
our responses to it create a dynamic market of products and services that
offer the illusion that we can regulate against risk.
A view of vulnerability as a private problem (rather than a conse-
quence of poverty) has dangerous implications. First, peoples’ sense
of the self as robust and competent is undermined. Despite that attri-
butions of within-the-individual deficits are morally and intellectually
dubious (Vehmas, 2010), assumptions of deficit have the power to ren-
der children’s rights ineffective by restricting opportunities and posing
obstacles to children’s capability building. Secondly, the discourses of
individuated risk and vulnerability are likely to forge parent–child inter-
actions and relationships as potentially toxic, which in turn justifies the
public scrutiny of families within which parents and children are to be
measured, judged, disciplined and changed. The discourses on pervasive
risk and vulnerability are used to justify behavioural interventions in
place of economic redistribution and access to public services. Thirdly,
because of the increasing numbers of children who are deemed to be at
risk (based on open-ended definitions of vulnerability and need), social
care services are overwhelmed and thus may miss children who suf-
fer or are likely to suffer significant harm. With resources being thinly
spread to the growing numbers of ‘children in need’, identifying those
who truly need support becomes challenging. Child protection services
(a domain in which the state has a legitimate role to play) can be diluted
and their effectiveness reduced as they try to deal with an influx of
cases (Munro, 2010). The open-ended definitions of risk and vulnerabil-
ity do not stop with children. By extending the idea of ‘chaotic’ families
to almost all families who do not appear to function within an eco-
nomic model, the serious difficulties faced by a minority of families are
trivialised and not addressed properly.
Furthermore, a policy focus on individuated crises and risks neglects
the big issues (e.g. limited children’s life chances, inequality, unemploy-
ment) that affect families and society at large. The policy responses to
high-impact, tragic incidences of child abuse and death have a disori-
entating effect because they divert the focus from the real problems to
generic, abstracted and individuated crises in children’s environments.
The real risks in children’s life do not emanate from stranger danger but
from poverty, institutionalised violence, inequality, poor state educa-
tion and decline in social mobility, all structural problems that have the
potential to reduce parents’ and children’s lives to a ‘bare’ life. To focus

on high-impact tragic events in children’s lives as a blueprint for inter-
ventions to solve similar problems when applied in similar situations is
simplistic. Offering panic-driven policy responses based on a minority
of cases endangers what is fundamental to democracy because it creates
a false norm and shifts the focus from real problems such as poverty
and the widening inequality gap to anticipated risks that trigger pre-
emptive social policies (Smeyers, 2010). There are plenty of real and
urgent problems to deal with and we do not need those whose likeli-
hood to happen is small and, as Smeyers argues, ‘though there are cases
where it is reasonable to address predicted undesirable social outcomes,
in general child rearing is not such an area’ (2010, p. 284).
Concerns about the diminishing quality of children’s lives have
mutated into moral panic and hysteria over modern childhood rather
than stimulating a political engagement with structural problems. Com-
peting views about children ranging from being competent or a resource
to being ‘diminished subjects’ and a drain to public resources divert
thinking from tackling social problems. Moreover, parents in poverty
tend to be perceived as too vulnerable to engage with possibility think-
ing, search for alternative options in their lives and exercise their rights.
Being treated as a citizen presupposes capability to engage with the
world rationally; however some parents are portrayed as not capable
and thus not ‘ready’ to be handed down rights and treated as citi-
zens. With the unregulated markets as its ultimate arbiter, neoliberalism
has redefined civic values and what it means to be a citizen alto-
gether. This, along with globalisation and the existence of a finite planet
have contributed to a growing uncertainty about citizens’ prospects of
employment and social advancement and quality of life. Clearly, social
policy has shifted from making political decisions about narrowing the
inequality gap and lessening structural disadvantage to moralising and
micromanaging parents. To narrow the inequality gap requires political
solutions, and what family micromanagement shows is lack of political
vision with regard to the remaking of a civic society.
A departure from humanism and egalitarianism
In 21st-century policy in Britain (as well as in other Western countries),

understandings of fairness and social justice have departed from lib-
eral egalitarian traditions concerned with distributive justice, access to
opportunities, networks and rewards and equality in social and eco-
nomic relations. In egalitarianism, the state and its institutions are
spaces for social justice but in neoliberalism such spaces have shrunk
into a community and thus have become fragmented considering that
diverse communities have diverse understandings of social justice and
fairness. Community and families have become the new social and
political spaces between the state and society (as a national collective)
within which the self-governing of individuals takes place, and tar-
gets for the exercise of political power are set (Rose, 1999). In these
spaces, a polity as a social and political being is transformed into atom-
ised individuals who are responsible to the state without accounting
for the systemic constraints in their life. Citizens are asked to over-
come systemic barriers and effect economic and social advancement on
themselves and are held accountable through the exercise of individual
management and blame. With politics moving in the community, the
neoliberal state as a regulatory state is not retreating; what is retreat-
ing is the state as a guarantor of citizens’ political and social rights,
and of public services and civic institutions. Society in the form of a
welfare state is ‘rolling back’ and instead an ‘enabling’ state emerges
(Donzelot and Estebe, 1994) which is not directly involved in tack-
ling problems related to employment, health, education and social
justice. This is manifested in the diminishing role of the state in
planning, especially with regard to public services and welfare organ-
isation. The receding state does not mean that the ‘technologies of
governing have become superfluous’ (Simons and Masschelein, 2008,
p. 396). On the contrary, these political changes promote forms of gov-
ernment that foster and enforce individual responsibility, privatised
risk-management of ever-emerging crises, empowerment techniques,
regulation and market forces and entrepreneurial models in a variety
of social and interpersonal domains (Cruikshank, 1999; Henman, 2004;
Rose, 1999).
A feature of the neoliberal rationality is to realign the responsible with
the economic-rational individual whose moral quality is based on ratio-
nally assessing the costs and benefits of certain acts. The image of a
worthy citizen as a self-determining individual who accepts their obli-
gation to act morally and responsibly captures the image of the ‘good’
parent who is autonomous and capable of reversing inequality and
responsible for shaping their children’s lives. In a market-driven society,
the transformative power of human agency, as conceptualised within
humanism, is diminishing, having significant implications for citizen-
ship and human rights. Citizenship and political participation are not
a given for some groups; they depend on individuals’ responsiveness
to moralising and willingness to move closer to the market, pointing
to a revival of the puritan ethic that is now expressed in the guise of

tackling social exclusion. Citizenship has become fluid due to globalisa-
tion, intensification of inequality and ambivalence to the legitimacy of
nation states in the presence of international corporations. A new form
of flexible citizenship defined not by civic institutions and the nation
state but by unregulated markets emerges. As Ong argues, such modes of
citizenship organise people and distributes rights and benefits to them
according to their marketable skills rather than according to their mem-
bership within nation states. Those whose knowledge and skills are not
assigned significant market value, such as migrant women working as
domestic maids, may be denied citizenship (Ong, 2006). This reduces
citizens into economic units whose rights have become abstracted and
for whom representation and access to resources for basic survival are
not guaranteed. Even though citizenship and participation have a uni-
versal quality, in reality, social participation is for people who possess
sufficient economical resources. In recent years, economic differences
in participation are widening (Nihei, 2010). In arguments questioning
the state and deliberating new social movements, the expansion of the
citizen’s voice is assumed to be good. However, the question of ‘whose
voice’ remains overlooked. Parents and children who live in poverty are
reduced to consumers, mere commodities and border-crossers who fight
for basic survival and whose voices are less likely to be heard.
As the inequality gap widens, we seem to move away from a humanist
view of the world in which individuals are moral agents characterised by
resourcefulness, scepticism, irony and self-reliance, passion of thought
and the will to understand rather than merely describe the world around
them. A new moral order is on the rise where individuals are to be
managed with help from the sciences to turn their and their chil-
dren’s lives into a project. The principles of humanism that consider
human beings as the centre of moral and philosophical debates are
under attack: human beings are no longer agents who are able, through
reason, to understand nature and liberate themselves from tyranny in
any form (Ecclestone and Hayes, 2009; Malik, 2001). What it means to
be a citizen has been reduced by ideologies of paternalism that treat
individuals as not capable of rational thought. Parents and children,
especially those living in poverty, are seen not as capable individuals
who face structural and social inequality but as psychologically incapac-
itated and vulnerable persons who can only operate within structures of
dependency and state intervention. Manifestations of this form of vul-
nerability, and the marginalisation it engenders, are evident in family
policy which exploits parental anxiety by claiming that what parents
do is the solution for all educational and social problems without

accounting for the socio-economic reality of their lives.
Final thoughts
Contemporary societies face many challenges: the neoliberal legacy of

inequality and the diminishing role of the welfare state, the sidelin-
ing of civil rights movements and human rights, the existence of a
finite planet, the disproportionate resource accumulation at the top one
per cent and the destruction of human habitats and with them ways
of life in the name of economic growth. Furthermore, dogma and fun-
damentalism (both religious and secular, but particularly religious) as
a response to uncertainty and crisis in adult authority have reduced
individuals’ opportunities for moral reasoning and democratic engage-
ment and have shaken the foundations of a civic society. Contemporary
politics, or etho-politics, are less about competing visions of different
kinds of society and more about how best to manage existing politi-
cal and economic systems. In the West, there seems to be a widespread
acceptance of how things are with a little interest in the idea of poli-
tics for the purpose of collective social transformation, and little faith in
the existence of other possibilities (or a real alternative to how society
should be). The possibility for social renewal is diminished and instead
we talk about management and an individuated sense of happiness
(as promoted by happiness gurus). These challenges cannot be addressed
through double-speak and moralising. Current policy conceptions of
families and children have created a confused policy landscape: on the
one hand, parents are bestowed with extraordinary powers to reverse
inequality and maximise their children’s social advancement and, on
the other hand, they need family experts to help them become good
and effective parents with the state becoming interventionist, especially
for disadvantaged parents. To place the onus on individual parents and
the family (in all its forms) is exploitative because disadvantage can-
not be reversed without political decisions and also the family (as a
civic institution) is not and cannot be the ultimate arbiter of social and
political life.
Note: Statistics on risk and ‘children in need’

∗
According to the statistical information from the Every Child Mat-
ters document, 3–4 million children have been clustered as vulnerable
and 300,000–400,000 as ‘children in need’. The NSPCC estimated that
13 per cent of children have suffered some form of abuse while 2 per
cent suffer some form of neglect during childhood (Cawson et al., 2000).
The Children in Need Census reported that 377,600 children in England
started an ‘episode of need’ in 2009–2010 and 694,000 were in need at
some point in the year (DfE, 2010). According to the Children Act 1989,
a child in need is defined as a child requiring additional support from a
local authority, if he or she is unlikely to achieve or maintain, or have
the opportunity of achieving or maintaining a reasonable standard of
health and development without support, if his or her development is
likely to be significantly impaired, without support and/or if he or she is
disabled. The category that includes children with any form of disabil-
ity, young carers who care for family members with disability/illness,
excluded children and so on, is very wide. From the 603,700 referrals
made to children’s social care services, 39,100 children were subject to a
child protection plan on 31 March 2010. The most common reason for a
child to be placed on a child protection plan was neglect (43.5%). So in
the year 2009–2010 about 3.14 per cent of the population of children
and young people were regarded as children in need, but only 0.32 per
cent of children were the subject of child protection plans (i.e. substanti-
ated cases of abuse). From the 603,700 referrals made to children’s social
care services in 2010, 395,300 initial assessments were completed within
the year (65.5% of the total referrals in the year) and 137,600 core assess-
ments were completed within the year (22.8% of the total referred).
However, this indicates that over half of the cases received an initial
assessment, which puts children and their families under unnecessary
stress (for families who do not need protection) and is likely to trivialise
concerns by families who are truly in need of support services.
Part III
Parenting, Culture Wars and
Civic Renewal
So far, in light of the MCS findings about the influences of parenting and
social class on children’s learning and well-being, parenting has been
discussed in the context of family policy developments in Britain, high-
lighting early intervention and the evolving effects of neoliberal policies
on families. The nature, scope and paradoxes of family policy and its role
in supporting resilience in parents were examined, as well as assump-
tions about parents’ capacity to transcend their circumstances through
state intervention. Most importantly, parental involvement with chil-
dren’s learning and the role of the home learning environment and
social class in children’s development offered an insight on the extent
to which parenting influences the achievement gap between poor and
wealthier children. Consistently with much current research, social class
emerged as a powerful factor in influencing children’s language, literacy
and social behaviour, questioning the rhetoric that parenting is a key
determinant in shaping children’s life chances.
The disproportionate policy focus on parents to reverse inequal-
ity and narrow the achievement gap is part of a wider culture war
that has been waged on citizens in neoliberal societies, a culture
war that is less about a clash between conservative and liberal ide-
als and more about the governance of parents through the state
scrutiny of intimate family life to an unprecedented degree. The cul-
ture war on parenting is policy-driven and is more about moralising
individuals and promoting new conceptions of diversity and toler-
ance and less about engaging with the social and political forces
that shape families in the 21st century. The culture war on par-
enting can be understood through the lens of growing inequality
and polarisation in society, and the political hypocrisy reflected in
the paucity of discussions about social class, poverty and the serious
challenges that typical families face.
The MCS findings stimulated a wider discussion on how evidence is
used to promote certain conceptions of the ‘good’ parent within fam-
ily policy. The ‘good’ parent doctrine has corrosive effects on parents’
confidence but also redefines the relationship between individuals and
the state. The move from the big government to the big society should
not be about placing the onus on individuals without accounting for
the social and economic constraints that surround their lives, especially
in countries like Britain or the United States where the inequality gap
is widening. A preoccupation with individual behaviour, be it parents’
or children’s, is less likely to amount to social action. Rather, to support
individual parents and children to develop human agency and live a
life they value, we need new arguments about the renewal of families as
civic institutions and parents’ capability building.
Increasingly, the strong policy focus on individuals has contributed
to shrinkage of civic spaces for families to meet and engage in pub-
lic reasoning for the common good. The remaking of a civic society,
primarily through the renewal of the family as a civic institution, is
discussed here to offer an alternative view of parents and children as
capable of connecting to public life and engaging in moral and politi-
cal debates. Issues bigger than what parents do with their children are
addressed by asking questions, for example, ‘what is possible for par-
ents and children?’, ‘what is good and for whom?’ and ‘what’s good
for society?’ To address these questions, a civic renewal of the family is
needed. The remaking of a civic society involves the consideration of
three overlapping layers: the interpersonal life world (e.g. family); insti-
tutions and services (e.g. education); and collective associations and public
reasoning in the polity (e.g. community groups and associations; repre-
sentation; parent voice). In thinking about the interpersonal life world,
Sen’s capability approach to human well-being contributes to the civic
project by considering families’ living conditions and capabilities for
parents and children to convert opportunities into a valued life. The
capability approach offers an alternative to family micromanagement
and a culture of behavioural modification. At the layer of institutions,
civic education plays an important role in the making of a civic society
in that it complements parents’, teachers’ and children’s responsibility
with that of other civic institutions to promote the common good. Edu-
cating for a civic society should work in tandem with economic changes
and market regulation to tackle inequality and its effects on the ade-
quacy of current education systems. Finally, through the third layer of
Parenting, Culture Wars and Civic Renewal 145
collective associations and public reasoning, parents and children are

encouraged to be actively involved in debates about poverty and public
services and the ways in which market forces shape their lives. To halt
and reverse social polarisation we need a new theory of social justice and
public good to shift thinking from market solutions to the challenges
that parents and children face in late modernity.
Civic transformations of structural inequality and the narrowness of
parents’ and children’s worlds involve collective action predicaments –
whether in understanding the challenges of raising children in the
21st century or acting to sustain the environment or reconciling the
rights and well-being of diverse communities. These dilemmas cannot
be reduced into micromanagement, nor can they be resolved by indi-
viduals in isolation, nor by ‘exit’ because we cannot stand outside them,
nor by market approaches. The cost-benefit considerations that have
permeated family policy discourses regarding the role of parents in sup-
porting their children rely on the assumption that child rearing is an
economic matter, deprived of any political and moral standpoints. The
resulting moral vacuum is filled with market considerations and state
interventionist thinking. Communities in civil society as a whole should
be involved through public reasoning in that these ‘are urgent problems
for human beings together and in common . . . . If we are so much as
to survive as a species . . . we clearly need to think about well-being and
justice internationally, and together’ (Nussbaum and Sen, 1993).
A civic society is a fair society, which may be achieved through
a fairer distribution of resources and services and capability building
to enable people to make use of the opportunities available to them.
Treating everyone as having the same capabilities and needs does not
promote equality in society. As the MCS findings showed, inequality is
reproduced not because parents are insufficiently involved with their
children’s learning and do not have the ‘right’ attitudes and aspirations,
but because opportunities for social advancement, such as good quality
education and decent-wage jobs have become largely unattainable. Par-
ents’ social class matters in terms of influencing child outcomes but to
offer market solutions alone to the complex needs that disadvantaged
families face is not sufficient.
As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, what is needed is
much more than a struggle for policy to promote a long-term engage-
ment with societal changes guided by the principles of the common
good. As it currently stands, family policy operates within a managerial
framework that does not promote social transformation. This has impli-
cations for supporting parents and children in increasingly polarised
societies, especially when the proposed changes are individuated, short

term and reactive to ‘what works’, largely lacking in principles. Such
changes cannot speak to the world that we aspire to as citizens and
members of diverse communities. Short-termism and the ‘what works’
mentality present significant challenges to debates about what makes a
good life. There is a need for a new paradigm for family policy to shift
emphasis from technocratic solutions to political decisions underpinned
by the principles of equality, difference, the pursuit of a truly human life,
respect for human agency and the ethics of care to make it fit for pur-
pose. To this end, this part concludes with a four-tier approach towards
families’ capability building: civic education to promote and sustain
criticality, empathy and the common good; a feminist orientation to
family policy to delineate mothers’ and fathers’ roles in supporting
their children; a fairer resource distribution model to tackle structural
inequality and reintroduce debates about social class and equalisation
of opportunity and outcome; and an expansion of families’ public space
to promote Rawl’s ‘public reasoning’ and the practices of deliberative
democracy.
7
Parenting: A New Culture War
Family policy in 21st-century Britain has waged a culture war on par-

enting, highlighting the moral and cultural tensions and conflicting
political views about the civic orientation of families and what makes a
good parent. Historically, a culture war has been about clashes between
conservative and liberal values and mores in society. Gradually, how-
ever, culture wars have become not so much about conflict but a contest
over the limits of acceptable pluralism and its language (e.g. moral
vocabularies) over where and how and on what terms the boundaries
of a tolerable diversity would be drawn. The culture war on parenting
has been policy-driven and is more about moralising individuals and
promoting new conceptions of plurality and tolerance and less about
engaging with the wider social and political forces that underpin the
struggle between progressivism and orthodoxy and the place that fam-
ilies occupy. Here, the culture war on parenting is discussed through
the lens of neoliberalism and the growing inequality and polarisation
in society, and the political hypocrisy as reflected in the paucity of dis-
cussions and deliberations about social class, poverty and the challenges
that ‘average’ families face.
The governance of parenting has become a central feature in UK fam-
ily policy to an unprecedented degree (Henricson, 2008). Across the
political spectrum, family policy has focused on the importance of par-
ents spending time with children and engaging with their learning in
order to cultivate the right character and reinforce the right synaptic
pathways in their brain. And while the discourses about parenting and
policy dictum are burgeoning, the social and affective experiences of
being a parent are shrinking. Parenting has been re-coded from being
to doing and has become an economic abstraction in that a ‘good’ par-
ent is one who is acquisitive and participatory in the market, a parent
147
148 Parenting, Culture Wars and Civic Renewal
as homo economicus, who is expected to accumulate resources for them-

selves and their children. This view of parenting is at odds with being
and sharing everyday experiences with children. Interestingly, policy
pronouncements about parenting have taken place among significant
family changes over the last three decades which have seen parents
becoming increasingly more involved with their children. On both sides
of the Atlantic, we witness what Michael Sandel (2004) describes an
‘explosion of responsibility’ in the time and effort that most parents put
towards their children along with a diminished sense of responsibility
towards other people’s children.
Increasingly, parents are not only expected to be ‘good enough’ but
the ‘principal architects of a fairer society’ (Lexmond and Reeves, 2009)
and ‘powerful cognitive engineers’ (Wall, 2010). The notion of a ‘good
enough’ parenting has increasingly been under attack. What parents do
with their children is discussed as a process towards brain development
with neuroscience (see Chapter 5) being used to justify policy moves
towards prescriptive parenting. The views of parenting as a key determi-
nant of children’s synaptic development and brain capacity, linked to
increased life chances and social mobility is deterministic and resonant
of 20th-century eugenic policies. Furthermore, the use of an instru-
mental and pseudo-scientific language regarding parenting has reduced
parent–child relationships to authoritarian policy precepts of ‘how to’
raise children. An opportunistic use of a pseudo-scientific language,
which appropriates terminology from neuroscience and developmen-
tal psychology disciplines, manipulates parent–child relationships and
works against the ethics of care. The affective and moral experiences
involved in child rearing are obscured by such language of parenting
which devalues parents’ confidence in their capacities to raise children
(Ramaekers and Suissa, 2011). Recent discourses on child development
are reminiscent of the writings of the American behavioural psycholo-
gist J.B. Watson in the first quarter of the 20th century which suggests
that being a parent is no longer about emotional experiences and
instinctively doing what is right:
No one today knows enough to raise a child. The world would be con-
siderably better off if we were to stop having children for twenty years
(except for those reared for experimental purposes) and were then to
start again with enough facts to do the job with some degree of skill
and accuracy. Parenthood, instead of being an instinctive art, is a sci-
ence, the detail of which must be worked out by patient laboratory
methods.
(Watson, 1924)
Parenting: A New Culture War 149
In a similar vein, at the start of the 21st century, child rearing is under-
stood as a matter of technique and skill rather than a complex web
of emotive and social experiences and human relationships which are
unpredictable and occasionally messy. Within family policy, child rear-
ing is about making cost-benefit considerations and individual parents,
through nudging, are to be ‘empowered’ to make the right choices to
manage their poverty not by challenging unequal resource distribution
but by saving public resources (Bristow, 2010). Most disturbingly, as
Field’s and Allen’s reviews illustrate, young people’s life’s worth is dis-
cussed in economic terms by calculating input/output ratio in resources:
the money the state spends to provide services for children and the ben-
efits that will be incurred by way of future contributions to a workforce.
The savings on taxpayers’ cost for raising children successfully (reduced
welfare and criminal justice expenditure) is seen as a profit. As such,
parenting has to be monitored and controlled to maximise the benefits
incurred (expressed as the ratio of ‘problem’ to ‘model’ citizens). Within
policy, children are construed, at best, as future citizens and not ‘citi-
zens now’ and, at worst, as a commodity to be acted upon to increase
its bio-value. The instrumentality of child rearing is not confined within
disadvantaged groups only. In policy documents, children are viewed as
a resource or ‘redemptive agents’ (Moss and Petrie, 2002, 2) who are to
make a significant economic contribution to society.
As already discussed in previous chapters, a large number of policy
documents (e.g. Allen’s and Field’s reviews, the CentreForum report
on Parenting Matters: Early Years and Social Mobility) encourage par-
ents to become responsible entrepreneurs to reverse child poverty and
shape their children’s futures. These documents assume that the current
state of parenting in Britain is problematic (with most parents ignor-
ing and maltreating their children) and although the well-established
links between poverty and child development and well-being are pre-
sented, their discussions on parenting do not account for these links.
The authors of these documents take the view that the problems associ-
ated with poor and inadequate parenting are widespread to justify policy
cost-benefit calculations on how to raise children and a national adver-
tising campaign (with 5-a-day messages such as ‘read to your child for
15 minutes’; ‘play with your child on the floor for 10 minutes’) and, most
crucially, early intervention for parents for whom the national campaign
will not work. A technocratic view of parenting within a 5-a-day model
works against the transformative power that parent–child relationships
have for social renewal. In the following sections, the governance of
parenting is discussed through policy constructions of the ‘good’ parent
and the politics of nudge for the remodelling of parents who do not
conform with the policy ideals of parenthood. This chapter concludes

with a discussion on the rise of parenting determinism and the nature
and role of research evidence in policy and practice.
The making of the ‘good’ parent in late modernity
The obsession with effectiveness and efficiency as key organising prin-

ciples of late modernity is felt in almost every domain in life, including
parenting. Parents are expected to engage with the task of child rear-
ing effectively and, in so doing, are encouraged to acquire parenting
skills. Within family policy, narrow and prescribed views of an optimal
child and a good and effective parent are based on the rationalisa-
tion of everyday life whereas the professionals’ expertise has eclipsed
individual parents’ judgement. The state has become prescriptive about
parent–child interactions, considering child management, monitoring
and control as indicators of effective parenting. Parents are expected
to manage, monitor and control their children and to engage in spe-
cific activities with them that are deemed to be effective in creating
responsible future citizens. As such, parenthood is normalised as a for-
mulaic process that can be broken down into a series of prescriptive
steps towards good parenthood, achieved through advice from parent-
ing experts. For parents who do not abide by this orthodoxy and do
not comply with the policy demands to mould their children’s lives
(to fit the market), their effectiveness is questioned. Original research
by Baumrind (1967) in the United States produced three categories
of parenting, namely ‘authoritative’, ‘authoritarian’ and ‘permissive’.
Subsequent studies have proposed further categorisations, for exam-
ple ‘traditional’, ‘indulgent’ and ‘indifferent’ (Maccoby and Martin,
1983), and ‘intrusive’ and ‘inconsistent’ parenting (Feinstein et al.,
2008). Policy-endorsed norms for parenting appear to favour authori-
tarian or intrusive types of parenting (Churchill and Clarke, 2010) in
that the ideal parent is one who monitors and controls their children,
whereas the duty to assist them in developing as morally competent
agents has become increasingly marginalised (Le Sage and De Ruyter,
2008).
Parenting is deemed successful or not and its evaluation relies on
policy-endorsed criteria of good parenting backed by the parenting
‘science’. This, however, raises important ethical and philosophical
questions about the implications of reducing complex relationships,
affective experiences, social interactions and moral dilemmas into a
checklist. Despite parents being seen as omnipotent, as Judith Suissa
argues, ‘parenting has become not so much expanded as impoverished’

(2006: 32). Increasingly, children’s and parents’ social and civic spaces,
crucial for developing autonomy and moral judgement, are shrinking.
The policy focus on parental governance has restricted parents’ diverse
possibilities because parents operate within communities, such as fami-
lies, schools and neighbourhoods, within which they can easily become
invisible because their voices do not challenge the boundaries of these
spaces (Rose, 1999a). What some children lack, especially disadvantaged
children, is accessing public spaces and interacting with adults who are
in a position to exercise adult authority. However, the type of parent-
ing that is considered effective in family policy is about social control,
and relating to children through control and monitoring is a trou-
bling prospect. Further, current family policy advocates a conception
of parents as human and financial capital maximisers whose parenting
practices should lead to predetermined outcomes, rather than a parent
who rewards and punishes children in an attempt to cultivate certain
mores and codes of behaviour, congruent with their family and commu-
nity values. Children as future investments and the parental capacity to
operate within the market have become proxy indicators of how well
the task of parenting is accomplished: market logic and values have
replaced nurturing. As such, a ‘good’ parent is a learning parent and an
entrepreneur against whom good and effective parenting is measured:
a specified life plan is promoted with clear consequences if the plan is
not followed. This explains the high levels of parental anxiety and child
unhappiness in 21st-century Britain as identified in the 2007 UNICEF
report.
The notion of ‘good’ parenting has a judgement value that is hard to
define, becoming a platform for the projection of various meanings to
fit various agendas. The emphasis on parenting in family policy is justi-
fied through invocations of research evidence, neuroscience mainly, to
objectify the role of parents in raising children and maximising oppor-
tunities for social advancement and social mobility. As such, good par-
enting is thought to compensate for social and economic disadvantage.
New Labour’s and the coalition government’s stance of what the parents
do and not who they are matters, has introduced a new moral code, espe-
cially considering that such a statement has lately been articulated by
David Cameron and Nick Clegg whose developmental and professional
trajectories, life chances and opportunities for social advancement were
the result of who their parents were in terms of their capacity to access
and use resources and networks and offer a privileged upbringing to
them. Such attempts to diminish the impact of privilege and deny the
role of social class in defining young people’s life chances invoke a new
morality in the political discourses about poverty and child rearing, one
that does not engage with the societal and economic constraints and
affordances in people’s lives. Furthermore, the view that what parents
do makes all the difference in children’s lives invokes hubris and has
negative implications for cultural understandings of parenthood and
childhood.
A state-endorsed view of the ‘good’ parent has corrosive effects on
parents’ confidence. The economic calculations coupled with a lack
of confidence that some parents may have in their parenting can be
disempowering. Conceptions of parenting as another proximal factor
are reductionistic in that they imply that the emotional and intellec-
tual exchanges and experiences between children and parents can be
reduced into a set of variables whose effect on child well-being can be
calculated and appropriately remodelled. ‘Good’ parenting is regarded as
a question of technique instead of being fundamentally about quality of
relationships and affective experiences between parents and children.
Parenting is not a set of skills but an object of care (see the section
The Ethics of Care in Chapter 8). Raising children is not a practical
problem that requires technical or managerial solutions, panic-driven in
most cases, about how to make parenting effective. Increasingly, parents
are under pressure from family gurus and educational institutions (e.g.
schools) to offer concerted cultivation to their children. However, good
parenting is not about moulding children to an image of a child with
a competitive edge but about the richness of relationships with others.
As Sandel argues, children’s qualities are unpredictable and influenced
by many factors, and parents alone cannot be held wholly responsible
for the kind of children they have. Child rearing is an invitation to many
possibilities, an ‘openness to the unbidden’ (Sandel, 2004).
The ‘over-pedagogised’ family: Parenting as learning and capital

Parents have become edu-parents to expand their children’s opportu-
nities towards learning. Bernstein’s term ‘over-pedagogised’ society has
now come to apply to the family: an ‘over-pedagogised’ family in which
parents as educators occupy a central place. Parents are to engage in
learning to improve their parenting skills but also to become involved
with their children’s education. Through parenting classes, parents are
to reposition themselves and their relationships to their children in
accordance with policy views of good parenting. The acquisition of
parenting skills is also a condition of economic development and pro-
ductivity, a process of creating parent capital to give added value or what
Allen (2011) describes as ‘massive savings’. Parent–child relationships

are positive as long as they maximise the potential of children as future
investments (e.g. parental involvement with home learning as a way of
maximising children’s human capital).
The idea of parenting as a learning enterprise reflects our changing
attitudes towards parenting and learning (learning is framed as indi-
viduals’ responsibility) but also a political culture that translates social
problems (poverty, inequality) to parenting solutions (skills acquisition).
Similar trends have been observed in school effectiveness initiatives
aimed at converting social problems to educational solutions (Simons
and Masschelein, 2008). Through parental involvement with learning,
the onus for educating children and young people has shifted from
the state to the family. Learning and education are about increasing
children’s human capital; education is no longer a force of liberation
and social transformation but a skills-developing exercise to make the
workforce of the future fit and responsive to the needs of the market.
Skills and education are used as synonymous in discussions about social
mobility and economic competitiveness. This shifts learning from being
a social process through which children and parents develop a vision
of themselves and the kind of society they want to create to learning
for self-governance and human capital accumulation. Most worryingly,
learning is no longer about acquiring knowledge to enable young peo-
ple to function as active citizens capable for social change, and nor is
‘learning to be human . . . learning to live in personal relations to other
people . . . because our ability to enter fully into human relations with
others is the measure of our humanity, for inhumanity is precisely the
perversion of human relations’ (Fielding, 2007, p. 406). Furthermore,
the ordinary activities of parents in relation to their families have come
to be governed through learning. This form of learning is a ‘mechanism
par excellence’ to secure a range of collective social, cultural and eco-
nomic goods as well as to ameliorate the potential privations and risks
associated with the private spaces of the ‘home’ or ‘neighbourhood’ and
‘environment’ (Rose, 1999). Changes in parents’ subjectivity (as learn-
ers and enablers of their children’s learning) are to be achieved through
the pursuit of individualistic self-interests and by becoming what Clarke
(2008) calls ‘a possessive, self-sufficient individual for whom life is to be
managed as a project’.
In late capitalism, human action, from child rearing to learning,
has been re-coded as a process of accruing capital. Parenting is capi-
talised upon as a social and economic investment and parents as key
drivers behind children’s life chances and social mobility. Parental love
has been transformed into parental capital; learning into human and
intellectual capital; and friendships and social networks into social and
cultural capital. The proliferation of different forms of capital and an
economic rationale to underpin all human activity offer a vision of life
as a means to an end and not as an end in itself. As such, human rela-
tionships are not formed through emotional and affective desires but
through processes whereby adults transmit advantages to children (liv-
ing a life as a project). The family has become a social space characterised
by economic imperatives and the principles of the market, where trust
and affective experiences have an instrumental value. As such, it is an
apolitical space because the emphasis is on maximising economic and
not social advantage by ‘fostering an ethos of human enterprise and
moral responsibility’ (Rose, 1999, p. 484). The growing capitalisation on
human activities offers a new lens through which poverty is not looked
at as the absence of financial capital (material poverty) but as a lack of
other forms of capital which can be accrued if only parents invest their
time and effort to create networks, learn and acquire parenting skills
and become involved with their children’s learning. As such, poverty is
expressed not in political but in cultural and subjective terms.
Parent capital is thought to accumulate through involvement with
prescriptive parenting practices whose goal is to ensure that children’s
lives are managed to avoid becoming a future problem and a drain to
public resources. Prescriptive parenting is thought to maximise chil-
dren’s human capital via the development of soft skills and a good
character: children are to acquire soft skills and emotional literacy as
a means of changing disposition, attitudes and behaviour, to man-
age the self and adapt to the existing social and economic structures.
Despite the impact of the widening inequality on children’s and parents’
life chances and well-being, especially in socially immobile societies,
the importance of parenting in developing children’s soft skills, which
are ‘a key factor in determining young people’s ability to succeed’, is
hardly understated (Lexmond and Reeves, 2009). Social and educational
inequalities have come to be seen through the prism of young people’s
emotional skills, in that a poorly developed character explains poverty
and disadvantage. As such, children’s poor educational outcomes and
lack of social advancement are not related to societal structures but to
‘failures in self-governance, unable or unwilling to appropriately capi-
talise on their lives’ (Gillies, 2005, p. 837). New explanations about the
causes of poverty and inequality are offered: soft skills are a cause and
a solution to poverty. However, to reverse societal polarisation requires
more than building character, empathy and other soft skills in children.
Disadvantaged children’s soft skills as an explanation of their lim-

ited life chances is faulty on several counts: first, such explanations
encourage deficit assumptions about marginalised social groups (e.g.
White working-class boys) as lacking in emotional literacy (Francis
and Skelton, 2006) and promote standardisation of their behaviour
and character (a certain type of character – the one that makes you
employable) as a solution. Secondly, the emphasis on the importance
of teaching soft skills has hollowed out the curriculum and promoted
a therapeutic culture in schools. The rise of a therapeutic culture and
the subsequent diffusion of therapy services are likely to miss young
people who, due to disability or other mental health difficulties, are in
need of such services. What most children lack are not opportunities to
develop empathy or self-esteem but the intellectual tools to make sense
of the world around them and their place in it. Thirdly, the develop-
ment of good character is thought to occur within a very specific type of
authoritative parenting (although, in family policy, the lines between
authoritative and authoritarian parenting are blurred), and this may
reduce the repertoire of parenting styles exhibited in diverse families
and communities. Finally, the goal of developing soft skills, emotional
literacy and empathy as a means of accessing the job market to realise
various economic and social benefits (DfES, 2005; OFSTED, 2007) is
flawed. In a society where ‘the capacity for manipulation is most highly
praised and where compassion has no place’ (Chris Hedges, as cited in
Monbiot, 2011), to approach good character and empathy as a means
of increasing employment advantages is irrelevant and potentially mis-
leading. As Board and Fritzon point out, psychopathic traits (e.g. good
communication and social skills in flattering and manipulating others,
lack of empathy and conscience) and a strong sense of entitlement come
very close to the characteristics that most companies tend to look for
in their candidates (I do not advocate here the development of psy-
chopathic traits as a means of social advancement). As Monbiot (2011)
comments, depending on families’ socio-economic background, psy-
chopathic traits can be seen as a valuable asset in accessing competitive
jobs or a pathway to prison.
Soft skills such as communication and emotional maturity are impor-
tant for developing criticality and capacity to engage with an increas-
ingly diverse society. The discourses on supporting young people to
develop good character however are not about capability building
(as discussed in Chapter 8) but, as Monbiot (2011) argues, about com-
pliance and the development of a docile workforce for menial jobs who
will not pose a threat when left out of the corporate profit. In the
British media, especially in the aftermath of the 2011 summer riots in

many English towns, working-class young people have been portrayed
as lacking in emotional intelligence and capacity for empathy due to
poor parenting. These discussions on empathy however miss a crucial
point: empathy is context-specific and in order for young people to
build outward they need access to meanings they understand, meanings
that are located within their local communities. As Nussbaum (2004)
argues, care is learnt in small communities with their more intense
attachments. Compassion is collective and for families who live under
the strain of poverty in disintegrating and threatening neighbourhoods,
feelings of care and empathy towards others cannot be easily culti-
vated. As inequality grows and gives rise to a pathological narcissism
in social relationships, it has become clear to many young people who
face extreme poverty that those who accumulate most of the resources
are not necessarily those who have good character and a moral outlook
in life.
Parenting in a ‘classless’ society

In family policy’s assumptions about the role of parents in the public
sphere, parenting is discussed in economic and administrative terms,
being deprived of political and class considerations. Parents are increas-
ingly seen as consumers who abide by the pursuit of economic growth
through an exercise of choice. The moral vacuum left is filled with cost-
benefit analyses of human action, that is, raising children as a resource
for the future. A market approach to family and child well-being is corro-
sive because it does not account for our differences (e.g. cultural, ethnic,
disability), nor for structural inequality. Indeed, the lack of regulation
of corporations and other bodies of self-interest and a monetary view of
human life have exacerbated the inequality gap and changed the politi-
cal discourses (ideological arguments are replaced by market arguments)
and the mechanisms that shape institutions to meet the needs of the
public (citizens as consumers). In such a context, social and political
action is reduced to changing individual behaviour to fit into the real-
ity of the widening inequality gap and the resulting demise of the civic
project. Community consensus, parents’ personal values and capacity
for public reasoning have become secondary pursuits, whereas individ-
ual preferences and desires have taken centre stage and are catered for
by the market, highlighting the limited engagement of policy with the
big societal issues such as inequality and social class divides.
In the contemporary political culture, talks about social class are con-
sidered to be old-fashioned and unsophisticated (Gillies, 2007; Skeggs,
2004). Policy debates no longer occur in terms of material poverty and

social class; instead, they focus on parental warmth and parental respon-
sibility and good parenting, evading inequality and socio-economic
differences and their impact on family functioning and children’s
life chances. There have been attempts to separate social and educa-
tional inequality from structural disadvantage by considering the links
between poverty and poor life chances to ‘run through the style of
parenting that children in poor households receive’ (Cameron, 2010,
in a speech for DEMOS Building Character report launch as cited in
Lexmond and Reeves, 2009). Poverty is no longer seen as an influential
force behind parenting (e.g. by making parenting more stressful) but is
thought to be transmitted through parenting styles. This has important
implications for parents’ and children’s rights because such views on
poverty remove schools’ and other civic institutions’ responsibility for
offering opportunities for social advancement.
Furthermore, the application of market principles to understanding
child development and the re-conceptualisation of parents and chil-
dren within a market model are new elements in social policy that
have shifted the nature of citizenship (i.e. children not as citizens but
as future investments). Relocating families closer to the market has
changed the ideological landscape of family policy because parents who
cannot function as an active workforce are responsible for preserving a
‘cycle of deprivation’ or, even, becoming themselves the source of depri-
vation and thus responsible for child poverty. Within this rationality,
parents and children are encouraged to become entrepreneurial citizens
and to constantly readjust to opportunities and cultures of institutions.
Such conceptions of parenting enforce guidelines for parental behaviour
and practices without acknowledging that the social arrangements
within which parenting is done can be marked by impoverishment, job-
lessness and the ‘intensification of inequality’ (Robson, 2010, p. 70).
Further, it promotes a culture of parent blame which serves a political
purpose by diverting attention and resources away from poverty as a
structural disadvantage to regulating and punishing individual parents
while the economic barriers which prevent them from living up to the
ideal of a ‘good’ parent remain unexamined and unchallenged.
Nudge and the remodelling of parents
Nudge, a concept from behaviour economics (Thaler and Sunstein,

2008) and a political tool to change individual behaviour to achieve
predefined objectives, is a product of an individuated political culture.
Attempts to change individual behaviour instead of stimulating polit-

ical and social changes show a lack of political vision and little hope
in the possibility of political transformations. The idea behind nudge is
bounded rationality, the notion that humans are constrained in their
decision making by their limited capacity to process and evaluate infor-
mation and apply it meaningfully. Although people are rational, in a
sense of displaying a goal-orientated behaviour and having reasons to
justify actions, decision making stops when a solution that is good
enough (but not optimal) is found. Nudge accepts bounded rational-
ity as a given and accommodates it by setting a ‘choice architecture’
from which people choose the most appropriate path for action (articu-
lated as the ‘optimal’ choice out of many other choices). Nudge policies
are thought to enable parents to make choices that promote certain
behaviours and not others to achieve desired outcomes. And through
these choices, parents are to be remade and parent–child interactions
are to be reimaged. Through a ‘choice architecture’, parents are helped
(or coerced through parenting orders) to make choices that are deemed
to be the right ones for their children. This is a different approach to
one that considers citizens to be capable, through dialogue and public
engagement, of decision making. Parents, especially those with lim-
ited opportunities for social advancement, are encouraged to change
their behaviour as opposed to think and act collectively to overcome
their reduced circumstances and reach decisions that are meaningful
for their lives.
In family policy, nudge as governance is justified in light of prevalent
views of parents and children as fragile and vulnerable. The exercise
of economic and political rights is thought to be a domain for compe-
tent citizens whereas behaviour modification better meets the needs of
vulnerable people. Living in poverty is assumed to be people’s fault, a
condition that is due to their lack of aspiration and interest in learning
and cultural activities, and a failure to develop productive work habits.
To naturalise poverty as an individual’s deficit (e.g. lack of aspirations, a
‘culture of poverty’) justifies parents’ remodelling because when poverty
is understood as a culture and a lifestyle choice, behavioural interven-
tion becomes an appropriate course of action. Family policy makers
and parenting experts have taken up the role of educators who can see
the right course of action and design interventions to achieve prede-
termined outcomes. Changing parents’ behaviour is not an antidote to
poverty because what parents do with their children, although impor-
tant in its own right, offers individuated rather than political responses
to structural inequality. The inequality gap cannot be reduced by nudge
policies but requires political decisions. Most disturbingly, through

nudge policies, families are offered mitigation strategies to learn to
cope with structural inequality and social injustice instead of being sup-
ported to engage in deliberative action and develop community-based
responses to tackle the roots of inequality.
Nudge policies have negative consequences: by nudging parents to
rely on parenting experts for advice regarding their parenting, they are
likely to lose confidence in their own parenting and seek confirmation
in policy, and this may precipitate dependency. Nudge works against
the making of citizens as robust and capable of exercising their rights
and actively participating in a democratic society. What type of cit-
izens do the choice architects envisage creating? And is it ethical to
lead individuals to make predetermined choices through an external
manipulation of their physical or social contexts? Are human beings
simplistic and unidimensional, whose internal thought processes can
be influenced by external stimuli in a direct and unmediated fashion?
And what have decades of knowledge about child development come
to? Ultimately, the application of behavioural economics in parenting
is not about science or even about saving money, but has ideolog-
ical roots, relying on pseudo-science to justify individual behaviour
modification.
The politics of nudge raises many questions that are practical,
ethical and philosophical in nature. Nudge presupposes that people
are infinitely malleable to be shaped into a prefabricated image of
a ‘model citizen’. From an ethical and philosophical point of view,
governments do not have the right to influence individuals’ thought
processes nor to decide what constitutes appropriate behaviour (Jones
et al., 2010) because thoughts and behaviours are shaped by a mul-
titude of factors including genes, neurons, feelings, habitats, religious
beliefs, social interactions, access to resources and opportunities and
cultural influences. Nudge cannot be transformative at a societal level:
while there is some evidence that nudge has a positive impact on some
individuals, there is scant evidence that such benefits can be extrap-
olated to society at large. What seems to be an appropriate course of
action or behaviour for individuals, collectively, may be inappropriate
or even meaningless. Also, changes as a result of nudging people tend
to be superficial because people are not changed at any deep level in
their attitudes, values or motivations. In this respect, nudge is about
applying technical solutions to adaptive challenges (challenges that
require well-thought out and long-term solutions rather than admin-
istrative responses) and this is, according to Dan Heifetz (2002), the
most common form of leadership failure. The challenges we face, for

example, the dismantling of the welfare state, climate change or short-
ages in public health services require changes in people’s capacity to
engage meaningfully with their communities and capability building
and space for experimentation free from the mentality of ‘what works’
and short-term impacts. Finally, as with many other family policy ini-
tiatives, nudge policies face the challenge of proportionality and scale.
As discussed in Part I, considering that most parents already spend time
on their children’s learning, there is no point in nudging them to change
the frequency of their involvement. We may want to understand the
nature and the social context of their involvement better, rather than
focus on nationwide campaigns (see CentreForum report) to encourage
more involvement.
An alternative to nudge is to support people to develop the capacity to
reason and, collectively, work out solutions to their problems and direc-
tions of public policy. Public deliberation can support moral judgement
(Miller, 1992) because it encourages people to take on board differ-
ent perspectives and develop a civic orientation to decision making.
Through public deliberation, citizens not only exchange information
about different pathways of action but also justify their reasoning pub-
licly (see Chapter 9 for a discussion on public reasoning). In so doing,
they are more likely to constrain self-interest than when choosing an
‘optimal’ choice from a menu of choices. Privatised optimal choices are
less likely to bring public benefits because they do not result from public
deliberation. They are abstracted choices often based on decontextu-
alised evidence and the policy makers’ interpretation of it, whereas in
public deliberations, choices are co-constructed by a community of peo-
ple who engage freely. And, although research-based considerations are
important, paths for action are also influenced by community values
and tradition. In this day and age, participatory democracy through the
use of the Internet and activism forums has the potential to bring cit-
izens together, although one may argue that this type of democratic
participation is somewhat utopian and less likely to achieve real-life
outcomes.
Within nudge policies, the state assumes the role of an ‘expert’ whose
advice and practical recommendations are evidence-based. In a deliber-
ative democracy, however, the role of the state is to support citizens to
engage in public reasoning by promoting civic institutions and places
for assembly and acting as an organiser to support public’s access to the
information needed for deliberation. Family experts are an integral com-
ponent of nudge policies: changing parents’ behaviour is to be achieved
through parenting experts, which in itself is an odd profession. Tradi-

tionally, experts such as doctors examine a body of evidence and offer
advice based on their accumulated knowledge which is open to peer
review; however, it is not clear what the knowledge possessed by par-
enting experts is. Child rearing has become a high-stakes task and some
parents feel ill-prepared to undertake it. Parents are often told that par-
enting is one of the most difficult tasks and that the state has a duty to
support them in undertaking it successfully. Such orientation exploits
the lack of confidence that some parents may feel by being told that
their parenting cannot be trusted to offer children a cohesive experience
of growing up.
Parenting experts have replaced community consensus to offer tech-
nical solutions about parenting and the dilemmas involved in raising
children. In these encounters, the authority of family members, teach-
ers or neighbours has been replaced with parenting ‘expertise’ and the
absurdity of applying adult standards of conduct (e.g. choice, reason,
empowerment) to managing children’s behaviour (especially children
who come in contact with the law). The ethos that parent–expert
encounters create is regrettable, especially when parents surrender the
privacy of their family to receive advice from ‘experts’ on how to deal
with the challenges in the natural process of raising children while the
big issues such as inequality and societal polarisation are not tackled.
Parent determinism and ‘back-door’ eugenics

Parents are increasingly seen as key players in their children’s lives.
Furedi (2001) talks about the rise of parenting determinism, a belief that
risk factors at a societal level (e.g. achievement gap, poverty) and par-
enting practices and behaviours at a family level (e.g. home learning,
parental warmth) are directly and causally linked. These monodirec-
tional links however do not account for the interplay of multiple factors
(not related to parenting) such as peers, media–celebrity culture, expo-
sure to violence, disintegrating neighbourhoods, a culture of stranger
hysteria and lack of social trust that influence children’s well-being.
Moreover, parent–child behaviour influences are bidirectional in that
children’s attitudes and disposition also affect parents. In their inter-
actions, parents and children tend to reach a versatile equilibrium,
with complementarity and conflict being crucial for children’s moral
development, agency and autonomy. However, in family policy, parents
should maximise their children’s physical, cognitive and social perfor-
mance with support from parenting experts. As such, children are seen
as passive and malleable, shaped by good or bad parenting and not as

capable of shaping their interactions with parents.
Parenting determinism shares many features with 20th-century bio-
logical determinism which was articulated as biology determining indi-
viduals’ life chances in a fatalistic way: change was not possible; for
example the disability of ‘body and mind’ was fixed and thus immutable
for which education and society had no role to play. With the shift from
the medical to social models of human development, deficit assump-
tions moved from the individual to systemic structures and societal
barriers. However, with the rise of parenting determinism, we have come
full circle in considering individual factors as key determinants of chil-
dren’s life chances and social mobility (although this time it is not genes
but parenting that influences children’s brain synaptic development).
This is illustrated in the dubious links drawn between parenting prac-
tices and changes in children’s brain development and social mobility
(e.g. links between breastfeeding and social mobility), with parenting
practices determining social outcomes via biological changes in babies’
brains. In a way, parenting determinism, including hyper-parenting,
is about ‘back-door’ eugenics: the idea is that certain parenting prac-
tices can change next generations’ synaptic development to make them
fit into unchanged societal structures. Parenting determinism propels
interventionist action in the form of parenting classes, parenting orders
for parents whose children have come in contact with courts because
changes in parenting are thought to influence children’s brain and, ulti-
mately, life chances. Equally troubling is the scope of state intervention
with parents and children in severe disadvantage to manage them to fit
into existing market and institutional structures. This goes against social
inclusion as a gradual removal of systemic barriers in people’s lives. The
idea behind parenting determinism is the same as that behind eugenics:
change ourselves (by way of genes or parenting effects on synaptic path-
ways), change our nature to fit into the natural and social world around
us rather than attempt social transformation. As such, we do not engage
actively with the world because the onus is on changing the individ-
ual self rather than the political and societal structures and institutional
arrangements which have made the world inhospitable to an increasing
number of families.
The science of parenting: ‘what works?’
Research is increasingly used to justify the formulation and implemen-

tation of social policy, including family policy. To rely on empirical
educational and social science research to justify family-based interven-

tions can be useful as long as the validity of the research is carefully
examined and the interpretations of the research findings are cross-
examined and open to peer review. However, over the last decade, an
idle rhetoric of ‘what works’ has gained considerable ground in policy
circles with little contestation and has become the organising princi-
ple and intellectual cornerstone of much family policy. A key problem
with the evidence-based rhetoric is that research is often used in a
selective and decontextualised manner to justify the implementation of
preconceived policy initiatives that dovetail with governmental agen-
das. Using research this way promotes a pseudo-scientific culture based
on general claims about causal connections that are not supported by
research. The claims based on neuroscience research, for example, about
child brain development and the ways in which parenting and early
childhood experiences are implicated in it are not scientifically valid
(see Chapter 5). And to use them to justify family policy amounts to
pseudo-science.
In general, the ‘what works’ approach to parenting and child devel-
opment is faulty on several counts. First, it encourages us to think about
what works and not about principles (in fact, these are often presented
as being diametrically opposite goals). Separating what works from the
principles that should underpin research such as validity, representation
and voice is problematic because a sense of proportion and relevance can
be lost if we do not know the circumstances under which the findings
were obtained, how relevant they were to a given policy context, what
demographic groups were represented and whose voices emerged dur-
ing the research process. Secondly, we should reflect on the narrowness
of ‘what works’ (e.g. child rearing as a technical problem that requires
technical solutions) and also on the labels used (e.g. ‘troubled’ families
or vulnerable children). The use of such idioms are not about seman-
tics but highlight how language is used and how research evidence is
manipulated to justify policy (see Chapter 6 for a discussion on the use
of a lingua franca in family policy). Thirdly, to extrapolate research find-
ings to policy contexts is often problematic because policy agendas tend
to determine the object of research and ultimately what works. Instead,
‘what works’ should be democratically defined and framed as an inquiry
in itself while accounting for its social and cultural context.
As Biesta argues ‘the extent to which an institution actively supports
policy makers to go beyond simplistic questions of what works may
well be an indication of the degree to which a society can be called
democratic’ (2007, p. 12). Through a genuine engagement with research,
family policy can be transformative and capable of offering public sup-

port relevant to people’s lived experiences. However, a schism is often
observed between how research evidence is interpreted in family pol-
icy and what the research findings actually tell us. This was illustrated
with the findings from the MCS, presented in Chapters 1 and 2, which
painted a picture that is different to that presented in Field’s and Allen’s
independent reviews and other policy documents. There are, at least,
three distinct points of departure in research on parenting and child
development I would like to point out to illuminate the context of the
culture war waged on parents.
First, a key assumption that permeates family policy is that parents
in poverty do not engage adequately or frequently with their children’s
learning and thus they need to be encouraged to do so. However, as
discussed in Chapter 3, research findings (from the MCS but also other
recent studies) have shown a large number of parents (over 75%) to be
routinely involved with their children’s learning and, most crucially,
this high level of parental involvement was found to be irrespective
of parents’ socio-economic status. Yet, despite this evidence the policy
focus is on nudging parents to become involved with their children’s
learning. Secondly, family policy considers parental learning support
to be paramount in reducing the achievement gap between poor and
economically better off children. However, a closer look at the data sug-
gests otherwise: the contribution of parenting (home learning, parental
warmth) to five- and seven-year-olds’ language and literacy measures
was found to be minor (after children’s characteristics such as cognitive
skills and behaviour were accounted for). Although parental engage-
ment with children’s learning is important in its own right, these
findings challenge the existence of a causal and direct relationship
between what parents do and children’s learning. Third, although there
is an acknowledgement in Allen’s and Field’s reviews of the strong link
between poverty and child outcomes, parenting is argued to account
for a large proportion of variance in children’s social and learning out-
comes, but this is not the case. As stated in Chapter 2, the contribution
of socio-economic factors to children’s outcomes is strong, even when
parenting variables were accounted for. Maternal education and reading
habits in particular emerged as strong predictors of children’s literacy
and language. In contrast, parenting variables (e.g. parental learning
support, parental warmth) made very small contributions (Hartas, 2011,
2012).
Collectively and consistently with previous studies, what these find-
ings show is that children’s language and literacy attainments are
differentiated along social class and not parenting (frequency of parental

involvement with home learning or parental warmth). They also show
that the achievement gap between poor and rich children persists
despite routine parental involvement with home learning, raising ques-
tions about the efficacy of home learning as a mechanism to tackle
educational inequality. And yet, the research presented in policy doc-
uments to support policy goals has not accounted for these findings.
This disjuncture raises important questions about the ways in which
research (not only neuroscience but also educational) can be used as
a policy tool to justify interference with family intimate life and shift
public debates from social class to the role of parents in children’s edu-
cation in an unequal society. Research in family policy circles is often
used to moralise rather than liberate, and this goes against critical the-
ory paradigms of research as a force for social transformation and social
justice.
8
Family Policy and the Capability
Approach to Parents’ and
Children’s Well-Being
Sen’s capability approach to human well-being provides a use-

ful framework to explain parent–child interactions and interactions
between families and public agencies. The capability approach has two
core concepts, namely, functionings and capabilities. A ‘functioning’
is what a person achieves whereas ‘capability is the ability to achieve’
(Sen, 1995, p. 266). Functionings are related to the different condi-
tions that surround people’s lives. Educated parents, for example, may
be in a better position to offer learning support at home and create
learning conditions that are conducive to child academic achievement.
Capabilities, in contrast, ‘are notions of freedom, in a positive sense:
what real opportunities you have regarding the life you may lead’ (Sen,
1987, p. 36). With regard to children’s learning and well-being, parents’
functionings refer to parental behaviour and practices that support chil-
dren to live a life they value while acknowledging the existence of social
and structural constraints, whereas capability refers to parents’ ability
to operate within these constraints and convert the real opportunities
they are afforded into valued functionings and, ultimately, exercise the
freedom to choose among possible lifestyles. An important principle of
the capability approach is that individuals are able to exercise volition
in deciding what constitutes a valued activity or state of being, while
acknowledging human diversity and different living conditions in nego-
tiating the principles of equality and difference and balancing diverse
views on parenting.
Sen does not specify what constitutes ‘valued functionings’ because
what children and parents value is relevant to the societal and cultural
influences in their lives (Sen, 2004). For Sen, capabilities sets are context-
specific and their legitimacy depends upon who is involved in their
definition and whether they have been evaluated through democratic
166
Family Policy and the Capability Approach 167
processes (see also Bonvin and Farvaque, 2003). Thus, to achieve equal
agency and freedom for men and women, it is necessary to include
diverse voices in the process of defining and selecting functionings.
Unlike Nussbaum (2004), who accepts an Aristotelian conception of
‘valued functionings’, that is, attributes that are common to all and val-
ued by most people across cultures, Sen leaves it to parents to decide
what they value and let their values and beliefs guide their parenting,
while questioning notions of ‘good’ parenting and the ‘right’ way to
parent.
Here, I view parenting and family policy through a capability lens and
argue for the principles of equality, including gender equality, difference
and human agency and the ethics of care to underpin family policy.
Also, abandoning current gender-neutral policy discourses in favour of
a feminist orientation to parenting and family policy is advocated to
support capability building in parents, mothers in particular.
A capability approach to parenting
The capability approach to human well-being makes an important con-

tribution to understanding parenthood and its influence on child devel-
opment in three ways. First, it acknowledges that functionings, or what
parents achieve during their interactions with children, are bounded
by their living conditions and parents’ ability to convert opportuni-
ties into functionings (access to real opportunities and their capacity to
make use of them). Secondly, although the capability approach draws
a distinction between intrinsic and instrumental values inherent in
children’s education and well-being, it does not approach these val-
ues as being mutually exclusive. This is useful in that although the
relationships parents form with their children and their communities
have an intrinsic value, that is, valuable in and of themselves, chil-
dren’s education and learning can also have an instrumental value in
terms of supporting children to function as engaging citizens in increas-
ingly diverse societies. Thirdly, the capability approach highlights the
important role that parents and society play in supporting children’s
evolving capabilities through learning and socialisation, offering a view
of parenting as a relational rather than a technical act. The role of
parents in particular and society in general in supporting children to
choose what capabilities to evolve to exercise their rights is central
within the capability approach to children’s well-being (Saito, 2003).
An important contribution of the capability approach to the viability
of children’s rights is its ‘valuational scrutiny of individual advantages
and adversities, since the different functionings have to be assessed and

weighted in relation to each other, and the opportunities of having
different combinations of functionings also have to be evaluated’ (Sen,
2004, p. 318).
Within a capability approach, the idea that parents’ and children’s
well-being is influenced by many factors counteracts prescriptive parent-
ing practices (e.g. reading to children 15 minutes a day). The currency
in the capability approach is what people can do or be and not how
close parents are to the market or the extent to which they have
been remodelled into an image of the ‘good’ parent. Thus, progress is
assessed in terms of capabilities or people’s capacities to exercise real
freedoms, whereas within family policy progress is assessed in terms
of the money saved from averting (through early intervention) welfare
dependency and the use of public services (e.g. police, prisons). Further,
and considering the paucity of family policy regarding children as ‘cit-
izens now’, the capability approach offers a comprehensive framework
towards building capability in children through respect for their rights,
access to good education and civic participation to exercise agency and
achieve the goals they have a reason to value.
The capability approach offers an alternative to neoliberal perspec-
tives about human development by considering human life and civic
institutions (e.g. family, education) not as means to an end but as ends
in themselves; emphasising the idea of capability as opposed to utility
and maximising capabilities rather than profit; considering individuals
not as passive targets of intervention but able to exercise agency within
their structural constraints; focusing on families and not individual par-
ents as the unit of moral concern; and, finally, evaluating outcomes
not only in monetary terms but also in people’s capability building
and the freedoms to develop capabilities. The capability approach to
human well-being is not economic (e.g. maximising profit) but seeks to
expand individuals’ real freedoms or what people are able to do or be.
For Sen, there is not a single but many freedoms that can work together
to make positive freedom possible. He lists five groups of instrumental
freedoms:
Political freedoms – the opportunities that people have to determine

who should govern and on what principles, and also include the
possibility to scrutinize and criticize authorities, to have freedom
of political expression and an uncensored press, to enjoy the free-
dom to choose between different political parties, and so on. They
include . . . opportunities of political dialogue, dissent and critique as
well as voting rights and participatory selection of legislators and

executives.
Economic facilities – ‘the opportunities that individuals . . . enjoy to

utilize economic resources for the purpose of consumption, or pro-
duction, or exchange.’ The quantity of income as well as how it is
distributed and accessed is important.
Social opportunities – arrangements society makes for education,

health care, etc.
Transparency guarantees – these relate to the openness that people can
anticipate; the freedom to deal with one another with a justified
expectation of disclosure and clarity. These guarantees play a clear
role in preventing corruption, financial irresponsibility and violation
of society’s rules of conduct for government and business.
Protective security – a social safety net that prevents sections of

the population from being reduced to abject misery. Sen refers to
‘fixed institutional arrangements such as unemployment benefits and
statutory income supplements to the indigent as well as ad hoc
(temporary) arrangements such as famine relief or emergency public
employment to generate income for destitutes’.
(Sen, 1999)
It is important to remind ourselves of these freedoms considering that,

within neoliberalism, freedom has been reduced to freedom to earn and
own, a concept that is far removed from the real freedom to become
capable of shaping our communities collectively and equally. Family
policy should be a guarantor of instrumental freedoms and evaluate
parents’ and children’s social arrangements according to the freedom to
promote or achieve the functionings they value. The shifts from fiscal
to behavioural policies observed during the last decade were less likely
to promote parents’ and children’s capabilities through access to good
education and engagement in democratic debates and public reasoning,
which all contribute to a healthy economy. Sustainability is crucial con-
sidering the short-termism of much of the family policy and planet’s
finite resources and the emphasis on advancing human development in
ways that endure over time. If, however, ‘equality in social arrangements
in family policy is to be demanded in any space – and most theories of
justice advocate equality in some space – it is to be demanded in the
space of capabilities’ (Alkire, 2005, p. 122).
Family policy through a capability lens
The capability approach offers the tools to evaluate inequality and the
social and economic circumstances that surround people’s development
and well-being. From a capability point of view, poverty is a violation of
human rights and lack of freedom in that for people who face poverty
their chances for living a life they value are reduced. This definition of
poverty is based on the Aristotelian notion that an impoverished life is
a life where one is not free to carry out the important activities one has
reason to choose (Sen, 2000). As stated at the United Nations Devel-
opment Programme (2001), ‘human development and human rights
are mutually reinforcing, helping to secure the wellbeing and dignity
of all people, building self-respect and the respect of others’. As it cur-
rently stands, some family policy initiatives target parents and children
who face severe poverty in ways that suggest that poverty is their fault
and not a violation of their human rights. Family policy should be less
about interventionist attempts to engage the ‘hard to reach’ and more
about finding ways to widen parents’ and children’s choices in polit-
ical, economic, social and cultural spheres. And this requires material
and institutional support to promote a human rights framework and,
most crucially, governmental action to address critical human rights
challenges brought about by inequality. Material resources alone are
not adequate because resources have no value in themselves if dis-
connected from their promotion of human functioning (e.g. education
and subsidised health care can promote longevity better than increased
income). For Nussbaum ‘all rights are understood as entitlements to
capabilities and have material and social preconditions, and all require
government action’ (2007; p. 21). Family policy should thus inquire into
individual parents’ and families’ needs, as expressed by them, and their
diverse abilities to access and convert resources into functionings.
The capability approach has brought to the fore the rights of parents
and children. Building capability means opening up parents’ and chil-
dren’s worlds and ‘producing a world in which all children grow up with
a decent set of opportunities for education, health care, bodily integrity,
political participation, choice, and practical reason’ (Nussbaum, 2007,
p. 22). The interventionist orientation of family policy, as articulated in
Allen’s and Field’s reviews, lacks vision and principles. Family policy dis-
courses should engage directly with what is valuable, for whom, under
what circumstances and whether principles are debated and disagree-
ments are resolved. The prescribed views of good parenting are at odds
with the heterogeneous values that increasingly diverse societies have
come to espouse. Such views work against gaining an understanding of

how individual and family betterment can be brought about through
structural changes and the exercise of human rights. From a capabil-
ity perspective, I would argue for the following principles to underpin
family policy.
The pursuit of a truly human life

Family policy should engage with the structures, processes and resources
that are definitive in supporting a life that is truly human. A new
conception of human beings not as a means to an end (e.g. parents
and children as means to an economic activity) but as ends in them-
selves is advocated. Increasingly, humanist perspectives about the value
of human life are compromised by cost-benefit discourses and gov-
ernmental views of progress as mere economic growth. Family policy
should implement rules by which the government and other public
agencies arrange family life in the public sphere, and the means by
which human beings pursue what is good and ethically desirable in
their lives.
There appears to be a misalignment however between Sen’s capability
approach and current family policy’s aims to locate parents and fami-
lies closer to the market to achieve economic growth. The cost-benefit
calculations, as they are presented in the government’s reviews (Allen,
2011; Field, 2011), have very little to do with supporting young people
and their families to acquire the freedom to choose a life they value.
Parents’ nurturing of their children is replaced with parenting as a cost-
benefit exercise. As Smith (2010) argues, a ‘soft totalitarianism’ lurks in
cost-benefit discourses regarding programmes designed to support indi-
vidual parents and children, and in the economic calculations about
how much a child will cost the state and how much the state will
get back by reducing future citizens’ reliance on taxpayers’ money. Fur-
ther, cost-benefit views of child rearing have sidelined decades of civil
rights movements (e.g. children’s rights, disability movements) and sub-
stituted parent–child relationships by a machinery of labels and rules
and procedures whereby children are no longer members of a commu-
nity supported by adults who have a duty of care but entities to be
processed. More worryingly, a ‘what works’ mentality in child rearing
is framed by economic arguments which have appropriated the lan-
guage of ecological development theories, social inclusion and human
rights. A policy view of parenting as an action to be guided towards
specific outcomes resonates with Arendt’s conception of zoe, a simple
biological existence or ‘bare life’ sustained by increasing children’s cap-

ital (academic, socio-emotional). This is a different conception to bios,
human life as meaningful life which thrives on relationships and affec-
tive experiences that revolve around the recognition of vulnerability as
a part of the human condition.
Perspectives on vulnerability as an aspect of the human condition,
common to all, appear to be missing from contemporary political think-
ing (family policy in particular). The gap left is filled with views of
parents and children as vulnerable and fragile or ‘diminished subjects’
(Ecclestone and Hayes, 2009) without accounting for structural inequal-
ity, fractured communities and the lack of opportunity and education
(see Chapter 6 for a discussion on individuated risks and vulnerability).
Such views of vulnerability often present families as being the prob-
lem or an assemblage of instrumental needs (Woodhead, 2006). Parents
are objectified and perceived as incapable of exercising their rights and
engaging with their local communities, justifying micromanagement
and therapeutic interventions at a family level. For children and par-
ents portrayed as vulnerable and a ‘problem’, their rights as citizens
can easily become a void discourse of entitlement. This view of vul-
nerability works against living a truly human life and brings invisibility
and marginalisation to parents and children. Most crucially, portray-
ing parents as ‘problems’ does not encourage debates about the societal
mechanisms that support or hinder them to develop the intellectual,
social and financial resources necessary to parent well. Further, to focus
solely on individual (e.g. impairment) rather than external (e.g. social
inequality) challenges has political implications. It offers individuated
rather than political and social solutions to problems such as socio-
economic disadvantage, poor-quality education, unemployment and
limited opportunities which, ultimately, constitute the exercise of rights
decontextualised and potentially ineffective in supporting parents and
children to develop resilience and agency.
And yet, the notion of vulnerability as an individual deficit (with the
needs of individuals or groups being defined by those in power) perme-
ates the nature and scope of early intervention. Placed on a continuum
of individual action and systemic constraints and institutional arrange-
ments, notions of vulnerability may account for the transactional nature
of child development (e.g. individual action surrounded by living condi-
tions) and acknowledge that inequalities are not natural but produced
and reproduced by society and its institutions (Fineman, 2008). Through
a capability lens, vulnerability is about being human rather than the
outcome of inappropriate individual choices or a psychological mishap
(although the capability approach accepts that individuals vary in their

ability to convert resources into functionings). This approach to vul-
nerability is a counterpoint to current social welfare models that do
not always acknowledge that parents’ ability to parent well is influ-
enced by their structural constraints and affordances. Most crucially,
vulnerability and capability are not fixed entities in that similar liv-
ing circumstances and resources are not sufficient conditions to ensure
equality in outcomes.
Equality and diversity: Positional and cultural differences

A second principle to guide family policy should be about the recogni-
tion of human heterogeneity and diversity, drawing attention to group
disparities (such as those based on gender, race, class, caste or age) that
amount to cultural differences. The recognition of difference is central
to the capability approach and to equality and equity debates, for in
order to guarantee equality of real freedoms to achieve functionings, dif-
ferent individuals will require different kinds and amounts of resources
(which is why equality of resources is in and of itself an insufficient
condition for the achievement of functionings). According to the capa-
bility approach, functionings are linked with access to resources and
opportunities and, most crucially, with how individuals use these oppor-
tunities within their systemic constraints, stressing the importance of
the means people have at their disposal to achieve valued functionings.
For this reason, personal, social and environmental conversion factors
are needed to account for the fact that people have different capacities to
gain access to the same resources and different potentials for converting
them into functionings. Specifically, redistribution should account for
two sets of factors that affect people’s opportunities: ‘internal resources’
(such as strength and skill) and ‘external resources’, including wealth
and income, and also family support and social networks and the social
and material structures within which these resources manifest them-
selves. Nussbaum (2007) proposed a distribution of not only material
resources but also capabilities for people by promoting a ‘threshold of
real opportunities, especially for those who are least advantaged, below
which no human being should fall’. However, external and internal
resources and opportunities do not operate in isolation but reinforce
each other: people’s preferences and choices are adaptive behaviours to
the structural circumstances that surround their lives. For example, edu-
cational advantage is transmitted in subtle ways that go beyond reading
books at home, and these subtle transmissions are influenced by the
resources, opportunities and capabilities parents possess.
Unlike Rawls’ theory of justice (1999), which claims that inequalities

emanate from lack of opportunity (or unjust distribution of ‘primary
goods’), the capability approach considers both opportunities and indi-
viduals’ capacity to convert opportunities into valued functionings.
Thus, we should differentiate among equality of opportunity, equality of
outcome and equality of status because individuals may not have equal
opportunities even though they may have equal access to resources and,
even if they do, they may not achieve equal outcomes. This distinction
is crucial for understanding diversity in parents’ ability to use the means
available to them and convert them into substantial opportunities for
them and their children considering that families can have very differ-
ent opportunities even when they have the same means (e.g. income,
access to education). Equal access to resources alone (although crucial)
cannot tackle inequality because it depends on what parents do with the
means at their disposal and their capacity to convert them into valued
functionings for their children’s benefit.
The principle of equity, which draws on fairness and equality, should
go hand in hand with the principle of difference in promoting distribu-
tive justice for different groups. With equity the focus is on individuals
and groups who have unequal opportunities such as individuals with
disability, parents with ill health or other difficulties that pose obstacles
to developing capabilities. Equity however throws up what Isis Marion
Young (1996) described as the redistribution/recognition dilemma in
that for redistribution of resources and opportunities to take place the
individuals who need support will have to be identified, and this may
result in misrecognition and stigma. Young drew a distinction between
the politics of positional difference and the politics of cultural differ-
ence. The politics of positional difference accept that individuals differ
by being unequally positioned within contexts characterised by struc-
tural inequality, whereas the politics of cultural difference focus on
a disproportionate representation within state and policy arenas (e.g.
some groups are dominant and others marginalised). Too much empha-
sis on cultural differences may conceal structural inequality and, for
parents in poverty, positional differences are more relevant to their
lives than are cultural differences. Although parenting is influenced by
culture, parents operate within structures not always of their own mak-
ing, stressing the importance for a distinction between differences that
arise as a result of individual preferences, choices and capabilities and
differences that are the outcome of forces beyond people’s control.
For family policy to abide by the principle of difference and diversity,
it should consider what parents and other family members, including
children, are able to do and be. Giddens argues that ‘the protection and
care of children is the single most important thread that should guide
family policy’ (1998; p. 94). For Sen, however, the unit of moral con-
cern is not the individual but the group (e.g. family) in order not to
overlook the dynamics that define a group and any form of inequality
that might be present, and to balance responsibilities and obligations
between political institutions and families. Such orientation can be use-
ful for family policy whose focus tends to be either on parents (what
they do to/with their children) or on children (e.g. child poverty) and
not on parent–child interactions within their wider socio-economic con-
texts. We cannot divorce children’s well-being from parents’ well-being,
especially considering the symbiotic nature of their relationships. The
fragmentation of how we perceive family members and their relation-
ships with each other makes concerns about child well-being sound
void, abstracted and artificial and has implications regarding poverty,
care and capability building.
Gender equality
Gender equality is the third principle to underpin family policy. Fam-
ily policy discourses appear to be progressive in using a gender-neutral
language (e.g. parenting) to discuss parental responsibility and obliga-
tion and avoid gender stereotyping. The use of a gender-free language
however is problematic because it does not acknowledge the fact that
family policy mostly targets mothers and its implications are felt dif-
ferently by fathers and mothers. The negotiation and reconciliation of
forces that affect families and parents’ role in it are, by and large, seen
as women’s issues. Although the balance of the contributions men and
women make to households in the form of paid and unpaid work is
changing, an increasing number of women have added paid work to
their existing care responsibilities at home, whereas men have increased
their care work only relatively slightly (Gershuny, 2000). In the United
Kingdom, as in other developed countries, women do twice as much
domestic work as their male counterparts, and yet the discussion on
parental responsibility and parental involvement in children’s learn-
ing and care at home is not gender explicit. As such, it is meaningless
to explore possibilities for capability building in women, mothers in
particular, without bringing gender equality to the fore.
The gender-neutral language used in family policy conceals gender
inequality and paints a misleading picture that mothers can ‘have it all’
in the same ways that fathers can. However, the reality is very different.
According to the Fawcett Society (2011):
women in the UK typically earn less, own less and are more likely to
live in poverty than men. They are underrepresented in Parliament,
in public life and in boardrooms across the country. It is women who
make up the majority of low paid workers, women who do the bulk
of unpaid work and women who are most likely to live under the
breadline in their old age.
And this predicament cannot be reconciled with the fact that women in
Western countries are better educated than ever before: they are attend-
ing university in ever increasing numbers and, in many cases, achieve
better degree results than men (Thompson et al., 2009).
In understanding gender inequality and its implications with regard
to capability building in women, we should recognise the existence
of a multifaceted jeopardy that women, mothers in particular, face in
the form of a ‘motherhood penalty’ as well as wage and career gaps;
unemployment/low paid work and poverty; cuts in benefits and public
services with the ‘rolling back’ of the welfare state; increasing pressure
from unpaid care work; individuated, gender-free and child-centred con-
ceptions of parenting; and pressure from clashing ideals, identities and
notions of motherhood.
Motherhood brings economic vulnerability in women because it
reduces their earnings, adding to already existing gender gaps in pay
(Budig and England, 2001; Waldfogel, 1998; Waldfogel and Washbrook,
2008). Economists have coined the phrase ‘motherhood penalty’ to
describe the income gap between mothers and women without chil-
dren. Although the wage gap and the glass ceiling regarding men’s and
women’s employment have been recognised, the motherhood gap has
been documented only recently (Williams, 2006). The motherhood gap
is about the wage penalties that mothers face for child rearing because
they often reduce their hours of paid work or leave employment due
to caregiving responsibilities. As such, men and women have different
career trajectories in that women are more likely to have career interrup-
tions and part-time employment. Relatively few women adhere to the
same patterns of work as men in terms of working from early adulthood
to retirement without interruption, and many mothers work less than
full time, especially in what Williams (2006) calls ‘high human capi-
tal professions’. Although in their 20s and perhaps early 30s women are
level with men, their career trajectory changes dramatically after becom-
ing mothers: some leave the workforce and others stay in positions
below senior management, leaving the higher ranks to be dominated by
men. Mothers are more likely to be in low-paid jobs and this translates
into mothers’ lifetime earnings being only 38 per cent of men’s (Rose
and Hartman, 2004).
The severe economic hardship for people in the United Kingdom
and other Western countries is having a disproportionate impact on
women. The Sex and Power 2011 report (an index of women in posi-
tions of power and influence), published by the UK Equality and Human
Rights Commission, confirms that ‘the gender balance at the top has
not changed much in three years, despite there being more women
graduating from university and occupying middle management roles.
We had hoped to see an increase in the number of women in posi-
tions of power, however this isn’t happening’. This trend is not abating
and the slow progress towards gender equality is being systematically
destroyed. We seem to move backwards with regard to women’s rights;
however, this is not reflected in family policy. Women are pushed out of
the workplace via unemployment or employment structures that make
it very difficult for them to work and pay for childcare, and this com-
promises their financial independence and reinvigorates stereotypes of
the vulnerable and dependant woman. During the writing of this book,
in the United Kingdom, the number of women unemployed reached
1.09 million as a part of the coalition government’s drive to reduce
deficit. Specifically, the Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that
710,000 public sector jobs will disappear by 2015 (Office for Budget
Responsibility, Autumn 2011). Women make up 65 per cent of the pub-
lic sector workforce (Economic and Social Data Service, Quarterly Labour
Force Survey Household Dataset, April–June, 2010). Unless we address
the gaps related to motherhood and gender, family policy should not
use a gender-free language to describe mothers’ and fathers’ roles in
child rearing because it marginalises and silences women. The gen-
dered nature of inequality and social exclusion does not sit well with
gender-neutral conversations of parenting.
Although women have always faced employment barriers, with the
economic recession, they bear the burden of poverty in ensuring the sur-
vival of their families (Amancio and Olivera, 2006), combining unpaid
domestic work with integration into a labour market that is increas-
ingly precarious and unregulated. The predominantly female workforce
in public-sector services is affected by the privatisation of public services,
removal of subsidies to basic food and disability support and the dis-
integration of employment rights. Public service cuts and the growing
privatisation of health and education further challenge women’s efforts
to balance paid and unpaid work and provide for their children. Many of
the cuts are to the benefits that more women than men rely on and also
the changes to the tax system will benefit far more men than women.
In the absence of social welfare, the care responsibilities of mothers have
increased to fill the gaps. Women face as many challenges as contradic-
tions: they are encouraged to think that employment opportunities are
there for them and that they can ‘do it all’. Poverty however has become
feminised, especially as women are more likely to lose their job or be
forced into flexible and informal working conditions.
With the current economic downturn and the ‘rolling back’ of the
welfare state, more demands for domestic care are placed on women.
The moral responsibility to care tends to be stronger for women,
accounting for the anxiety that most mothers experience. In a study
by Doucet (2011), women expressed worries about their influence
on children and whether they were being ‘proper mothers’, concerns
largely absent from fathers’ accounts. Although fathers are increas-
ingly involved in childcare (Sullivan, 2006), women are often viewed
as best placed to take care of children, and men and women frequently
approach parenting differently in that traditional constructions of mas-
culinity may discourage the development of empathy whereas women
are more likely to be taught to focus on others and to tune into their
children’s needs and feelings (Knudson-Martin and Huenergardt, 2010).
The conflict between paid and unpaid care work is often viewed as
mothers’ personal problem and not as a collective concern and civic
obligation to support the next generation as an act of solidarity and
citizenship.
Parents are encouraged by the CentreForum report to take up the
5-a-day tips for successful child rearing although we know that women
engage in more than their share in household chores and childcare
and any other form of care. Considering the multiple demands from
unpaid care work, the traditional wage gap between men and women
has a limited use in understanding gender inequality because it does
not account for the different types of work (including unpaid care),
the motherhood gap and the different trajectories in women’s careers.
If we are to assume gender equality in family policy, we must address
childcare, unpaid and paid work, work/life conflict and also acknowl-
edge that these concerns are not (and should not be) mothers’ alone.
Family policy assumes that both fathers and mothers share the role of
a homemaker equally; however the reality is that there is a mismatch
between homemaking and workplace responsibilities and mothers have
a larger slice of this mismatch to deal with. However, fathers can and do
learn to give care and nurture (Coltrane, 1996) and identify their roles as
a provider and parent as equally important. Those who share childcare
tasks talk about bonding with their children in ways that are similar to
mothers’ (Cowdery and Knudson-Martin, 2005).
Clashing ideals of motherhood and integration into the labour mar-
ket further jeopardise women’s capability building. Mothers in full-time
employment are caught in the middle of two ‘fundamentally inconsis-
tent ideals’: the ideal worker who spends long hours in paid employ-
ment and the intensive parent who puts time and labour into child
rearing (Williams, 2006, p. 5). Mothers, more than fathers, have to
negotiate conflicting demands in the multiple roles they assume: the
ideal worker in a competitive workplace, the ideal caregiver engaged in
unpaid work within the family and the intense parent who is to struc-
ture children’s lives to achieve educational outcomes. Unpaid care work
and intensive parenting clash with the notion of the ideal worker in
market-driven economies who spends long hours at the workplace and
is flexible and responsive to the needs of the market and who (prefer-
ably) does not have any family responsibilities. Parents are said to have
choices; for mothers however the choices are limited. They risk either
economic marginalisation if they undertake unpaid care or blame if they
are seen as failing in their duties as mothers and caregivers.
Despite significant changes in parenting trends and patterns over
the last decades, the identity of mothers and fathers follows different
trajectories. The provider/breadwinner identity for men and the carer
identity for women show intergenerational continuity (Brannen and
Nilsen, 2006). Men’s contribution to domestic life in terms of caring
responsibilities and other unpaid work is still seen as optional although
their contribution to the market and their role as breadwinners are
a manifestation of family commitment (Townsend, 2002). A gender-
neutral model of parenting however cannot account for the differences
in roles, trajectories and identities between mothers and fathers. Cul-
turally embedded notions of the ‘perfect motherhood’ are more likely
to translate into intensive mothering. As discussed in Chapter 3, inten-
sive parenting has negative consequences for children’s well-being and
gender equality. Intensive parenting is felt differently by mothers and
fathers. Contemporary fatherhood is intimate rather than intensive,
given fathers’ prioritisation of forming an emotional relationship with
the child over the quantity of time spent with them (Dermott, 2008),
whereas for mothers the pressure to achieve outcomes (good academic
performance, moral development) is more keenly felt. Through inten-
sive care, mothers believe that they can guard against risk, especially as
they are told that all children are likely to be at risk at some point in their
lives. Feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the task of parenting,
mothers (more so than fathers) have less confidence in themselves and

tend to rely on experts for guidance to ensure that their parenting is the
right one (Shirani et al., 2012). Some mothers construct moral identities
(e.g. ‘perfect mother’) by making child rearing to be a major project in
their life, putting its importance above career, thus the pressure to do
not only a good but a perfect job is enormous. The quest for ‘perfect
motherhood’ fuels mothers’ anxiety which, for Barbara Ehrenreich, is a
manifestation of class anxiety: a fear of falling out of middle class, and
thus to ensure that children are raised in a manner that reproduces a
middle-class position.
The consolidation of the neoliberal project in recent years has wors-
ened women’s lives through the de-politisation of the challenges that
women face (poverty, unequal pay) but also because inequality is
masked as an individual rather than a structural problem. With the
rise of neoliberalism and identity politics, third-wave feminism, or post-
feminism, has become less of a critique of capitalism and more shaped
by neoliberalism’s increasingly individuated culture in which cultural
rather than structural explanations of difference have proliferated.
Third-wave feminism has been influenced by Giddens’ individuation
thesis within which women are constructed as the self-regulatory and
self-governing individuals whose lives is not affected by social class or
race constraints. As such, gender and other markers of difference are
less significant in determining women’s lives and are likely to mask the
constraints, reduced opportunities and inequalities they face.
The fact that third-wave feminism has become a lifestyle choice rather
than a political institution has a negative impact on gender-equality
policies. The individuation and gender-free language of parenting do
not advance gender equality and the politics of unpaid work and domes-
tic arrangements. At the same time, it has become increasingly difficult
for mothers to pursue equal rights within the labour market. The chal-
lenges that women face have been marginalised and positioned out of
the political sphere through discourses of child poverty (not women’s
or family’s poverty) and the use of a neutral language that assumes that
fathers and mothers are equal in their engagement with the family and
the labour market. Mothers’ economic marginalisation results in the
impoverishment of children. Child poverty does not exist in a vacuum
but is one of the outcomes of the feminisation of poverty. The gender-
equality agenda has been subordinated to child-centric discourses and
parenting has become an explanation for child poverty, with the sin-
gle parent (who incidentally is a single mother) being a ‘scapegoat’
to explain many of society’s ills. Thus, instead of talking about child
poverty, we need to talk about mothers’ economic status and shift the
discourses from child poverty to family poverty.
The promotion of human agency

A fourth principle of family policy should be about the promotion of
human agency achieved through practical reason, deliberative democ-
racy and public action in forging goals, making choices and influencing
policy and acknowledging that different people, cultures and societies
may have different values and aspirations. Through a capability lens,
parenting is not abstracted but affected by the conditions (e.g. oppor-
tunities for social advancement) that are necessary to make parenting
possible, and the freedom that family members have to decide what
constitutes good parenting within their tradition and culture. Human
values are collective and formed through public participation and what
Rawls (1971) calls ‘public reasoning’ in reaching a consensus on the
capabilities that are important for families to exercise human agency
and flourish. As Sen argues:
The problem is not with listing important capabilities, but with insist-
ing on one predetermined canonical list of capabilities, chosen by
theorists without any general social discussion or public reasoning.
To have such a fixed list, emanating entirely from pure theory, is to
deny the possibility of fruitful public participation on what should
be included and why public discussion and reasoning can lead to a
better understanding of the role, reach and significance of particular
capabilities.
(2004, pp. 77, 81)
Families, and not local elites (political or religious) or family experts,

should be directly involved in deciding what constitutes capability (Sen,
1999, pp. 31–32). A democratic approach in defining capabilities raises
questions about parents’ human agency and the role of family experts.
Promoting human agency, or the capacity to define priorities and make
decisions and advance key objectives, is about expanding people’s world
by promoting an enabling physical and social environment within
which individuals act with intent to achieve valued functionings. This
is particularly important as for people who live in poverty their oppor-
tunities are limited and their physical and social world is shrinking.
Nussbaum classified capabilities into three types: Basic capabilities which
are innate capacities, a necessary basis for developing more advanced
capabilities. She pointed out that most infants have the basic capabil-
ities for practical reason and imagination, though without a good deal
more development and education they cannot use it. Internal capabilities
build on pre-existing basic capabilities by processes such as exercise, edu-
cation and training. Most adults have the internal capabilities of use of
speech, capabilities that would not exist without the informal education
that occurs along with socialisation. Many internal capabilities require
a more structured educational environment. Combined capabilities are
defined as internal capabilities plus the external conditions that make
the exercise of a function an option. Public family policy should pro-
mote combined capabilities; this requires two kinds of effort: the promo-
tion of internal capabilities (by education or training) and access to the
external institutional and material conditions (Nussbaum, 1999, p. 44).
Human agency and well-being rely upon the promotion of combined
capabilities. Recently, however, public discourses reflect an individuated
culture of well-being and happiness. Campaigns in the United Kingdom
by the economist and labour peer Lord Richard Layard have brought
happiness to the forefront of policy debates. Such policy trends con-
flate human well-being with an abstracted (albeit seductive) discourse
on happiness which departs from Sen’s and Nussbaum’s idea of human
well-being because it does not account for the influences of people’s liv-
ing conditions and their capabilities in making sense of these influences.
Social policy trends on happiness differ from the capability approach to
human well-being in that the latter stresses people’s capacity to have
a life they value accompanied with the freedoms to achieve such life.
Within social policy however happiness is discussed as a fixed state,
which does not account for the conditions that surround people’s lives
(e.g. inequality gap, the diminishing of the state as a guarantor of public
services and human rights), conditions that are detrimental to happi-
ness. As such, happiness becomes a void discourse and an insult because,
for families who experience poverty and lack of opportunity, the most
appropriate response is not happiness but discontent upon realising that
the promise of a good life has become remote and that alternative pos-
sibilities are simply not there while they are increasingly asked to be
content with less. Happiness and well-being are not distributed equally
because they are tied to the living conditions and the positive freedoms
people have.
In 2006, David Cameron claimed ‘it’s time we admitted that there’s
more to life than money and it’s time we focused not just on GDP but
on GWB – general well-being’. Although it is widely recognised that
we should not think about quality of life in terms of possessions, we
should be sceptical of such pronouncements especially as the inequality

gap increases and a disproportionate amount of wealth and resources
accumulates at the top one per cent of the population. Sen argues that
GDP or access to resources is not an adequate measure to describe indi-
viduals’ functionings but admits that for marginalised groups financial
resources are needed. And as discussed in Chapter 2, although income
alone is not sufficient to guarantee positive social and academic out-
comes for children, its modest impact on children’s well-being should
be accounted for. The coalition government’s preoccupation with hap-
piness is symptomatic of a wider culture that problematises emotion
and intimate life, and promotes an abstracted and individuated under-
standing of the social world. The happiness terminology (i.e. moral
vocabularies) in policy circles is appealing for its propensity to promote
consensus and minimise resistance because who would argue against the
goal of happiness, especially when it is presented in such an abstracted
manner? In a climate of economic downturn and unregulated markets,
such preoccupation with happiness works against social transformation
because happiness discourses are static and counterproductive in that
people may be less inclined to change a perceived state of happiness
(however illusion-ridden it might be).
The ethics of care

Family policy should be guided by the principles of equality and respect
for difference, promotion of human agency, gender equality and the
pursuit of a truly human life. These principles cannot be substantiated
without the valuing of care, and the ways in which it is shared by men
and women and by the household. The ethics of care are central to capa-
bility building and the common good. Through capability lenses, the
ethics of care are about collective agency in families and communities
to promote human capacities and flourishing. A collective agency can
be achieved through the exercise of care (provision and receipt of care),
at a family and a civic level, to support parents to make the most of
the opportunities afforded to them and achieve valued functionings for
themselves and their children. Care is both a ‘concrete activity, in the
sense of caring about and for daily needs, and as a moral orientation –
as an ethics or a set of values that can guide human agency in a vari-
ety of social fields’ (Sevenhuijsen, 2000, p. 7). Currently, discussions on
how to reconcile an adult worker model with unpaid care work are miss-
ing from family policy. Feminist issues regarding domestic arrangements
and unpaid care work have not come to the fore and have not been
examined adequately.
Sen’s positive freedoms to choose a life people value provides a sub-

stantial basis for the recognition and valuing of care work and the means
for questioning instrumentalism in family policy. Care work and gender
equality are the cornerstones of capability building for both parents and
children, especially considering the unequal living conditions and dif-
ferent capability sets that families have, bringing gender inequality, one
of ‘disparate freedoms’ (Sen, 1992, p. 125), to the fore. For Habermas
(1990), care is local and particular and is influenced by conceptions of
a good life as embedded in a given culture. Care is relational and care
relationships involve interdependency, thus ‘unequal power relations
between men and women are likely to distort interdependence, consid-
ering that the choices men make may constrain those of women’ (Lewis
and Giullari, 2005, p. 89).
Considering that care work is central to human flourishing (par-
ticularly, but not exclusively, in respect of young, old and disabled
people), family policy should make it possible for parents or other
family members to choose to care (Lewis and Giullari, 2005). Family
policy initiatives, such as Welfare to Work policies, aimed at increasing
parental responsibility by moving parents closer to the market to pave
the way to social inclusion. Giddens stressed the importance of parents’
involvement in the labour force as a means of attacking ‘involuntary
exclusion’ (1998, p. 110). However, if social inclusion is conceptualised
along employment lines and an active market participation, giving and
receiving care, unless commodified, are less valued and less likely to
warrant social inclusion. In policy initiatives, women’s employment in
particular is discussed as an engine for economic growth and, in this
hierarchy, unpaid care work is less valued. Although Giddens recog-
nises that there are wider goals in life than work, in his Third Way,
paid work is intrinsically linked with individual parental responsibility.
With pronouncements such as ‘no rights without obligations’, individ-
ual responsibility and obligation have gradually replaced the language of
political rights and social justice with little contestation. Also, the pro-
nouncement ‘no rights without responsibilities’ implies a form of social
contract which assumes that men and women are equal in accessing
resources and transforming them into a valued life. Parental respon-
sibility is closely tied to paid work (a route to social inclusion) and
this has implications with care work in the family. Giddens’ notion of
responsibility and obligation has a one-sided connotation of ‘ascribed’
responsibility, the attribution of desirable attributes and attitudes to
individuals, rather than an ‘achieved’ responsibility which deals with
how individuals make decisions about responsibility in the context of
their lives as they see it fit (Sevenhuijsen, 2000, p. 28). And unless care
work and gender equality are taken into account, parental responsibility
cannot be theorised adequately.
Family policy, as it currently stands, has posed an interesting conun-
drum with women feeling squeezed between labour and unpaid caring
responsibilities at home while they encounter multiple forms of inequal-
ity (e.g. SES and domestic inequality). The cost-benefit mindset devalues
motherhood and domestic life, making care secondary. Current policy
conceives care not as a human activity but a hurdle to be negotiated to
ensure that it will not affect women’s participation in paid work. In so
doing, care is commodified by paying others (mostly women from devel-
oping countries) to do it. In many Western countries, the care deficit
is growing. The solution to this is to ‘outsource’ care for children and
the elderly by accessing care work that is normally taken up by low-
paid women who leave their own children and families behind to fill
the care gap. Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2003) have coined the phrase
‘emotional imperialism’ to describe the process whereby the market-
orientated developed world does not accommodate care work; instead
it imports it from the developing world which itself experiences a ‘care
drain’.
The family as a civic political institution (not a policy structure that
is open to state scrutiny and intervention) is necessary for mothers to
become political subjects rather than helpers to fill the care gaps left
from reduced public services, with children’s education and care being
outsourced to them. It is important to note that family is inherently a
politicised institution and thus, as it comes under public scrutiny, we
need to distinguish what is personal from what needs to and can only
be accomplished in a public arena. From a feminist perspective, care
is a political issue and should be understood in a concrete, gendered
manner to unpick normative representations of women’s participation
in paid and unpaid work and what this means for women’s rights and
social citizenship and for gender equality.
The assumption of equality in care arrangements renders mothers’ dis-
proportionate unpaid work in the family invisible. Within an economic
model, gender equality is acknowledged in a particular, partial and
instrumental way: in respect of the importance of labour-market par-
ticipation, but not care work (Lewis, 2005). Sen (1992) recognises that
inequalities in resources are a crucial dimension of gender inequalities
but concludes that gender inequality in advanced societies can be under-
stood much better by focusing on women’s opportunities for capability
building and achieving functionings rather than on resources alone.
In considering family policy’s interventionist orientation, women’s

experiences of poverty and motherhood are taken out of their gender
and social class to offer individuated explanations to the dilemmas that
mothers face with regard to care work. The pursuit of gender equality
can be achieved through policies that address unpaid care work in the
family as well as the position of women in the labour market. The bal-
ancing of paid and unpaid work needs to happen at a household and
market level.
Gender-free policies tend to submerge issues that concern women
into non-gender ‘equality’ policies in the United Kingdom and other
European countries. A gender-free and de-politicised view of family is
less likely to support mothers to negotiate domestic arrangements and
reconcile work-related pressures and parenting because, increasingly,
these issues are seen as being part of individual lifestyles that require
atomised and not collective actions. In equality-blanket policies, the
pluralistic and complex conceptions of gender as an identity and domes-
tic arrangements, mediated through race, class, age, sexuality and so on
and shaped by historical, social, political and economic contexts, are
likely to be overlooked. Although insufficient attention can lead to false
generalisations, too much renders the task of bridging diverse struggles
much more difficult, especially if difference is conceptualised in fixed,
essentialist terms (Motta et al., 2011). Mothers and fathers do not face
similar challenges and are not equally involved with arrangements in
the domestic and labour spheres. Policies should account for difference,
especially as poverty and public services cuts have launched a sustained
attack on women. The impact of the socio-economic and cultural con-
text on mothers should be accounted for but also the challenges faced
by mothers in an unequal society should not become too context spe-
cific and thus culturally relativist. However, with globalisation and the
crumbling of the welfare state in many Western countries, the issues
that mothers experience in the United Kingdom are not unique but
reflect wider patterns of power and inequality that shape women’s and
children’s rights.
In the gender-neutral language of parenting and care responsibilities,
there is no distinction between gender difference and gender equality.
This gives rise to two possibilities regarding the gender orientation of
care work. One possibility would be to accept and accommodate gen-
dered differences in paid and unpaid work by recognising and accepting
as a fact that the burden of the responsibility for caring and household
work falls on women mostly, and would have to accommodate women’s
double role (as workers and carers) in the labour market. Such policy
reforms may offer women flexible, quality part-time employment, long

periods of maternity leave and contributions to pension schemes for
time taken out to fulfil caring responsibilities. While this approach is
less likely to meet the goal of securing economic independence for all
adults and would have the disadvantage of reproducing some of the
dependency promoted by the male breadwinner model, it would bet-
ter respond to the social reality of families than the gender neutral
model. But we need to be explicit about the possibility for essentialist
views about care as women’s work to emerge from the gender-difference
model. The second way of gendering parental responsibility is to remove
the obstacles to women’s participation in formal employment on equal
terms to men within a gender-equality model. However, there are chal-
lenges to overcome. The first challenge is inequality in the labour market
that necessitates the enactment of policies to close the gender pay gap,
promote women’s employment in more highly paid occupational sec-
tors and encourage women into senior roles. The second challenge is to
address the unequal distribution of unpaid work in households, both in
terms of caring and housework. If men and women are equally respon-
sible for informal caring work, then women might experience fewer
disadvantages in the sphere of formal employment. A third challenge
is to support mothers who are affected by the effects of poverty through
capability building (one way of achieving this is by offering educational
opportunities).
These challenges however are not accounted for in policies about par-
enting. Awareness campaigns to encourage the active participation of
fathers through the take-up of paternity leaves are steps in the right
direction but are not enough. However, limited opportunities for build-
ing capability in parents while accounting for their living conditions
and care responsibilities are particularly worrying in light of the current
global economic downturn, considering that the UK and other Western
countries had 16 years of economic growth in the period 1992–2008
and yet policy has taken small steps towards gender-equality reforms.
Family policy, developed and enacted within a capability framework,
has the potential to move from an assemblage of technocratic solutions
to opening up parents’ and children’s worlds and bringing to the fore
issues related to gender equality and a gendered paradigm for care to
promote human agency and a truly human life.
9
A New Paradigm for Family Policy:
Civic Education, Equality and
Public Reasoning
Family, as a civic institution, has been progressively undermined.

To renew family as a civic institution and a space where progressive val-
ues such as mutualism, interdependence and reciprocity thrive, requires
a new paradigm, and not a mere rearrangement of policy goals or
nudge policies. Family policy needs a new epistemology to make the
paradigmatic transition from old and reheated arguments about fami-
lies failing in their duties to possibility thinking about alternative futures
for children and their parents. Paradigmatic transitions need what Sen
refers to as ‘positive freedoms’ and capacity for critical reflection and
public reasoning, the pillars of a civic society.∗ The remaking of a civic
society can start with the family as a key unit and with policy that
accounts for the neoliberal pressures and the gradual erosion of families’
public space. A capability approach to individual well-being should be
brought to the heart of family policy and public debates about parenting
and children.
Families’ capability building
In this chapter, I argue for a four-tier approach towards families’ capabil-

ity building: civic education to promote and sustain criticality, empathy
and conceptions of the common good; a feminist orientation to family
policy to delineate mothers’ and fathers’ roles in supporting their chil-
dren; a fairer resource distribution model to tackle structural inequality
and reintroduce debates about social class and equalisation of oppor-
tunity and outcome; and an expansion of families’ public space to
promote Rawl’s ‘public reasoning’ and the practices of deliberative
democracy. These goals are interrelated and should work hand in hand
because, in unequal societies, capability building is likely to be fraught
188
A New Paradigm for Family Policy 189
with obstacles considering that equalisation of opportunities does not

necessarily bring equal outcomes to people. Also, a fairer resource distri-
bution alone may not be sufficient given that we live on a finite planet.
Finally, as an antidote to corporate education and a culture of learning
as an end in itself, civic education for parents and children is central to
developing shared notions of the common good and the kind of society
we want to live in.
Civic education
Education plays a significant role in promoting parents’ and children’s
human agency and a truly human life. To develop human agency, par-
ents require genuine opportunities for education that go beyond skills
(parenting or otherwise) as well as capability building to make the most
of the opportunities available to them. To this end, education, as Neal
Lawson and Ken Spours argue, should be about ‘developing the collec-
tive capacity of people to be able to govern themselves’ and engage in
social change. Civic education is about developing a sense of who we are
as individuals and communities but also about empathy and the com-
mon good. But education can only achieve these goals and promote
democracy when, in itself, it is democratically governed. Within school
effectiveness, for example, accountability is individuated and teachers
are de-professionalised, operating within managerial structures that are
not always democratic. Current market forces have shaped education
by not only altering the processes and mechanisms of teaching and
learning but also setting new norms to frame the purpose of educa-
tion, replacing pedagogy with instrumental and short-term processes
of accumulating human and social capital. Schools and other learning
institutions use the language of ‘value added’, ‘value for money’, cost-
efficiency, target setting, business terms which ‘fail to recognise the rich
unpredictability of learning’ (Nixon, 2004, p. 1). In thinking about civic
education, it is difficult not to be influenced by these terms and the ori-
entation in pedagogy they espouse. A managerialist language has caused
deep ideological shifts in education, questioning its intrinsic value and
reducing education to skill acquisition. However, civic education can
promote skills and much more: it can support parents and children to
become aware of accomplishments and be receptive of knowledge in the
context of their life.
Civic education offers an expansive vision of education at the heart
of a civic society and underpins the politics of the common good.
This is education that operates at both means and ends: instrumental
in terms of supporting parents and children to develop the capabil-

ities required to function as engaged citizens and intrinsic in terms
of education as a value within and for itself. As discussed in Part I,
parental education plays an important role in influencing children’s
life chances. Although these findings may suggest an instrumental ori-
entation, that is, maternal education as a means for achieving school
outcomes, they highlight the power education holds over individuals’
life chances. The average family with parents lacking in educational
qualifications finds it increasingly difficult to cope. Wilcox (2010) wrote
that ‘Middle Americans’ – people with a high school diploma but not
a college degree – find it difficult to function in society. According to
Wilcox, the family life of today’s parents with secondary school edu-
cation increasingly resembles the life (in terms of financial insecurity,
lack of employment) of uneducated people, whereas in the 1970s it
closely resembled those of college graduates. In explaining why poli-
cies have failed to tackle poverty in the United Kingdom, Rowson and
colleagues (2010) argued that individuals in poverty lack the education
to take advantage of the opportunities that globalisation presents. There
is strong theoretical and empirical evidence for the crucial role that edu-
cation plays in offering parents decent-wage jobs and having a strong
positive impact on children’s outcomes (see Part I). For people with uni-
versity degrees, especially postgraduate degrees, access to employment
has been good thus far (Peck, 2011). In light of this, however, one may
ask why the focus of family policy has not been on providing genuine
educational opportunities to disadvantaged parents instead of parenting
skills.
Clearly, what educated parents do with their children has a signifi-
cant impact in terms of accessing educational resources and services and
also expanding their vision of society beyond their current situation.
However, learning and a greater awareness should not solely be instru-
mentalist, viewed as a means of solving problems about climate, poverty
or inequality, but also expand knowledge and capacity for empathy and
critical thinking. In times of crisis, there is a danger to pursue knowledge
as a means to specific ends but civic education should reverse this trend.
Civic education is not about accumulating mere skills for preparing a
future workforce to fit into market structures because we do not know
what a future workforce would look like and also the market structures
are not fixed but malleable. For example, as technology is improving
and the number of people gaining education is on the rise, at least in
emerging economies, the nature of employment is changing rapidly.
In many Western countries the economic pressures have been moving
up the educational ladder in that people need to obtain higher educa-

tional qualifications to compete in the marketplace, and even then the
existence of decent-wage jobs is precarious.
Civic education can lead to an economic betterment but, most cru-
cially, it is about being open to other possibilities and the making of a
good society. It is about promoting awareness and knowledge to enable
young people and their families to live together and create possible
futures, to build a different type of society from the one we have now.
Raising and educating children is not a cost-benefit exercise but an act
of hope and faith in the existence of other possibilities beyond earn-
ing. Neoliberal ideas and the exploitation they espouse have become
entrenched in society and its institutions and it can be challenging
to reclaim excellence, passion and dynamism when these terms are
used as a thin veneer to cover cultures of exploitation. To change the
public from being spectators to agents in their own remaking, civic
education has an important role to play in striving for the common
good in pluralistic societies. Political top-down approaches to behaviour
modification do not amount to a good society. This is particularly rel-
evant considering the rise of dangerous ideologies and fundamentalist
thinking.
Civic education is a force for the common good which is about edu-
cating young people for a ‘world that is or becoming out of joint’
(Arendt, 1958). To this end, education should embrace uncertainty and
challenge consensus: the world is not predictable and thus education
cannot be geared towards the possibility of an ordered world. Education
for social justice and the good society should embrace the possibility
of difference where dissent and competing discourses are essential to
helping young people to develop criticality and a culture of extended
compassion towards human weakness and vulnerability, as attributes
common to all. This is crucial considering that within corporate struc-
tures, people become atomised individuals and an assemblage of wants
and desires for the market to satisfy. The market emerges as the facil-
itator of the individuals’ attempts of devising lifestyles that fit their
needs and desires through the tools of choice and consumption. Desires
met by the market may feel good for an individual but are likely to
work counter to the common good. Moreover, they promote a dis-
torted image of ourselves and our relationship to the natural and social
world which can have significant consequences: the lessening of human
agency and a view of human beings (especially those in poverty) as
being diminished or a liability for whom the state has to assume an
interventionist role.
Through civic education, young people may achieve what Mathew

Taylor (2010) describes as a ‘socially embedded model of individualism’
to embrace the rights of the individual, cultivate empathy and coun-
teract the hubris in being captive by wants. Such education resides in
the humanities and sciences where through scientific knowledge, his-
tory, film and the study of philosophical and religious ethics and global
economic and environmental systems, young people may get into the
habit of decoding the suffering of others to understand lives both near
and far and their relationship to the natural world. As Nussbaum (2003)
argues, young people develop empathy by learning to be ‘tragic specta-
tors, and to understand with increasing subtlety and responsiveness the
predicaments to which human life is prone’. There is a consensus among
social commentators that societies increasingly become more empathic
as a result of civil rights movements, travelling and coming into con-
tact with different cultures and, as Steven Pinker argues in The Better
Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, exposure to literacy and
book reading which cultivate perspective taking. Although there may
be a decline in physical violence in certain parts of the world, it is hard
to argue for a decline in symbolic and political violence. Inequality, the
destruction that globalisation has brought to communities and people’s
lives and the rise of new social apartheids push us to rethink progress.
We tend to equate progress with human welfare and although progress
can contribute to human welfare they are not the same. As we move
into the second decade of the 21st century, the enlightenment princi-
ples of progress, reason and centrality of economics in politics require
rethinking. Through civic education, we may be well placed to consider
the relational nature of progress because we certainly have the technical
knowledge to understand how to accomplish things but the question
is whether we know what these things are and are aware of the moral
dilemmas in our attempts to seek them.
To become a force towards the common good, civic education must
foster the habit of critical thinking, rooting out the inconsistencies of
a self-serving thought, a key role for secular philosophy and human-
ism to play. And it must also excite the imagination through the arts
and sciences and offer knowledge on the world’s economic conditions
in both developed and developing countries and the adverse living con-
ditions that surround a large proportion of the world’s people. Because
of heterodox beliefs and approaches to parenting and child rearing, the
fast moving pace of technology and the immediacy that characterises
society, there are profound ethical disagreements about the nature of
the common good, entailing many different narratives with a sharp
distinction between politics and morality. This is compounded by the

rise of an individuated culture and awareness that morality cannot be
sustained solely within religion. In his theory of justice, Rawls (1971)
accepts that because reasonable people have different visions of what is
good, ‘the point of a good polity is not to promote a particular vision
of the good life, it’s to ensure that goods are distributed fairly so that
we can then go out and pursue our respective visions of the good life
on a fair basis’. For Rawls, access to equal opportunities is sufficient for
individuals to achieve equivalent outcomes. For Sen, however, individ-
uals are not equal in their capacity to convert opportunities to valued
functionings and thus equality of opportunity alone is less likely to pro-
mote equality in a society and sustain actions towards the common
good. Although moral and political principles are justified to the extent
they promote the common good for the greatest numbers, in unequal
societies, the common good should be about cultivating individual and
collective resistance to greed in that citizenship should not be defined
in terms of possessions.
A feminist orientation to family policy

Despite allusions to feminism in family policy (by using neutral terms
such as parenting; see Chapter 8), a feminist orientation to family pol-
icy has been long overdue. With the proliferation of gender-neutral
family policies, parenting and issues related to employment and edu-
cation opportunities for parents need to be addressed within a feminist
legal framework. A lack of such framework may result in normative and
potentially inaccurate conceptions of parenthood (e.g. motherhood as
being desirable for all women; fathers and mothers as being equally
involved and thus allocation of parenting duties is equal) that feed into
family policy. Gender-neutral parenting has been used as a wide brush in
family policy, and there is very little on the implications of motherhood
as being separate from fatherhood in terms of women’s unequal pay,
unemployment, pressure to combine paid and unpaid work, social class
differences regarding experiences of motherhood, unequal allocation of
parenting responsibilities at home or financial instability upon divorce
to mention a few (see Chapter 8 for a discussion on a multifaceted
jeopardy that mothers are likely to face). Before we use gender-neutral
terms, we need to sort out the politics of domestic life and tackle gender
inequality. Placing the onus on parents is essentially about placing the
onus on mothers to overcome structural constraints at both societal and
personal levels.
By actively engaging with a feminist legal scholarship, family pol-

icy may find ways to articulate gender equality and difference and its
implications on parenting; the politics and ethics of care in the fam-
ily; and the diversity in perceptions of motherhood (e.g. oppressive or
life affirming), particularly the ambivalence of motherhood that defined
feminist scholarship of the early 1990s. The third-wave feminism of the
1990s developed a more ‘sympathetic and empathetic mode’ towards
motherhood by encompassing mainstream identities in an attempt to
counteract marginalisation for women who do not engage with tra-
ditional roles and expressions of femininity. For the third wave, the
political became personal in a process that was congruent with and
facilitated by the rise of a therapeutic culture. For example, third-wave
feminist memoir writers such as Walker and Orenstein in the United
States have approached motherhood in a depoliticised manner, as a ful-
filment of women’s personal desires. Similarly, in the United Kingdom,
writers such as Rachel Cusk talk about the ambivalence experienced with
motherhood and its impact on women’s personal agency. These writings
convey a strong sense of anxiety about motherhood and the disastrous
possibility of top-down state interference with it. Such ideas con-
trast with the second-wave feminist writings on motherhood. In 1979,
Adrienne Rich published Of Woman Born: Motherhood as an Experience
and Institution in which motherhood was discussed as an act of marginal-
isation, arguing that mothers tend to be perceived as unable to make
decisions about their lives and fathers as unengaged with their children.
Clearly, within the second wave, motherhood was perceived as being
responsible for the schism between private and public life which aimed
to marginalise women. As discussed in the previous chapter, although
third-wave feminism is more sympathetic to motherhood, it lacks an
institutional and political analysis of both motherhood and fatherhood
and does not acknowledge the de-politicised (and policy-driven) status
of the family.
A feminist orientation to parenting not as a mere service to the
well-being of children but a central human experience is timely and
essentially relevant. Contemporary policy constructions of parenthood
do not engage with parent-driven critiques about the experiences of
being a parent. An ambivalence regarding parenthood is evident in fam-
ily policy, especially with regard to how competent and effective parents
are viewed to be. But this differs from the ambivalence to motherhood as
articulated by mothers because the former is policy driven and imposed
on parents who live in poverty. Family policy should take on board
women’s and men’s personal stories and truths to develop a legal and
pragmatic (and not a moralistic) vocabulary about the experiences of

parenting. Otherwise, there is a danger that the plurality of parents’
voices and their experiences of parenthood may amount to no more
than mere subjectivities. A lack of parental perspectives also normalises
parental anxiety about child rearing with parents either engaging in
hyper-parenting or risking to be seen as failing in their duties. A fem-
inist legal theory has the potential to engage with the wider issues that
affect parenting such as structural inequality in employment (gender
inequality of pay, motherhood gap) and education, and normative con-
ceptions of motherhood and, most importantly, to create a critical space
in which family policy is debated and mothers and fathers are supported
in their decisions about child rearing.
A feminist orientation in family policy means to question the forced
separation in the challenges children and parents face. Policy makers
and politicians should no longer view parents and children in isolation
from each other (we talk about child poverty but not family poverty
or about ailing childhoods but not ailing families): if, for some parents,
children’s rearing has become a task fraught with the possibility of fail-
ure, it is because parents’ lives have become difficult. The 2007 UNICEF
report warns of ailing and unhappy childhoods attributing this mostly
to busy parents and a limited parental involvement (although data
from national longitudinal datasets suggest otherwise; see Chapters 1
and 3). However, the UNICEF report fails to consider that children are
unhappy because their parents are unhappy. Separating the challenges
that parents and children face in the name of child-centric approaches
reinforces a culture of blame that targets families and restricts opportu-
nities for exploring the impact of wider forces (e.g. inequality) on their
well-being. The policy focus should be on the family as a unit at the
centre of poverty and disadvantage and on the wider social and political
context of inequality to tackle the challenges that parents face such as
unemployment and unequal opportunities.
Finally, family policy requires a genuine feminist orientation to pro-
mote women’s rights and gender equality considering that women have
the greatest share in childcare despite some policy attempts to involve
fathers more. As discussed previously, in most families, care work is still
organised around traditional gender roles and the impact of domestic-
ity is felt differently between men and women and among women of
different social classes. Class inequalities are sharply felt by women and
the burden of poverty is heavier on them in terms of implications for
their physical and mental health. In the absence of social networks and
public services, women tend to function as a ‘buffer’ between poverty
and their children to manage limited resources, poor housing and the
social strain from living in run-down neighbourhoods (Lister, 2005).
Children’s social mobility cannot be attained if fathers and mothers
are socially immobile and lose the benefits of employment and educa-
tion. Children’s life chances heavily depend on whether parents are in
a position to access education and employment. Capabilities in moth-
ers may be developed through lifelong educational opportunities but,
unless the gender and motherhood gaps narrow, women will not be
able to retain the benefits accrued. There is little clarity on how family
policy makers interpret the interplay between gender equality and dif-
ference in families. Instead of focusing on the notion that ‘what parents
do matters’, family policy should engage with the reality of these gaps
and the fact that women are ‘missing’ from senior positions, especially
after they become mothers. It is worrying that, with the current eco-
nomic downturn, the reverse is happening: increasingly, women lose
their jobs and undertake a disproportionate amount of unpaid work.
Capability building should be gendered and target both inequality and
the motherhood gap by offering educational opportunities to women
and removing structural and attitudinal barriers while accounting for
the gendered responsibilities of parents. However, as countries oper-
ate under a reduced fiscal space (OECD, 2011), bridging these gaps is
a remote possibility.
A fairer resource distribution and equalisation of opportunity

and outcome
Neoliberal policies have placed a disproportionate faith on the markets
to achieve public good. The deregulation of the markets and a mis-
placed hope that the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few
will, eventually, ‘trickle down’ to those in need have given rise to a new
moral order with individuals and communities at the top of the wealth
bracket feeling that they do not owe anything to society or its institu-
tions (Hutton, 2011). In Western economies, the action has been at the
top: the richest one per cent of households earned as much each year as
the bottom 60 per cent put together; they possessed as much wealth as
the bottom 90 per cent; and with each passing year, a greater share of
the nation’s wealth was flowing through them. It was this segment of
the population, almost exclusively, that held the key to future growth
and future returns (Peck, 2011). Although the rise of super-elites is not
a product of educational differences, education (and levels of education
in particular) has played a significant role in explaining the gap between
the haves and have-nots. Other big forces have also contributed to polar-
isation in society, including the technological revolution which has
created much bigger winners much faster than ever before (Peck, 2011).
Many theories have been brought forward to explain unfair resource
distribution patterns, ranging from a lack of regulation of the finan-
cial institutions to human greed. However, what is missing is a wider
debate about the kind of society we want for ourselves and the next
generations. Very few seem to question the kind of society that offers
exponentially hedge fund managers as well as the continuing rise of
the number of multimillionaires despite the current economic down-
turn. And even attempts have been made to impose a human face on
global capitalism to make it palatable: consumption, as Slavol Zizek
(2011) argues, has been given a ‘redemption spin’ and an ethical orien-
tation through some forms of charitable work operating within market
structures. We still attribute poverty to individual fault and cultural prac-
tices (such as some people are reckless or lazy; certain cultures place a
great emphasis on material possessions) but the hubris that inequality
has brought about has remained largely unexamined. The message that
individuated explanations of poverty sends out is that we need to man-
age our lives in ways that do not cause trouble or waste public resources
or obstruct the flow of capital; in other words, we are asked not to
change the circumstances but to adjust within them and be content
with them.
The growing polarisation in society has created a social apartheid jus-
tified by a dangerous doctrine that those who possess wealth deserve to
do so, regardless of proportionality, and that those who are poor have
chosen to be so. Wealth has become the signifier of personal worth and
poverty is seen as an individual mishap, or worse, an individual choice.
The societal values, set by wealth and consumption, work against a civic
renewal because what means to be a citizen is understood in monetary
terms. Because of uncontrolled capitalism, we have lost the solidity of
civic institutions and public services and the relationships that embody
reciprocity and empathy (Hutton, 2011). Markets’ dominance is incom-
patible with building social relationships because a mere ‘trickle effect’
from the wealth accumulated at the top one per cent cannot reverse
inequality and social immobility. Social class divides persist and families’
socio-economic background matters more than ever before. Thirty-nine
per cent of children born to parents in the top fifth of earners stayed
in that same bracket as adults. Likewise, 42 per cent of those whose
parents were in the bottom fifth remained there themselves. Only 6 per
cent reached the top fifth: ‘rags-to-riches’ stories have become extremely
rare and if things carry on like this, the class divide will be difficult to
bridge (Peck, 2011).
Tax policy reforms are a direct and powerful instrument for increas-
ing redistributive effects to ensure that ‘low-income households do not
experience further loss in income distribution’ (OECD, 2011, p. 40).
However, redistribution strategies based on income transfers and taxes
alone are less financially sustainable, especially considering the fiscal
reductions experienced by most Western countries and the shrinking of
decent-wage jobs. As the OECD report argues, policies for more and bet-
ter jobs are more important than ever, especially for women who are
hit the hardest by the current economic downturn and especially moth-
ers who are more likely to be in part-time jobs. Many women work in
more than one dead-end job to make ends meet. The best way to escape
poverty and guarantee children’s social mobility is education and jobs
that offer a decent wage. In so doing, as the OECD report states, poli-
cies that invest in increasing the human capital of the workforce are
paramount. Higher educational attainment and lifelong learning have
been important in counteracting the underlying increases in earnings
inequality in the long run. Access to tertiary education improves the
prospects and living standards of lower-skilled people and gives parents
opportunities to acquire the skills needed in the labour market but also
the skills to live a life they value. Educational or learning accounts can
be used as a means to help parents to achieve this objective (OECD,
2005).
What does this mean for family policy? For a start, a new theory of
social justice and equality is needed. Also, renewed debates on social
class and its impact on parenting and children’s well-being and life
chances should re-enter national and global conversations to move
away from cultural and privatised explanations of poverty. Equality
is crucial for human emancipation because a ‘highly unequal society
would harm itself by not making the best use of the talents and capaci-
ties of its citizens’ (Giddens, 1998, p. 42) and by producing a widespread
disaffection and conflict. At the same time we should differentiate equal-
ity in accessing resources and opportunities from equality of outcomes.
Equality of access can prevent imbalances due to differences in having
basic resources. But, as discussed earlier, this alone does not guarantee
equal outcomes and that is not only because individuals make different
uses of the opportunities afforded to them. A just allocation of material
resources can support families’ survival and reduce conflict but, ulti-
mately, we live on a finite planet and the idea that economic growth
can be endless is faulty. Overpopulation and consumption place great
demands on natural resources and on the capacity of ecosystems to

function. As such, economic growth alone cannot compensate for the
resulting decline in the quality of people’s habitats and ways of life.
Also, monetary interventions that tackle poverty but not inequality are
not very effective. As the New Labour fiscal policies of the early 2000s
have shown, a market solution to ‘lifting’ children out of poverty via
financial means alone have not delivered the desired outcomes. Lift-
ing families out of poverty has not made much difference to their lives
because inequality is being reproduced irrespective of how much par-
ents are involved with their children’s learning and whether or not they
show the ‘right’ attitudes and aspirations.
Equality cannot be achieved by treating everyone the same, requiring
a workable understanding of fairness in society along with a fairer distri-
bution of resources and services. Most crucially, we should challenge the
processes whereby ‘markets mimic governance’, as Sandel stated at his
BBC Reith Lecture. Such processes involve the use of market principles
and tools in spheres of life in which they do not belong such as parent-
ing, social trust, education and well-being. We should also resist offering
market solutions to societal problems, without accounting for the moral
and social limits of policy. In unequal societies, the processes whereby
markets mimic governance are particularly troubling because they reveal
a lack of true democratic governance and, most importantly, a dimin-
ished sense of freedom articulated as freedom to own and freedom to
micromanage citizens without seeking distributive justice. A fairer dis-
tribution model and also a capability approach to the equalisation of
opportunity and outcome can support the renewal of families as a civic
institution. Without a civic renewal of the society as a whole (not just
communities), all we can achieve is to implement another economic
model of living within which everything is understood as capital (albeit
a more equally distributed capital).
Families’ space for public reasoning

Families’ public and political space is shrinking. Here, I refer to Conroy’s
definition of a political space: ‘it is, or rather should be, that space which
transcends the particularity of the individual or group, a place of per-
suasion and action: the place where words struggle into existence as a
way of prefacing action’ (Conroy, 2010, p. 327). A political space is a
truly public space where ‘agonistic engagement’ occurs to test and eval-
uate solutions to complex social and ethical challenges. Furthermore, a
political is a critical space where citizens come for public reasoning and
democratic deliberation. Public reasoning is about making sense of the
world and, through deliberation in public spaces, setting the norms to

articulate problems and solutions. The public and social spaces where we
are to ‘determine how we should live collectively no longer – if indeed
they ever did – offer a genuinely agonistic space where our (sometimes
modestly, sometimes substantially) differing ethical and teleological
claims are held worthy of consideration’ (Zizek, 2011, p. 3). Civic insti-
tutions, including families, have become de-politicised and thus denied
their political space in which individuals act collectively.
Society needs citizens who are capable of reasoning and sound judge-
ment and have a vision of a society for themselves and the next
generation. Public reasoning and deliberation are important not only
because they promote human happiness but also because they protect
individual human beings against being used as a means to some end or
other, however desirable that end might be (Rawls, 1999). Parents and
the public in general, through actively engaging in democratic deliber-
ation and dialogue, can identify tensions in the relationship between
the state and the individual. Public reasoning is underpinned by the
assumption that parents are able, through dialogue, to evaluate the via-
bility of options available to them and play an active role in supporting
their children to develop the capacities required. Through public reason-
ing, children and their parents become dialectical and exercise criticality
and act with intent, a strong sense of selfhood and awareness of their
social relationships. A form of criticality not only as an exercise of reason
but, essentially, as a critical approach to ethics, obligation and differ-
ence is crucial for parents and children to realise their rights. However,
this has implications for equality in that parents are not equal in their
contribution to public reasoning and in their ability to convert civic
engagement into a valued life.
In market societies, the public sphere is either commodified or
reduced to ensure it does not interfere with the flow of global capital.
Families have a limited public space to exist and exercise deliberative
democracy. Increasingly, public spaces are becoming corporate, con-
tributing to the shrinking of the world as experienced by more and
more families and young people who find it difficult to locate mean-
ing in their communities, especially as their boundaries are shifting. In a
world where public space is shrinking and, as a consequence, young peo-
ple’s capacity to engage critically, opportunities to have a voice that is
not institutionalised are very few. Also, opportunities for parents to exer-
cise agency and use their critical and rational competence for ‘discursive
democracy’ are increasingly being denied and with that the ‘possibil-
ity of rational consensus arrived at through free, unconstrained public
deliberation between free and equal citizens’ (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005,
p. 152). Within family policy, decision making has moved from the
sphere of democratic deliberation and political rights to offering man-
agerialist solutions to social and political problems. As Alain Badiou
(2003) argues, we live in a social space which is increasingly experienced
as ‘worldless’ in that it sustains a ‘worldless’ ideological framework in
which people are deprived of ways of locating meaning: there is no pub-
lic assembly for citizens to engage in reasoning and deliberative decision
making and as such the only form of protest is acts of violence. The
summer 2011 riots in some English towns showed that young people
who see nothing in society for them can easily engage in lawless acts.
These young people are seen as being ‘disposable’ (Giroux, 2010) and
not ‘hard to reach’ because limited genuine attempts have been made so
far to reach them and support them to become part of networks of social
relationships. The young people who engage in violence or in an apo-
litical mass therapy do so because they have no other ways of engaging
with society. People talk about their frustration due to unequal oppor-
tunities for education and employment, future uncertainty and reduced
public services, all problems that require political solutions. Some young
people use demonstrations as an opportunity for mass therapy to come
together and talk about their helplessness, whereas others engage in
raw violence and destruction. In either case, there are no conversations
about what an alternative future might look like and what counts as
common good and for whom.
As with public spaces, a language that is free from censorship and
moralising to allow reasoned judgements and the creation of an ‘ago-
nistic’ space is increasingly under attack. Despite the enlightenment
emphasis on engaging critically with the world, refraining from mak-
ing judgements has come to be seen as a sign of tolerance and social
inclusion. Furedi (2011) observes that tolerance has become about being
inclusive, being sensitive and politically correct to the point of indiffer-
ence. Understandings of tolerance have changed over time from being
about critically engaging with the world to not being judgemental, not
provoking debates, and this indicates a departure from the enlighten-
ment thinking of tolerance as promoting the clashing of ideas even if
this causes upset. Tolerance has come to be perceived as not saying any-
thing that might hurt another person and is no longer about engaging
with clashing ideas. Not being allowed to make value judgements, how-
ever, shuts down genuine debates and, instead, ‘moral vocabularies’ that
frame social crises as good or evil proliferate. Further, the evidence-based
rhetoric that permeates most of family policy (partly a product of the
polarisation and politicisation of research in education and other dis-

ciplines) works against public reasoning because research knowledge is
not liberating but regulatory (see Chapter 7 for a discussion on evidence-
based policy). Public reasoning involves the capacity to engage with
others critically; thus tolerance as non-judgementalism is problematic
because it causes confusion and restricts debates about the big issues
that influence families all over the world. Ultimately, this notion of tol-
erance is regressive and patronising for young people and their families
in their attempts to collectively develop a vision of society.
The family in a civic society
The renewal of the family as a civic institution cannot occur in a vac-

uum but within a civic society. We cannot talk about models for a
fairer distribution and equalisation of opportunity or the expansion of
families’ public space and capability building through civic education
without referring to some notion of a civic society. A civic society is not
a neoliberal society (where corporate organisations have become more
competent, organised and powerful than nation states), nor a replace-
ment for the state. It does not advocate less government and contests
moralising in family policy. A civic society differs from a corporate soci-
ety in exercising distributive justice and having a strong communitarian
ethos and social trust and respect, relying on networks that bring mutual
benefits and promote civic activism. It is important to stress here that a
civic society is not seen as a panacea or what Edward and Hulme (1995)
called ‘the magic bullet’ in terms of replacing the state’s responsibilities
towards service provision and social care. A civic society does not oper-
ate outside the state nor does it advocate a reversal of the roles of the
state and the market.
A civic society is not instead of the state and not a means of remov-
ing the responsibility of the state to offer public services and act as a
guarantor of social and political rights (Fineman, 2008). This is a crucial
distinction considering current policy trends to focus on the efforts of
individual families and volunteering organisations (e.g. charities, self-
help groups, community groups) to reverse inequality while the state is
‘rolling back’ from offering public services. As Steve Wyler, Director of
Development Trusts Association puts it:
The battle of ideas is, at its heart, a debate about the capability
and potential for ordinary people, especially those living in low-
income communities, to play a direct part in controlling resources
and exercising power. For those who take the view that such people
represent a liability . . . then Big Society becomes essentially a phil-
anthropic and moralising effort. If so, the Big Society is unlikely to
succeed.
(cited in Rowson et al., 2010, p. 10)
Civic participation is different from participation in volunteering activ-

ities whose aim is to supplement finance and service insufficiencies
brought about by the reduction of public services. The Big Society, as
currently conceptualised, proposes a form of civic participation to cover
for the reduction of public services. Such models of civic engagement
are likely to confine social rights into self-help and mutual cooperation
which, although at an individual level are important attributes, cannot
sustain social solidarity at a macro level (Ignatieff, 2001a). Further, a
view of disadvantaged people as a liability is not helpful in encouraging
them to engage with society. A four-pillar approach to family policy (i.e.
civic education, feminist orientation, fairer resource distribution and
families’ public space) is about parents being an asset (or a potential
asset) and not a liability or moral failure.
Increasingly, the state functions as an enabler to empower citizens
to abide by the principles of obligation, responsibility and community.
Giddens’ third-way politics have redefined rights and obligations along
the notions of ‘no rights without responsibilities . . . no authority with-
out democracy’ (1998, pp. 64–67). Through a civic society lens, these
new relationships between the state and the individual require exami-
nation. Giddens’ proclamations of ‘no rights without obligations’ raise
important questions worth asking: what does obligation mean, to whom
and within what framework? As the steady accumulation of capital at
the top one per cent has shown, obligation is not about mitigating
the egoistic self-serving and self-governing individuals at the top one
per cent but to regulate the poor and bring them closer to the market.
In this context, obligation is about maximising economic profit and
not obligation to family and community life, as these are incompati-
ble. Neither is obligation towards ‘following or breaching the socially
endorsed, ethical legal rules’ (Bauman, 1992, p. 29). For families, rights
and obligations should be intrinsically linked with capability building
through civic education, a feminist orientation of family policy, fairer
redistribution models for resources and opportunities and the expansion
of families’ public space. Otherwise, the notion of ‘no rights without
obligations’ is about a top-down enforced social contract that takes for
granted that people are equal in accessing resources and converting
them into a good life. Giddens’ proclamation of ‘no authority with-

out democracy’ is about the importance of locating authority within
participatory democracy whereby citizens develop a consensus through
democratic deliberation and where authority is not delivered ‘top down’
but from grass roots decision making. However, a participatory democ-
racy relies on people who are capable of engaging in public reasoning
in public spaces and, thus, it is not clear to what extent this is possible
within a neoliberal context where public space is diminishing and with
it, forms of democratic deliberation. A civic society is about reversing
this trend.
The continuing urge in family policy to derive legal obligations for
parents highlights a widespread mistrust in individuals’ moral capaci-
ties and thus aims to ‘legislate on moral truth claims by laying them
down as legal imperatives for those who cannot function within the
boundaries of proper morality’ (Sevenhuijsen, 2000, p. 3). The social
vocabulary of responsibility, obligation, community and partnership
misses notions of equality of opportunity and outcome, social justice,
access to public services and human rights, the cornerstone of a civic
society. As Rose argues, in the form that social democracy is conceived
within the third way:
it offers very little for those who think that our present is still
characterized by some rather old forces of injustice, domination,
exploitation, cruelty and indifference, that its practices support and
obscure some fundamental divisions of power and resources between
the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ and that its political language is suffused
with hypocrisy and double-speak.
(1999, p. 474)
Capability building has the potential to bring out families’ ‘hidden

wealth’ (Rowson et al., 2010) in terms of supporting people’s abilities
and capacity for social connections. It is hard to measure existing lev-
els of hidden wealth in families and communities and even harder to
delineate how these levels change over time or compare within and
across countries. Hidden wealth exists in relationships and cultures, in
the strengths of families (even in families facing disadvantage). How-
ever, as family policy stands, disadvantaged parents are seen as deficient,
lacking in their capacity to raise their children, and thus requiring a
national campaign and family experts to persuade them to get involved
with their children. Such views are problematic and work against the
notion of hidden wealth in families. A growth in hidden wealth seems
to be a reasonable approximation of what it means for society to get

‘bigger’. But what does it mean to have ‘bigger’ citizens? The idea of
‘bigger’ citizens is best captured in terms of what is required for effective
participation in society (Rowson et al., 2010, p. 10). It is an interest-
ing paradox, however, to talk about hidden wealth in families on the
one hand and early intervention with parents who are considered to be
deficient (on grounds of disadvantage) on the other.
By building capability through civic education and a reinstatement of
families’ public sphere, parents and children may be in a better position
to ascertain their political and social rights and promote human agency
but also to fight the political hypocrisy in policy proclamations that par-
ents matter. The question of whether or not parents matter is irrelevant,
a mere moral standpoint. I have never believed that parents do not mat-
ter. The relationships between parents and children are strong, based on
care, compassion and nurturing. As argued elsewhere, parenting is not a
technical act of raising children as a project to morph them towards an
arbitrary end no matter how seductive this end might be. Parent–child
relationships are important but so are the relationships between parents
and other family and community members and friends. Proclamations
about how much parents matter exert emotional pressure and invoke
guilt on parents to change their lives into a project of successful child
rearing and take a competitive stand against other people’s children.
Also, there are strong moralistic undercurrents in such proclamations
that divert the debates that we should be holding about the wider social
and economic influences that shape families’ lives and parents’ capacity
to parent well.
Why does family policy stress that parents matter? This is an unnec-
essary and void statement because parents do not need to be told that
they matter to nurture and care for their children. They know that and
most parents do a good job of it. The capacity for care and nurturing
in humans is strong and parents nurture their children not because
they think that in doing so their children will turn out to be success-
ful, socially mobile adults but because nurturing is an integral element
of our evolved humanity. It is disconcerting that intimate family life
is subjected to moralistic scrutiny and parents are manipulated along
the lines of the omnipotent and the all-blameable parent. What is more
disconcerting, however, is that the pronouncements about how much
parents matter occur in an economic climate where care and nurtur-
ing are seen as obstacles to parents moving closer to the market, and
severe public cuts have targeted mothers the most while disadvantaged
young people have become suspects in a polarised society. One may
argue that the policy focus has been too much on the family and less
on the structure and the presence (or absence) of other civic institutions
to socialise young people. And this trend has to change. Family policy
should challenge the fact that parents’ and children’s worlds are clos-
ing in on them and that the average family finds it increasingly difficult
to cope.
Through capability building in disadvantaged families, engagement in
the public sphere and a fairer distribution of resources, we may reclaim
society as a political space bounded by human rights and social justice.
This is not easy because even as capitalism currently experiences crisis,
it can easily mutate into a sinister socio-political state, especially con-
sidering its capacity to align itself with different political and religious
and cultural places and ideas. Current demographic trends indicate that,
globally, democratic forces are in decline. More and more young people
grow up in non-egalitarian societies and families where the principles
of equality, human agency and the pursuit of true life are under attack.
A large numbers of girls and women live in societies that discriminate
against them and where they have limited rights as citizens. Even within
democratic nations, families and young people in poverty have become
disposable, with no discernable future.
To renew family as a civic institution, I argue for the importance
of civic education with both instrumental and intrinsic goals for par-
ents and children and for a feminist orientation to policy to ensure
that the different roles and contributions of mothers and fathers in
families are acknowledged. For changes at a macro level, I argue for
reversing the shrinking in families’ public and political spaces and for
a fairer distribution model, being aware of the challenges the latter
throws up with regard to the equalisation of opportunity and outcome.
I have drawn upon the capability approach to discuss the principles
that should underpin family policy which, although comprehensive,
is not without drawbacks. But I think a capability approach to family
policy should be emblematic of the types of proposals we will need to
weigh when thinking about supporting families in unequal societies.
Most importantly, we need to re-engage in conversations about social
class and the impact of neoliberal policies on families. Such conversa-
tions may begin with a reassessment of how globalisation is affecting
society, and of what it will take for the average family to thrive in a
rapidly changing world. These are crucial conversations because, as Peck
(2011) argues, in unequal societies built-in advantages and disadvan-
tages are growing and with the concentration of wealth in relatively few
hands there is little hope that much of the next generation’s elite might
achieve their status through hard or innovative work and not through
inheritance.
Note
∗
Historically, the notion of a civic society has undergone many trans-
formations. In ancient Greece, the concept was used as a synonym for
the good society, operating not separately but within the state. The for-
mation of a civic society relied on citizens engaging with what Socrates
called ‘dialectic’ or the capacity to debate societal issues through public
argument and rational dialogue. Public argument and what Rawls (1999)
later called public reasoning are the cornerstones of a civic society. Civic
society entails collective action guided by shared interests to defend cit-
izens against the state and the market forces, and by the belief that
the state should be influenced by democratic forces. At the start of the
20th century, unlike Marx, Gramsci understood civil society as a domain
within a political superstructure but separate from the socio-economic
structures of the state (Edwards, 2004, p. 10).
Conclusion
A key aim of this book was to engage in conversations about what it

means to be a parent in 21st-century Britain and to examine parent–
child interactions and their influence on child outcomes. Decades of
social science research and recent findings from analyses of national,
longitudinal datasets, including the MCS, have painted an interesting
picture regarding parenting in unequal societies, especially at a time
when severe public cuts and the ‘rolling back’ of the welfare state
have made it increasingly difficult for the average family to function.
Although the data this book drew upon come from the United King-
dom, the issues discussed reflect broader trends in family policy in the
Western world. In many Western countries, a policy focus on individual
parents as the cornerstone to children’s life chances and social mobil-
ity reflects an individuated political culture where problems of structure
are translated into parenting solutions. The ‘good’ parent doctrine and
the emphasis within family policy on early intervention as a means
of remodelling parents into ‘good’ parents capable of morphing their
children to achieve good outcomes have eclipsed public debates on the
ways in which social class and structural inequality shape children’s life
chances as well as the persistence of the achievement gap between poor
and wealthier children.
The achievement gap is political
The relationship between parenting, social class and child social and
educational outcomes paints a complex picture of the continuity of the
achievement gap in the face of widespread social changes, especially
with regard to increases in parental involvement in children’s learn-
ing. The complexity reflects an inherent difficulty in understanding the
208
Conclusion 209
changing face of structural inequalities in terms of relative degrees of

inequality and uneven opportunities for social mobility and, most cru-
cially, the particularities of poverty and its effects on children’s language,
literacy and behaviour. Most parents from all demographic groups are
routinely involved with children’s development and learning and yet
their children’s outcomes are uneven. It is clear that some families
are trapped in a vicious circle. Socio-economic inequality functions as
both a cause and effect and shapes the relationship between parental
involvement and school outcomes: it makes educational resources and
institutions unattainable, which in turn poses obstacles to parents and
their children in generating bridging forms of cultural capital to access
educational opportunities (Hartas, 2012).
To regard parental learning support as a key strategy to raise achieve-
ment without considering families’ individual circumstances may be
overly simplistic and potentially ineffective. This is especially the case
given that underachievement appears sustained by structural inequality
and not lack of parental involvement with children’s learning. In disad-
vantaged families, home learning is likely to be undermined by a lack of
money to spend on educational resources and services. Given the cur-
rent economic downturn, this situation is unlikely to change until at
least 2020. It is important, therefore, that policies to support families
do more (e.g. offer free childcare and family literacy programmes) than
merely focus on parenting skills. They should offer parents education
and employment opportunities to build their capabilities. The resources
are closely aligned to an economic capital that parents accrue through
their proximity to the labour market, whereas human capital is the result
of parental education and group membership. Family interventions,
if they are parent driven, respect family intimate life and go beyond
parenting skills, and stand a fair chance of being of greater benefit to par-
ents and young children. Finally, the increasing focus on parents’ skills
and behaviour promotes a view that the problems of poverty, inequality
and injustice can be solved by individuals facing up to their particular
challenges. This is a very different approach to that which considers par-
ents to be capable of acting and thinking together to tackle inequality
in ways relevant to their local communities.
A new culture war on parents
Being a parent involves a broad practical judgement with a strong philo-

sophical and moral ground and not a collection of technical skills.
Parenting knowledge is value centred and action oriented, participatory
and relational that reflects power relationships and structures. Policy dis-
courses on good and effective parenting imply that there is a standard
practice whose outcomes can be objectively identified and evaluated and
also enforced if necessary. Such normative understandings of parenting
encourage state intervention because how problems are perceived and
solutions are framed is influenced by dominant discourses. In identify-
ing these issues in family policy and parenting, this book questions the
relationship between the neoliberal state and individual parents and
discusses the policy context within which a culture war is waged on
parents. The book does not advocate a reduced governance or a roman-
ticised past of family and parent empowerment where the family, as an
institution, was not in ‘decline’, but accepts that the renewal of families
as civic institutions is a goal worth pursuing.
Parenting is not something that you either get right or wrong. How-
ever, it is becoming more and more difficult, not because parenting is
an inherently complex task, but because the world, especially for some
social groups, is shrinking. People are told that they have the freedom
of choice and the freedom to own but the freedom to change and
transform society and imagine alternative futures has become elusive.
Also, the role that parents play in supporting their children’s well-being,
as articulated within family policy, is riddled with paradoxes: on the
one hand, parents are omnipotent, capable of shaping their children’s
life chances and future and on the other hand, parents have become
infantilised, incapable of dealing with the task of child rearing with-
out support from family experts. Other paradoxes are equally powerful.
For example, although family policy is presented as evidence based, it
dismisses research findings from studies that have examined the social
ecology of children’s development and delineated the many proximal
and distal influences in children’s life. Instead, it focuses on one proxi-
mal factor only, that is, parenting, to the exclusion of others. Essentially
these paradoxes highlight a neoliberal strategy of leaving parents, in
particular, and citizens, in general, alone to cater for themselves while
they are governed through intervention. There has always been a strug-
gle between parents/families and the state, with the state not trusting
parents to raise their children in ways that offer allegiance to the state
and now to the market. This distrust, fuelled by populist anxiety, has
seen the state increasing control over the spaces of home and family to
the subsequent disempowerment of parents.
Questions as to whether families should be left alone to do what is best
for the children or whether the state should intervene are too generic to
be meaningful (Smeyers, 2010). And so are statements such as ‘what
Conclusion 211
parents do matters’. I do not advocate less government, but I ques-

tion the rise of an interventionist state that approaches parents and
young people as problems that require cost-effective solutions. A media-
supported (and promoted) access to high-impact events (children who
tragically died in the hands of people who had a duty to care for them)
makes it difficult for social policy makers to eschew their obligation
to citizens. However, we should not allow panic-driven interventions
fuelled by a populist rhetoric to define the relationship between indi-
viduals and the state and the political spaces that families occupy. Such
pre-emptive intervention in families is likely to create more problems
than what it purports to solve (Smeyers, 2010). Instead, we should have
political discussions as to what kind of support parents and families
require to climb out of poverty and help their children to live a life
they value.
Parents should be able to seek advice about child rearing if they need
it, but their relationship with their children cannot be reduced into a
series of activities towards predetermined ends, and a family is not just
a home learning environment or a policy arena but a political space
whereas parents and children influence each other and adapt to the
challenges they face. Parenting programmes can offer parents advice but
not the ‘right’ model of how to raise children (partly because such model
does not exist). Even then, offering advice to parents is not enough
because reversing inequality and narrowing children’s achievement gap
cannot be achieved through advice only. It is not the challenges of chil-
dren growing up that parents cannot face but the fact that the big issues
that affect their lives such as a lack of decent-wage jobs, limited gen-
uine opportunities for education and degrading neighbourhoods remain
largely unexamined. The use of a pseudo-scientific language of ‘what
works’ has replaced a political dialogue informed by genuine research
evidence on the impact of social class on child development.
Neoliberal policies and market ideologies have sustained an attack on
society and have eroded the space of families as civic institutions. More-
over, they have waged a cultural war on parents and have brought back
to the fore debates of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor to explain
intergenerational disadvantage and growing inequality. The complex-
ity in understanding inequality is further accentuated by discourses
about a ‘culture of poverty’ or poverty as an outcome of individual par-
ents’ choices and cultural practices and beliefs that deviate from the
mainstream. Such views are likely to influence the scope of family inter-
vention and reinforce a form of micromanagement of families instead
of promoting political and collective approaches to ‘lifting them out’ of
poverty. Moreover, views about a ‘culture of poverty’ are likely to trivi-

alise the challenges that families living in poverty face. Finally, calls for
the renewal of the family as a civic space and of a civic society as a whole
have been appropriated by the Big Society rhetoric which promotes civic
participation to cover for the reduction of public services. Families’ and
children’s social rights are reduced into self-help narratives that cannot
sustain social solidarity and a civic society, not as a replacement of the
state but as a force for the common good.
The MCS findings, especially those about the strong influences of
social class on young children’s development, have implications for
family policy to operate within a progressive framework. For this to hap-
pen, we need more than evidence-based policy initiatives to promote
families’ and children’s well-being. We need an ideological framework
that is guided by the principles of the common good and the convic-
tion that economic growth and the affluence it brings is not an end
but a means to promoting people’s life chances. As Hobsbawm (2009)
argued, the test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just
rising income and consumption for some people but widening oppor-
tunities and what Amartya Sen calls capability building. A progressive
family policy should strive to renew the family as a civic institution
and build capabilities in families to promote parents’ and children’s
well-being. Family policy should not be driven by technocratic solu-
tions but by political action underpinned by the principles of equality,
including gender equality, difference and human agency and the ethics
of care.
Family policy needs a new paradigm to move from an interven-
tionist focus to building capability in parents and children and to
understand the context within which the cultural wars on parenting
occur. Policy makers should contest the simplicity in arguments that
the links between parental involvement, academic achievement and
upward social mobility are direct and monotonic because they are not.
The MCS findings dispelled myths about parents in poverty being less
involved with their children’s learning, lacking in aspirations or about
poor child development and academic outcomes emanating from cul-
tural and not structural constraints. Parenting, although important in
its own right, is not a panacea to reducing the achievement gap and
expanding children’s social worlds. A capability approach to parents’
and families’ well-being should be brought to the heart of family policy
and public debates about parenting and children. Building capabilities
in families, however, cannot happen in a vacuum. As discussed earlier,
this can be achieved through civic education to promote and sustain
Conclusion 213
criticality, empathy and the common good; a feminist orientation to

family policy to delineate mothers’ and fathers’ roles in supporting
their children; a fairer resource distribution model to tackle structural
inequality and acknowledge the impact of social class on children’s
life; and an expansion of families’ public space to promote practices of
deliberative democracy.
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Index
achievement gap, 2–5, 9–19, 50–4, citizenship, 4, 125, 133–9, 157, 178,
84–7, 161–5 185, 193
Allen, Graham, 23, 81 civic education, 144–6, 188–92, 202–6
austerity, 13 civic institutions, 10, 13, 5–4, 84, 131,
authoritative parenting, 76, 155 138–9, 144, 157, 160, 197, 200,
average family, 54, 127, 190, 206 206
AVON Longitudinal Study, 50, 56 see also social institutions
civic participation, 168, 203
Baby P, 1, 71 civic renewal, 8, 62, 144, 199
behavioural intervention, 14, 75, 77, see also social renewal
123, 136 classless society, 8, 16, 156
Climbié, Victoria, 1, 71
coalition government, 2, 9–15, 72, 74,
capability approach, 144, 166, 167,
81, 85, 101, 151, 177, 183
168, 170, 173, 174, 182, 188, 199,
cognitive stimulation, 21–2
206
common good, 8, 10, 61–2, 144–6,
capital
183, 188–93, 201
cultural capital, 58, 154
concerted cultivation, 54– 68, 86, 152
intellectual capital, 3, 34, 154
corporate society, 123, 128
parent capital, 152, 154
cost-benefit calculations, 5
social capital, 6, 54–5, 189
see also cost-benefit considerations
care work, 80, 175, 183–6, 195
cost-benefit considerations, 78,81,
character development, 5, 88
109, 124, 145, 171, 185, 191
child behaviour, 6, 29, 41, 161
critical periods, 93
child maltreatment, 92, 93, 96–7
criticality, 62, 146, 155, 188, 191, 200
child protection, 81, 135–6, 141
culture of poverty, 11, 34, 51–3, 77,
child-centred policies, 112
158
child poverty, 2, 12, 36, 77–8, 82, 88,
culture war, 14, 124, 143, 147, 164
149, 157, 175, 180, 195
cycles of deprivation, 79
child rearing, 152, 161
child-related characteristics, 18
children’s brain, 1, 91–100, 147, 148, deficit discourses, 3
162, 163 democratic deliberation, 199, 201, 204
children’s life chances, 3, 8–15, 66–8, disadvantaged children, 7, 37, 85, 151,
113, 119, 126, 128, 136, 143, 148, 155
151–7, 190, 196 distal influences, 54, 66
children’s well-being, 17–18, 21–4, diversity, 10, 14, 111, 143, 147, 166,
28–9, 60–8, 82–5, 100, 106, 107, 173–4, 194
112, 114, 121, 123, 127, 133, 143,
144, 145, 149, 152, 154, 156, 161, early childhood, 2, 6, 37, 40, 91–4
166, 167, 168, 170, 175, 179, 182, early home environment, 1, 14,
183, 188, 194, 195, 198, 199 69, 84
238
Index 239
early intervention, 10, 48, 71–3, 81–7, Foundation Stage Profile, 26

90–1, 97– 101, 108–12, 116–25, free market, 6, 121–2
168, 172, 205
ecological theory, 113 gender equality, 9, 167, 175–80,
economic downturn, 43, 178, 183, 183–87, 194–6
187, 198 gender stereotypes, 67
economic redistribution, 5, 81, 88, gender-free policies, 186
136 ‘good enough’ parent, 51, 64–5,
educated mothers, 32, 56, 57 148
mothers’ reading habits, 7, 19, 24, good parent, 12, 31, 67, 108, 130–1,
31–2, 39, 57, 164 147, 150, 152, 157, 170, 181
see also mothers’ educational see also perfect motherhood
qualifications good society, 15, 62, 191, 207
educational inequality, 50, 85, 125, governmental technologies, 124
128, 165
egalitarianism, 125, 137 happiness, 4, 60, 67, 140, 182–3,
empathy, 28, 42, 54, 62, 64, 98, 146, 200
154–6, 178, 188–92, 197 ‘hard to reach’ families, 12, 132, 170,
enrichment activities, 27, 50 201
epigenetic influences, 92, 96, 98 home learning environment, 7, 18,
equality of opportunity, 3, 59, 85–6, 28, 35, 44, 84, 114, 143
174, 193, 204 homework, 21–8, 32, 49–50, 56–7, 83,
equality of outcome, 86, 198 113
ethics of care, 9, 109–10, 146, 148, human agency, 9, 63–4, 109–10, 138,
167, 183, 194 144, 146, 167, 181–9, 205–6
etho-politics, 125–6, 140 human condition, 9, 133, 172
eugenics, 66, 161–2 human development, 91–2, 100–2,
Every Child Matters, 72, 76, 131–5, 140 113, 115, 162, 168–70
experience-dependant plasticity, 94–5
experience-expectant plasticity, 95 individual pathology, 9, 133
individual responsibility, 52, 72–4, 77,
family experts, 61, 68, 118, 133, 140, 123, 138
160, 181, 204 inequality, 2, 8, 10–15, 33–6, 41–54,
family income, 5, 18, 19, 32, 36–43, 108–28, 136–47, 153–87, 190–9
76, 85, 114 see also structural inequality
family intimate life, 9, 111, 124–5, 165 intensive mothering, 179
family investment model, 55 intensive parenting, 62–7, 82, 179
family micromanagement, 71, see also intensive mothering
112–13, 128, 137, 144
Family Nurse Partnership, 101 language development, 22
family policy, 1, 3, 5, 9, 10, 14, 15, 17, literacy, 3, 7, 8, 17, 19, 21–32, 37–46,
23, 24, 45, 46, 52, 53, 58, 68, 56 65, 130, 154–5, 192
71–7, 80–8, 90– 99, 105–35, literacy-rich home, 23
143–78, 181–206
family resources, 83 market values, 80, 110
family support, 41, 79, 107, 111, 113, MCS, 6–40, 42–59, 143–5, 164
173 moralising, 3, 10, 130–2, 137–8, 140,
Field, Frank, 2, 81–2 143, 147, 201–3
fiscal policies, 72, 77, 80, 82, 199 see also moral vocabularies
240 Index
moral vocabularies, 129–32, 201 poverty, 6–19, 33–60, 80–139, 152–64,

motherhood gap, 176, 178, 195–6 174–87, 190–9, 206
motherhood penalty, 176 see also child poverty
mothers’ educational qualifications, 3, protective factors, 1, 18, 96–9, 105,
7, 19, 32–9, 59, 69, 82 115
public reasoning, 145–6, 156, 160,
169, 181, 188, 199–207
National Academy for Parenting
public services, 12–13, 72–4, 88, 90,
Practitioners, 72
99, 101, 106, 108, 115–19, 122–4,
natural growth, 55–9, 64–6
131–2, 136, 138, 185–6, 201–4
neoliberalism, 9, 68, 121–4, 127,
public space, 124, 133–4, 146, 151,
137–8, 169, 180
188, 199–204
see also neoliberal policies
public spending cuts, 72–3, 90, 112
neoliberal policies, 14, 125, 143, 196,
206
reading, 19–32, 39–50, 83, 101, 113,
neuromyths, 98 115, 164, 168, 173, 192
neuroscience, 71, 90–100, 148, 151, rearing practices, 12
163–5 see also child rearing
see also neuromyths resilience, 1, 5, 8, 10, 41, 62–4, 95–6,
New Labour, 2, 10, 36, 51, 72–82, 109, 113–16, 127–31, 143, 172
119, 151, 199 resource distribution, 47, 146, 149,
nudge, 124, 149, 157–60, 188 188, 196, 203
responsibilisation, 122, 124, 127, 130
outsourcing, 12, 61 rights
overregulation, 3, 123 economic rights, 5, 111, 127
human rights, 5, 44, 108–12, 125,
138, 140, 170–1, 182, 204, 206
paradigm, 14–15, 146, 187–99, 201–7
legal rights, 109, 110
parent deficit, 51
social rights, 14, 111, 138, 203, 205
parental aspirations, 23
risk, 15, 18, 37, 52, 66, 79, 91–9, 102,
parental autonomy, 112, 116 104, 107, 113–19, 123–5, 132–8
parental behaviour, 2, 5, 19, 24, 45, see also risk factors, 99, 107, 115–16,
102, 104, 108, 157, 166 132
parental involvement, 5, 8, 9, 11, 22, ruling elite, 2
28, 33, 43–9, 55–8, 86, 108, 143,
153, 164–5, 195 sensitive periods, 92, 97
parental support, 3, 17, 19, 34, 39, social advantage, 4, 34, 45, 52, 58–9,
64–5 65, 67, 72, 154
parental warmth, 18, 23, 157, 161, social behaviour, 19, 21, 27, 30, 41,
164, 165 143
see also parenting sensitivity see also social competence
parent-child interactions, 1, 18–19, social class, 8– 39, 43–68, 108, 125,
23–4, 29–30, 113, 122, 150 127, 143–7, 156–7, 180, 186, 188,
parenting determinism, 14, 66, 123, 193, 195, 197, 206
150, 161–2 social contract, 111, 203
parenting doctrine, 2 social competence, 23–8
parenting sensitivity, 21 social ecology, 5– 6, 18, 24, 115
perfect motherhood, 179 social exclusion, 72, 75–81, 105, 126,
plasticity, 94–5 130, 139, 177
Index 241
social inclusion, 72, 79, 81, 85, 105, structural inequality, 1, 12, 46–7,
112, 118, 130–1, 171, 184 51–3, 106, 112, 123–6, 145,
social institutions, 92 156–9, 174, 188, 195
social justice, 9, 86, 126–7, 131, Sure Start, 75
137–8, 184, 191, 198, 204 synaptogenesis, 93–4
social mobility, 3, 8–15, 33–6, 43–6, systemic constraints, 12, 72, 80, 111,
72–3, 83–8, 130–6, 151, 153, 162, 138, 172–3
196–8 systemic influences, 53
social networks, 31, 45, 52, 101, 130,
154, 173, 195 tax policies, 4, 46
social policy, 2, 5, 14, 21, 44–5, 122–3, therapeutic culture, 60, 62, 155,
129, 157, 162, 182 194
‘troubled families’, 3, 163
social renewal, 11, 140, 149
societal polarisation, 13, 54, 119, 154,
unpaid care work, 13, 176–9, 183–6
161
socio-economic background, 44, 50,
valued functionings, 166, 173–4,
155, 197
181–3
socio-economic factors, 5, 17, 19, 27, volunteerism, 12
32–8, 40–2, 51, 97, 127 vulnerability, 125, 133–6, 172–6,
see also socio-economic background 191
soft totalitarianism, 171
strengths and difficulties Washington Consensus, 122
questionnaire, 26 welfare state, 11–14, 65–6, 120, 125,
structural constraints, 45, 73, 86, 102, 138, 140, 160, 176–8, 186
108, 166–8, 173, 193 ‘what works’, 91, 104, 107, 146,
see also systemic constraints 160–3, 171

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PALGRAVE

Graham Allan, Graham Crow and Sheila Hawker

Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life

Transferred to Digital Printing in 2014

Series Editors’ Preface vii

Part I The Early Home Environment in an Unequal

2 Parents’ Social Class Still Matters . . . 36

3 Parenting in an Unequal Society 48

Part II Neoliberal Family Policy: Early Intervention

5 Critical Reﬂections on Early Intervention 90

6 Neoliberalism and Family Policy in Britain 121

Part III Parenting, Culture Wars and Civic Renewal

8 Family Policy and the Capability Approach to Parents’

9 A New Paradigm for Family Policy: Civic Education,

list of inﬂuential research-based texts, thereby contributing to existing

Graham Allan, Lynn Jamieson and David Morgan

This book was written at a time marked by unprecedented changes in

Ellen Key, a Swedish reformer, proclaimed the 20th century to be the

The parenting doctrine

On both sides of the Atlantic, parents have been given dispropor-

I will be arguing in the report that there are other circumstances

As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, the discourses on

an inﬂuence that cannot be left to chance. As the term ‘parenting’

individual solutions to be enacted through income redistribution and

In considering key debates in social policy at the start of this century,

About this book

The research basis of the book

within which parents support their children were examined. To this

characteristics, home learning environment and socio-economic back-

What this research challenges

poverty’ (as stated in the Daily Telegraph, 19 August 2010). Current

Current family policy seems to entertain a socially accepted yet

The book challenges anti-humanist views of children and parents as

engenders. Parents matter (although such statement is irrelevant when it

The political and social backdrop of this book

societal ills, factors proximal to children’s lives have gained prominence

and structural inequalities in people’s lives. Whether we set new goal-

The structure of this book

We can no longer argue that we live in a classless society, especially as

The Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) was commissioned by the Eco-

alone is not sufﬁcient to understand children’s experiences of grow-

Researchers in child development and other related disciplines have

Home learning and child outcomes

And if parents’ involvement matters in this way, what kinds of home

home learning referred to parental support with emergent literacy (i.e.

with enrichment activities and homework were not found to be signif-

rated by their teachers. For teachers, parental education and homework

Parent–child interactions and child outcomes

The quality of parents’ interactions with their children (e.g. parental

platform to moderate emotional responses and associated behaviours

of ﬁve-year-olds’ behaviour and seven-year-olds’ language and literacy

entry (Campbell 2000; Keenan and Wakchhlag, 2000). This suggests

Parental behaviour and aspirations and child outcomes

In models of parenting, parental behaviours with regard to reading

emerged when the effects of maternal reading habits on seven-year-olds’

is unambiguous: if we give them that kind of attention and support

Since 1997, major anti-poverty policy initiatives have been introduced

they relate to increases in human and intellectual capabilities (Hoff

Parents’ socio-economic status and child language and

Lochner, 2005). While the size of the socio-economic impact on

seven) to investigate the size of the socio-economic impact at different

engaging in conversations, reading books and teaching school-related

be augmented by initiatives that support families as a whole to reduce