The Scientisation of the Parent-Child Relationship

Stefan Ramaekers; Judith Suissa

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The Scientisation of the Parent-Child Relationship

In: Negotiating Childhoods

Authors:

Stefan Ramaekers

Stefan Ramaekers
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Judith Suissa

Judith Suissa
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 179–187

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848880467_019

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Recent policy initiatives in the UK and mainland Europe reflect a growing acceptance of the need for some form of ‘parenting support’. As several commentators and researchers have noted, behind these accounts is an increasingly prescriptive account of ‘good parenting’ aimed at ameliorating social, emotional and developmental problems. In this paper, we address the ways in which this dominant language of ‘parenting’ defines and restricts how we conceptualise and talk about the parent-child relationship, and how parents are expected to understand and relate to their children. Specifically, we address the sense in which particular theoretical frameworks, primarily from the field of developmental psychology, have become normative. We can describe this phenomenon as ‘the scientisation of parenting’; a phenomenon captured in the way in which theoretical constructs such as ‘attachment’, which are often embedded in a complex and contested background of evaluative assumptions, become part of our every-day language about ‘parenting’, and act as universal categories by which to assess the quality of particular relationships between parents and children, children’s behaviour, or the appropriateness of parental choices and actions.

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Negotiating Childhoods

E-Book ISBN:: 9781848880467

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 08 May 2010

Subjects
- Philosophy
  - General
- Social Sciences
  - Cultural Studies
  - Youth & Adolescence

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The Scientisation of the Parent-Child Relationship

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Negotiating Childhoods

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