Constructions of Parents and Languages of Parenting

Abstract

{\dq}In the UK and Europe, home-school collaboration, as several theorists have noted, is ``regarded as an essential requirement for the social and intellectual development of children [and] parents are expected to be extensively involved in their children's schooling'' 1 . The recent UK policy document ``Every Parent Matters,''2 outlines the way in which the government can ``enable parents to play a full and positive part in their children's learning and development'', and promotes the use of ``home-school agreements'' that outline parents' responsibilities towards their child's schooling, through for example ensuring that they complete their homework on time. Annette Lareau has documented a similar trend in the US, which she captures in the insight that ``parents are no longer merely expected to give their children love, intimacy and security and to safeguard their physical health and development'', but are expected to ``stimulate and take responsibility for the intellectual development of their children''.3{\dq} {\dq}While Lareau, in this quote, is identifying two contrasting approaches, and has developed an important account of the social and cultural context in which they operate4 , my concern here is the increasing tendency, in both policy and popular literature, to talk about parenting in terms of ``jobs'' or ``roles''. Both ``providing love, intimacy and security'', and ``stimulating intellectual development'', when conceived in these terms, constrict our way of thinking about parents and, I argue, fail to capture the ethical and conceptual complexity of the parent-child relationship. Amongst other things, there is a sense, I suggest, in which this relationship is educational. Yet it is so not in the sense in which ``education'' is used in most literature on parents. Indeed, the dominance of the logic and language of schooling has contributed to the difficulty in articulating a different, philosophically richer understanding of being a parent. In the following discussion, I explore some problems with the current discourse on parenting and suggest some tentative steps towards developing a different language in which to talk about the parentchild relationship and particularly its educational significance.{\dq} {\dq}Sociologists enquiring into ``home-school relations'' have researched the ways in which children negotiate the boundaries between the home and the school5 . They have shown how these relations cannot be simplistically defined but are influenced by a complex intertwining of factors such as class, age, gender and ethnicity. At the same time, they argue that the official, public discourse of the school has come increasingly to interfere in the sphere of the home. Other theorists have gone even farther in this critique, talking about the ``curricularization'' of ``non-school activities of childhood'' 6 - a phenomenon that they attribute to the growing trend of home-school collaboration. What I wish to explore here is the idea that not only is there a kind of activity that goes on within the home that can be regarded as having educational value (Alldred, for example7 , about ethnic and religious practices); but that parents' interaction with their children is already educational. It is hard to capture the sense in which this is so because the language and logic of public education - i.e. schooling - affects the way we think about education. Indeed, the term ``education'' is often conflated with ``schooling'' in both policy and academic literature – even by those critical of the current policy trends. Thus, Gillies8 states that ``involvement in a child's education is viewed as a key parental responsibility. What she actually means is ``involvement in a child's schooling'', but the implication that ``education'' is what happens outside the home distracts our attention from the fact that parents are already, by virtue of being parents, facing questions, dilemmas and situations, in their daily interaction with their children, that are educational in the sense that they involve a deep concern with the kind of person their child will become. Yet the conceptual and ethical complexity of this interaction is, I suggest, occluded by the restrictive way in which parents are described in both policy discourse and popular literature on parenting. All of this is no doubt true, but what I want to focus on here is not this conflict between the effects of schooling and the aims of public education, but the conflict between the official discourse on ``parenting'' and an alternative, possibly richer understanding of what it means to be a parent.10 Policy discourse on parents in the UK, while making much of the point that parents are responsible for their children's development into flourishing adults, at the same time clearly implies that ``education'' is what goes on at school. Parents, in the language running through the official documents, are to ``support their children's education'' by being adjuncts to the aims of education determined at the national level and implemented by public schooling. (The same assumption lies behind toys marketed with the label ``Supports the National Curriculum''). The tensions described above reveal the inadequacy of any simple requirement on parents to ``support'' their children's schooling. Indeed, researchers from several fields have identified significant problems with this policy trend. For example, sociologists have addressed the construction of a ``good parent'' that lies behind the home-school partnership discourse11 , and the gendered and classed aspects of such a construction. Indeed, as the above example shows, my acting as the kind of parent who can sit down with my son, understand his homework, and engage with it (never mind ask meta-philosophical questions about the situation), reflects my embeddedness within a particular socio-economic and cultural context.{\dq} {\dq}what this example shows is that the policy language is inadequate not only because it reflects problematic social and cultural assumptions about what constitutes a ``good parent''. Nor is the problem that this discourse represents an intrusion of state control into the private world of the home. This seems to be the gist of the critique suggested by researchers like Hallam12 , who points out that often homework, apart from having dubious educational benefit, can have a destructive effect on the relationship between parents and children, generating conflicts and tension. The implication here is that the parent-child relationship, conceived as something other than educational - a realm perhaps more appropriately described in terms of trust, love and intimacy - is somehow contaminated by the demand on the parent to act as an ``educator''. A similar image is suggested Vincent and Tomlinson's critique in their informative review of home-school relations where they argue that the ``soft'' rhetoric of partnership that dominates at school level ``acts to conceal a continuing professional concern to control the manner and degree of parental involvement''. As they point out, this is developing into an ``overt, harder-edged attempt to direct family life and the behaviour of children and their parents. [...] In effect, the parent is coopted to help achieve the purposes and resolve the problems of the school without any real participation in the definition and diagnosis of those purposes and problems''. Yet attempting to achieve a more genuine and greater involvement of parents in discussion about the public aims of schooling does not address the complexity at the heart of being a parent. Even a parent who had participated significantly in the running of their child's school may find themselves in dilemmas (such as the above) over how to act as a parent. What I want to argue is that such dilemmas are educational in the sense that the parent-child relationship is already saturated with educational, ethical and philosophical questions: questions about how to live well, what values to defend and why, and what it means to care about and influence the kind of person another human being will become. We have a language in which to talk about education in the public realm: a language of aims, value, roles and objectives. But is there not another way we can talk of education, and in which we can conceive parenting as itself an educational act in the sense suggested here? {\dq} {\dq}And Kristjansson offers some examples of cases where children may experience anger in a school setting, for example in feeling discriminated against by the teacher. In doing so, he warns against ``overintellectualizing, by tearing the cognitive part of character regulation away from its affective and social fabric''17 Yet clearly the ``affective and social fabric'' experienced within the school is of a very particular and, in a sense artificially restricted type. Were we to place this enquiry within the fabric of the home, we may come up with very different insights. {\dq}Interestingly, Alldred et al, in their studies of the way children understand and negotiate the boundaries between school-life and home-life, describe how, for the many children interviewed, home, in contrast to the school, was perceived as a space associated with both intimacy and freedom from restraint18 . Strikingly, they mention not just freedom in relation to activities like eating and watching television, but to do with getting angry. And surely in the context of a family, where the child has been part of a network of intimate relationships from birth, questions about anger, its ethical significance, its justification and its role within one's life and character take on a very different dimension from that suggested by the school context. Yet Kristjansson does not mention the home at all and, in fact, assumes that the ``we'' in the title question ``Can We Teach Justified Anger?'' is the public ``we'' of policy makers, curriculum planners and teachers. Surely, though, the fa