Rights, Needs and Duties

Abstract

Our main concern in this book is to show how the parent-child relationship, the importance of which is universally acknowledged, has been claimed by certain languages and forms of reasoning, to the extent that it has become difficult to find other ways of talking about it and exploring its significance, at both an individual and a societal level. There is, in fact, an intentional ambiguity in the title The claims of parenting. First of all, this is meant to capture the idea that parents today have various claims made on them in the sense that they are expected to perform in certain ways and to achieve certain outcomes. Moreover, and connectedly, there are the various claims, in the public domain, about parents and parenting. And finally, there are the claims of parenthood, in the sense of what it is that parenthood demands of us when we come to see it as a human activity in a rich ethical sense of the word. Importantly, this ambiguity is reflected not just in our conceptual distinctions but in our lived experiences, where, as we discuss throughout the book, these very distinctions can often become blurred in the sense that the claims that are made about and on parents can eventually become claims that are made by parents themselves, as parents gradually come to see themselves in the ways implied in the predominant languages of ‘parenting’.