Contested parenting and its affective economies: A commentary

Abstract

In stringing together the fine-grained ethnographic studies that comprise this special issue of Ethos, “Contested Parenting. Experts, Audiences, Selves,” our commentary is designed to go beyond the micro-setting of daily routines to the emotional entanglements of family relationships within wider economic and political networks. Calling on the notion of affective economies, we examine how, in the present-day “parenting culture,” racial and class inequalities mediate not only expert intervention and policy objectives, but the moral and emotional foundations of parental selves. Comparing widely diverse settings—from New York mothers of the cosmopolitan elite to working-class dads in the Caribbean, from African-based ex-pats engaged in the international aid industry to Vietnamese immigrants in Berlin, it becomes clear that, as we descend the socioeconomic ladder, parental anxieties are retooled and compounded by the accusatory gaze of surrounding audiences. Failing to see today's parenting culture as a contextually-circumscribed ideal, government policies tend to isolate its component parts in universal principles of good practice, propagating a myopic moralism that exacerbates feelings of frustration, humiliation, and burn-out among families and professionals caught in the cross fire of historically-shaped structures of inequality and discrimination.