Parenting as contested practice between experts, audiences, and selves: An introduction

Interrogating what constitutes “good parenting” captures and reflects multiple debates within and across different societies, milieus, and power constellations. In this Special Issue, Contested Parenting. Experts, Audiences, Selves, we bring together seven articles and a commentary that tackle how people move through the labyrinth of diverse knowledge formations and when they reproduce themselves as “good” via their own considerations of parenting models. This introduction advocates for understanding parenting as the encounter between at least three groups of actors: first, the parents themselves, who work with their own parenting imaginations while also addressing the expectations and role ascriptions of “ideal types” of personhood; second, the experts—professional or self-ascribed—who represent a central authority on how to observe, comment, and, if necessary, intervene; and finally, audiences, including not only (other) parents and experts but also in-laws, neighbors, and any onlooking member of an imagined community that apparently observes and judges whether parenting is done in the right, the good, and the appropriate ways. This three-fold perspective sees this introduction concentrate on classed, gendered, and racialized parenting imaginaries by exploring the subjectification of parents in and through the idea and the practice of raising—or not raising—children.