Читать книгу The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Social Development - Группа авторов - Страница 94

Over the last two decades, family policy in the United Kingdom and other countries in the global north (e.g., United States, Canada, France) has taken a psychosocial, interventionist turn whereby parents and children’s social experiences are to follow predetermined paths calculated along how intensely parents care for their children, the quality of the emotional bonds and attachments they form, how often they engage with learning and other enrichment activities, and the support they offer for the development of language and social skills. Increasingly, child socialization is constrained within the private sphere of the family, within interpersonal relationships between parents and children that are managed through early intervention and risk‐reduction programs, especially designed for the “troubled” families. In this context, socialization has become a vehicle for social policy intervention, adopting an instrumental focus that alters the values that underpin socialization such as mutual obligation and ethics of care, with inequality being understood as a manifestation of bad parenting.

These shifts mean that a key focus in child socialization is to prepare children to function and capitalize in postindustrial economic contexts. Child socialization is rationalized in ways that promote new forms of self‐governance assisted by the tools of the “responsible” parent and family risk management through early intervention. Children and young people, especially those in poverty, are seen as either vulnerable or dangerous, with risk being directed at them or them posing risks to others; they are not seen as active agents but in need for remodeling. Parents are encouraged to approach child rearing and socialization as a cost/benefit exercise, a process of maximizing future investment to ensure their children function effectively as economic subjects. As such the focus of family policy in postindustrial societies is more on parents’ and children’s behavior, lifestyle, values, and beliefs and less on structural inequality, disadvantage, and social justice, considering “individual characteristics and dispositions as pathways to the social advancement” (Hartas, 2014, p. 5). We witness what Rose coined as “etho‐politics” which is about harnessing character as a tool for social and political transformation through calculating efficiencies and socializing children as resources and future investment outcomes. Etho‐politics exert a significant impact on child socialization through the micromanagement of family intimate life (e.g., how many fruits per day children eat; how often parents read to their children and play with them; whether they experience attachment problems) to ensure that their behavior, character, and values align to the market. Ultimately, “objectification and instrumentalization” reshape the family’s social and emotional dynamics and the parents interactions with children.

Intensive parenting in the global north has changed child socialization patterns in that some parents are expected to expend time and energy and follow family experts’ advice on how to raise and socialize their children. A growing number of studies and social commentators have questioned the benefits of intensive parenting (Marano, 2004; Sandel, 2004) in terms of whether it is conducive to supporting children to develop agency and a healthy self‐esteem (one that emanates from accomplishment), social skills tested through peer interactions, and emotional resilience. Children in families who exercise intensive parenting have been observed to be trained “in the rule of the game” in how they and their parents interact with schools and professionals. Children tend to socialize with peers unsupervised by adults less often and feel confident to shift interactions to “suit their preferences,” finding it difficult to self‐organize and decide what activities to engage in without adult structure and monitoring, requiring attention from adults and being less keen on “hanging out with adults in a non‐obtrusive, subordinate fashion” (Lareau, 2003, p. 6).

Parents are held responsible for creating “rich” early years environments by pursuing early‐learning strategies, accessing enrichment activities and expressing high educational aspirations to reduce the achievement gap (Hartas, 2011, 2012). This is likely to instrumentalize the expression of love and care for children with parents being held responsible for “attachment issues,” for not talking to their children enough to increase their vocabularies, or not maintaining eye contact and engaging in play‐based learning with their children (Macvarish, 2014). Intensive parenting undermines child development and socialization because it places children under scrutiny resulting in them becoming more self‐conscious and less likely to engage in trial and error during educational and social exchanges. As such, children become less likely to experiment and learn from failure and figure out things for themselves; instead they are encouraged to live their life as a project of continuous self‐improvement. In contrast, children in families that practice less intensive parenting spend more time in activities they initiate and interacting with peers and family members, having opportunities to develop empathy (Lareau, 2003).

These socialization differences reflect social class differences whereby intensive parenting is more likely to be middle‐class parenting. They also reflect a turn towards social determinism. Child socialization is increasingly informed by neuroscientific views, including neuromyths, about the plasticity of children’s brain and the power of parenting in modifying children’s brains through “good” parenting, harnessing the “epigenetic potentialities of parenting” (Gillies et al., 2016, p. 228). Mass surveillance and biometric marking of populations are already happening (e.g., schools routinely collect biometric data from children) but, for children living in poverty, the “biopolitics of life” reinforce individual value of a particular kind and push towards certain types of socialization (Gillies et al., 2016, p. 229).

The necessity of cultivating and augmenting child developmental outcomes through “optimal” socialization substitutes discussions about the social context of families and conflates poverty and disadvantage with bad parenting and child socialization practices. For children being raised in inadequate housing with food insecurity, parents who “fail” to provide optimal socialization to maximize their children’s future are blamed as bad parents while the structural conditions that mostly determine children’s socialization and life chances are largely left unchallenged.

Intensive parenting and the creation of the “responsible” parent are driven by the neoliberal project. As Sandel (2004) argued, intensive parenting is a Promethean act in seeking to enhance children’s social, cognitive, and emotional capabilities, offering fewer opportunities for human sympathies, care, and relationships. Parental love is a balancing act between accepting and transforming love, with the former affirming the child’s selfhood and the latter supporting children to change, shaping children’s life. Although to balance accepting and transforming love is not easy, in the context of intensive parenting, transforming children’s life chances becomes a key goal. By putting much effort and intensity in achieving the perfect conditions for their children’s socialization, parents are less likely to promote social change to tackle inequality and benefit family life in general. Instead, a form of social determinism is promoted that comes “disturbingly close to eugenics” (Sandel, 2004, p. 7), with parenting rather than genes determining child socialization and life chances.