Labour’s nannying will undermine families
New book shows how the rise of experts has weakened the authority of parents
A new edition of Parenting Culture Studies shows that, far from being ‘common sense’, Labour’s thirst for nannying will cause far more problems than it solves.
With opinion polls pointing to a decisive Labour victory, we need to take the party’s policies seriously. Keir Starmer’s top team rarely gives much away but, earlier this month, they alighted on something to rally behind: the importance of dental hygiene. The Labour leader wants school children trained in how to wield a toothbrush.
Starmer and his Shadow Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, think that Britain’s children are overweight, unhealthy, unhappy, stunted and toothless. In response, Labour’s Child Health Action Plan proposes toothbrushing classes, more child mental health counsellors, breakfast clubs, a ban on flavoured-vapes and a national register of children not in school. Under the guise of ‘health’, a Labour government would go further than ever before in taking responsibility for children’s upbringing. ‘I’m up for a fight over nanny state accusations,’ declared Sir Keir, who clearly thinks a Labour government must substitute for feckless grandmas. When it comes to obesity or tooth decay in children, he added, ‘for a government to say “well that’s none of our business,” I just think is fundamentally wrong’.
But Starmer is tilting at windmills. What’s notable is how few critics have provided this challenge. Rather than championing the importance of parental responsibility and family privacy, the current government has pointed out that it is already providing ‘toolkits’ for toothbrushing instruction and funding for breakfast clubs. Others suggested that far from unwarranted interference, Labour’s proposals did not go far enough. Toothbrushing lessons are all well and good, quizzed one BBC interviewer, but surely they will be ineffective without a sugar tax to boot.
Lack of opposition has not quelled Starmer’s bluster: ‘If anyone wants to fight me on this question of the nanny state or common sense – bring it on.’ Until very recently, overt accusations of ‘nannying’ were seen as something to avoid. Of course, policies designed to nudge our behaviour and shape the way we raise our children have been around for decades, but ‘nannying’ was considered too bossy. The argument that parents were incompetent was not considered a vote winner. This taboo has, it seems, now been busted. Starmer is not only proud to own the nanny tag, he elides it with ‘common sense’. So, what has changed?
It is not the case that children’s health is worse than ever before. As Christopher Snowdon pointed out on Spiked, British children are taller than ever, have better teeth than ever and – when it comes to weight – are pretty average compared with children in other countries. It is not children that have changed then, but adults. And it is not our health that has deteriorated but our sense that parents know what’s best for their own children.
The rise of parenting
A timely new edition of Parenting Culture Studies is vital reading for anyone wanting to understand how raising children has moved from being ‘none of the government’s business’ to a central concern of policy makers. Authors Ellie Lee, Jennie Bristow, Charlotte Faircloth and Jan Macvarish have updated their 2013 book to trace the continuing demise of the sanctity of family life and the replacement of parental authority with the tyranny of parenting experts.
They argue that the whole notion of ‘parenting’ is a relatively recent invention. Prior to the 1970s, bringing up children was less a distinct practice performed by specfic individuals but an everyday part of community and family life. Parenting emerged as families became smaller and home life more privatised. Yet, from the outset, this shift from being a parent to doing parenting was ‘associated with the view that parent–child relationships are problematic or deficient’. Rather than being seen as something mothers and fathers do naturally or instinctively, parenting became problematised as an activity requiring a particular set of skills which was best ‘conducted under the watchful gaze of experts’.
Unlike the authors of most other books on parenting, Lee et al do not tell parents how they should bring up their children. They do not dish out advice to mothers already struggling under a weight of worthy tomes. Instead, they interrogate the broader culture that shapes family life today. They describe this as,
the more or less formalized rules and codes of conduct that have emerged over recent years which reflect this deterministic view of parents and define expectations about how a parent should raise their child.
Today’s parenting culture, they contend, ‘is broadly one that is child-centred, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labour intensive, and financially expensive’. This places an exacting toll on mums and dads. Yet failure is judged harshly. As Starmer’s endorsement of the nanny state makes clear, a ‘parenting deficit’ will not be tolerated.
Parental determinism
As Lee et al explore, the notion of ‘parenting’ as something that can be taught, practiced and monitored was embraced by psychologists, social workers and policy makers as a response to a growing belief in ‘parental determinism’. This ‘construes the everyday activities of parents as directly and causally associated with ‘failing’ or harming children, and so the wider society’. As they point out:
The dominant message communicated to mothers and fathers is that the health, welfare, and success (or lack of it) of their children can be directly attributed to the decisions they make about matters like feeding their children.
Parents are told that doing the ‘wrong’ thing could have lifelong consequences for their child. And yet, other than in the most serious cases of abuse, the existence of a direct, causal relationship between parents’ actions and a child’s future prospects defies reality. It denies social and economic circumstances and our capacity to steer our own life course. Children are not raised in laboratories and families do not exist in a vacuum. For this reason, parenting can never be an exact science: it will always be a cultural practice.
Parental determinism, then, has become accepted not because it has been proven to be true, but because parents fear it might be true. Your child might not end up failing their GCSEs if you give up breastfeeding, but why take the risk? Your child might not suffer Fetal Alcohol Syndrome if you sip the odd glass of wine while pregnant but, again, why take that chance? Add to this the risk of being shamed by those more diligent and being a parent becomes fraught with anxiety.
Risks everywhere
Parenting Culture Studies considers why risk has become ever-present for parents and even parents-to-be. It is there in decisions about drinking alcohol in pregnancy and infant feeding, in discussions about the role of fathers and men in childcare settings, and in concerns about ‘strangers’ and adults outside of the immediate family. It reaches its climax in the view that parents themselves pose a risk to their own children. It is not just that we have a more expansive sense of risk nowadays, but our response to risk has shifted too. We no longer accept risk as an inevitable part of life, or see facing potential danger as an opportunity for growth, instead, risk must be avoided at all costs.
In this way, managing risks on behalf of their child becomes central to a parent’s role. As Lee et al explain: ‘parents are, in effect, seen as risk-managers, tasked with optimizing their children’s outcomes in conjunction with expert advice.’ This has led, they argue, to a new morality of family life, ‘which has “keeping us safe” as its prime value’. Yet this imperative exposes some of the key problems with today’s parenting culture. A heightened awareness of risks posed by others leads to ‘the wider breakdown of adult solidarity’ that ‘fuels the imperative of risk-aversion.’ And the awareness that parents themselves pose a risk to their children robs mothers and fathers of the confidence they need to be authoritative parents. The only winners are the ‘parenting experts’.
The rise of the experts
The problematising of parents goes hand in hand with the rise of the parenting experts. As Ellie Lee explores, both have a long history. As early as the nineteenth century, self-declared experts were beginning to challenge the idea that parents had an instinctive sense of how best to care for their children. There was concern that, left to their own devices, loving mothers would indulge their children. There were concerted efforts ‘to educate and influence the mother and make her ‘instinct’ secondary to their ‘science’’. Experts assumed that moulding model citizens required ‘the displacement of folk knowledge by scientific insight.’
Since this time, the parenting ‘rules’ have changed so often they seem to come full circle. Yet the experts continue to reinvent themselves and declare new sources of authority. By the middle of the twentieth century, ‘attachment’ became a key concern with psychologists such as John Bowlby advising how best to promote secure attachment between mother and child. Such ideas continue to be influential.
Despite this lengthy history, it is only really in the past two decades that parenting experts have become household names and that their ‘theories’, formalised into parenting classes, have been promoted by policy makers as the solution to everything from childhood obesity to poor academic attainment. At the same time, the targeting of expertise has shifted from ‘problem’ families to all mothers and fathers. Lee points to the ‘increasingly consensual assumption that all parents benefit from parent training and parenting support.’
The upshot, as Parenting Culture Studies explores, is a far more ‘intensive’ approach to raising children, involving vast amounts of time, energy, and money, as well as deference to carefully selected self-styled gurus. As Lee et al point out, this intensive parenting is ‘certainly not followed in practice by every mother’ but the prevalence of expert guidance comes to be ‘implicitly or explicitly, understood as the proper approach to the raising of a child by the majority of mothers’. This means that even though parents frequently ‘break the rules’, for example, by switching to formula feeding, using technology to pacify toddlers or ignoring bed times, they do so self-consciously. Awareness of an expert-approved approach to raising children is now pervasive.
Elsewhere this month I read Education for Democracy, a compilation of essays by writers including Basil Bernstein and Raymond Williams, edited by David Rubinstein and Colin Stoneman. This book was published in 1970 and many of the chapters reflect the concerns of that time: the move away from academic selection and notions of inherent intelligence towards a more progressive and child-centred approach to education. There are arguments against streaming by ability and for comprehensive schools. Two things are interesting fifty years on. First, how so many of the claims we hear repeated today stretch back to this time. Authors contend that tests are harm a child’s self-esteem, facts are easily accessible so shouldn’t have to be learnt, subjects are a barriers to intellectual curiosity and the real purpose of schools should be ‘learning to learn’. Truly, the educational rot is longstanding.
The second point that struck me is something far less discussed today: class. Every single chapter of this book talks about the educational disadvantage faced by working class pupils. The aim of every author is to improve the life chances of working class pupils. I would argue they reach the wrong conclusions - but what’s notable is how little class seems to be a concern for teachers today. It seems to have largely been superseded by gender and race. It made me wonder how schools might be different today if the concerns and experiences of working class boys in particular were afforded as much interest as half a century ago.
I also read and enjoyed The Accountability Deficit by Molly Kingsley, Arabella Skinner and Ben Kingsley. It’s tempting to forget the horrors of Covid lockdown but this book is a reminder not just of the insane measures we subjected children to during this period but also the fact that democracy effectively shut down for two years. The MPs who should have been scrutinizing legislation that took away our freedoms packed up shop, encouraged to leave a tiny cabal to get on with it. The Accountability Deficit reminds us why politicians must never be allowed to get away with this again.
Finally - fiction. An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge was a tricky read. By the end, I enjoyed it enormously. But the main character, Stella, seems to get lost in the chaos of the early chapters. The story unfolds in a slum part of Liverpool in the aftermath of World War Two. Having just left school, 16-year-old Stella joins a theatre company as an assistant stage manager and finds herself thrust into the adult world. It’s another reminder of how much things have changed - not just since the early 1950s when the book is set, but since 1990 when this book was published. Some of Stella’s experiences would be labelled abuse today, but they are narrated with a complete lack of sentimentality. And yet again it is great to see working class characters taking centre stage, not as victims, or comic relief, but fully-rounded people with cultural interests that include classic works of drama.