The Problem with Parenting: How Raising Children Is Changing Across America
The Problem with Parenting serves as an essential guide to the recent origins and current excesses of American parenting for students, parents, and policy makers interested in the changing role of the family in childrearing.

Family scholarship focuses predominately on the evolution of family structure and function, with only passing references to parenting. Researchers who study parenting, however, invariably regard it as a sociological phenomenon with complex motivations rooted in such factors as class, economic instability, and new technologies.

This book examines the relationship between changes to the family and the emergence of parenting, defined here as a specific mode of childrearing. It shows how, beginning in the 1970s, the family was transformed from a social unit that functioned as the primary institution for raising children into a vehicle for the nurturing and fulfillment of the self. The book pays special attention to socialization and describes how the change in our understanding of parenthood—from a state of being into the distinct activity of "parenting"—is indicative of a disruption of our ability to transfer key cultural values and norms from one generation to the next.

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The Problem with Parenting: How Raising Children Is Changing Across America
The Problem with Parenting serves as an essential guide to the recent origins and current excesses of American parenting for students, parents, and policy makers interested in the changing role of the family in childrearing.

Family scholarship focuses predominately on the evolution of family structure and function, with only passing references to parenting. Researchers who study parenting, however, invariably regard it as a sociological phenomenon with complex motivations rooted in such factors as class, economic instability, and new technologies.

This book examines the relationship between changes to the family and the emergence of parenting, defined here as a specific mode of childrearing. It shows how, beginning in the 1970s, the family was transformed from a social unit that functioned as the primary institution for raising children into a vehicle for the nurturing and fulfillment of the self. The book pays special attention to socialization and describes how the change in our understanding of parenthood—from a state of being into the distinct activity of "parenting"—is indicative of a disruption of our ability to transfer key cultural values and norms from one generation to the next.

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The Problem with Parenting: How Raising Children Is Changing Across America

The Problem with Parenting: How Raising Children Is Changing Across America

by Nancy A. McDermott
The Problem with Parenting: How Raising Children Is Changing Across America

The Problem with Parenting: How Raising Children Is Changing Across America

by Nancy A. McDermott

Hardcover

$65.00 
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Overview

The Problem with Parenting serves as an essential guide to the recent origins and current excesses of American parenting for students, parents, and policy makers interested in the changing role of the family in childrearing.

Family scholarship focuses predominately on the evolution of family structure and function, with only passing references to parenting. Researchers who study parenting, however, invariably regard it as a sociological phenomenon with complex motivations rooted in such factors as class, economic instability, and new technologies.

This book examines the relationship between changes to the family and the emergence of parenting, defined here as a specific mode of childrearing. It shows how, beginning in the 1970s, the family was transformed from a social unit that functioned as the primary institution for raising children into a vehicle for the nurturing and fulfillment of the self. The book pays special attention to socialization and describes how the change in our understanding of parenthood—from a state of being into the distinct activity of "parenting"—is indicative of a disruption of our ability to transfer key cultural values and norms from one generation to the next.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781440853180
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date: 08/24/2020
Pages: 208
Product dimensions: 6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Nancy A. McDermott is an independent writer and researcher and an affiliate of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Part 1 What Is Parenting Culture?

Chapter 1 Why Parenting Is Different 3

Chapter 2 Parenting's Anti-Social Socialization 19

Chapter 3 The End of Child-Centered Families 43

Chapter 4 The New Rules of Parenting Culture 54

Part 2 Essays on Parenting Culture

Chapter 5 Parenting before Parenthood: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the Transformation of Pregnancy 69

Chapter 6 Infant Feeding and the Reconstruction of Motherhood: The Cost of Breastfeeding Orthodoxy 91

Chapter 7 Gender Neutral Parenting's Fight against Social Norms 113

Chapter 8 Helicopter Parents versus Free-Range Kids 129

Conclusion: Solving the Problem with Parenting 152

Bibliography 165

Index 181

What People are Saying About This

Frank Furedi

"This is a fascinating exploration of one of the principal problems of our time—the failure of adult society to socialize its young. McDermott offers an excellent case for the urgency of tackling this problem."

Professor Ellie Lee

"Nancy McDermott has produced a book that breaks new ground in our understanding of the family and of parenting culture. Its account of adulthood and what it needs to mean is compelling, breaking away from both parent-blaming and the underestimation of the importance of what parents do, and need to do, as the adults in the room."

Susan Fox

"Nancy McDermott shows us how modern day parenting hinders children’s socialization by focusing too narrowly on children’s sense of themselves instead of their connections with and obligations to the wider world. She argues that to raise socially responsible adults we need to show our children that they are an integral part of the universe—just not at its center."

Lenore Skenazy

"Nancy McDermott is my go-to thinker when I can't understand why parents—or kids, or entire civilizations—are acting so strange. She doesn't just have her finger on the pulse of society, she's there in the bloodstream, giving live reports. What a treasure!"

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