About us

The Centre for Parenting Culture Studies (CPCS) was founded in the School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Research at the University of Kent. The idea for the Centre first emerged at a conference Monitoring Parents: Childrearing in the age of ‘intensive parenting’ held at the University of Kent in 2007, and we have carried on our collaborations since then.

CPCS associates work in different disciplines but our common view is that child-rearing as a social activity needs to be distinguished from ‘parenting’ and the culture that surrounds it. One of the achievements of our network has been to establish the study of ‘parenting culture’ as an important enterprise in its own right and we seek to explore and illuminate the dimensions and problems of this culture.

Through our work we show how the role and meaning of parenthood has changed; child-rearing has expanded to encompass a growing range of activities that were not previously seen as an obligatory dimension of this task. We have identified this trend as exercising a decisive impact on the constitution of mothering and fathering identities and the relationship amongst parents. How mothers and fathers manage and perform these identities is one a theme running through our work. The expansion of the child-rearing role has also encouraged the belief that ‘parenting’ is a problematic sphere of social life. Indeed, ‘parenting’ is almost always discussed as a social problem. Many social actors have sought in this context to turn child-rearing into an object of policy making, encouraging the emergence of the activity ‘parenting’. The causes and effects of this policy turn is another central area of our research.

Read an article about the beginnings of CPCS or this feature in Kent Magazine You can also watch some films of us during the early years of the Centre here and also discussing key themes in intensive parenting here 

Some key themes and areas for our research and discussions are:

  • The medicalisation of parenthood and the professionalisation of everyday life
  • Risk consciousness and parenting culture
  • Gender and parenting: the ‘intensification’ of fatherhood
  • The management of emotion and the sacralisation of ‘bonding’
  • The politics of parenting culture
  • The policing of pregnancy (including diet, alcohol consumption, smoking)
  • Reproductive choices (including contraceptive use, family size)
  • The moralisation of infant feeding (including breast and formula feeding, weaning)
  • The experience of the culture of advice / ‘parenting support’

Our Story

Organising collaborative events has formed a focus for our work. We were delighted to win funding from the Economic and Social Research Council for a seminar series ‘Changing Parenting Culture’ that ran through 2009 and 2010. Since then, we have continued to bring people together through a large number of international, local and online events. These activities and many of the discussions at them have been archived as we have gone along.  Highlights have been:

We have published special issues and collections and books. Palgrave published Parenting Culture Studies in 2014, with an updated second edition in 2023. Key themes in that book have been developed in subsequent monographs including by Jan Macvarish in her Neuroparenting: the expert invasion of family life and Jennie Bristow in Stop Mugging Grandma: the generation wars and why boomer blaming won’t solve anything and Charlotte Faircloth in Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood: Gender, Intimacy, Equality

Our work has aimed to encourage students and early career colleagues to use Parenting Culture Studies in teaching and as a source of inspiration and ideas. We are delighted to have welcomed many Visiting Researchers to showcase their work following the publication of our book. You can see some examples of that here.