Parenting Culture and Growing up: The socialisation problem revisited
Over the coming academic year, we are hosting a series of discussions looking in various ways at the widely discussed problem of growing up and becoming an adult. Central to the propositions of Parenting Culture Studies is that the rise of ‘parenting’ and the expansion of the parental role is inseparable from changing constructions of childhood. Assumptions about risk and vulnerability have reshaped cultural norms about what growing up is taken to be with, in turn, profound effects for the parental role. This has been described as the intensification of parenting, and the impacts of intensive parents for the task of socialising children continue to shape thinking and research. Evidence, suggests, though that much about long held conventions surrounding childhood and adulthood are now manifestly in flux in news ways. Even accomplishing the status of ‘adult’, for example, now has its own term, ‘adulting’. A great deal of confusion shapes social and cultural understandings of what parents, as adults, need to do, to raise their children, when adulthood itself is so unsettled. The following discussions that revisit the problem of socialisation are open to all and will mostly be held on Zoom.
Autumn term 2024
Thursday 5th December
Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood. In person seminar, as part of the SSPSSR Seminar Series, at the University of Kent.
Professor Keith Hayward
Have you ever noticed that in areas of everyday life, rather than being addressed like a mature adult, you’re increasingly treated like an irresponsible child in constant need of instruction and protection? Noticing society’s creeping descent into infantilisation is one thing, however understanding the roots and causes of the phenomenon is not quite so easy. In this topical and vitally important new work, cultural theorist and academic, Dr Keith Hayward, exposes the deep social, psychological and political dangers of a world characterised by denuded adult autonomy. Infantilised is no one-dimensional, unsympathetic critique. Brimming with anecdotes and examples that span everything from the normalisation of infantilism on reality TV to the rise of a new class of political ‘infantocrat’, this comprehensive book also offers an insightful and at times humorous account of infantilism’s seductive appeal and details some suggestions for avoiding some of the pitfalls associated with our increasingly infantilised world.
Dr Keith Hayward is Professor of Criminology at the University of Copenhagen. He has published widely on matters relating to crime, terrorism, and popular culture. He lives in Copenhagen.
Spring Terms 2025 (On Zoom)
Helicopter Parents and ‘Meta-Helicopter Parenting’ (Wednesday 29 January 2025, 3pm GMT)
Professor Talia Welsh
Talia is Professor and Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta. She researches Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work in child psychology and philosophy. Her books include the translation of Merleau-Ponty’s lectures in child psychology and pedagogy in the volume Child Psychology & Pedagogy: Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne (Northwestern University Press, 2010), The Child as Natural Phenomenologist: Primal and Primary Experience in Merleau-Ponty’s Psychology (Northwestern University Press, 2013), Feminist Existentialism, Biopolitics, and Critical Phenomenology in a Time of Bad Health (Routledge, 2022), and the co-edited volume Normality, Abnormality, and Pathology in Merleau-Ponty (SUNY Press, 2022). She’s applied her ideas to critique the idea of the ‘Helicopter Parent’ in her essay ‘Meta-Helicopter Parenting: Ambivalence in a Neoliberal World’.
Background Reading:
Is there a teenage mental health crisis? (Wednesday 26 February 2025, 3pm GMT)
Matilda Gosling and Dr Ashley Frawley
Ashley Fawley has written extensively about therapy culture and the shifting boundaries between mental illness and normal emotion. Her most recent book is Significant Emotions (2023) and she is a Visiting Researcher with CPCS at the University of Kent. Matilda Gosling is a social scientist and independent researcher with more than 20 years’ experience, including 12 years running an international social research consultancy. Her work covers education, skills and child development, as well as social psychology and analysis of belief systems. She is the author of Evidence-Based Parenting (2024), and Teenagers: The Evidence Base, in which she addresses the climate in which mental health conditions start to flourish, will be published in 2025.
Background Reading:
https://www.matildagosling.com/
https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/parentingculturestudies/about/visiting-fellows/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13607804231215943
Intensive parenting and young adults’ travel: insights from Australia (Friday 28 March 2025, 10am GMT)
Dr Jennifer Kent
Jennifer Kent is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, Australia
Dr Jennifer Kent is a Senior Research Fellow in Urbanism at the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning. Jennifer’s research interests are at the intersections between urban planning, transport and human health. She specialises in combining quantitative and qualitative data with understandings from policy science to trace the practical, cultural and political barriers to healthy cities. Key issues examined to date include parenting and private car use, the links between health and higher density living, the interpretation of health evidence into urban planning policy, the health impact of extended commute times, and cultural and structural barriers to sustainable transport use.
Background Reading:
https://www.sydney.edu.au/architecture/about/our-people/academic-staff/jennifer-kent.html