From the start, we have held regular forums to discuss new research ideas and publications we have found inspiring. Through 2024-5 we held two series, mainly online, prioritising presentations from early career colleagues. You can find details of these and previous forums below.
Parenting Culture and Growing up (2025)
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. Through 2024-2025 we held a discussion series about these issues which you can read about below.
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.
Helicopter Parents and ‘Meta-Helicopter Parenting’
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:
A recording of the event can be found here
Is there a teenage mental health crisis?
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
A recording of the event can be found here
Parenting the emerging adult and caring through the car 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
A recording of the event can be found here
New Directions for Parenting Culture Studies (2024)
This series of discussions was held on Zoom and highlighted work by early and mid-career colleagues who have made use of ideas set out in Parenting Culture Studies within their work.
Parenting Culture and declining fertility rates
Sunna Símonardóttir
Sunna is an Adjunct Lecturer and post-doc at the University of Iceland. She is currently joint PI of the FIBI project – Fertility intentions and behaviour in Iceland: The role of policies and parenting culture that received a Grant of Excellence from the Icelandic Research Fund. Sunna’s research focuses on fertility intentions and behaviour in Iceland. The goal is to understand the decision-making process underlying the choice to have a child and explore how gendered parenting ideologies and circumstances affect decisions regarding the timing and number of children. The ongoing study will shed light on how individuals and couples make decisions on becoming parents and family size and what they perceive as the rewards or deterrents of parenthood. The study will also explore how parenting culture influences the fertility choices of individuals and how dominant discourses of motherhood and fatherhood are constructed and negotiated.
A recording of the event can be found here
Background reading:
Intensive parenting, childhood independence and playing out
John Day, Lenore Skenazy as respondent
At this event John is going to talk about his research which links the ‘intensification of parenting’ and what he terms the ‘generational fracturing of spontaneous physical activity from childhood play’. John is a Lecturer in the School of Health and Social Care at the University of Essex, where he co-leads research training for the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology. He began his research career in Kent, researching his PhD at Canterbury Christ Church University, and before taking up his current post, was the Research Manager at Healthwatch Essex, where studies conducted by the research team that he led were funded by the UKRI, Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust and the National Lottery Community Fund. His research interests include generational and family sociology and his work in part has considered how changes in parenting culture influences childhood especially around play. Lenore Skenazy has spent now more than 15 years writing and campaigning around childhood independence. She is the founder of the Free Range Kids movement, author of a book of the same name, and more recently a co-founder of Let Grow, the US-based non-profit that works to ‘make it easy and normal for parents to give their kids back a childhood’.
Background reading:
https://www.essex.ac.uk/news/2023/08/31/children-lacking-spontaneous-play
A recording of this event can be found here
The rise of ‘parenting policy’ and the fragmentation of the family
Ashley Frawley, Claude Martin as respondent
Ashley is a sociologist who researched her PhD at the University Kent, working with Frank Furedi and Ellie Lee. She was associate professor of Sociology at Swansea University, and is now visiting research fellow at MCC Brussels, where she focusses in part on family policy, and is visiting researcher at the University of Kent, and COO of Sublation Press. She is the author of two books, Semiotics of Happiness (2015) and Significant Emotions: Rhetoric and Social Problems in a Vulnerable Age (2023). She is a contributing editor at Compact Magazine, writes regularly for UnHerd and for other publications, including the New Statesman. Claude is one of Europe’s most eminent sociologists of the family and family policy. His research investigates the protective nature of social ties, the transformation of the family and modes of regulation by public authorities (civil law and social law). He has conducted comparative research on family policies in Europe, and more particularly on childcare policy. He was a member of the European observatory on family issues at the European Commission. CPCS was lucky enough to work with Claude as part of the project he directed from 2017-2020 on Childhood, Well Being and Parenting.
Background reading:
https://brussels.mcc.hu/publication/families-in-fragments-why-the-eu-must-bring-back-the-family
Watch Claude here talking about CPCS:
A recording of the event can be found here
The double bind of intensive parenting
Raquel Herrero-Arias
Raquel in an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Promotion and Development at the University of Bergen, where she teaches on two Master’s programmes, and assists with postdoctoral training. She got to know CPCS when she was researching her PhD, which was about experiences that Southern European parents have when they raise their children in Norway. The main focus of this research was on how parents navigate through parenting practices, ideals, values and expectations when they encounter social actors at family, institutional and community levels both in Norway and their countries of origin. She spent a term with CPCS during her PhD work as the Centre’s first Visting Doctoral Student.
Background reading:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13698575.2020.1856348
Watch Raquel here talking about CPCS:
A recording of the event can be found here
Saving Brains? Early Childhood Interventions in the Global South
Gabriel Scheidecker
Gabriel is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK), University of Zurich. He received his PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the Free University of Berlin in 2015. Before that he graduated in Philosophy and Historical Anthropology from the University of Freiburg, Germany, A cross-cutting theme of his research is childhood, which he explores in various settings. Currently he is conducting research as a principle investigator of the project “Saving Brains? Applying Ethnography to Early Childhood Interventions in the Global South” (2023-2028), funded by an SNSF Starting Grant. The project aims to do both, conduct ethnographic research about early interventions and initiate cross-disciplinary debates about the scientific and ethical validity of such interventions. During his postdoc he focused on children and families in Berlin with a Vietnamese migration history, and their interaction with institutions of childcare and parenting support. For his PhD he conducted research about emotion socialization and relationship formation in a rural community in Madagascar.
Background reading:
https://www.isek.uzh.ch/de/ethnologie/forschung/forschungsprojekte/saving-brains.html
A recording of the event can be found here
Previous CPCS forums include:
2023
Gender, Identity and Parenting Culture, with Matilda Gosling and Dr Jennie Bristow
‘When parenting culture goes global’, with Dr Gabriel Scheidecker
2021
Parenting panic: Child veganism as a battleground between parents and experts with Dr Edmée Ballif
2020
‘Parenting the Pandemic’ with Dr Charlotte Faircloth
2019
Post-Graduate Presentations with Verity Pooke (University of Kent), Emergency Contraceptive Pillls (ECP) as a Social Problem in the Age of Safe Sex and Raquel Arias (University of Bergen), Self-Legitimation and Sense-Making of Southern European Parents’ Migration to Norway: the Role of Family Aspirations
Rethinking medicalisation and pregnancy with Hannah Pereira: Early Medical Abortion and the Values of Doctors who Provide Abortion: a case of De-medicalisation? and Zehra Zeynep Sadıkoğlu: The Medicalization of Pregnancy and Childbirth in Contemporary Turkey: The Effect of Risk Discourses for Turkish Women’s Experiences
Film screening: ‘Birthday Parents’ with Hilde Danielsen
2018
The Business of Birth Control: Contraceptives as Commodities before the Pill
Introduced by Dr Claire Jones
2017
Bad Beginnings? A Qualitative Study of Prison Mother and Baby Units, with Rose Mortimer
‘War – a family affair. Anthropological perspectives on family life, parenting and gender in the light of military deployment’ with Maj Hedegaard Heiselberg
Emergency Contraception in an era of ‘safe sex’ with Verity Pooke