The contributions to this volume build on two cornerstone studies on British and US societies. The first is Sharon Hays’ The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (1996) which shed light on the ideology of ”intensive motherhood” as enjoining mothers to spend maximum amounts of time, energy, and material resources on the child’s wellbeing, prioritizing the latter’s needs at all times, while dutifully following the theories of ”parenting experts” on child development. The other key text is Frank Furedi’s Paranoid Parenting (2002) which focused on parents’ increasing awareness that their behaviors entail risks for their young children’s physical and/or emotional development. This led Furedi to describe the uneasy dyad between ”infant determinism” and ”parent causality” as significantly conditioning the ”identity work” in which men and women engage as they become parents. 21st century parents embrace a seemingly empowering ideology of individual responsibility for raising their children, while constantly under pressure to learn and adopt parenting ”good practices” designed by state-sanctioned experts, in hopes to keep their families from being stigmatized as walking social problems.

This book puts these concepts to the test of other social strata and situations, by expanding the field to include migrant communities in developed countries, and otherwise marginalized or non-traditional groups and individuals in Western or non-Western countries. The tensions between capitalist injunctions and traditional values around child-bearing and rearing are brought to light, particularly where gender roles and generational-based expectations of obligation and responsibility are concerned.

The book is organized around four themes. The first one—”the moral context for parenting”—offers three contributions discussing recent evolutions of British society. First, Edwards and Gillies bring into historical perspective the recurrent political rhetoric around ”neglectful” parenting as a recent evolution of British society and the main cause behind contemporary social ills. Their research on sociological studies from the 1960s demonstrates that in this oft-celebrated ”golden age,” unsupervised activities for children were considered normal and adults were not blamed as irresponsible or disengaged parents: ”Particularly noticeable is the absence of moralized discussions of parental liability that are so central to contemporary social commentary” [33]. Dow’s chapter, building on recent fieldwork among environmentalist professionals living in rural Scotland, articulates ethical notions around the perceived need to be less ”selfish” and well ”prepared” for parenting with conceptions about sustainability, showing how ideological representations of nature, goodness and responsibility are translated into altruistic aspirations, especially among middle-class, educated female respondents. Jensen’s participant observation of White British middle-class mothers viewing the parent-pedagogy program Supernanny ”discusse[s] the importance of approaching parent pedagogy in its popular representational forms as part of a broader parenting culture which is often treated as a supermarket of advice” [66]. She demonstrates how, while distancing themselves from the “real” (i.e., uneducated, voyeuristic) audience targeted by the program, these critical viewers reproduce class distinction, but ambiguously feel just as exposed to permanent scrutiny and criticism as the inevitably failing parents of the program, as a consequence of the same judgmental, expert-led parenting culture: ”Parenting, and particularly, mothering always involves comparisons, judgements and self-accounting in reference to other parents” [65].

The second theme discusses the structural constraints to ”good” parenting, assessing the agency of both parents and children in negotiating their appropriation of dominant models. Hinton, Laverty and Robinson focus on the tension between public-health messages or broader societal expectations on healthy lifestyles in the UK (e.g. preserving children from second-hand smoke) and the compromises resulting from unequal power relations between the adults in the families: ”The evidence suggests that families do not simply accept ”expert” opinion but negotiate parenting practice in relation to their own beliefs, values, experiences and normative ideals, and that this is an ongoing and complex process…. While some families interpret health ”risks” as self-evident and assimilate public health advice into their daily routines with little disruption, other families may find that members oppose changes to their lifestyles and adjustments may only be brought about via the enforcement of rules to control or prevent ”deviant behaviours” [74]. They also mention the pressure to conform exerted by the children themselves on the parents—a phenomenon known as ”socialization-in-reverse”, whereby children actively make their parents accountable for their parenting, so that ”the child-adult relationship is something to be constantly negotiated” [80], which ”may have detrimental consequences for parent-child-relationships and individual well-being if parents consider themselves to be failing in their ”duty” to protect their children” [81]. Both Berry’s fieldwork among undocumented Hispanic migrants in the area of Durham, North Carolina, and Jaysanne-Darr’s among South Sudanese refugees enrolled in an educational program in Massachusetts, show the disconnect between the mainstream model of intensive parenting, the constraints of migrants’ lives (marked by institutional racism and insecurity in the first case,) and the parents’ own models of socialization and kinship obligations—often dismissed as inadequate in an individualistic society, even though in both cases, the migrant parents value education highly for their children. Both contributions show how lack of in-depth understanding of migrant families’ cultural values can lead to marginalization of their children within the US educational system: ”The decontextualized vision of expert-led, skills-based parenting creates an easy atmosphere to consider low-income and immigrant parents [as] deficient in parenting skills and requir[ing] training to support their children’s success” [96].