This paper will critically examine the assumptions structuring policy discourses of support and inclusion, and will link them to wider political and theoretical debates. Reflecting an increasing professionalization of childrearing practices, recent policy documents have emphasized the need for all parents to have access to support, advice and guidance. Implicit in this approach is the notion that 'socially excluded' parents in particular are isolated from the information and assistance that enables effective parenting. Meanwhile, the concepts of poverty and inequality are becoming increasingly detached from government definitions of social exclusion. Policies addressing the 'condition' of exclusion commonly emphasize a perceived disconnection from mainstream values and aspirations, as opposed to marginalization from material resources. In the case of family policy, interventions framed within the discourse of 'parenting support' stress the importance of helping parents to do the best they can for their children. However, tacit moral judgements direct the nature and type of support that is promoted, with a particular emphasis placed on advising and 'including' marginalized parents. In this paper, policy definitions of support will be analysed and their implications in terms of gender and class will be drawn out. It will be argued that despite a rhetoric of empowerment and investment, the current emphasis on support represents a top-down projection of values and standards on to families, thereby 'supporting' conformity rather than promoting access to parenting resources.

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Ideas that the quality of parental nurturing and attachment in the first years of a child's life is formative, hard-wiring their brains for success or failure, are reflected in policy reports from across the political spectrum and in targeted services delivering early intervention. In this article we draw on our research into 'Brain science and early intervention', using reviews of key policy literature and interviews with influential advocates of early intervention and with early years practitioners, to critically assess the ramifications and implications of these claims. Rather than the 'hopeful ethos' proffered by advocates of the progressive nature of brain science and early intervention, we show that brain claims are justifying gendered, raced and social inequalities, positioning poor mothers as architects of their children's deprivation.

This paper argues for a critical reclaiming of family and highlights the risks associated with decentring such a powerful and pervasive concept. Influential critiques of family as an organising category are considered in the context of a contemporary trend towards reorienting it within broader studies foregrounding personal and intimate realms of human connectedness. It is suggested that while concepts of personal lives and intimacy have much to offer they can not capture the full range and nature of relations raised through the lens of family. In particular the political consequences of subsuming family within wider approaches are set out through reference to a new public politics of family in which emphasis is placed less on structure and function, and more on knowledge and competence. Through an exploration of the key changes characterising this shift a case is made for retaining family (alongside intimacy and personal life) as a flexible, enduring and necessary sociological framework.

Family lives are an area where people's moral identities are crucially at stake. Yet the significance of dependent children to the work needed to sustain morally adequate adult identities is largely overlooked. Furthermore, the particular situation of divorce or separation and repartnering where children are involved is fundamentally relevant to current sociological debates about the changing nature of marriage and family life. Notions of the pursuit of self-development and couple intimacy clash and create tensions with notions of duty or responsibility to children's needs. Drawing on a study of parents and step-parents, we consider how interviewees' moral understandings were fundamentally shaped by social constructions of the Child and the Adult. Importantly, the presence of dependent children led to an overall key moral imperative concerning the requirement for responsible adults to put the needs of children first. There were, however, strong gender dimensions in the ways in which this moral imperative was played out, and in some tensions with an alternative, but secondary, moral ethic of care of self. We discuss the significance of the Child/Adult construction in relation to theories about the nature of contemporary family obligations and of contemporary morality more generally.