Class, education and parenting: cross-cultural perspectives

Liminal states: Propertied citizenship and gendered kin work in middle-class Kolkata families

“…While a narrative of reciprocity is common, the reality is that such lives depend on the exploitation of wives, daughters, and female care workers. Just as parenting feeds into the way aspirations and class relate to marriage, domesticities and property across global middle-class lives (Golden et al, 2021), elder care is another mode of bringing care work as a classed practice into conversation with globalised middle-class subjectivities and the state.…”

Globally aspired, locally constrained; how national education test regime in Turkey shapes middle‐class parenting

“…We (2022) have previously documented for the same group that they follow a two-step educational strategy for ensuring their children's social mobility: capturing public schools with a middle-class school mix and transforming them into private-school-like spaces through intense engagement. Complementary to it, the present study focuses on their parenting practices and reveals that while the parents appropriate concerted cultivation as the primary childrearing strategy and seek to cultivate competitive kids, in a way conforming to Brown's (1990) notion of parentocracy, and Yemini, Maxwell, and Mizrachi' (2019) and Golden et al's (2021) relevant findings, they must negotiate these aspirations with contextual circumstances. Specifically, the parents freeze cultural activities and delay gratification from these activities because exams are organized in the form of multiple-choice and centralized in the Turkish context.…”

“…We have been living in parentocratic times for decades in which children's educational success is increasingly dependent on parents' resources rather than their ability and efforts (Brown, 1990). As Golden et al (2021) put it, increasing neoliberal reorganization of education around the notions of competition and choice has reinforced parentocracy and diffused it across the globe, affecting parenting practices and childrearing styles. A growing body of literature recognizes `concerted cultivation as the primary childrearing strategy of middle-class parents worldwide (Reay et al, 2011;Yemini et al, 2019).…”

“…As Golden et al. (2021) put it, increasing neoliberal reorganization of education around the notions of competition and choice has reinforced parentocracy and diffused it across the globe, affecting parenting practices and childrearing styles. A growing body of literature recognizes `concerted cultivation as the primary childrearing strategy of middle‐class parents worldwide (Reay et al., 2011; Yemini et al., 2019).…”

“…It makes them feel insecure concerning which modes of parenting will be counted as responsible and will be rewarding in terms of their children's educational success and development. As a result, these studies show how the global spread of “western” educational ideas and frameworks affects parents' understanding of proper parenting and forces them to engage in increasingly complex educational strategies to prepare their children for their futures in their respective national contexts (Golden et al., 2021).…”