Middle-class Mothers’ Moralities and ‘Concerted Cultivation’: Class Others, Ambivalence and Excess

Perrier, Maud

doi:10.1177/0038038512453789

Cited by 60 publications

(65 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Karen indicates that in disallowing their identity to be subsumed by motherhood women may be perceived as 'not caring', and, by implication, as being a 'bad mother', thus revealing something about the difficulties associated with managing these two competing positions: the self, and the 'good' intensive middle-class mother. These findings are similar to those of Perrier (2012) who found that middle class mothers seemed caught between resisting and complying with the demands of intensive motherhood.…”

Section: Challenging Intensive Motherhood Approaches To Infant Develosupporting

confidence: 89%

Parenting agendas: An empirical study of intensive mothering and infant cognitive development

Budds

Hogg

Banister

et al. 2016

The Sociological Review

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Abstract:Intensive parenting debates reflect the critical importance of a child's early years, and parents' roles in determining later developmental outcomes. Mothers are usually assigned primary responsibility for facilitating their infants' cognitive development through adequate and appropriate sensory stimulation. Drawing on Foucault's technologies of the self we explore how new mothers shape their mothering practices in order to provide appropriately stimulating interactions. Using findings from 64 interviews (31 women were interviewed twice, 2 women were interviewed only once) we identify three main positions whereby mothers function in relation to their infants' development; mother as committed facilitator, creative provider and careful/caring monitor. We consider the perceived normative nature of these positions and the impact they can have on middle-class women's subjectivities as new mothers. Our study of parental agendas and infant cognitive development suggests that a continued focus on the mother's role within early infant development reflects and upholds ideologies of child-centred, intensive mothering, which risks precluding 'alternative' maternal subjectivities and promotes conservative feminine identities.

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Section: Challenging Intensive Motherhood Approaches To Infant Develosupporting

confidence: 89%

Parenting agendas: An empirical study of intensive mothering and infant cognitive development

Budds

Hogg

Banister

et al. 2016

The Sociological Review

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“…The contradictions and anxieties experienced by Kaisa and Mika and their parents also foreground emotional aspects and the heterogeneity of middle‐class families. These anxieties echo findings by Perrier () and Reay (, ) in which what middle‐class mothers saw as beneficial for their children from an educational viewpoint was not free of ethical conflicts, exemplified, for example, in anger over their children's lack of interest in schoolwork or in critical and contradictory attitudes towards the formal learning of small children. In this study, the ethical conflicts faced by children and parents were feelings of pressure and stress over workload and the conflict between having peer‐related problems in school versus the future civic competencies and advantages held out to TCP office holders.…”

Section: Synthesis: Parental Strategies and Emotional Contradictionssupporting

confidence: 65%

“…However, applying the ideas of social reproduction presents a risk of understanding middle‐class parents solely as capital‐bearing and transmitting individuals (Perrier, , p. 658). Cultural capital is not a static resource linked only to class differentials nor does it work only to secure class privileges.…”

Section: Middle‐class Families Cultural Resources and Emotionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children's Public Participation, Middle‐Class Families and Emotions

Kiili

2014

Children & Society

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The article examines the activities of a municipal children's parliament (the TCP) in a middle‐sized Finnish town. The article focuses on members of the TCP board and their parents and the emphasis is on parents' views as very little research exists on family background in relation to children's public participation. All the participating families were middle‐class, both as self‐defined and according to their socioeconomic background. The parents studied detailed different emotions they and their children experienced as members of the children's parliament. The article illustrates that being a middle‐class child and participating in civic activities is not an uncomplicated description of privilege. Children and parents engaged in the TCP board displayed three distinct strategies, to interpret and support engagement in the structure; as hobbyists, school‐oriented or ambivalently engaged. They had to cope with feelings of pressure and stress over workload and the conflict between having peer‐related problems in school versus the future civic competencies and advantages held out to TCP office holders. The article extends the understanding of participation to include discussion of social class and emotions and calls for further research on these themes.

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“…Instead, we explored how participants themselves used 'class', perceptually and linguistically (Atkinson, 2010, p. 161) to account for their school choice. This allows for the emergence of 'class talk' as participants attempt to make sense of their decisions and how they implicitly position themselves and others within the classed hierarchy (Atkinson, 2010;Perrier, 2012). It is in such accounts that class experiences are revealed (Savage, 2000) as participants offer observations and evaluations of the social environment of the school from the interpretive standpoint of their class positions.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Class talk: habitus and class in parental narratives of school choice

Hill

Lai

2016

Journal of Marketing Management

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This article explores how social class is linguistically negotiated and contested in parental narratives of school choice in the British education marketplace. Our study reveals prevalent yet obscured vestiges of 'class talk', and in doing so, unmasks 'micro-political' acts of status claiming. Using interactional narrative interviewing with 30 parents, we explore how inter-and intra-class differences are emotionally expressed, thus exposing the embodied dispositions of parents' habitus and its' subtle influence on school choice. The parental narratives also unveil a moral and political tension between the neoliberal ideal of entrepreneurial self-advancement and an egalitarian sentiment for social equality. Our study therefore challenges the neoliberal educational policy of market choice in closing the attainment gap.ARTICLE HISTORY

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Middle-class Mothers’ Moralities and ‘Concerted Cultivation’: Class Others, Ambivalence and Excess

Cited by 60 publications

References 32 publications

Parenting agendas: An empirical study of intensive mothering and infant cognitive development

Parenting agendas: An empirical study of intensive mothering and infant cognitive development

Children's Public Participation, Middle‐Class Families and Emotions

Class talk: habitus and class in parental narratives of school choice

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