Rethinking Parent and Child Conflict

Susan Grieshaber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135955441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

The book draws from Foucault's notion of power-knowledge-resistance and feminist poststructuralism to offer a re-theorization of parent-child conflict.

CHAPTER 1
Relationships among Parents and Children as a Modernist Understanding

This book is set in the context of contemporary life and depicts relationships among parents and children in four families living in a capital city in Australia. It tells stories about conflicts that occurred among these parents and their children in the course of daily domestic activity in four ordinary families. Parent and child conflict has been addressed in child or developmental psychology through research that began in the early years of the twentieth century and gained momentum rapidly. At the close of the twentieth century parents had access to a wide range of advice about childrearing and managing conflict between themselves and their children. Because of the overabundance of manuals and the step-by-step advice that many provide, it is often assumed that parent and child conflict is easily resolved. This chapter provides an introduction to themes raised in the book by explaining how psychology has achieved a place of dominance as the purveyor of parenting advice. Following this, it argues that postmodern times necessitate different approaches to understanding family relationships and maps out how this occurs in the remainder of the book.

Being a parent is by no means an easy job. The Hollywood film Parenthood implies that childrearing means a lifetime of anxiety for parents and goes as far as to suggest that after so many centuries, somebody must have found the formula for turning children into happy and successful adults. This surely reflects the difficulty of the process in contemporary life. In a review of the film, Stannard and McGuiness (1989) indicated that parenthood is the world’s toughest job and a responsibility that “we are all expected to embrace cheerfully and yet without the slightest qualification” (p. 50). Contemporary “Western” culture supports a multimillion dollar child advice industry composed of child psychiatrists and psychologists, pediatricians, social workers, teachers, support organizations, and a host of media publications (Willis, 1991). In this context, parents are searching continually for more effective ways of handling childrearing generally and, more specifically, parent and child conflict. Much of this advice is about how parents can help children to become successfully socialized (i.e., how to produce “good”
children, and, by association, how to be “good” parents). Underlying tenets also suggest it may be more about helping parents learn how to control and train their children to be particular types of people. This is exemplified by best sellers such as Toddler Taming (Green, 1984, 1987, 1990), which has been reprinted up to twelve times for each edition.

For the primary caregiver, the everyday realities of domestic life are fraught with what the child advice industry describes as problematic constructions of the child: the bed wetter, the child who eats too little, the arguer, the disobedient child, the nagger, the child who has temper outbursts, the hitter/fighter, the child who back answers, the constant attention seeker, the fibber, and the child who resists going to bed, to mention just a few (Grieshaber, 1993). These are all examples of potential conflict situations between parents and children because the child advice industry identifies children who wet the bed after a certain age, children who argue, and so on, as problems. Advice about how to manage, resolve, or prevent such problems comes from research based in psychological theory, from the professionals or experts, to parents. Learning how to control children according to what the experts say is very difficult, despite the assumption that conflict should be resolved easily because of the answers provided by the (psychologically based) child advice industry. However, in the everyday interaction of domestic life, conflict and child noncompliance persist.

The number of books and manuals written about childrearing and disciplining children indicates the significance of the child advice industry and the concern that it generates about effective childrearing. Some time ago Cleverley and Phillips (1987) claimed that the “best-selling book in the Western world, after the Bible, is a handbook on child care” (p. vii). Despite this, they have said that it “is not generally appreciated how a small number of theories—theories with sometimes controversial underpinnings— have decisively shaped the patterns of child rearing and educational practices that have been adopted” (p. vii). Cleverley and Phillips continue, claiming that

the bases of popular child-rearing practices, and of deep-seated attitudes towards children, pass largely unexamined . . . attention has been focused upon a small number of models of the child that have been of undoubted influence in Western thought in the last three hundred years, and that are still with us.
(p. viii)

This is of concern because ideas that are up to three hundred years old still influence what we think about and how we interact with children.

One example comes from the idea of original sin, which informed parents and educators in Britain and the United States in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who subscribed to the Puritan evangelical tradition (Cleverley & Phillips, 1987). The assumption underlying the Puritan model was that the child and the child’s nature were defective in some way and had to be overcome. One of the most important things that parents could do for their children was to restrain their self-will, as this was what had created problems for Adam (in the Christian tradition). The traditional saying encapsulates the Puritan approach: spare the rod and spoil the child. Physical punishment, discipline, strict routines, and Christian training to rid children of evil habits were some of the characteristics associated with Puritan approaches. Although social, political, and economic conditions have changed considerably since the Puritan ideas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were widely accepted, modern interpretations of Puritan ideas about children and childhood prevail today.

Cleverley and Phillips (1987) noted that religious fundamentalism was revived during the 1970s and 1980s in the United States, specifically the “Moral Majority” (p. 32), which was a political and cultural force. Along with this return to religious fundamentalism came modern advice to parents about original sin: “all children—not just certain children, all children— are born delinquent” (Stedman et al., cited in Cleverley & Phillips, 1987, p. 32). Modern versions of the Puritan evangelical model also provide advice for parents about how to rid children of poor moral habits:

Good habits can be impressed and bad ones broken in a variety of ways. Thumb sucking can be overcome by encasing the child in a zipper-type sheet at night; a disobedient child may be put in an isolated place for punishment, or deprived of his favorite food; and corporal punishment can be used freely. . . . Parents should never attempt to reason with children or shame them into good behavior—correctly used, spanking guides and controls initiative, inventiveness and self-reliance and will instill a deep sense of respect, discipline, self-control, and a settled, orderly appreciation of loving authority. Right habits develop when children do what they are told, play orderly games, and are not allowed to play war games or games in which they pretend they are adults or dress up in adults’ clothes. (Cleverley & Phillips, 1987, pp. 32–33)

Although this example comes from the perspective of parenting, Leavitt and Power (1997) have documented how young children in long day-care settings have been treated so they also learn the correct habits:

Benjamin was running around when he was supposed to be sitting in his chair. The teacher caught him, sat him in a chair, and turned his body to face the wall. “You should be ashamed of yourself.” Benjamin put his head down and sat quietly for the duration of his time out. At snack time he was placed at a table with three other boys. The four children were given pretzels, labeled by the teachers as “regular snack.” At the other tables, the children were given birthday cake. Benjamin, very upset at being excluded, cried while the children recited their before-meal prayer. He was so upset he could not say grace. The teacher noticed, walked over to his table and said, “You may not eat snack until you say grace!” Benjamin continued to cry. The teacher looked down at him and commanded, “Say it!” Benjamin whispered a hoarse response, but afterward he could barely swallow his snack. (pp. 54–55)

Here, rules that were transgressed were treated with “time out” and special food (birthday cake) was not only withheld from the culprit, but three other boys as well. The rigid enforcement of the rule about grace reminds one of Puritan ideas about breaking children’s self-wills.

Recent movements in the United States have focused on a return to traditional Christian beliefs and values in schools and curricula. For instance, Apple (2001) identified the group, the “authoritarian populists— religious fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals who want a return to (their) God in all of our institutions” (p. 11; emphasis in original). Further, Apple sees the authoritarian populists pushing to “restore “our” traditional common culture and stress discipline and character, return God to our classrooms as a guide to all our conduct inside and outside the school” (Apple, 2001, p. 5). These calls for a return to Puritan pasts and the reinstatement of God to classrooms sit alongside Rousseau-influenced ideas of child-centered education, where children have choice and are able to grow and develop at their own pace. Such approaches are endorsed by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) through its notion of developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) (Bredekamp & Copple, 1997) and are known for their rejection of traditional or academic approaches to early childhood curricula. These and other models have an enduring presence in literature about children, families, and early childhood education.

The discipline of psychology constructs parent and child conflict as either abnormal or normal, depending on the level of deviancy shown by the parent, the child, or both. Professionals, including child psychologists and educators, advise parents that it is normal to experience some conflict between parents and children, and that parent and child conflict can occur when parents discipline children, or when child noncompliance to parental requests results in conflict and argument. Serious behavior problems (potentially abnormal) are considered to be those actions that are not socially acceptable and would result in a child failing to become successfully socialized.

Anglo-European and Western understandings or discourses of the “parent” and the “child” in nuclear families locate parents in positions of power with responsibility for their children from birth to the late teenage years. The processes of socialization or enculturation encompass development from infancy to adulthood and have been variously charted and described by psychologists, sociologists, ethnographers, and others in allied disciplines. From a child development perspective, socialization is generally understood as adult responsibility for “teaching children how to act in ways that are acceptable to the community culture in which they live” (Kostelnik, Whiren, Soderman, Stein, & Gregory, 2002, p. 200). Socialization thus enables the transmission of culture between generations, where culture is understood as “norms, attitudes, beliefs and social roles” (Howe, 1999, p. 12). Norms, attitudes, and beliefs about parent and child conflict and how they are acquired are part of the focus of this book.

Difficulties with disciplining children and children who do not comply with parental requests often mean that some form of parent and child conflict results. This can be expressed in various forms, including verbally, physically, by silence, and various combinations of these elements. Because most research about parent and child conflict has been undertaken within the field of child psychology, the research often begins from the idea that social behavior is attributable to, and ultimately sourced in, the individual. Studies have therefore tended to identify the behavior of the parent or the child as the cause of conflict and recommended change strategies for parents and children. Likewise, not coping effectively with the way children behave is seen to be the result of some difficulty on the part of the parent and/or the child. Parents and/or children are often seen as lacking in some way, as being deficient in their parenting or child role (deficit theory). The large variety of programs developed to educate and in some cases remediate parents having difficulty coping with noncompliant child behavior reflects the great concern expressed by child psychologists and educators in this area. For their part, children are typically classified using terms such as behavior management problem, noncompliant, defiant, a difficult child, and, in extreme cases, deviant, the latter conjuring images of the evil child described by James, Jenks, and Prout (1998). Because of what these categories mean, children are directed into specially organized programs aimed at changing undesirable or socially unacceptable behavior. The establishment of these categories and the programs to treat “difficult” children are important parts of developmental psychology and how it operates to create standards for what it means to be a “good” parent and a “good” child. They are also part of the functioning of the era known as modernity. To explain further, I consider modernism and modernity, and then postmodernity, with a focus on children and families.

Social theorists understand modernity as a period in “Western” history from roughly the Middle Ages to the 1960s. Since the early 1900s, parent and child conflict has received significant research attention. The discipline of child psychology has established itself as a major influence on child-rearing practices, as well as exerting a powerful and pervasive influence in the institutional field of early childhood education (Burman, 1994; Dahlberg, Moss, & Pence, 1999; Weber, 1984). From the late 1960s, the foundations of modernist theories have been challenged by those who have come to be known as “postmodernists.” Generally speaking, postmodernists have questioned the tools of analysis and the categories of operation that psychologists have used, arguing that conditions in society have changed so much that more insightful ideas are required to understand and explain contemporary social circumstances.

Modernity

Modernism is described as the social, cultural, intellectual, political, and economic situations that exist in modernity. Modernity began with the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the shift from religious, philosophical, and intuitive perspectives to secular, rational, and positivist perspectives (Cannella, 1997). Thus the Enlightenment saw an end to feudal societies and a questioning of and a rejection of the power of the church. The invention of the printing press meant that others had learned to read and that the clergy had lost control of reading and interpreting the scriptures. The nineteenth century ushered in “processes of individualization, secularization, industrialization, cultural differentiation, commodification, urbanization, bureaucratization, and rationalization which together have constituted the modern world” (Best and Kellner, 1991, p. 3). In the gradual change from feudalism, modernity came to be characterized by a focus on the moral and reasoning individual, the development of industry, the transition from agrarian to urban societies, a rise in the importance of commodities and therefore consumerism, and the development of various means for measuring and controlling the population and aspects of everyday life (such as registers of births, deaths, and marriages; systems of government and law enforcement). All of these changes were based on particular systems of reasoning and the notion of progress embraced by modernism.

The Enlightenment or Age of Reason spawned the idea that knowledge or truth could be discovered through reason and that this would bring “freedom and happiness” (Cannella, 1997, p. 21). The significance of Descartes’ ideas of the separateness of mind and matter resulted in the belief in differences between the internal mind, and external nature and reality. Cartesian dualism meant that dichotomous ways of thinking developed, particularly the scientific belief that separation of perception (the internal mind) from objective reality would result in scientific discoveries. Science became oriented to the search for universal human truths that could be discovered through reason and the use of scientific tools. The notion of progress developed and scientific advances combined with reason provided a way for the advancement and progress of man [sic]. O’Farrell (1999) described the Enlightenment project as expressing the

. . . idea that, through the use of intellect and reason, principally in the form of science, humanity can understand the universe and find solutions to all the problems which plague existence. In other words, the judicious use of reason and our powers of rational science will eventually solve all our political and social problems as well as allow us to master [sic] our physical environment in the form of our own bodies and the broader natural environment. (p. 12)

Modernism and the idea of progress were so seductive that they produced a blind faith in the ability of those who were “civilized” to control not only human destiny, but also nature and knowledge.

But, as O’Farrell goes on to ask, where did modernism take us? In her answer she listed “two World Wars, several revolutions and dictatorships”
(p. 12), a devastated natural environment (p. 13), and

mass slaughter and vast numbers enslaved and excluded from mainstream society on a scale unprecedented in history. A schooling system which promised social equality and enlightenment for all has done little more than reinforce social division and entrench new forms of conformity, ignorance and exclusion.
(p. 13)

These experiences of modernity strike a chord with many people. Although scientific advances and notions of progress have resulted in improved living conditions for many in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Relationships Among Parents and Children As a Modernist Understanding
• Chapter 2: Parent and Child Conflict As Social Control and Regulation
• Chapter 3: Parent and Child Conflict As Relationships of Power
• Chapter 4: Researching With Families
• Chapter 5: Introducing the Families
• Chapter 6: Food to Go
• Chapter 7: School’s In
• Chapter 8: Tidy Houses and Bedtime Stories
• Chapter 9: More Than Sibling Rivalry
• Chapter 10: Regimes of Practice As Normalizing Agents
• Appendix
• References