Introduction
In ordinary language and public discourse , the way we speak about raising children and what it means to be a parent today has become dominated by the vocabulary of ‘parenting’. This is not only a renaming of raising children, but also a reframing of it as a specific set of practices and skills. Thus, to understand raising children as ‘parenting’ changes what we do, how we relate to children , and how we understand ourselves (cf. Faircloth and Lee 2010; Ramaekers and Suissa 2012). Our concern in this book is to articulate instead a pedagogical understanding of upbringing . As the course of this introduction will make clear, a focus on the pedagogical is contrasted with the more instrumental accounts of the parent-child relationship found in the discourse of parenting. This is not in order to present a ‘way out’, a ‘better’ view of raising children , but rather to articulate aspects of the experience that are left out of the discourse of parenting.
In recent sociological, critical psychological , and educational -philosophical literature, the contemporary ‘culture of parenting’, or what is sometimes called a ‘turn to parenting’, has been subject to critique . 1 This book is a contribution to that work of critique of the reframing of upbringing as ‘parenting’. But different from most of the work in this area, we are not discussing, or contributing to the analysis of, ‘parenting’ as such, at least not in a direct sense. The book’s purpose is to provide an affirmative , post-critical account of upbringing .2 That is, we do not seek to show what is ‘beneath’ the discourse of parenting, for example , by focusing on processes of the subjectivation and subordination of parents by particular relations of power . Such accounts are important, but only reinforce the extent to which the parenting culture provides only a partial view of the experience of being a parent. Hence the aim to provide an affirmative account: we seek to articulate those aspects of our experience not captured by ‘parenting’. That is, to speak of what we do do when we raise children .
In what follows we intentionally speak of ‘upbringing ’ rather than ‘parenting’ or ‘childrearing ’. Both parenting and childrearing entail a reference to a person, either the parent or the child , which tends to divert attention to either one of the two ‘sides’ involved in the broad process of what it means, with reference to Arendt (2006), to introduce and invite children into a common world , or, with reference to Peters (2015 [1959]) and Cavell (1979), to initiate them into shared forms of life. The concept of ‘upbringing ’ entails the suggestion (or at least leaves open) that it is not (just) parents doing certain things in order to achieve particular developmental outcomes in their children (‘parenting’), nor that what such introduction or initiation entails is focused on the child’s well-being (‘childrearing ’), but rather that it is a complex set of relationships not only between persons, but also between other socio-material agents, and between generations , situated within a particular culture (see, e.g., Laboratory for Education and Society 2018; Noens 2017; Noens and Ramaekers 2014).
In contrast to the ‘parenting discourse ’, which offers an expertise that speaks from outside the parent-child relationship , we attempt here to write from within that relationship, and thus to intentionally speak differently about it, in order to present again some aspects and dimensions of the process of upbringing that are at risk of being denied by the (alluring, captivating, seductive) force of the language of ‘parenting’.
Specifically, we are presenting a philosophical account. In a Wittgensteinian vein we could call this ‘assembling reminders for a particular purpose’ (Wittgenstein 1953, #127) ; that is, for the purpose of broadening the range of possibilities we have at our disposal to articulate the experience of raising children . We are not seeking to define what parenting ‘ought’ to be about, but rather to present aspects and dimensions that are an inevitable part of the human activity we call raising children, and hence that should also be part of any attempt to try to understand and say something meaningful about it. This may seem like a bold claim. What can this inevitability mean given the diversity of experiences , contexts, and values that shape upbringing ? And how are we articulating the ‘experience ’ of raising children by means of a philosophical analysis? In what follows we will elaborate further on the turn to parenting, take issue with the narrowing down or partiality this understanding entails, and set out how we will go about articulating an affirmative account of upbringing in the rest of this book.
Upbringing as ‘Parenting’: A Brief Account3
While experts and literature on childcare have been around for a long time (cf. e.g. Apple 2006, for more on this), over the last few decades, at least to varying degrees in Western Europe and the US, we have seen a proliferation of advice manuals, classes, literature, and television programmes aimed at parents. Hardly a day goes by without some kind of ‘parenting’ issue, or an issue that should concern parents, being reported in the news; from reports on the latest ‘findings’, to accounts critical of the very focus or fixation on ‘parenting’. The extent of this is overwhelming, as illustrated by the multiplicity of ‘types’ of parents that currently populate the scene—the competent parent, the conscious parent, the idle parent, the mindful parent, the authoritative parent, the helicopter parent, the good enough parent, the relaxed parent, the imperfect parent, the attachment-focused parent , etc.—whereby each ‘type’ is proffered as representing a particular ‘style’ of ‘parenting’, characterised by a set of techniques, behaviours, and skills with which to address daily concerns and problems in raising one’s children . It would not be an exaggeration to use the word ‘industry’ to capture the extent of what is going on.4 It is an industry that manifests itself not only in popularised literature and in everyday life, but also in academic research and scholarship.5
It is worth noting here that the term ‘parenting’ is a relatively new concept (cf. e.g. Smith [2010] for more on this; cf. also Furedi [2008]). That we have come to address the ways parents (should) raise their children mainly, and explicitly, in terms of the concept ‘parenting’ is now a characteristic feature of our current condition , at least in Anglophone countries. At th...