Sociologists - the life of the party

They don't have physicists' atom-smashing reputation or look like Jeff Goldblum's chaos theory scientist in Jurassic Park, but the sociologists at Kent University's parenting conference are the kind of scientists I want at my next dinner party. They tell funny anecdotes, they epater le bourgeois and best of all, they quantify all those things about being a modern parent that drive so many of us mad.

The line-up at Monitoring Parents: Childrearing the Age of Intensive Parenting was full of witty sceptics talking about how government, experts and media are creating a hysterical parenting culture. It was every Alpha Mummy's dream. Susan Douglas, an American media historian who has written The Mommy Myth, excoriated the idea of the new mother who is expected (by others and herself) to achieve perfection in everything from providing her kids epicurean delights (organic, wholesome, and made fresh each day) to keeping a house that Martha Stewart would envy. Frank Furedi, the University of Kent's Professor of Sociology and author of Paranoid Parenting: Why Ignoring the Experts May Be Best for Your Child, scoffed at expert and government interference in parenting that has gone so far as to produce a pamphlet for fathers instructing them how to hug their children. ("Where do I put my arms again?")

At the conference, held this week on Monday and Tuesday in Canterbury, everyone in the room seemed to be simultaneously nodding their heads and enthusiastically putting in their two cents. When Charlotte Faircloth, a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, presented her paper on mothers who breast-feed beyond their child's first birthday and the ideas of what's "normal", people's hands shot up to comment so quickly you would have thought she was throwing sweets.

Andrew Billen, who also attended, writes in today's T2 about parenting paranoia. Check it out!

Comments

[Claire King]

1) Ooh the lovely Jeff Goldblum

2) Hysterical parenting...linked to paranoid parenting - more and more prevalent it seems. Are they fuelled by the media, by government nannying and 'new research has found' articles? Or is it a pressure that 'Alpha' parents put on themselves these days?

For those of us who work/have worked, particularly in business arena, we should be used to managing risk appropriately, coaching, encouraging and educating and letting people make their own mistakes. Can't we be allowed to do that for our children too? If not, what kind of adults will they become?

This all starts with pregnancy and breastfeeding. The facile recommendation that women teetotal throughout pregnancy, rather than giving us the information to make our own choices, for example. Will the recent report on junk food 'addiction' in the womb and at the breast lead to a new list of foods we are recommended to eliminate?
Whilst I'm convinced that my two year old enjoys such a varied diet at least in part because she picked up some flavours in the womb and during breastfeeding. It doesn't mean that for the 18 months of pregnancy and breastfeeding I never ate steak frites or Ben & Jerrys.

Then childhood. For me it meant playing out, climbing trees, falling off horses, conkers in autumn and snowball fights in winter and walks to the shop to buy 10p mixes.
And I didn't have a mobile phone to call home with, (although as a good Brownie I off course had 2p for the telephone box in my pocket at all times).

I have friend who winces every time my daughter falls over and scrapes her knees running round in the meadow. My daughter - she's having a great time and just gets up and brushes herself down and says "oops". But many of her friends are often being told 'slow down, be careful, you'll fall over' and as a result they just hang around uncertainly at their parents feet. Of course I'm always within running distance if she strays too close to the edge (road on one side, drop off into spiky brambles with stream below on the other), but that's in case of naughtiness. She knows full well that the edge is dangerous because I've explained it to her. Ditto eating strange berries.

Ditto putting things around her neck...Mittens with strings on to go through the arms of coats. Is it really true you can't get them in England anymore because they are dangerous? What's all that about?

And then of course there are hurt feelings. Surely it can't be true that many schools do not allow 'competitiveness' at sports days? Have we become so inadept at parenting that we cannot explain to children the differences between winning, losing and taking part, both in sports and in life in general?

All we can expect from this kind of mollycoddling is a generation of 'chickens with no feathers' as my Ukranian friends would say.

Incidentally, I have another friend whose daughter fell over (at a sports day) and grazed her knee. But it wouldn't stop bleeding. And that was how they discovered that she had leukemia and as a result she got fast treatment and survived. If she'd not been running to win and never taken that fall it would have been too late to save her.

The bearing and raising of our children means decision making on a daily basis and takes an awful lot of courage. What has changed in the last 30 years? Why all the wimping out?

3) OK, rant over! But please, if this thread revives, let it not turn into a discussion about the McCanns. There are other threads on that...