Contested parenting and its affective economies
A commentary
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7769413 |
|---|---|
| Authors | C Fonseca (0000-0002-7761-6095, Program of Post‐Graduate Studies in Social Anthropology Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul Porto Alegre Brazil, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 53 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Publication date | 2025-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Ethos (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0091-2131 • E-ISSN: 1548-1352 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/etho.70009 |
| OpenAlex | W4409691820 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 24 |
In stringing together the fine‐grained ethnographic studies that comprise this special issue of Ethos , “Contested Parenting. Experts, Audiences, Selves,” our commentary is designed to go beyond the micro‐setting of daily routines to the emotional entanglements of family relationships within wider economic and political networks. Calling on the notion of affective economies, we examine how, in the present‐day “parenting culture,” racial and class inequalities mediate not only expert intervention and policy objectives, but the moral and emotional foundations of parental selves. Comparing widely diverse settings—from New York mothers of the cosmopolitan elite to working‐class dads in the Caribbean, from African‐based ex‐pats engaged in the international aid industry to Vietnamese immigrants in Berlin, it becomes clear that, as we descend the socioeconomic ladder, parental anxieties are retooled and compounded by the accusatory gaze of surrounding audiences. Failing to see today's parenting culture as a contextually‐circumscribed ideal, government policies tend to isolate its component parts in universal principles of good practice, propagating a myopic moralism that exacerbates feelings of frustration, humiliation, and burn‐out among families and professionals caught in the cross fire of historically‐shaped structures of inequality and discrimination
Economics · Sociology · Early Childhood Education and Development · Psychology · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics
Parenting Culture Studies
La parentalisation du social
Knowledge forms and gendered moralities in policies of infant care in Brazil
Introduction Special Issue “Paradoxical orders
Unsettling care
Defining the Limits of Acceptable Parenthood
Affective Economies
Horizons of long-distance intimacies
The de-kinning of birthmothers
"Making families" child mobility and familiar organization in Cape Verde
Care as social organization
What exactly is a family man? Performing and precluding respectable fatherhood in Dominica
Motherhood amidst reprimands and advice
Making beautiful babies
Aid workers parenting in the field
Parenting as contested practice between experts, audiences, and selves
Contesting parenting expertise
Disrupting the social by centering the self
Help can harm
"Poor brain development" in the global South? Challenging the science of early childhood interventions
Attaching shame to hierarchy and hierarchy to some versions of attachment
Afterword
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |