ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the concept of parenting as voiced by children and adolescents. Using a life course analysis it charts their constructions, revealing in these early representations the beginnings of continuities in parent-child relations which span individuals lives. In so doing it challenges assumptions which, despite accumulating evidence, still tend to see the young as spinning off from the parental home into independence and adulthood, and gives place to a neglected field-the parenting of the older adolescent (Oakley, 1987; Brannen et al., 1994). It illuminates social processes and sentiments already at work in these early years, laying the foundations of the subsequent histories of parent-child relations.
