ABSTRACT
From a British policy perspective, children and their care are constructed as largely the business of parents, that is, as a private matter for families. In recent years, there has been much contemporary political concern about parents’ ability to care for their children in response to changes taking place in household form, notably divorce, lone parenthood and re-partnering. This political concern seeks to reinforce the ideological representation of the private nature of family life, with renewed emphasis being placed upon parental responsibility, while at the same time subjecting parents’ care to the surveillance of experts. Of course, parenting, or rather mothering, has long been targeted for intervention by the state. However, it is the form in which the state exerts control over parenting that is changing rather than the fact of control itself. One current trend is to construct parents as ‘partners’ with institutions and experts so that together they may exert influence upon children. Policies on parental involvement and participation are promoted through schools, the social services and the law. In the case of the new policies on home/school relations, the extension of pedagogy to include parents in children’s education alongside teachers can be seen, as Edwards and Alldred (1999b) suggest, as an attempt to extend children’s family life into their school life. As Edwards and Alldred conceptualise it, the process of children’s familialisation interacts with the process of institutionalisation so that children are subjected in schools to a double surveillance. Moreover, paradoxically, this may work against other policies and processes, namely to give children greater autonomy and self responsibility as they move up the educational system. While our study did not aim to address these issues, they constitute an important development in the theoretical conceptualisation of the significance of parents in children’s lives.
