ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an investigation of the way in which certain ideas about what is deemed to constitute a desirable relationship between men and children have become bound up within what I suggest has been a mutual reconfiguration of understandings of childhood and parenthood within the social conditions of late modernity.2 What follows is an exploration of those forces which have produced a particular constellation of ideas about ‘good fatherhood’. I shall argue that these are ideas which have been central to the broader debate presently taking place around the legal regulation of the relationship between men and children. The argument draws on a literature recently termed ‘the new sociology of childhood’ and family practices, although it does not seek to serve as a discussion of the general scope of this work per se. Nor does what follows present an overview of the multifarious ways in which law regulates the relationship between adults and children on a daily basis. It seeks, rather, to map out the way in which a circulation of discourses of childhood and parenthood are presently serving – within the field of the popular knowledge, the media and at the level of official government discourse – to constitute the relationship between men and children in some problematic and contradictory ways.
