Jennie Bristow

Risk, health and parenting culture

In this Editorial, we have three aims. We mainly aim to highlight the key issues raised in the papers that follow, and orient readers to some thematic and methodological connections between them. We have divided the papers into three thematic groups: expert-led constructions of the risk-managing parent; risk society and the development of parental identity with reference to food; and extending ‘parenting’ backwards. We explain what we mean by these themes and how each paper fits in. We also seek to explain the background to this special issue of Health Risk and Society, and we describe the seminar series that gave rise to it, and make some points about what we mean by the general subject area for that series, ‘parenting culture’. Our final objective is to draw attention to a key point that emerges from the research discussed here, namely the importance of ‘parenting’ as a key site for the development of the risk-centred society and risk-consciousness.

Editorial: Risk, health and parenting culture

In this Editorial, we have three aims. We mainly aim to highlight the key issues raised in the papers that follow, and orient readers to some thematic and methodological connections between them. We have divided the papers into three thematic groups: expert-led constructions of the risk-managing parent; risk society and the development of parental identity with reference to food; and extending ‘parenting’ backwards. We explain what we mean by these themes and how each paper fits in. We also seek to explain the background to this special issue of Health Risk and Society, and we describe the seminar series that gave rise to it, and make some points about what we mean by the general subject area for that series, ‘parenting culture’. Our final objective is to draw attention to a key point that emerges from the research discussed here, namely the importance of ‘parenting’ as a key site for the development of the risk-centred society and risk-consciousness.

Reporting the Riots: Parenting Culture and the Problem of Authority in Media Analysis of August 2011

This article reviews the results of a small study of the national British newspapers in the period immediately following the 2011 riots, which analyses the ways in which political and media discourse linked the riots to the problem of ‘parenting’. It examines three discourses that arise from this linkage: (a) a generalised ‘moral collapse’; (b) the specific problem of ‘troubled families’; and (c) parenting policy and the problem of discipline. From this, I propose there is a fourth, ‘missing discourse’, which would situate the problem of parental authority within a wider crisis of adult authority. Drawing on historical and sociological reflections on the problem of parental authority in the late modern period, I propose that a more fruitful discussion would take account of the ways in which parenting culture and policy has challenged assumptions about generational responsibility.

Why Study Generations

The concept of ‘generation’ denotes the biological reality of being, the historical reality of living, and the epistemological problem of knowing. These multiple meanings often operate simultaneously, making generation a powerful concept for understanding the social world; and also a slippery concept, which is difficult to define and apply. This chapter summarises the ways in which sociology has approached the study of generations over the twentieth century, and, following Mannheim, situates the problem of generations within the sociology of knowledge.

Teachers, the End of Ideology, and the Pace of Change

Teachers, as representatives of the older generation, are charged with responsibility for transmitting the cultural heritage. However, a growing ambivalence about the status and role of knowledge has formed the basis of a consciousness framed by the imperatives of risk management. This chapter discusses the way that the instrumental orientation of education reconceptualises the relationship between teacher and pupil, conceiving of teaching as a technical function rather than as a generational interaction between past, present, and future.

Gender and the Intimate Politics of Reproduction

Policy interest in the problem of generations has for a long time had a naturalistic quality, expressed in a preoccupation with demographic trends, and the ideology of eugenics. It has also presumed an interest in the domain of social reproduction, situating the family as a cause of, and solution to, social problems. This chapter explores the way that changes in women’s social position over the twentieth century have both allowed women to participate fully as members of ‘social generations’, and opened up the sphere of reproduction to intensified scrutiny and management. Relations within, and between, generations are conceptualised in increasingly brittle terms.

‘Safeguarding’, Child Protection and Implicit Knowledge

Much of children’s knowledge of the world comes not from formal education but from implicit, everyday interactions between the generations, within the family and the community. This chapter discusses how the need to protect and socialise children is gradually devolving from a generalised generational responsibility into a bureaucratic function that seeks to distance children from the adult world, encapsulated in the language of ‘safeguarding’. In this regard, the dynamic interaction between generations is rationalised, and flattened out.

Fresh Contacts, Education, and the Cultural Heritage

Education is properly understood as a generational responsibility, in which the accumulated cultural heritage is passed on to students who, because they have grown up in different times, will take and shape this knowledge in their own way. This chapter develops Mannheim’s understanding of the importance of ‘fresh contacts’ to discuss the crisis of the curriculum over the twentieth century, where ambivalence about the cultural heritage has allowed instrumental imperatives to dominate the purpose of education.

The Birth of the Sixties — Generations after the Second World War

‘The twentieth century has two periods of intensive study of historical generations: the years between 1920 and 1933 and the period after the Second World War,’ explains Jaeger (1985). ‘During the first period, German contributions dominate in terms of numbers and importance. The second period shows a broad spectrum of international research, during which American studies, mostly social scientifically oriented, gain prominence’. (p. 277)

Conclusion — The Problem of Generations Today

This book has investigated how the Baby Boomer generation has become constructed as a social problem in Britain. My approach to this question is based on the understanding that the problem of generations is, following Mannheim (1952), to do with the mediation between past, present and future, where society is preserved, made anew, and at certain points transformed, by the interaction between the new members of society who come into ‘fresh contact’ with the existing cultural heritage. The sociology of knowledge seeks to understand this mediation, by accounting for how generational location interacts with wider social forces to develop ideas in the present day.