Why I'm divesting from parenting
And I'm just treating children like people now. Also, the Parenting-Industrial complex, how capitalism birthed intensive parenting, and what about love?
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The title of this piece is, obviously, a provocation.
I haven’t stopped parenting my children, of course. But - I am giving up on parenting as a thing we do to children. And I am full on rejecting the Parenting-Industrial complex (or trying).
And, I think perhaps there is something to explore there.
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I’ve stopped talking and thinking so much about parenting, because I want to look at the way we live with children through a different lens altogether. Basically, not a parenting lens, but a lens of relationship and just children being people who are unique and different and with whom we share a space and common values.
What do I mean by “not a parenting lens”?
Well, I’m not a fan of parenting as big business, but I’m also not a fan of parenting as a thing we do to children (which is essentially what intensive parenting has become). I’m not a fan of styles of parenting, or of so-called parenting experts.
It hasn’t always been this way. I was absolutely sold on attachment parenting and gentle parenting in the early days, I read all the books and tried to say all the right things. I did this because I wanted to parent differently to my parents, but didn’t have anyone to look to for how to do this.
I have gone through the entire parenting style tunnel, and now I’ve come out the other end. But I was in the tunnel a long time, trying to find a style of parenting that would finally fit. I know what that feels like; looking outside of ourselves for answers, wanting someone to give us steps and scripts, needing to find a sense of community and shared values.
And while I realise many of you will want to hold on to the idea of parenting, while rejecting the way it has been co-opted by capitalism, I think the two things are connected.
Parenting as a word and concept is fairly recent in fact, and inextricably tied to capitalist interests.
I want to shift away from a parenting lens entirely, and here’s why.
I have often spoken about peaceful parenting, consent-based parenting, low demand parenting or perhaps more commonly, partnership parenting (which in the end feels like the label I most want to associate with, if I really have to.)
But when I stop to think, I realise that actually, I’d like to step entirely outside of parenting as a concept.
I want to divest from the Parenting-Industrial complex: from paying money to get advice on what I should do with my children.
But before we decide we don’t need parenting anymore, let me walk you through why we even have it in the first place.
The birth of parenting
Parenting does not begin when the first human had the first baby. That’s parenthood - it’s different.
While the words ‘mother’ and ‘father’ have been around since the birth of language, the term parent has also been around a while – since the 14th century, says Alison Gopnik, in her book The Gardener and the Carpenter.
Of course, ideas and advice about how to raise children have also been around for a long time. Apparently the ancient Egyptians were fond of physical punishment, whereas the ancient Greeks tended to veer towards being more authoritative. Every culture had their own culturally constructed ideas about children, and ways to raise and care for them. This isn’t what I’m talking about when I talk about parenting.
When I talk about parenting, I really mean the kind of parenting that emerged in the 1950s in the US, and became associated with the suddenly more popular word “parenting” (coined in 1958), according to Alison Gopnik.
This term became increasingly popular in the 1970s, and this was the moment that a state of being (motherhood, parenthood), and a role (parent), became a state of doing – parenting. This quickly became what we now call intensive parenting; Annette Laureau goes deep into what this looks like in Unequal Childhoods.
I would argue that intensive parenting is almost the same as parenting in the West, because parenting for many Western parents, IS intensive, intentional and focused on “concerted cultivation” of our children. It’s not enough to just be a parent: you also need to be doing the work of parenting.
Gopnik claims that parenting has overall not improved the lives of children, while also making the lives of their parents worse. It has turned a role, and a relationship, into a form of concerted work. It has also, increasingly, turned a concern that was primarily societal, or at the very least communal, into the job of the parent (usually one parent, usually the mother.)
“We can aspire to love better without thinking of love as a kind of work,” she writes. What she is saying is that we can love our children, nurture our relationships with them, provide them with what they need – without turning it into a job. We can care for our children without (intensive) parenting.
Parenting and women’s work in the West
Parenting sounds like and is in fact, work. Work that has for many reasons become women’s work (one of which was that women were predominantly raising the children already, and also patriarchy!)
What strikes me here is that just as parenting was ascending to its current place of glory, women in Western countries were also increasingly joining the workforce. As many women looked for paid work outside of the home, looked for careers and forms of creative expression that did not center around or were not located within the home, so did parenting begin to take shape as something that women should be concerned with, researching, and doing to and for their children.
Dr Spock wrote his popular book on how to parent in 1946, and it was predominantly aimed at middle class mothers who at the time mostly tended to stay home with their children.
In 1969, Bowlby pioneered his theory of attachment, which essentially explained that infants need one main attachment figure to provide safety, love and sustenance for the first few months and years of their life. Bowlby was adamant that maternal deprivation could be harmful for young children, in other words that children needed to be with their mother in the early years.
“Professional women like myself – I had my first baby in the year the book was published – became worried that they would damage their children by returning to work even on a part-time basis, and those who worked full-time were widely criticised. Many nurseries closed, and nursery schools switched to taking children only on a part-time basis. We should, perhaps, have known that these measures were questionable, since for generations women in the north of England had worked full-time in the mills, with no apparent north–south difference in the incidence of psychopathy,” writes Barbara Tizard.
Parenting is in fact a very middle-class, white endeavor. Black women in the US, Indigenous women, many women of colour, poor and immigrant women, have never not worked. Working class women everywhere have always worked for some form of pay, while also raising children. Children have been looked after and cared for by an assortment of trusted people, and survived.
The rise of Parenting as a Western phenomenon, coincided with the rise of white middle class women wanting to join the workplace. Parenting was fundamentally aimed at these women. It’s a patriarchal, capitalist, mostly Western and white phenomenon.
Not only did it serve to guilt women for leaving their babies (whether this was a choice or not), but it also gave those women who decided to pursue a career regardless, two jobs: that of parenting, and that of working for pay.
(Don’t get me wrong: I stayed home with my children. I still do. I love caring for them and I enjoy many domestic tasks. But I just don’t think this is the ONLY way to raise healthy children.)
Fast-forward to the 90s.. and we have The Baby Book by the pioneers of attachment parenting, the Sears.
While Sears coined the parenting method, and the scientific theory of attachment was popularised by Bowlby and then Mary Ainsworth, the way humans raise children in an attachment-focused way is as old as humans themselves.
Except that the difference is that Western attachment theory and parenting focused on the parent (usually the mother) as the primary and necessary caregiver, whereas our historical understanding of the way children grow up secure and attached is not as labour-intensive on one individual. This piece by Tracy Cassels points out that the main feature of both the theory of attachment and the parenting method is responsivenes, and that in evolutionary terms, the person responding is not the most salient feature - it is the fact that someone, not always the same person, is responsive to the child.
We now know about the many different ways children are looked after and cared for all over the world, and grow up to live lives as adults, and can see that intensive parenting, or parenting as a job, is a very Western, modern phenomenon.
The idea that there is one right way to form an attachment with a child, and one right person to do it, and that this should be done as intensively as Western parents do it, is ridiculous when we look at parenting throughout history.
(Side note: Parenting is actually a word (and a concept) that is hard to translate into many other languages. I realised this when I struggled to find the Italian word for it and had to google it. I found out many languages have had to play around with the word parent to sort of fabricate the word parenting because it’s just not a thing. Not until very recently at least!)
The Parenting-Industrial Complex
All of that said - I am not saying that carework isn’t labour. Of course it is! All I’m saying is that care and domestic labour is a thing we do either in general or for someone, rather than concerted, intense work we do TO someone.
My point here is that I wish to elevate carework and mothering, but stop obsessing over which parenting style and which parenting expert we are following. I want to separate carework from parenting and the Parenting-Industrial Complex.
I believe carework and loving our children is separate to parenting and its many capitalist iterations.
In her book, All About Love, bell hooks writes about what love looks like. She says, “When love is present the desire to dominate and exercise power cannot rule the day,” and she emphasises that love is an action, and is not always pleasant or painless, but that an ethic of love is at the core of raising children AND cannot be present in a hyperdindividualistic, capitalistic society.
Parenting is what our patriarchal, capitalist system has created to turn love and care into a very specific type of job and a commodity to sell; to turn learning how to really practice love, and to nurture small people, into shaping and moulding them; to turn the labour of caring into something that chains us via evidence-based research and science, and something we need to achieve and excel at (and possibly buy a ton of courses and books on - capitalism at work!)
Now we have a parenting paradigm that tells us how we can parent for the best outcomes. (See my critique of Diana Baumrind’s paradigm).
We are accused of helicopter parenting, when some of us are simply trying to follow all the parenting instructions and be “good mothers,” a definition that is often unclear but somehow very specific.
The truth is we cannot win: you are either a negligent mother or a tiger mother.
You will never please everyone. You will never do it right. You will exhaust yourself and lose yourself, and then be accused of losing yourself, and then have to find yourself because you weren’t supposed to lose yourself, and then be told you’re a bad mother for trying to find yourself again and losing focus on your children.
You will intensively parent and then be told you are too controlling and that’s why your children have mental health struggles. You will be hands-off and then be told you are permissive and that’s why your children are badly behaved and will probably become criminals or just all-round entitled people (who knows which is worse). You will lower demands only to find that actually the demands on you have tripled. You will demand stuff of your kids only to find that that too, is very demanding of you.
You cannot win because that is the whole point of the Parenting-Industrial complex: it thrives on our insecurity.
This is a feature of capitalism in general: “One source of capitalism’s power is that whether people have some or a lot, they don’t feel like they have enough,” says Astra Taylor in an interview about her new book.
There are many parts of the Parenting-Industrial complex that are insidious, and I’m going to break some of them down below (not all! there are too many!)
The PI complex elevates “experts.”
This ties in with the way experts thrive in insecure times, and in societies where we feel a collective sense of scarcity.
I have noticed this in online parenting spaces: parenting “experts” elevate themselves by packaging parenting in a specific way, and selling it to desperate, struggling parents. They thrive off of our sense of scarcity, and off of our initial sense that we have finally found a home under a specific parenting label.
One salient example is the Good Inside company (we prob all know Dr Becky by now). She has turned her very gentle parenting-adjacent advice, repackaging essentially already out there concepts and ideas, and massively monetized it to (mostly) wealthy people. Look, I bought her book on kindle, so I’m judging noone here.
I’m not sure what comes first: our collective insecurity, or the expert telling they have a new way and they can teach us. I suspect the two sort of feed off each other.
The PI complex is adultist.
Adultism is age-based discrimination, directed towards children. It can look like individual discrimination, as well as structural. It is a system of oppression just like patriarchy or ableism, and being a child can be a marginalised identity, that can also intersect with other marginalised identities.
Very few parenting experts acknowledge systemic barriers, let alone talk explicitly about adultism. Very few take into account the voices of the actual people concerned: children.
The PI complex normalises doing parenting TO children.
The idea of doing something TO a child, to someone who is already systemically marginalised and whom we hold power over, makes me bristle.
It reinforces our beliefs that children need things done to them (parenting, instructing, disciplining, educating), and that those things need to have names and methods, AND that the way we assess our success is through outcomes.
Alison Gopnik compares parenthood and carework to gardening, and parenting to carpentry, and this feels right to me. It also feels right that unschooling fits with caring for a plant as it grows much more than it does with moulding, shaping, and building our children to a specific blueprint.
Parenting, much like teaching and educating, has become something we do TO our children. You can’t parent if you’re not doing it to someone, right?
Can we parent WITH our children? Hmmm.. not really. That would imply they are also doing the parenting. Parenting is simply not a mutual endeavour!
Fundamentally, parenting is not collaborative.
What about partnership parenting? Or respectful parenting? Or low demand parenting?
First off, we won’t really have one definition of what either of these is. And plus, I reject that making up new labels and names and sticking parenting after them, somehow tranforms the basic premise of parenting: parenting is a thing we do to our children.
Why not talk more about love, instead? About living in partnership? About acceptance and unconditional positive regard (a psychological term popularised by Carl Rogers). Why not simply talk to our children? Meet them where they are at?
The PI complex is about promotion and profits
If you are running a business, these are some of your main concerns. I don’t care how people couch it - whether they use language of community, of helping parents, or whatever.
The bottom line is: this is your business now.
Can there be ethical parenting experts under capitalism? I’m not sure. I don’t have an answer to this yet. Maybe? But I think this needs to be intentional, and so often it is not.
The PI complex is often about results.
A lot of the guidance is based on saying a specific thing, to get a determined result.
“Say xyz to get your child to go to bed.” “Set xyz consequence to make sure they eat their meals.”
The focus of parenting is so intensely on how to do it in order to get our children to do what we want them to do.
“It’s not working!” or “Gentle parenting didn’t work for us.” is a refrain I hear a lot.
I feel like this is morally problematic, because it doesn’t take into account that children are people and they also may have thoughts, feelings and agendas.
If the child is a product of our parenting, this erases the fact that children co-create meaning, that children are born with unique personalities and tendencies, that children deserve a say in all things that regard them.
We are turned into workers and our child into a product.
Then PI complex sells us an individual solution to a systemic issue.
Parenting is a bit like diets: an individual protocol for a structural problem (the similarities don’t stop there, but that will have to be another post!)
The PI industrial complex is thriving because in our hyperindividualistic culture, we are made to believe that breaking personal cycles and parenting in a certain way will ultimately make not only our children thrive, but create a better world.
This is a stretch, at best.
The problems are not individual. bell hooks called out “the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.”
She was talking about New Age spirituality, but this can apply just as well to parenting. We are told the problem is us, and that if we do enough work within ourselves and our families, we will be whole again and make the world a better place.
The thing is, we may have individual struggles but fundamentally the problem is not us, nor is it our children. A lot of the reasons why we struggle are structural: we are underpaid and isolated, we are trapped in a system that creates wealth for a minority rather than distributing it, there are barriers of all sorts to financial stability, we lack access to affordable healthcare, food, education and outdoor spaces, we don’t have the support we need on all sorts of levels, and so on.
Most parenting advice and methods I see out there never mention any of this. For many, it is in their interest not to. We are paying them, after all, and they are delivering a product.
Aren’t labels useful though?
Yes, parenting labels can be useful for some. I certainly went from gentle parent to respectful parent to unschooling parent to partnership parenting.. to whatever I’m doing now. Just being a human living with smaller humans.
The labels, in a way, were a pipeline to recognising that actually, I don’t want to be a part of this capitalistic endeavour.
Labels also help people feel less alone, feel seen, feel part of a community. There is nothing wrong with that. It can be beautiful. My issue is not with that, so much as with who is profiting off of this “community.”
Who is preying on parent’s feeling of being lost, of now knowing where to turn, of having no support (all structural issues!) and selling them an individual solution?
Labels aside, I feel like parenting is a distraction to the bigger issues we have, and to actually getting to know our own unique child and their own specific needs and desires and quirks and learning to live alongside them. It is a barrier to collective goals and working together (unless it is explicitly focused on that, but I don’t see much parenting advice that is!)
Is this just semantics?
No, I don’t think it is. Yes I do love words, and words matter.
But this isn’t just about words - it’s about the proliferation of parenting methods and styles that are gatekeepy and have specific language surrounding them and a specific way to do them. It is about the way an industry has emerged that preys on our insecurities and our systemic issues.
But if we don’t parent, what do we do?
Does this mean we don’t have a responsibility of care? No, of course not. We are carers, of course. We still ARE parents. It is a role, a duty and a responsibility. A really really important one.
Humans have been carers and parents since the beginning of time, without scripts and scientific studies.
How about just being in relationship with our children?
There is no label for this, because it’s not a philosophy or a method and cannot be packaged and sold. There are no scripts, no specific ways to implement it, no acronyms to help you remember what you’re supposed to be doing.
I can’t tell you how to do it, because nobody can. And also I’m still figuring it out myself.
I suppose I could give it a name, but why? I’m not selling you anything here.
But what it does involve is re-learning how to be in consent-based, non-coercive relationship with others, how to centre children’s rights and autonomy and liberation, how to recognise the ways we use power to dominate.
It involves doing some inner work to figure out how to be in relationship with ourselves.
It involves recognising adultism, and power, and structural oppression. And the role of systems and institutions and wider mechanisms in the ways we exist in the world.
Recognising that we can’t do this alone, that in some ways loving our children means engaging to build wider networks of connection in our communities.
It requires a degree of labour, of course. We are carers after all. Ideally, we would be sharing the carework in community (and the lack of this sort of collective raising of children is also a reason why parenting has become a high achiever’s dream. I forgot to talk about how parenting fuels perfectionism!!).
We are carers, but it’s not a job - it doesn’t have a checklist, productivity hacks, outcomes and a system of incentives.
I don’t wish to bash anyone who talks about parenting or teaches parenting or writes about parenting. The issue is not really an individual one.
But I do think that if you’re engaging in any way with a parenting style, then we need to be able to critique the PI complex.
All of us who are parents bear some responsibility for the ways we perform our parenthood, even while a lot of that is influenced by who we are and how we are impacted by dominant systems.
I don’t think parenting is entirely beyond re-claiming or redemption, but I just choose to not be bound by the definition of parenting, and as much as I can to divest from the PI complex.
I would LOVE to hear your thoughts!!
Fran x
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Fran, this really resonates. If we try to be a “good” parent using the models that might once have made us a “good” student or employee, we will look to outside authorities to define our role, and we will see our children as products that reveal our success in conforming to externally defined standards. Taking on “parent” or “mother” as an identity immediately places our children into an objectified role and makes them complicit in upholding and affirming our performance of said identity. I feel like millennials (I’m one, and not exempt from this) are highly drawn towards “evidence-based” parenting info, and I have lots of thoughts about why that’s problematic -- but I’ll spare you, Fran, and anyone else who bothered to read this comment! Thanks for the thought-provoking piece.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the outcomes of parenting - aka our children, how they live and act and work. Growing up in evangelical Christianity, if a child decided not to be a Christian as an adult, it was considered the worst failing of a parent ever. Somehow, it must be your fault - they straight up told parents that.
I walked away from all of that, but is what I’m pursuing now any different I wonder? In capitalism, the worst failing would be to raise a child who becomes an adult who doesn’t support themselves, who doesn’t contribute to society (aka make money to pay taxes and social security).
To be vulnerable, I think I’ve traded my parents deepest fear of their child not following Jesus for the fear that my kids won’t get a job that supports themselves. But what I find…interesting? Ironic? now is that people are working full time, sometimes multiple jobs and they STILL can’t support themselves.
Im not sure what my conclusion is other than to try my best to be present with my kids, stay in relationship with them, not have set outcomes in mind, and not catastrophize one of their current struggles into “but because they don’t do XYZ right now they won’t ever succeed in life”. (And by life I mean figure out how to survive in late stage capitalism America…which maybe they’ll decide to ditch that altogether and move abroad somewhere it’s not so bad. We’ll see!)