Abstract
Drawing on evidence ranging from her own analysis of Britain’s Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) and the neuroscience of child development to evaluation studies of parenting programs and philosophical theories of civic life, Dimitra Hartas argues in Parenting, Family Policy, and Children’s Well-Being in an Unequal Society that government-sponsored parenting education programs reflect a paradoxical turn in family policy in the United Kingdom in an era of growing inequality. She contends that states are dismantling social safety nets and receding from governing by increasingly outsourcing public services to the private sphere at the same time they are engaging in greater oversight of and intervention into parenting practices. Government interventions that focus on “remodeling” parents to be more involved in their children’s education as a way to help families transcend material and social deprivation, Hartas concludes, blame individual parents for children’s reduced life chances and obscure the role of structural factors in shaping inequality.
Hartas’ analysis of the MCS found that among three-, five-, and seven-year-old children, parents’ social class—as measured by parental income and education—was the most significant pathway through which poverty tends to affect children’s literacy, language, and social development. Despite government programs’ focus on encouraging parents to value education, read to their children, and help with homework, home learning and parental learning support were not found to be significant factors in predicting children’s language acquisition and academic performance. Notably, the MCS data also revealed that most parents, across all socio-economic groups surveyed, already held high educational aspirations for their children and consistently offered the learning and emotional support that parenting policies and programs assume parents need persuasion and instruction to do. Hartas argues that this evidence points to why family policy should focus less on encouraging parents to get involved in their children’s learning. Instead, it should focus more on reducing socio-economic differences in children’s academic performance and well-being by maximizing parents’ capabilities through policies that promote access to education, decent-wage jobs, and public services.
Because class shapes parenting resources and abilities despite shared educational values and aspirations, Hartas contends that parenting programs focused on early reading and cognitive stimulation will not address educational inequality. Instead, behavioral modification programs that teach lower-income parents to emulate the parenting practices of middle-class families see the appropriate role of the state as an agent that should regulate and remodel parents into responsible and skilled administrators of their children’s life chances. Framed as cost-effective techniques for the management of social problems associated with “at-risk” families, such programs erroneously characterize parents as economic actors and the most important causal factor in the reproduction of social inequality.
Hartas ultimately proposes that in place of neoliberal programs that put the onus of addressing childhood poverty on the shoulders of parents, family policy should be guided by a four-tier family capability-building approach: civic education focused on critical reasoning, empathy, and the common good; public supports that allow both mothers and fathers to balance care and work responsibilities; redistributive programs that address the structural roots of inequality and reframe political debates about social class to focus on meaningful discussions of economic opportunity and constraint; and a philosophy that families should be public spaces that promote a truly deliberative democracy.
Hartas offers a theoretically sophisticated analysis of how the logic of “parenting determinism” has become ascendant in an era of severe public cuts to education, high rates of unemployment, and restricted welfare states. In doing so, the book succeeds in its central goal to propose a new paradigm for family policy that prioritizes the principles of gender equality, human agency, and an ethics of care over individualized, technocratic, “evidence-based” solutions that focus on parenting as the one significant proximal factor that shapes children’s life chances. The book’s primary strength is Hartas’ ability to draw on a range of major sociological and philosophical theories of civic education, justice, democracy, equity, and ethics—including those from the likes of Anthony Giddens, Martha Nussbaum, John Rawls, and Amartya Sen—to show how neoliberal programs focused on micromanaging parents as arbiters of children’s opportunities undermine the ability of family policies to strengthen the family as a civic institution.
Though she focuses on family policies in the United Kingdom, Hartas could have just as easily written this book about political discourses in the United States, where culture-of-poverty understandings of social inequality and neoliberalism have shaped welfare, education, and family programs for decades. Hartas sheds new light on how to think about the logic, strategies, and implications of U.S. policies ranging from the welfare reform of the 1990s through the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and education reform through the No Child Left Behind Act. Those doing work on these and similar policies will find much value in the book’s critique of family and education programs in the United Kingdom guided by strikingly similar policy priorities.
Though she makes a strong and impassioned case for why we need family policies guided by a family capability-building approach, the book would have benefited from a fuller, more nuanced discussion of the specific programs Hartas is critiquing. She provides notable examples of political commentary from those who advocate for parenting education and early literacy programs but little detail about what these programs look like on the ground and how we can change (or completely dismantle) them to accomplish the goals of the capability approach. This leaves this reader enthused about the possibility of a family policy paradigm that can truly promote equality and justice and simultaneously at a loss for how to implement it in practice given the current political climate.