Abstract
This excellent edited collection of ten chapters focuses on the process of transmission of parenting cultures between generations. The editors, Siân Pooley and Kaveri Qureshi, offer up a new framework for thinking about these often unsaid and intangible practices of communication between parents and children, and parents and grandparents as well as different generations of other kin. The focus is on adult children—and so the volume provides a welcome addition to the literature, by examining what happens to the parent–child relationship later in the life course of both child and parent, through the prism of intergenerational relations, and specifically the transmission of parental values. As Pooley and Qureshi highlight, “[p]eople do not stop being parents when their children grow up” (p. 11). This is a study, then, as the authors acknowledge, about (prospective) grandparenthood as much as parenting and parenthood.
In the introduction, Pooley and Qureshi provide a valuable overview of the literature on the transmission of parental knowledge, skills, and values through generations. The conceptualization of key terms such as reproduction, generation, and parenting/parenthood/parents is sophisticated, here and throughout the book. Parenthood and parenting are conceptualized as multilayered, involving the practical activities of a care relationship, but also emotional labor, responsibility, and decision-making as well as being a skill, a position of authority, and an identity. This allows for nuanced analysis of the changing meanings of parenting within families, and different generations. This in-depth discussion of the literature and key concepts within it, crossing history, sociology, and anthropology among other disciplines, is matched by a theoretical framework for understanding the very processes of transmission, as opposed to its outcomes that are, as the editors highlight, usually the focus of research. These four processes are implicit normative expectations, moral judgment, habituation, and memory, which variously relate to the implicit and explicit discussion of what reproduction, childcare, and parenting behaviors should involve, as well as embodied practices and the place of memory in constructing roles and identities as parents. The editors provide a helpful summary of how the following chapters contribute to this framework, and which authors engage with which processes (p. 22). The book is structured on these lines, rather than by geographical area or chronological period, allowing for a more ambitious collection that attempts to tell us something broader about these processes, without losing any sense of cultural specificity. Furthermore, the themes appear to have been derived from the chapters themselves and the wide range of topics they cover. As such, the collection promises not only a range of new case studies of intergenerational transmission around parenting across a variety of cultures but an empirically derived theoretical model for transmission processes more broadly.
The essays included are of a high standard. The authors take us from nineteenth-century England, through twentieth-century Uganda, to contemporary Japan and China. There is a diversity of methodologies and approaches, from the macrolevel analysis of demographic change in East Africa provided by Shane Doyle to the ethnographic studies of a handful of individuals, such as in Qureshi’s piece on migrant Pakistani mothers, and participant–observation as in Elizabeth Raman’s study of the “hydrocentric lifestyles” of a group of Amazonian Indians. Whatever approach they take, they place the perspective of parents themselves at the forefront, allowing for the agency of those involved in these processes of two-way intergenerational communication, whether young children or elderly grandparents. The chapters also variously focus on different moments in the parenting lifecycle, from potential parenthood, as in Robert Pralat’s contribution about the prospective future families of young “nonheterosexual” people in Britain, to the perspectives of grandparents, such as in Adam Philogene Heron’s chapter about aging men in the Antilles. These are rich, complex, and often beautifully written pieces that have a lot to tell us about the subjective experience of being a parent, grandparent, and the tensions such an experience can present. Where the book’s success lies is not, however, in the quality of each individual work but in its coming together as a unified book, as more than the sum of its parts. The authors all engage with the framework set out by the editors, and it is this tight thematic focus that makes this an important contribution.
There are two frequent downfalls of edited collections. The first is a lack of cohesion between chapters on a thematic or analytic level—and as above, Pooley and Qureshi have done a fine job of ensuring the chapters work effectively together to produce a book that works as a whole. The framework of four overlapping and entangled processes works effectively, as each chapter provides evidence for one or more of these modes of transmission. And of course, there is a lot of overlap here, between, say, the moral judgments of a grandparent about their child’s parenting practice, and an individual’s memory of being parented by that parent. But ultimately, the chapters show how this fourfold model can help enhance understanding of what is a slippery subject matter to pin down.
The second critique of many edited volumes is their lack of diversity, in geographic, social, or chronological terms. Parenthood between Generations is perhaps a little easier to fault on these grounds: of the ten chapters, five are based on research into different communities in Britain, albeit a diverse range of migrant populations as well as white Britons, and of (prospective) parents of different class backgrounds and sexualities. The other five chapters are studies of parents from a range of backgrounds from across the globe: China, Japan, Amazonia, Uganda, and the Antilles. But can this admittedly wide range of cultures represented, from nineteenth-century England and contemporary British South Asian diaspora to contemporary Antillean men and Northwestern Amazonian communities, support a new theory of transmission that could be applied not only to parenting across all societies but to other forms of transmission too? Similarly, three chapters are explicitly historical, going back to the late nineteenth century—those of Davis, Doyle, and Pooley. Although others discuss the experiences of various generations and, in particular, the impact of previous childhood experiences and so are historically aware, the remaining seven chapters are largely rooted in the contemporary period. Is this enough evidence to suggest the framework can work over different time periods?
Given the size of the volume, however, fuller coverage of other parts of the world—Africa, North America, Australasia, and so on—or a wider range of time periods—is this applicable to the early modern period and earlier?—could not realistically be expected. This is the work for future scholars and a call to adopt, use, amend, and further develop this framework in a wider variety of historical and contemporary settings. So, what we do have is a valuable new model to be further tested in other kinds of societies and cultures in terms of the transmission of values, practices, and skills relating to all aspects of human life. This is an ambitious and welcome agenda, to further understanding the very processes of change and continuity.
Altogether, then, this is an exemplary edited collection—it does what any edited collection should, in coming together to produce something collaborative than no scholar could achieve alone. Furthermore, it provides historians, sociologists, and other scholars a new way of thinking about generational change, continuity, and communication. Any framework such as this can be reductive and simplifying rather than instructive, but used well, as exemplified here, the nuanced nature of historical change and continuity over the individual life course and at a societal level is not lost. The book sets out a new agenda for better understanding the “deep emotional legacy that children inherit” (Chowbey and Salway, p. 249) from older generations, and likewise the way younger family members shape their parents and grandparents too, as part of a process of “lifelong moulding” (p. 280). It’s a great success.