Epilogue: ‘Mummy Maybot’: a new age of authoritarian neoliberalism

This book has examined the good parenting scripts emerging from popular culture, policy discussion, public debate and across media, and how these scripts have championed affluent, ambitious and aspirational maternity in particular, and created and sustained a vocabulary of ‘individual responsibility’ and ‘hardworking families’. It has also discussed how neoliberalism co-opted liberal feminism and has highlighted increasingly unsympathetic and lurid portrayals of poverty, as well as the rising resentments over social security that they animate. This epilogue discusses the rise of a new trans-Atlantic age of neoliberal authoritarianism in Britain under the government of Prime Minister Theresa May, focusing in particular on her early commitments to ‘just about managing’ families (JAMs) and her initiatives aimed at containing resentments about austerity and the crushing material privations caused by the retrenchment of the welfare state.

Introduction

This book examines the cultural politics of parent-blame in Britain, or more precisely, mother-blame, arguing that the manufacture and circulation of ‘bad parents’ is part of a social, cultural and political rubric that is at once gendered and gendering. It begins with the premise that parent-blame manifests, in part, through the sacralisation and idealisation of some mothers. It also discusses the emergence of the figure of the ‘bad parent’ as a ‘bearer of crisis’ and shows how this figure came to populate public debate, popular culture, policy documents and political speech, everyday conversation, social media and media culture at the turn of the twenty-first century. Finally, it locates the construction of ‘parenting crisis’ within a broader context of neoliberalism. The book contends that the neoliberalisation of parenting disguises and obscures the structural processes and excesses that are widening social inequality and deepening the poverty of those marginalised at the bottom.

Weaponising parent-blame in post-welfare Britain

This chapter examines how contested cultural austerity romances were mobilised to create high levels of public consent for ‘austere’ policy making in Britain. In particular, it considers how the classed romances of retreat and virtuous thrift came to feed the fire of moral indignation around the perceived excesses of the welfare state. The chapter analyses the reimagining of the welfare state: how welfare has been rewritten as a blockage to meritocracy and how the notion of welfare disgust was crafted. It shows how, in a state of apparently permanent austerity, new forms of hostility are directed at those seen as wasteful, irresponsible and a parasitic drain. This is evident in the so-called benefit broods, and the chapter uses the case of the Philpott family to explore how parent-blame was weaponised in in a broader ideological project that seeks to construct an anti-welfare commonsense.

Parenting in austere times: warmth and wealth

This chapter examines how ideas of ungovernable families were put to ideological work in a new era of austere policymaking in Britain. Following the financial recession of 2008–2009, an austerity culture emerged in Britain and the United States, which prized and celebrated the virtues of restraint and ‘making do’ with fewer resources. The chapter analyses the movements of these austerity cultures and how they stitched ideas of good parenting to being thrifty, resourceful and resilient. It explores how the hidden labour of thrift connects to the invisible labour of social reproduction, and how austerity culture occasioned a retreatist set of fantasies that sought to move mothers from the workplace back into the home. It also considers the explanatory power of the ‘warmth over wealth’ narrative and how the discourses of ‘tough love’ that were initially deployed in reference to misbehaving children were expanded and applied to ‘troublemaking families’.

Parenting – with feeling

This chapter examines the emotional politics of parenting culture, and more specifically, the importance of the idea of ‘pure relationships’ in the manufacture of a parenting crisis. It considers how parent-blame forms a political battleground conducted through the vocabulary of feelings — bad parents designated as such by professionals, through their failure to provide adequate emotional care, to regulate their own feelings or to generate emotional resilience and skills in their children. The chapter highlights the psychological vocabularies that have manifested as the central pillar of neoliberal parenting moralism, and at the expense of sociological vocabularies of class, inequality and structures of disadvantage. It also discusses the collusion between such individualising and psychologising languages and the reproduction of fantasy ‘tough love’ parents, who are able to exert the correct (and elusive) combination of attentive nurture and confident discipline.

Mothercraft to Mumsnet

This chapter examines some of the key shifts in mothercraft and parent pedagogy, focusing on what ‘counts’ as good parenting and who is recognised as a legitimate expert. Using the case of parenting website Mumsnet, it explores how the ‘scientific motherhood’ of early mothercraft came to colonise new disciplines and to create new forms of knowledge. It considers what kind of parental constituency Mumsnet imagines and addresses and what this imagined Mumsnet constituency might tell us about the construction of ‘good parenting’ today. By analysing the discourses of choice and individualism that structure Mumsnet, the chapter highlights questions around the biopolitics of the family and of childrearing expertise. Finally, it discusses the shifting ‘structures of feeling’ around parent pedagogy as well as key historical accounts that have tended to either celebrate the rise of the ‘empowered parent’.

The cultural industry of parent-blame

This chapter examines how discourses of parental deficit became mobilised and circulated by media producers and across political and public debate in the first years of the twenty-first century. It also shows how these discourses recycle existing figures of parent-blame and manufacture new ones in a televisual form. It considers the rise of a lucrative cultural industry of parent-blame, driven by the media and taken up strategically in subsequent policy debates about family intervention, that hit its peak at the mid-point of the New Labour government's political tenure, and describes the new vocabularies of meritocracy and aspiration that formed the backbone of the New Labour project. Citing the case of Supernanny, a reality television programme that promised to transform the lives of families struggling with parenting, the chapter shows how the media economy of popular parent pedagogy brought the television spectacle of ‘families in crisis’ into the nation's living rooms.