New economy, neoliberal state and professionalised parenting: mothers’ labour market engagement and state support for social reproduction in class‐differentiated Britain

Abstract

Contemporary economic, political and social shifts in the Global North are reconfiguring the resolution of productive and reproductive labour. This paper explores how the emergence of the New Economy, the rolling out of the neoliberal state, and the professionalisation of parenting are transforming: (i) the landscape in which mothers with primary-school-aged children make decisions about how to secure a living and care for their children and (ii) what role they think the state should play in facilitating the provision of childcare to support working parenthood. The paper makes two innovative contributions to knowledge. First, it pinpoints strongly class-differentiated changes in women's reconciliation of paid employment and caring work in contemporary Britain. The academically dominant one-and-ahalf breadwinner model is commonly reflected in middle-class lifestyles, but has little analytical purchase for workingclass women in this study, as they are more likely to mother full-time in state-dependent family households. It is vital that we understand these changes in women's labour-force participation and their implications for class inequality. Second, the paper concentrates academic attention on the sweeping expansion in the state's role in social reproduction through the provision of wraparound childcare (breakfast and afterschool clubs) in primary schools. Novel insights into parental attitudes reveal that middle-class women demand choice and feel entitled to statesponsored childcare provision which underpins the feminisation of the labour force. Working-class women value provision for others, but fear being coerced into using childcare instead of mothering in the home. Their responses reveal competing understandings of what counts as equality for women, and stark variations in different women's abilities to achieve this.

The CANparent trial—the delivery of universal parenting education in England

“…Building on the critical approach of Gillies, Reay and Klett‐Davies in particular, Holloway and Pimlott‐Wilson (, , ) have used combined methods of empirical research to extend the critique of parenting ‘support’. Moving beyond issues related to the professionalisation of parenting, the imposition of middle‐class values through parenting programmes and state encroachment on family life, Holloway and Pimlott‐Wilson have examined class‐based views of parenting education, largely on the part of mothers.…”

Reconceptualising play: Balancing childcare, extra‐curricular activities and free play in contemporary childhoods

“…Another, largely separate, strand of literature has examined women's increased labour market participation and the development of non‐familial childcare which has made this socio‐economic transformation possible (Busch, ; Gallagher, ). This literature is largely adult‐centric, for example considering parents’ work–life balance strategies (Holloway & Pimlott‐Wilson, ; Ward et al., ), with little consideration given to how these societal shifts impact on children's everyday lives (Harden et al, ; Smith & Barker, ). This paper builds on insights from these two separate strands of research, and challenges their individual deficiencies, through an integrated examination of the combined impact of these processes on the spatialities of children's lives.…”

The business of care

“…It is interesting to note, however, that increasingly for parents (particularly working-class parents) the discourse of 'choice' which pervades policy and media discussions of childcare markets no longer relates to whether or not they choose to care for their children at home or place them into daycare, but rather it is choice of which service they will be placed in (Vincent et al, 2008). As Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson (2016) have recently argued, women's decision-making around productive and reproductive labour in the New Economy is increasingly shaped by the state through an extension of its role in childcare provisioning, notably afterschool care. Under neoliberal policy frameworks, for families in middle and lower socio-economic groups, the expectation across both economic and social policy is for the (re)entry of mothers to the workforce as the best means of mitigating the potential long-term effects of social and economic disadvantage on children (Clarke, 2006;Smith et al, 2008).…”

“…At the very least it is calling into question the dominance of centre-based daycare provision within the current market STA and the devices, discourses, and texts used to stabilize and normalize its position within the market (such as the scope of the regulations and structure of government subsidies in favour of centrebased care). There is scope then for geographers working on the changing relationship between productive and reproductive labour in postindustrial societies to adopt the SSEM lens to consider how the childcare market is being stabilized and/or challenged in response to new employment patterns, and indeed how that differently affects particular parents and children as consumers of care (see recent work by Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2016). This research agenda could also be extended by taking seriously children's experiences of and their potential agency in shaping the care they receive (whether it is in the formal or informal sector), rather than view them as passive objects of study within the market (Smith and Barker, 2000).…”

“…Before doing so, there are a number of points of clarification to be made in order to situate the scope of the article. While there has been an increasing interest in the care of school-age children by geographers (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2016;Smith and Barker, 2001), in this article I refer to childcare specifically as the formalized extrafamilial care of pre-school children, increasingly also known as early childhood care and education. Secondly, although there is significant variation in how childcare markets internationally are funded, structured and organized, this article is further limited to a consideration of neoliberal childcare markets in Western welfare states (see Lloyd and Penn, 2013, for other types of childcare markets).…”