The weight of my words: the role of confession and surveillance in parenting programmes

Abstract

This paper considers the experiences of people ordered by the courts in one area of England to attend parenting education classes and also parents who voluntarily attend these programmes. There has been increasing intervention into family life, designed to improve 'poor' parenting, most notably the use of parenting education programmes. These programmes deliver skills training with the aim of enhancing parenting practices and improving the behaviour of children. The paper provides analysis of parenting programmes delivered by a voluntary organisation service and considers how the parents are surveilled by the parenting workers, who in turn are also subject to scrutiny and monitoring by their managers, using the Foucauldian concepts of pastoral power and governmentality. While there are many theoretical analyses of welfare interventions this paper uses in-depth interviews with those providing and receiving these interventions (n ¼ 22), in one service in the north of England.

Parenting ideals and (un-)troubled parent positions

“…The parents' participation in the parenting programme can moreover be seen as an expression of their emotional commitments to being good parents and a way for them to position themselves as responsible and benevolent parents. In this sense, they have something to gain from their engagement, and this commitment also tends to reinforce the more general and dominant discourse that represents good parents as subjects that are willing to improve their skills in accordance with parenting experts (see Dahlstedt and Fejes 2013;Furedi 2008;Peters 2013).…”

“…Several studies have critically investigated how different experts and coaches use governmental techniques to guide parents to becoming good, responsible, and self-governing citizens in a society influenced by neoliberal logic (see Dahlstedt and Fejes 2013;Peters 2013). The focus in this study is rather on parents themselves, how they mobilise and rework available discursive resources (see Wetherell 2005) on parenthood, and how these resources relate to notions of gender and social class.…”

“…The message is that a good parent is a responsible subject willing to improve her/his parenting skills Dahlstedt and Fejes 2013;Peters 2013). Hence, today there is a plethora of expert advice on parenting in the form of handbooks (Johansson 2007), parent magazines with informative checklists and tests , TV shows with a 'supernanny' or a family therapist Dahlstedt and Fejes 2013;Johansson 2007), or state-sponsored parenting/couples courses (Boddy, Smith, and Statham 2011;Danielsen and Mühleisen 2009).…”

Considering social work assessment of families

“…It also supplanted the idea of the ‘dangerous family’ with the more complex concept of the family in need of support. There is an inference, however, in early intervention literature that poor parenting is at the heart of the need for early intervention (Peters, 2012 , p. 413) and there is a failure to separate out categories of parents where there is an element of parental insufficiency and families where there is a need for services for reasons other than parental failings, for example where a child is disabled or a parent is disabled or ill.…”

“You’re risking being branded a bad parent…if you tell a story like that”

“…Clearly, the transition into the role of parenthood is not always easy. To complicate matters even more, parenthood is often under social scrutiny-government intervention programs exist to help educate individuals on how to be "better" parents (Peters, 2012), and the self-help aisles of bookstores offer advice to the same effect. The popular press creates a dichotomy within parenthood that illustrates parents should exist somewhere between being a "tiger" (the ultrastrict parent) and an "elephant" (the ultra-nurturing parent).…”