Standing Up to Supernanny

By Jennie Bristow

Parenthood, we are told, requires a massive adjustment to our lives, emotions, and relationships, and we have to be taught how to deal with that. But can it really be so bad that we need constant counselling and parenting classes? It is a myth that today's parents are hopeless and lazy: in many ways, we have become too diligent, too hopeful of great outcomes and clear rewards, to the point where we lose ourselves in trying to provide some kind of professional service to our children. The current obsession with perfect parenting increases our insecurity and distrust of each other, and diminishes our authority over our kids. This book is about asking: Why have we invited Supernanny into our living rooms - and how can we kick her out?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Imprint Academic
• Release date: Sep 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781845406585

Jennie Bristow

ennie Bristow is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Canterbury Christ Church University, an Associate of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies, and a writer and commentator on the new 'generation wars'. Her daughter, Emma Gilland is one of the 'Class of 2020', a secondary school student whose exams were cancelled due to the Covid-19 crisis. They live in Faversham, UK.

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Title page

Standing Up to Supernanny

Jennie Bristow

with

The Institute of Ideas Parents’ Forum

SOCIETAS

essays in political

& cultural criticism

imprint-academic.com

Copyright page

Copyright © Jennie Bristow, 2009

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.

Originally published in the UK by Societas

Imprint Academic, PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK

Originally published in the USA by Societas

Imprint Academic, Philosophy Documentation Center

PO Box 7147, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147, USA

2013 digital version by Andrews UK Limited

www.andrewsuk.com

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the intellectual and moral support of many people. Many thanks to Jane Sandeman and the members of the Parents’ Forum; to Claire Fox and the Institute of Ideas team; and to spiked. For their interest and editorial input, thanks to Veronique Baxter, Frank Furedi, Ellie Lee, and the team at Societas. Above all thanks to my family for constantly bringing home why this matters.

Jennie Bristow, Kent 2009

Notes on Contributors

Jennie Bristow writes the monthly Guide to Subversive Parenting for the online publication spiked, and is a frequent guest on Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour. She is co-author, with Frank Furedi, of Licensed to Hug: How child protection policies are poisoning the relationship between the generations and damaging the voluntary sector (Civitas 2008), and author of Maybe I Do: marriage and commitment in singleton society (Academy of Ideas 2002). Bristow edits the website Parents With Attitude and the BPAS journal Abortion Review . She is currently researching the changing contours of inter-generational relations.

Dr Val Gillies is a reader at London South Bank University, and author of Marginalised Mothers: Exploring Working Class Experiences of Parenting. London and New York: Routledge (2006).

Dr Helene Guldberg is co-founder and director of spiked and author of Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and play in an age of fear. London and New York: Routledge (2009).

Christina Hardyment is a writer and historian with special interest in family and domestic matters, and author of Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford. London: Francis Lincoln Publishers (2007).

Jennifer Howze is lifestyle editor at Times Online, and edits The Times’s parenting blog Alpha Mummy www.alphamummy.com

Tracey Jensen is a doctoral student at the Open University.

Dr Ellie Lee is a lecturer in social policy at the University of Kent; co-ordinator of Parenting Culture Studies ; and author of Abortion, Motherhood and Mental Health: Medicalising reproduction in the United States and Great Britain. New York: Aldine de Gruyter (2003).

Dr Jan Macvarish is a researcher at the University of Kent, with an interest in the sociology of family life and intimate relationships.

Nancy McDermott is a journalist based in Brooklyn, New York, and chair of the Advisory Board of Park Slope Parents, the second largest parenting group in the USA.

Jane Sandeman is the founder and convenor of the Institute of Ideas Parents’ Forum .

Zoe Williams is a columnist for the Guardian, with a particular interest in feminism and babies.

Foreword

As I write, yet another ‘landmark’ report has been published claiming that British children are in a worse state than any in Europe, and that parents are to blame. A Good Childhood: Searching for values in a competitive age, commissioned by the Church of England Children’s Society (Layard and Dunn 2009; The Children’s Society 2009a), contains the standard list of solutions to this apparent problem of degenerate kids and half-assed parenting—parenting education, parenting programmes and psychological support.

The report, as with many others of its ilk, claims to be reflecting the views of children—whether it does this is debatable. But one voice that is rarely even solicited in the contemporary debate about parenting is that of parents. It is accepted that parents are the villains, incompetents and saviours of our ailing society, who are waiting stage left to receive the next policy initiative thrown in their direction.

This situation is the backdrop to the Institute of Ideas Parents’ Forum. Three years ago I, along with two other mothers who also had children at pre-school and primary school, decided that we wanted to do something more than moan about how many of these initiatives impacted on our lives and made us feel that we were always doing something wrong. We wanted to understand why they were happening, why we weren’t allowed to just bring up our children how we wanted to, and whether there were any other people—parents and non-parents—who felt the same way. And we found that yes, there were people out there who did want to question the idea that there was some exact science to being a parent that only the experts could understand and prescribe. People did want to understand why intervening in something as intimate as family relationships had become one of the main planks of social policy

From the small monthly discussions of the Parents’ Forum, we developed a debate strand for the annual Battle of Ideas festival in November 2008, under the headline ‘The Battle for the Family’. This successful series of debates, kindly sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), brought together academics, journalists, policy-makers and parents to discuss why parenting has become such a key issue today, and what the impact of this shift has been on the broader politics of the family. Many of the panellists involved in ‘The Battle for the Family’ have contributed their reflections on the parenting debate to this book, and we thank them for their ongoing work and support in this area.

Jennie Bristow, the main author of Standing up to Supernanny, isa key member of the Parents’ Forum, and this book brings together many of the discussions we have been pursuing for the past three years. For us, the key point is that, despite the continual bad publicity, the family remains, for most people, ‘a haven in a heartless world’. People still want to have children, and when they do they realise how brilliant it is. Yes it is hard work, yes it does turn your life upside down—but most parents wouldn’t change it for anything. And this is what we are working to defend.

In an age of parent-bashing policy and intrusive expert advice, Jennie argues that we must reclaim the ‘muddled messiness’ that is family life. This means that there is not an exact science to being a parent to your children: there is not some recipe out there that tells you the exact amount of love you should give to your children, the exact way you should discipline your children, the exact authority you should exercise as a parent. You make the rules—for your children your parenting style is the right style. The book is a clarion call for parents not to get persuaded by the experts that there is a recipe to be assiduously followed which will produce the perfect child. As Jennie concludes, we are adults, not children to be bossed around. We should and must take responsibility for our own families and stand in solidarity with other parents.

I hope that this book is the start of a movement where parents find their voice and their confidence and reclaim the terrain that is rightfully theirs.

Jane Sandeman, March 2009

PART ONE — Standing up to Supernanny

1. Introduction

It should be a wonderful time to be a parent. Standards of living are higher than ever before; women no longer have to choose between work and motherhood; thanks to modern contraception we can plan the number and timing of our children, ensuring that we only have kids if we want and when we want. Men bathe babies, change nappies, attend the birth of their children and can only expect a meal on the table if they cook it themselves—and they are encouraged to feel good about themselves for doing all this.

So why is it that with all of these choices, all the flexibility, equality, love and respect we have come to expect as our right, parenthood comes as such a shock to the system? How can the arrival of one small extra person into our lives send the world topsy-turvy, transforming the savvy, confident people we were into a craven mass of earnest anxiety, hooked on the desire to do the right thing while our legs chafe in the shackles of Being Home? Has nothing really changed after all; has sexual inequality been suspended only for childless people, just waiting to come around again once we embark on parenthood? Or are we just hopelessly inept, and insufferably selfish, individuals?

John Bowlby, the famous child psychiatrist who in the middle of the last century popularised the notion that babies separated from their mothers would suffer tremendous trauma, has preached about the tremendous hard work involved in looking after small children, including giving them enough time and attention which ‘means sacrificing other interests and other activities’. ‘For many people today these are unpalatable truths’, he said in 1980 (Bowlby 1988, p2). The idea that modern parents simply aren’t up to the job, that they can’t handle the selflessness of looking after children or the responsibility of bringing them up without great swathes of official advice and support, has become a key feature of government policy and official advice that trickles down through the Department of Health, the Department for Children, Schools and Families, the Home Office, and any other Department that might have anything to say about parents and children.

Parenthood, we are continually told, requires a massive adjustment to our lives, emotions, and relationships, and we have to be taught how to deal with that. ‘There’s something very special and exciting about being alone for the first time with your new baby, but it can also be frightening’, states the first page of Birth to Five, the Department of Health’s guide to ‘everything you need to know about becoming a parent’:

This is when you begin to realise that you can never go back. You’re now responsible for a new human being. The responsibility may seem much too big. … Think of these first few pages as a guide to the basic information you’ll need to survive (DH 2007, p3).

The government-funded helpline Parentline Plus has as its tagline ‘because instructions aren’t included’ (Parentline Plus 2009). In November 2007, the launch of the government’s £30million national parenting academy made official the idea that parenthood is really something that people should be trained in by qualified practitioners according to a particular method of ‘parenting’, before parents themselves are let loose upon their own children (NAPP 2007).

Anyone who has had children will know that it’s not all a bed of roses; that there are tough times, tantrums, ear infections, arguments, and moments when you just don’t know what you are doing. But can it really be so bad that we need counselling to get us through it? Are we really so bad that we need to be trained? In a word: No. It is a myth that today’s parents are hopeless, and even more of a myth that they don’t try hard. In many ways, the problem is that we try too hard at being parents—we’re too diligent, too conscientious, too hopeful of great outcomes and clear rewards, to the point where we lose ourselves in trying to provide some kind of professional service to our children. This doesn’t help children, and for parents it’s a disaster zone. We make our lives miserably tough, for no reason other than that we think this is what we should be doing. This book is about finding a new way to look at family life today, which starts not from political slogans and unattainable ideals about what it should be, but understands and defends what it is, in all its muddled messiness.

What’s new?

A lot has changed about the family: marriage and divorce rates, family size, geographical mobility and, in particular, women’s role in society and their expectations of their lives. We need to make sense of these changes and what they mean for us. But the fundamental relationships of family life, the emotional intimacy between parents, and between parents and children, have not changed all that much—and these relationships need to be defended against the bad faith and meddling of policymakers and parenting ‘experts’.

Many commentators have noted how, in recent decades, parents and parenting have been thrust into the public, political spotlight—and that this has not been good news for parents. ‘Until very, very recently … parents counted for nothing in the world of politics’, notes Maureen Freely in The Parent Trap (Freely 2000, p1). ‘Childhood has moved much more into the public eye in the last twenty years’, writes Oxford historian Christina Hardyment in her classic account of baby-care advice over the past 200 years:

The hungry maw of the 24-hour rolling news culture delights in broadcasting the bad news about