Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the consequences for parenthood of a contemporary concentration of multiple forms of power in and through parent-child relations. It finds various and co-resonating forms and affects of parental estrangement.

Paper long abstract:

"Parenting", increasingly seen in Britain as the source of and solution to social problems, is an object of intensified governance and a channel for the moralisation of social class (Allen and Osgood, 2009; Faircloth et al., 2013); the corroborating invocation of "the Child" in public culture is said to mandate a principle of heterosexual reproductive futurism (Edelman, 2004). Yet the consequences of all this for parenthood itself are so far understudied. In this paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork on a "deprived" housing estate in England, I argue that working-class parents' intermittent alienation from the terms in which "good" and "bad" parenting was evaluated resonated with multiple other forms of parental estrangement. The capacity of social services to remove children from their parents, for instance, was a frequent preoccupation, yet even without such interference, parenthood comprised - "naturally" - a painstaking negotiation of holding on and letting go. Thus what disturbed the parent-child relation was sometimes indistinguishable from that relation itself. In accounting for this, I draw on contemporary Christmas practices to suggest that parents encountered their children as figures of enchantment, who evoked not only their own future but also the figural Child of reproductive futurism. Aspirational parenting in an area of "deprivation" - whereby "betterment" was pursued transgenerationally - accommodated the political discourse of reproductive futurism in exemplary fashion, since it cemented the parent's self-negating assimilation to "good parenting", and so facilitated this double vision of child and Child. Parenthood, consequently, comprised both devotion and thraldom, and an uncanny form of alienation.