Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Intensive Parenting and the Expansion of Parenting. - Chapter 3: Experts and Parenting Culture.- Chapter 4: The Politics of Parenting.- Chapter 5: Who Cares for Children? The Problem of Intergenerational Contact.- Chapter 6: Policing Pregnancy: The Pregnant Woman Who Drinks.- Chapter 7: The Problem of Attachment: The Detached Parent.- Chapter 8: Babies Brains and Parenting Policy: The Insensitive Mother.- Chapter 9: Intensive Fatherhood? The (Un)involved Dad.- Chapter 10: The Double Bind of Parenting Culture: Helicopter Parents and Cotton Wool Kids.- Chapter 11: Parenting’ after Covid-19: When the Quantity of ‘Quality time’ Becomes Untenable.- Chapter 12: From Safeguarding to Childism? Covid-19 and the School Closures Debate.- Chapter 13: Pregnancy and Vaccination: The Precautionary Principle and Parenting Culture in Covid Times.- Chapter 14: Conclusion. 

“By retracing the way in which maternal and parental work is supervised by a whole series of experts, this quartet of researchers lifts the veil on what parenting means today. The first edition, published a decade ago, was already a masterpiece and influenced the work of many. This updated edition is essential for anyone interested in the politicization of parenting issues.” —Claude Martin, Emeritus Research Professor, National Centre for Scientific Research, France “Future historians will wonder why more researchers were not documenting and refuting the idea that today's kids are more fragile and helpless than any before them, and ditto, their parents. These authors peer behind the endless parenting advice, warnings and ‘best practices’ to show us what is really going on when it comes to childhood, love, humanity, and the family.” —Lenore Skenazy, President, Let Grow, USA, and Author of Free-Range Kids Now in its second edition, Parenting Culture Studies seeks to understand how parenting is taken as a particular mode of childrearing that reflects broader social trends. Ten years after the initial volume's groundbreaking publication, the authors once again closely examine how the main aspects of parenting have been established, explored, and critically evaluated. Chapters revisit phenomena such as intensive parenting and politics around parenting, as well as controversial issues including policing pregnant women's bodies and parental determinism. In addition to updates throughout the volume, including those addressing literature that has built from the book’s original publication, the book features a new third part discussing parents dealing with risk assessment, school closures, contradictory care arrangements, and vaccine hesitancy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ellie Lee is Director of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies and Professor of Family and Parenting Research at University of Kent, UK. Jennie Bristow is a Reader in Sociology at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. Charlotte Faircloth is Associate Professor of Social Science in the UCL Social Research Institute at University College London, UK. Jan Macvarish is Visiting Research Fellow in the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent, UK.

“This revised and updated edition of Parenting Culture Studies brings together relevant literature from academic disciplines that provide critical insights into the study of contemporary parenting culture. It also includes a new section on the workings of parenting culture in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, reflecting on constructions of risk and parents’ experiences at this point in time. The chapters of this 2nd edition push the reflection and critical understanding of contemporary parenting culture further. In a time when we witness further privatisation of childrearing, this engaging and brilliant book invites to have a much needed conversation about how we, adults, may together approach the task of raising the next generation. Readers of this book will find key resources for teaching and writing about aspects of parenting culture. Undergraduate and postgraduate students in a range of professional programs, professionals working with families or interested in policies around parenting, and policymakers will benefit from reading this book.” (Raquel Herrero-Arias, University of Bergen, Norway)“This brilliant and engaging book offers critical insights into conditions shaping parenthood. The authors highlight the ‘double bind’ that affects parents as they try to meet all the expectations put upon them, and how political attempts to strengthen families may in fact serve to undermine it. In this way, the book provides a nuanced understanding of the ways in which parenting has transformed in the 21st century. These insights challenge prevailing assumptions about parenting and uncovers the ways in which societal norms and expectations create challenging conditions for parents - for example the idea that individual parenting practices directly determine children’s health, well-being, and future life chances. The 2nd edition includes new chapters reflecting on parents’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. This crisis is taken as an opportunity to highlight how part of the parenting culture collapsed during lockdown, making visible the labor of social reproduction and how critical this is to functioning economy. The authors discuss how the crisis also created space for push-back against some elements of the ‘intensive’ parenting culture where ‘quality time’ was no longer possible. The book convincingly argues that the crisis showed that it is not possible to socialize children through intensive parenting at home and that child-rearing must be considered a collective effort. Children need interactions with other children and adults if they are to develop as part of a community.”  (Pernille Juhl, Roskilde University, Denmark)“Parenting Culture Studies is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand contemporary child-raising. It offers an accessible and intriguing account of the broader processes that have influenced the formation of current parenting ideals as well as the implication of these for parents. I was thrilled to see the second edition, in which new chapters on parenting and the COVID-19 pandemic illuminate wider issues relating to the disorganisation of generational responsibility, the privatisation of parenting, and the suspension of education. Though primarily empirically focused on the UK, the book is of great thematic, conceptual, and theoretical relevance across the rest of Europe and beyond.” (Alexandra Szőke, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Hungary)“Parenting Culture Studies proved indispensable to me when it was originally published in 2014 when I was about half-way through my PhD. The originality and intellectual rigour of the work presented in the book helped me make sense of how parenting had been problematized and how parents face increasing amounts of scrutiny in most aspects of their lives. The authors engagement with intensive mothering, breastfeeding, attachment parenting and the expansion of parenthood, and motherhood in particular, have all informed my own work and brought context to my own research findings. This second edition of Parenting Culture Studies will undoubtedly provide inspiration to others doing work on the family, gender relations and parenting. Building on the work and ideas presented in the book I am interested in exploring how intensive parenting ideology has become a key component of gendered behaviours and expectations and this second edition will continue to offer me new insights and inspiration.” (Sunna Símonardóttir, The Social Science Research Institute, University of Iceland)“As countries struggle with the legacy of COVID-19 school closures, the publication of the second edition of Parenting Culture Studies could not come at a better time. Lee, Faircloth, Bristow, and Macvarish broaden and deepen the critique of parental determinism they began in the first edition and reckon with its consequences. In the ten years since the first publication, they find that parentingculture has become deeply entrenched in policy so that parents’ behavior is subject to official scrutiny as never before. Meanwhile it has become second nature for parents to disregard their instincts in favor of expert opinion. The impact has been disastrous. The COVID-19 lockdowns policies cruelly exposed the limitations of parenting culture as families struggled and failed to provide their children with the opportunities for socialization only available through education. The diminution of parents’ authority visa via experts undermined their ability to advocate for school openings. This important book makes the urgent case for a reckoning between expert-led parenting, which thinks only in terms of outcomes and real needs of children and the reality of family life.”(Nancy McDermott, author of The Problem with Parenting: How Raising Children is Changing Across America (2020))“By retracing the way in which maternal and parental work is supervised by a whole series of experts, this quartet of researchers lifts the veil on what parenting means today. The first edition, published a decade ago, was already a masterpiece and influenced the work of many. This updated edition is essential for anyone interested in the politicization of parenting issues.” (Claude Martin, National Centre for Scientific Research, France)“Future historians will wonder why more researchers were not documenting and refuting the idea that today's kids are more fragile and helpless than any before them, and ditto, their parents. These authors peer behind the endless parenting advice, warnings and ‘best practices’ to show us what is really going on when it comes to childhood, love, humanity, and the family.” (Lenore Skenazy, President, Let Grow, USA, and Author of Free-Range Kids)“Parenting Culture Studies is doing some important critical work, in an updated second edition that reviews developments in 21st century parenting culture studies, and now includes a consideration of what this ever-intensifying culture meant for parenting during the pandemic. The book provides a reality check in field dominated by expert edicts that are accompanied by a ramping up of monitoring and surveillance of parents, bolstered by a fixation on what might just possibly happen. Parenting Culture Studies is both accessible and sophisticated—a book that I can confidently recommend to undergraduate students and those new to parenting studies, as well as of interest to those familiar with the field." (Ros Edwards, University of Southampton, UK)“Parenting Culture Studies, now available in the second edition, is and will remain an essential reading for everyone interested in how childrearing plays out in our contemporary societies. The book is so essential because it enables readers to break away from the many taken for granted views about childrearing and its effects on children, and to gain a critical distance necessary to study them as features of a parenting culture. Parenting Culture Studies is also a joy to read as it employs a clear, accessible language while providing new and highly instructive insights with every chapter. Although the book offers a comprehensive and detailed portrayal of parenting culture, it also sets the ground for further explorations as the new conclusion points out. An obvious way forward is to expand the book’s focus on parenting culture in the UK, US, or other Western settings and to explore parenting culture globally. On the one hand, there is a plurality of distinct parenting cultures around the world, as cross-cultural research indicates. On the other hand, the kind of parenting culture described in the book is being vigorously propagated in the global South as a tool to boost economic growth and foster political stability. Parenting Culture Studies points to the urgency and provides an analytical toolkit to scrutinise parenting cultures globally.” (Gabriel Scheidecker, University of Zurich, Switzerland)PRAISE OF THE FIRST EDITION:“The authors of this timely collection are in the forefront of analyses of contemporary parenting. The discourses and practices of parenting are rarely held up for sustained critique. Readers of this book will be challenged to question the politics and rationales of parenting cultures in this provocative and cogently argued book.” (Deborah Lupton, University of Sydney, Australia)“This terrific collection of essays probes and destroys many of the reigning orthodoxies that have turned 21st century parenting into an activity marked by cultural and individual anxiety and the over-involvement of experts and policymakers. The scholars contributing to this volume together make a profound contribution to the study of parenting culture.” (Janet Golden, Rutgers University, USA)“This is a much needed book that challenges popular political rhetoric about parents and families. The authors accurately capture the ‘double bind’ that affects parents as they try to meet all the expectations put upon them. Various parenting ideals are skewered and dispatched by the authors - if only more educators and politicians would read this!” (Charlotte Haines Lyon, York St John University, UK)

Includes case studies on attachment and helicopter parenting to assess the socio-cultural roots of parenting debates Reviews the literature around intensive parenting, parenting experts and the politics of parenting Discusses intensive parenting, education and vaccination in pregnancy to show the pandemic's impact on parenting culture