Whilst 'parenting' is a thoroughly cultured product, it is often treated as a transparent set of skills. Exploring points of accommodation and tension between parenting as defined by professionals, and as experienced by parents themselves, this book investigates the relationship between being a parent and the expertise around parenting.

Foreword Frank Furedi Introduction Charlotte Faircloth, Diane Hoffman and Linda Layne Part 1: The Moral Context for Parenting 1. ‘Where Are the Parents?’: Changing Parenting Responsibilities Between the 1960s and the 2010s Rosalind Edwards and Val Gillies 2. Building a Stable Environment in Scotland: Planning Parenthood in a Time of Ecological Crisis Katharine Dow 3. Creating Distinction: Middle-Class Viewers of Supernanny in the UK Tracey Jensen 4. Negotiating (Un)healthy Lifestyles in an Era of ‘Intensive’ Parenting: Ethnographic Case Studies from North West England, UK Denise Hinton, Louise Laverty and Jude Robinson Part 2: Power and Inequality: the Structural Constraints to ‘Good’ Parenting 5. Problem Parents? Undocumented Migrants in America’s New South and the Power Dynamics of Parenting Advice Nicole Berry 6. Nurturing Sudanese, Producing Americans: Refugee Parents and Personhood Anna Jaysane-Darr Part 3: Negotiating Parenting Culture 7. ‘Intensive Motherhood’ in Comparative Perspective: Feminism, Full-term Breastfeeding and Attachment Parenting in London and Paris Charlotte Faircloth 8. Intensive Mothering of Ethiopian Adoptive Children in Flanders, Belgium Katrien De Graeve and Chia Longman 9. ‘Staying With the Baby’: Intensive Mothering and Social Mobility in Santiago de Chile Marjorie Murray Part 4: Parenting and/as Identity 10. "Spanish People Don’t Know How to Rear their Children!" Dominican Women’s Resistance to Intensive Mothering in Madrid Livia Jiménez 11. Becoming a Mother Through Postpartum Depression: Narratives from Brazil Maureen O’Dougherty 12. Sacrificial Mothering of IVF-pursuing Mothers in Turkey A. Merve Göknar 13. Intensive Parenting Alone: Negotiating the Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood as a Single Mother by Choice Linda Layne 14. Power Struggles: The Paradoxes of Emotion and Control Among Child-Centred Mothers in Privileged America Diane Hoffman Afterword Ellie Lee

'this book suggests an important consideration about the tensions recognizable in the contemporary era between what an intensive parenting culture prescribes (that means also to some extent what science experts say and suggest,) and what and how it is realistically possible in the capitalist neoliberal societies.'- Rosy Musumeci, University of Turin, Sociologica, February 2014