1. BABY BOOMERS AND THE DISCOURSE OF PARENTAL IRRESPONSIBILITY
Dr Jennie Bristow
Canterbury Christ Church University
‘Parenting and Personhood’ conference, 24 June 2016

2. BABY BOOMERS BEDEVILLED BY CONTRADICTORY CLAIMS-MAKING
Hedonism and healthfulness
Saving and spending
Self-obsession and cultural domination
Neglecting their children and loving them too much

3. The curse of the ‘helicopter parent’
‘Parents have been granted a licence to manage their offspring's university applications for the first time. One in 10 of this year's half a million university applicants have ticked a new box on the form that enables them to name a parent or guardian as their agent, allowing them to act on their children's behalf in the fight to get a place at university. “Your experience of form-filling will be invaluable to your child!” boasts the Ucas website…’ (Hilpern 2008)

4. Blame it on the boomers…
Sarah Briggs - a university communications manager who admits that she's only just weaned herself off helicoptering her two children, aged 20 and 25 - puts it down to her own experiences of growing up in the baby-boom generation.
“Our sheer numbers caused us to compete strenuously for places on sports teams and at the top of the class, for admission to the best colleges and later the best graduate and professional schools, and finally for the top jobs. As our children have come along, we have felt compelled to make the way easier for them, to clear away the obstacles that may lie in their path to success.”
Baby-boomers, Briggs believes, have made nurturing an extreme sport. (Hilpern 2008)

5. BLAME IT ON THE BOOMERS’ PARENTS…
Dr Patricia Somers, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, believes this rejection of the less- attentive child-rearing style of baby-boomers' own parents should not be underestimated.
“Many of them were latchkey children who don't want to replicate that same level of removal from their own kids' lives” (Hilpern 2008)

6. Or BLAME IT ON THE BOOMERS’ KIDS…
‘“Baby-boomer” grandmothers, who took a more relaxed attitude to raising offspring during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, said modern parents were under pressure to control every aspect of their children’s lives. Mothers were increasingly expected to monitor everything from their child's calorie intake to their exercise regimes and after-school lessons, they said.
‘Prof Rachel Thomson, a co-director of the report [The Making of Modern Motherhood], said women who became mothers in the mid-20th century remembered a time when it was something they “just got on with”’. (Malkin 2008)

7. Granny backlash?
‘Interestingly, the grannies who don't want their grandchildren to take over their lives are often the women who were the pioneering generation of working mothers. Just as they battled hard in their child- rearing years not to let their children derail or direct their lives, now, as grandmothers, they continue their fight for selfdetermination.
‘Let’s not forget that the baby-boomers are the selfish generation, the ones who put their own selfactualisation ahead of everything else, whether it was getting divorced, being the first rebellious teenagers or hoping they died before they got old and responsible. (Mills 2014)

8. THE PROBLEM OF OVER-PARENTING
‘Over-parenting’ a product of risk-averse culture
Children’s ‘failure to launch’ speaks to a wider crisis of adult identity
Yet…
Reaction against over-parenting feeds imperative of formalisation: generational detachment
Concern that parents have ‘too much’ influence over their kids

9. The search for more effective helicopters
‘Huddersfield University has had to set up a “family liaison officer” to feed information to parents round-the-clock about their kids' progress…
Such is the extent of helicoptering that some American universities have started offering counselling to students and introducing policies focused on gradual disengagement.’ (Hilpern 2008)
‘So I believe we now need to think about how to make it normal – even aspirational to attend parenting classes.’ David Cameron, 11 January 2016

10. references
Cameron, D. (2016, 11 January) ‘Prime Minister's speech on life chances.’ Accessed 4 April Available at: chances
Hardyment, Christina. (2007) Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford. London: Francis Lincoln Ltd.
Hilpern, Kate. (2008) ‘Umbilical cords just got longer: Going to university is no longer the rite of passage it once was.’ Guardian (G2), 10 September.
Malkin, Bonnie. (2008) 'Pushy mothers ruining children‘. Daily Telegraph, 7 April 7
Mills, Eleanor. (2014) ‘Doting or distant? The bitter arguments over working mothers have spread to the older generation.’ Sunday Times, 19 January

11. THE TURN AGAINST the sixties
Freedom, independence and experimentation held in question
‘Once the child-rearing principles of the Third Reich and Stalin’s Russia became threats to freedom rather than models of egalitarianism, a reaction set in, a determination to be freer and happier than children had ever been. After the Cold War, a war about ways of life, became established between the West and the Soviet Union, much political capital was made out of contrasting stereotypes of lifestyles. Subordinating the individual to the good of the whole therefore became dramatically unfashionable in the West. The vacuum left by the receding tide of patriotic fervour was filled, perhaps inadequately, by what the social anthropologist Martha Wolfenstein described as “fun morality”.’
(Hardyment 2007, pp : ‘Baby Rules OK, )

12. SOCIAL POLICY GETS PERSONAL
Shift from focus on institutions to relationships
‘This is what I would call a life cycle approach – one that takes people from their earliest years, through schooling, adolescence and adult life.’ David Cameron, 11 January 2016|
Social problems constructed as individual, behavioural and relational problems
Intergenerational relations are formalised and disrupted