BABY BOOMERS AND THE
DISCOURSE OF PARENTAL
IRRESPONSIBILITY
Dr Jennie Bristow
Canterbury Christ Church University
‘Parenting and Personhood’ conference, 24 June
2016
B ABY 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
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)
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)
BLAME IT ON THE BOOMERS’
PARENTS…
• Dr Patricia Somers, an associate professor at the University
of Texas at Austin, believes this rejection of the lessattentive 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)
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)
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 childrearing 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)
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
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
REFERENCES
• Cameron, D. (2016, 11 January) ‘Prime Minister's speech on life chances.’
Accessed 4 April 2016. Available at:
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/prime-ministers-speech-on-lifechances
• 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
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. 213-4: ‘Baby Rules OK, 1946-1981)
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