Raising Decent Citizens—On Respectability, Parenthood and Drawing Boundaries

Abstract

Parenthood is a normatively regulated category with distinctly loaded moral expectations about “good parenting”. These normative expectations are lived through the body in gendered, classed, and ethnicized ways. We examine the ways in which parents representing majority and minority ethnic backgrounds construct an image of themselves as respectable parents, a construct that is intertwined with the idea of decent citizenship. The parents drew on middle-class, professional, and familist discourses on assertive parenthood, characterized by close scrutiny of their children's activities and friends, and the clear boundaries imposed on them together with democratic, dialogical relationships with them, as the preferred way of parenting. Describing one's own parenthood as respectable included an implicit or explicit definition of “Others”, who were less respectable as parents in ways that carried gendered, ethnicized, and classed meanings. The qualities required of “a respectable parent”, besides physical and material characteristics, were also connected with the idea of “inner fitness” in the form of the right kind of moral values.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 29 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.