Flickr/woupa02. Some rights reserved.
Sentimentality, moralising and anxiety about children and childrearing is hardly new, but in post-austerity neoliberalism, childhood (including child safety, child nutrition, child health, mental health, and education) has become increasingly politicised. Child welfare (safety, nutrition, education, physical and mental health) is deemed of vital public importance, despite the increasing privatisation of responsibility for families and children precipitated by the neoliberal asset-stripping of welfare states and social infrastructures. Child welfare has thus become something of a ‘crisis’ discourse, with experts, politicians and public seemingly uncertain whether to blame parents for being ‘overanxious’ or simply incompetent. As financial language creeps into the terminology of our closest relationships, the middle class child is a parental investment - while others, such as migrant children and the children of benefit claimants, even working parents claiming tax credits - are treated as social costs only. The terror behind the frantic aspiration of ‘intensive’ middle-class parenting is a fall into the social abyss reserved for ‘losers’.
Children of ‘losers’ are easy to identify by recognisable markers of low social status and poor parenting: obesity, low educational achievement and ‘antisocial behaviour’. The ‘chav mum’, memorably stereotyped as Vikki Pollard in the reactionary British comedy show Little Britain, purports to represent wasteful lower class proliferation at its consumption-obsessed worst. The anxious cultural focus on children and young people is replete with blatant, often class- and race-based contradictions; for while states appear to be opting out of the work of social reproduction, allowing youth unemployment to spiral and child poverty to deepen, the achievements and wellbeing of wealthier children are fetishized.
