Keeping Tabs on an Uncivil Society: Positive Parental Control

Abstract

Interview data from a sample of parents with adolescent children are used to assess arguments that centre on the fears parents have about their child rearing practices. The focus in some recent accounts of parenting has been on how these fears indicate the moral and psychological state of parenthood rather than the problems parents think their children have negotiating an increasingly insecure outside world. By focusing on the latter, this paper relocates these fears externally as parents try to control their children's whereabouts. Control, rather than being defined negatively as a way of compensating for a lack of moral influence, is taken as an important means by which parents supervise their children's moral and physical wellbeing.