Understanding the nature and importance of the parent-child relationship

Abstract

The paper considers the role of parents and the nature of the parent-child relationship. It argues that scholars who have emphasised the agency and independence of children have faced a problem conceptualizing the parental role, since parents can often seem a threat to these ideals. We propose a relational understanding of the parental role, and show how it offers a significant but relationally mediated understanding of children’s agency. The paper explores the advantages of this approach for understanding children’s lives and the development of their values and personhood.

Introduction

This paper addresses the knotty question of how to conceptualise the parent-child relationship in a way which neither retreats from valuing children’s rights nor ignores the significant role that societies require parents to play in children’s lives. Childhood studies has often drawn attention to how societies often dismiss the importance of, or downplay, children’s participation and control over their lives. This has, in turn, though raised questions about the practices that parents should engage in, and often frames them at best as a conduit for supporting the development of children’s independence and, more frequently, as a threat to it. We step back from individual examples or accounts of parent-child interaction in order to consider how best to conceptualise the parent-child relationship, and how this relationship interacts with child rights and status. As such our focus is primarily interpersonal (thinking what a good parent-child relationship would look like, though we do consider some of the institutional implications that might follow from this. This theoretical perspective draws on work within childhood studies, as well as in political theory, sociology, philosophy and policy studies.

Our central argument is that childhood studies research need not underplay the importance of parents and the parent-child relationship in order to accommodate hard won gains in recognising children’s ability to shape their lives and surroundings. Note that we use the term parent to describe social, legal or biological, or any combination of these, and do not restrict the number of individuals who can hold this category for a child. Rather, we draw on the idea of ‘family practices’ (Morgan, 2011) to emphasise that it is the doing and configuration of groups of activities over time - and their recognition by others (Finch, 2007; Dermott and Seymour, 2011) - that defines parenting.

In the first section we explore the apparent tensions between core commitments of childhood studies - to the agency and independence of children-with ‘commonplace’ assumptions about the role and authority of parents. In contrast to other attempts to resolve this which either support children’s agency and downplay parental rights or vice versa, we suggest that this tension is actually caused by a mistaken normative understanding of what parenting is and should be. We argue that often parenting is understood in a mode we term teleological, meaning that ‘good’ parenting is seen as a set of activities which promote the best outcomes for the child. On this understanding, parenting is seen as fundamentally transactional and judged according to external standards. In its place, we suggest that good parenting should be conceptualised via the sociological concept of relationality. On a relational understanding humans are theorised as fundamentally situated in and shaped by their relationships with others. This shift focuses attention not on the actions of parents (which thereby casts children as passive recipients) but rather on the distinct dyads shaped by children, parents and social structures. We argue that such an understanding has several important advantages including that it (i) captures the idea that parent-child relationships need have no predefined goals, (ii) gives an alternative understanding of children’s agency that allows for structural context and (iii) shows how parents can be central to structuring children’s day to day lives without allowing them to dictate appropriate values.

Childhood studies and parenting

Over recent decades a cornerstone to the emergent discipline of childhood studies has been the emphasis and articulation of recognising the independent agency of children in creating and shaping their own lives; children are seen as ‘active in the construction and determination of their own social lives’ (James and Prout, 1990: 8). This project has been an effective academic response to previous thinking which conceptualised children as largely passive recipients of care, direction and regulation. Mullan (2020) summarises key work in the field as refuting ‘the view of childhood as time spent preparing (effectively waiting) for adulthood - of children as somehow being incomplete, unfinished, or a work in progress - emphasising rather than children are complete human beings and not simply human becomings, and that they are creative agents fully involved in their daily lives and social words’ (p. 8).

However, more recently scholars within this field have argued that this emphasis on children’s agency has led to an overly narrow focus. Leading theorists Spyrou, Rosen and Thomas Cook argue that ‘Wide swaths of thinking and research accordingly exhibit a decided aversion to centering anything that suggests a decentering of the child subject as the consequential actor or force under consideration (2018: 3). Similarly, Prout argues that ‘By emphasizing children as beings ‘in their own right’, the new sociology of childhood risks endorsing the myth of the autonomous and independent person, as if it were possible to be human without belonging to a complex web of interdependencies (2011: 8). In particular, we would argue that sociological accounts need to embrace and explore the interplay between structures and agentic influence as an integrated project rather than via separate subdisciplines. Our thinking aligns with the assessment of Haukanes and Thelen who suggest that the way in which childhood studies has developed has created and latterly reinforced ‘a peculiar division of labour between sociology, feminist studies and social anthropology, contributing to the current lack of co-theorisation of childhood and parenthood’ (2010: 21).

This paper addresses the problem of under theorisation and adequate understanding of the relationship between childhood and parenthood highlighted by the authors quoted above. While the relative importance of parents compared to a set of wider familial relationships, state actors, and social institutions has been debated across different contexts, this itself reflects a recognition in academic, policy and popular commentary that parents are (potentially) a very significant influence in their children’s lives and therefore demand academic attention. Parents have proved especially challenging for childhood studies because of the legal and wider social ways in which they are expected to, and actually do, wield power and responsibility over wide ranging aspects of children’s lives. Whatever one’s stance on the potential and desirable extent of children’s capabilities and agency, there remain elements of necessary authority, even if restricted to ensuring basic levels of safety and provision. Beyond this most minimal position most (all?) existing societies delegate significantly more responsibility to parents, who are expected to make choices (albeit constrained ones) over for example, medical procedures, education, diet, leisure, and enforcing what are taken to be a set of socially appropriate values and behaviours. Even those hostile to parental authority from a moral perspective must be attentive to its reach when studying the lived reality of children right now. As such, childhood studies could benefit from a theoretical framework that allows researchers to recognise the significant (perhaps too significant) role of parents within children’s lives, without thereby minimising or deemphasising the real agency children can and should have within this relationship and their wider lives.

Parents and children - A relational approach

In previous work (Dermott and Fowler, 2023) we critiqued what we termed the teleological approach to understanding parenting. Teleological refers to processes which have a defined end point, and are seen as successful if and to the extent this goal has been achieved. We suggested that many contemporary discourses-in academia, policy and popular culture-conceptualise parenting in this way. In brief, parenting is viewed as aiming towards producing ‘good adults’; where good is understood to mean a successful engaged and contributing citizen. Conversely, where children commit violent or anti-social acts the impetus is to blame the parents, since we can infer front the child’s transgressions that the parent failed in their role. We suggested this teleological model is evident across literature including the disciplines and subject areas of child psychology, political philosophy and social policy.

Teleological parenting can be situated within a history in which childhood and family life became organised around developmental progress and the production of competent future adults. From the rise of schooling, child psychology and expert-led guidance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to late-modern neoliberal emphases on individual responsibility and future-oriented self-investment, parents have increasingly been positioned as managers of children’s potential (Faircloth, 2023). The expansion of ‘psy knowledges’, performance-oriented educational systems, risk-based welfare regimes and digital monitoring tools has embedded this future-driven logic not only in parental ideas but in the political, economic and technological structures that shape everyday family life (see Ramaekers and Suissa, 2012: 1–15). Understanding teleological parenting in this wider context helps show that it is a socially produced orientation supported by concrete arrangements, not merely a philosophical stance – and thus clarifies what is at stake in proposing a relational alternative.

We argued this way of thinking is fundamentally problematic in so far is as it reduces parenting to a transactional relationship, and underemphasises the ways that the impact of parents is socially mediated. In addition, we showed how this approach sidelines the diversity of parent-child relationships (for instance by failing to capture the nature of the parent-child relationship in circumstances such as long standing chronic illness). In this previous paper we therefore aligned our position with many scholars in childhood studies who similarly reject a view of childhood that focuses on what children will be (their well becoming) rather than what they are and are capable of now (their wellbeing). However, we believe that rather than these problems leading to an impetus to minimise the impact of parenting, instead a better model of parenting is available that is more useful for childhood studies research and allows researchers to keep parents as a central part of the story without these problematic implications.

In place of the teleological model, we proposed an alternative view of parenting drawing on the sociological concept of relationality. Relationality refers to the idea that relationships are fundamental to the human experience, and that relationships themselves ought to be the proper subject matter of study. As Jennifer Mason (2004) puts it, persons are seen as ‘embedded within webs of relationship, their own and other people’s and to understand these we need to be able to keep the process of relating in focus just as much as, if not more than, the individual or the self” (p. 177). While personal (and professional) relationships are seen as important by almost all social science researchers, the contribution of a relational perspective is to see that relationships have a distinctive character and are critical in the formation of persons themselves though research of this kind remains under developed.

In what follows we aim to show how the parent child relationship can be reconceptualized in a relational way that allows for necessary parental authority at times but also captures the role that children can play in shaping such relationships. We point to three particular advantages of our approach, that it removes the needs for external goals or validators of the relationship, that it allows for children to have agency but within a set of existing structures, and that it captures the way parents can often guide children’s formation of subjectivity without allowing them to overly constrain children’s self-discovery.

Relationships need not have endpoints

As discussed above, on the teleological understanding parent-child relationships are necessarily seen as having defined endpoints which constitute ‘success’. Because the teleological model requires such outcomes, its widespread adoption– even implicitly-is associated with the need for conferring status on pre-defined milestones. e.g. educational qualifications, or leaving the parental home or getting married. Judging the success of a relationship via such milestones fundamentally mischaracterises the relational rather than outcome driven quality of parent-child dynamic. This is not to deny that critical life events which mark out changes in personal circumstances that are associated with stages in self-identity and linked to social status do exist, and indeed are important for the way that individuals and others narrate their lives. Our claim, however, is that the nature of parent-child relationships may be forged through navigating such moments but its quality cannot be assessed via them.

This relational proposal aligns thinking about parents and children with other personal relationships. For example, popular debates about the nature and quality of friendships do include a recognition of the possibility good or bad (or better or worse) friends. However, these assessments are based on actions and engagement, and so do not presuppose defined endpoints for judging its success. Like with the parent-child relationship the individuals in significant friendships will separately and together encounter positive and negative life events, and how these are negotiated is not an external test of the relationship but the very stuff of the relationship. Just as we might say someone is a ‘good’ friend, without thereby committing to the friendship having a defined end point (e.g. the career success of one party) we can say that a parent-child relationship can flourish without thereby committing to the relationship having a goal of later success.

A potential problem with this approach, particularly pertinent to this current paper, is that it could seem that the suggestion that the parent-child relationship should be more like friendship undermines a central element of parenting that is distinct from other kinds of relationships, namely the authority that parents wield over children. Anthony Giddens puts it ‘As parent-child ties approximate more and more to the pure relationship, it might seem that the outlook of the parent has no primacy over the inclinations of the child-resulting in a ‘permissiveness’ run riot’ (1992: 109). However, we deny - perhaps contrary to some who favour radical changes in favour of children’s liberty (e.g. see Godwin, 2020)- that a relational move has this implication. Instead, we accept that the parent-child relationship, at least with respect to younger children, must necessarily have aspects of inequality embedded within it due to the nature of childhood and responsibilities of parenthood (see Dermott, 2008). What we deny is that this authority exists so that children can reach some defined goal, instead, parental authority is part of the relationship and must be mediated by the distinctive character of the relationship in question.

Recognising that relationships need not have defined goals matters because it gives more space for participants to shape such partnerships. Rather than view parenting as responding to external criteria, the relational perspective prioritises internal dynamics so that interactions, while necessarily socially constrained, exist to fulfil the preferences and needs of those involved. This conceptualisation allows our model to better accommodate the wide diversity of parent-child relationships across different times and places, and the ways these relationships change and develop as both parties age. In addition, as we discuss below, our model allows for a degree of agency for both parties while recognising the importance both of structural constraints and their mutual dependency.

Autonomy in a relational setting

The question of whether and how children have agency/are autonomous, has proved a thorny one both in philosophical and sociological theory and in applied disciplines such as Law, Psychology and Policy Studies. Some philosophers, for example Tamar Schapiro (1999) go as far as defining what it means to be a child specifically as someone lacking autonomy. According to this position, it is therefore only children who can justifiably be forced to eat particular foods or go to school or wear particular clothes.

We clearly reject this position: children are capable of taking many independent actions, and of articulating a rationale for their choices. However, on the other hand, we also recognise (contrary to child liberationist principles) that children have particular vulnerabilities which imply they often do need guidance or protection. Both these elements are often present in real world scenarios. For example, in the case of how in England and Wales children are not only encouraged to express a view in relation to their residential and relational arrangements post parental separation and that these views are taken seriously by courts, but also that issues of protection and security, ‘the child’s best interests’ are taken into account (Symonds et al., 2022). This debate also plays out in issues like deciding the voting age (see for example recent discussions in the UK about the value of lowering of the voting age to six (Runicman, 2024) or the age of legal criminal responsibility, and regarding the rights of children to make decisions about their own care and education (see McMellon and Tisdall, 2020).

For this paper our claim is the parents are a central and under theorised part of this story, that is to say, we cannot properly understand when and how children can exercise agency just by looking at their lives and capabilities as an atomised individual, instead we can better understand children’s agency by including within this the relationship between parents and children, and developing a better conceptualisation of this.

A relational understanding of parents and children better captures children’s (and parents’) agency as being both (i) local, meaning it applies in some areas and at some times and (ii) relationally situated, meaning that it is applied in and through their relationships. The result is a model on which both children and parents have agency, but it is not free floating agency. Instead, both parties make both joint and interrelated decisions, meaning that both exercise agency but in a way that can only be understood in light of the structures and relationships to which such agency is applied.

A local autonomy view draws most notably on the work of Sarah Hannan (2018) who argues that ‘Individuals are not straightforwardly either autonomous or not; they are autonomous to varying degrees in different domains of choice (117). She adds that ‘Acknowledging that autonomy develops in domain-specific degrees makes the question of whether and when children are autonomous less dichotomous’ (121). Amy Mullin adopts a similar line, writing ‘Even young children can demonstrate some degree of local autonomy in some degree of their lives, but that is perfectly consistent with their long term caregivers behaving paternalistically to them; (Mullin, 2007: 536). Mullin’s contribution is to note that local autonomy in some areas is compatible with a need for parental care in other domains: arguing that children have what ‘pockets of volitional stability,’ (2014: 417), meaning that there are some areas in which children are capable of autonomous and self-directed action, reflecting things they authentically value.

The result of such a theoretical move is to allow that children are capable of making decisions in some areas rather than others, a local model of autonomy allows us to treat children as competent political actors when they engage in climate strikes, which we can see as a pocket of volitional stability for many children, without thereby being committed to thinking they are necessarily ready to e.g. have a vote in a general election (Fowler, 2024). For the present analysis, a local view of autonomy allows us to say that children do wield agency and authority in specified parts of the relationship, without thereby being committed to the idea that they no longer need guidance in other areas. As befits a dynamic/relational account, there need be no prior theory to tell us on which areas a specific child wields agency, this will be determined by parents and children (though with some background legal safeguards).

The second element of our view is that that autonomy should be seen as relationally situated. Our thinking draws here on existing feminist work, for instance McLaughlin writes: ‘Feminists therefore propose a reorientation towards thinking of social actors as embedded in practices of community that inform who they are, and which – potentially – are the source of their capacity to act and be recognised’, she approvingly quotes Rudy who notes that individual autonomy is negotiated by the ways that individuals are ‘inescapably part of particular communities and contexts, and the values embedded there help us to set goals for ourselves’ (Rudy, 1999: 48). (McLaughlin 7. Mullin argues ‘When it comes to acting autonomously (in a manner that reflects what we care about), dependence on others need not be a barrier (although it will be when those others seek to control us, and do not support our autonomy). This is in keeping with work within disability theory about the distinction between autonomy and independence (See Ells, 2001: 6) (Mullin, 2007: 417). Her focus on acknowledging agency but seeing it as relationally bound and mediated allows us to reconcile the twin impulses running through this paper, that children do already have an important kind of autonomy and as such are not passive recipient of parental choices, but that parents guidance happens and is permissible such that seeing children as independent from their parents and wide society is a mistake.

Parental value shaping and subjectivity

Childhood is recognised as important because it a phase in life when longstanding, often life long, commitments, attachments and values are formed. As such it is fertile territory for relational perspectives, which seek to understand the ways in which human personhoods are socially constructed and mediated. When proposing future projects in a relational framework Twamley et al. write ‘that there is scope for much more in-depth work into how relational processes are also implicated in the development of human subjectivities and social constructions of personhood’ (1992: 177). Such a perspective is useful since the critiques by Spyrou and Prout mentioned above suggest that sometimes scholars in the field of childhood studies have overstated the extent to which children are able to ‘self-create’ independent of social context. The parent-child relationship is particularly salient here as they themselves constitute a significant part of the social world their child experiences, and they both gatekeep and mediate access to other aspects of society. Parents, for example, have the power to involve their child in religious practice by making them attend a church or a mosque. Or thinking about food and concerns related to animal welfare or the environment, parents may decide to raise their child as a vegan or vegetarian by not providing meat or animal products themselves and by constraining what they are offered outside the house. Parents also can make explicit or implicit decisions about the expectations of gender roles within the household that are communicated to children verbally or through example. These are only a small number of specific instances which highlight the extent of parental influence. If academic conceptualisations of parent-child relationships ignore such influence they sideline the reality of childhood and thereby leave the ways that parents can make unconstrained or unjustified choices under theorised. Instead we suggest an understanding of the proper role and limits of parental action should be at the heart of childhood research.

This question has been discussed at length by political theorists. In this field, leading family ethicists Brighouse and Swift (2014) argue that parents have the right shape their children’s values. By value shaping, they paradigmatically mean raising the child as a member of a particular religious faith, but it also refers to encouraging the child to take up activities like sport or music. The reason they believe parents have this right is that they, like us, emphasise the importance of the parent-child relationship. For them, the health of this relationship requires shared values and thus that parents can direct their child towards having the same beliefs and commitments as they do. This outlook conditions the ways that parents should introduce and guide their children through ethical, moral and cultural debates and norms.

However, we believe their position misunderstands the ways in which a flourishing relationship requires shared ‘values’. We think there are actually at least two distinct ways in which the Brighouse and Swift version of ‘shared values’ could underpin the parent-child relationship which requires unpacking; shared identification and shared practices. Our view is that the parent-child relationship does benefit, and may even require shared practices, but need not require shared identification, by which we mean the alignment of children and parents’ views on issues or debates of substance. This distinction allows for recognition of the ways that a child’s life is developed within the context of practices shared with parents, but also allows children freedom to shape their own identity and stance on disputed questions (which are sometimes, and problematically, considered uncontestable).

The idea of the importance of shared practices draws on the work of Jamieson on intimacy (1999) where she argues that “knowing and understanding [in personal relationships] takes time”. The argument is that the development of a good parent-child relationship will be established on some degree of shared activities. This structuring of time could simply be a sharing of the everyday and mundane that is often underrated or unacknowledged, e.g. doing domestic chores or co-presence. It could also be because parents and children both have similar interests and gain enjoyment from doing them together, whether that is going shopping or running. Shared practices may though also involve some element of accommodation by either parents or children to support the other’s interests. For example, a parent may take a child to an extra-curricular activity, even though the activity is not something that they are interested in themselves but because it reflects the child’s preference. (Importantly, as a counter to the teleological approach, this is also not future oriented towards a child’s developmental outcomes.) Likewise, a child may engage in a shared practice with their parent because of their parent’s preference. Significantly, we do not view this as a (problematic) assertion of parental authority but rather as a key component of a personal relationship that includes an element of give and take. As the description above highlights, we dispute the extent to which there need to be shared values before these shared activities can be enacted. It may be that a sharing of time together leads to shared values but this need not be the case; what matters is that copresence itself prompts a deeper understanding of and closeness with the other person.

However, we reject the idea that parents should seek to ensure their child has shared identification with them, since on our view the parent-child relationship should not be contingent on shared viewpoints. This is important because according to Brighouse and Swift it is in virtue of the need to share values and viewpoints that parents are justified in dictating the child’s orientation to the world. We reject the link between activities and values because, as discussed in Dermott and Fowler (2023), other close personal relationships do not in fact require shared identification - friendships and romantic relationships can persist across disagreements on important matters - and parent-child relationships should be thought of in the same way. Second, that even where it might be argued that having some values in common makes close relationships easier to navigate, it is difficult-if not impossible-to decide a priori what those values should be. Individuals are dynamic in that they change their views over time, and the relative importance of specific views or values may also alter. A challenge to this position might be that for some individuals it would be difficult to maintain a strong personal relationship with someone who had diametrically opposing political views or did not have a similar religious beliefs, but as these are views or allegiances it is not the case that they necessarily persist. Third, because parents should be, in May’s phrase, ‘open to the unbidden’ (2002). By this he means that part of what it means to be a parent is to accept that one’s child will be different from oneself, or from what one expects. Our position is therefore that when accommodation or change is required it should and does not follow that it is the child who will change their behaviour to align with those of the parent. To reiterate it is the sharing of time and location, not values at the outset, which creates a space for the development and deepening of a flourishing parent-child relationship.

Shared identification can be contrasted with shared practices. Therefore, we concur with Brighouse and Swift that parental child relationships may in many cases lead to a sharing of values, and that this is not in itself problematic. However, we dispute the extent to which a sharing of values per se is a requirement for a flourishing relationship, and we therefore emphasise that parents should not work to ensure their child has shared identification with themselves, and further this is beyond the remit of what good parenting allows.

Conclusion

The relationships between parents (of all types) and their children is a central one to many children’s lived experiences. As such research into children and their lives and circumstances should be expected to focus on the actions of parents both in practice - what parents really do in different times and places - and on the moral limits on parenting. However, we noted a potential hostility to such research from those focussed most on children, and a related siloing of research into different departments and areas of expertise. We suggest this results from the ways that an acceptance of parental authority seems in tension with a commitment to children’s agency. However, we argued, in support of recent work in the field, that a relational understanding of parent-child interaction can remedy this worry, and creates a model on which children are actors who act as part of a web of relationships and co-dependencies. In this way, we differ from those who want to portray parents as primarily guardians, particularly of older children. This, we argue misunderstands the ways in which children’s agency acts both independently of their parents (a fact already emphasised within childhood studies) but also the ways in which children exercise agency within and through the parent-child relationship. Instead, our approach does require parents to think reflexively about the impact they have on their children, but does not, a priori, distinguish (most) practices as either essential or unacceptable.

Adopting a relational conception of the parent–child relationship has implications both for state actors and in the everyday unfolding of family life. It invites a reconsideration of policy frameworks that transform parents alleged primary responsibility for producing positive developmental outcomes into a core aspect of state thinking. Instead, policies should reflect the need for institutions to support conditions that enable children’s agency and their active participation in societal life. Policies relating to education, welfare and family support would de-prioritise parental responsibility and instead place greater emphasis on dialogical practice, shared decision-making and responsiveness to children’s situated perspectives rather than on adherence to developmental benchmarks.

This theoretical approach is also useful for further research on childhood and on relationality. A focus on a central relationship for many people’s early lives invites research into how relationality shapes the development of subjectivities and on the specifics of how children and parents act together across a variety of different social and temporal settings. The paper recommends a shift in thinking that we believe captures an implicit understanding of how parent-child relations are experienced and enacted. The concepts of relationality and situated agency are valuable because of the way that they capture how parents and children navigate together their social reality and the creation and sustaining of this shared relationship to their lives.