Aussie kids,global citizens: Cultural nationalism and cosmopolitanism in service providers’ and parents’ accounts

Abstract

Based on interviews with Australian parents and service providers and examination of parenting resources, this study examined the respective influence of cultural nationalism and cosmopolitanism on parenting in the early years. This analysis found, contrary to research on children’s social identities, that ideas of nation were significant to Australian parents and service providers. However, there are significant challenges to articulating and resourcing a vernacular orientation to family life. These include the dominance by multinational enterprises of the marketplace for parenting resources, the generic nature of these resources and the difficulty in defining what an Australian family or parenting style might be. At the same time, some parents identified with a cosmopolitan orientation to socialising their children. Their motivations were various, including future transnational mobility, conferring advantage in a competitive local job market and fostering an appreciation for diverse cultures. This was a strategic and entrepreneurial rather than a philosophical orientation.

Introduction

The infant child is often seen as the most potent symbol of a nation’s future. Particularly in those countries that can take for granted the survival and health of their youngest citizens, public policy has often hailed the young child as the expression of a nation’s viability and success (Sherr, 1999; Wang, 2011). The Australian National Early Development Strategy, tellingly titled ‘Investing in the Future’, states,

National effort to improve child outcomes will in turn contribute to increased social inclusion, human capital and productivity in Australia. It will help ensure Australia is well placed to meet social and economic challenges in the future and remain internationally competitive. (Council of Australian Governments, 2009: 4)

Parenting is thus constituted by governments as a project of national building and not simply a private concern. The State’s interest in the child’s/nation’s future underpins governance strategies, including many forms of intervention in family life (Millei and Lee, 2007). In an earlier statement, the Government had argued, ‘We should be able to monitor how they [children] are faring as routinely and with the same immediacy as we do our economy’ (Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA), 2004: 22).

In circumstances of global competition when nation-states are contesting for economic power, national building projects are always simultaneously projects directed at this global context. The production of a nation’s children is no exception. In current times, governments’ appeals to socialising agents, including schools and families, often make reference to these transnational relations, particularly in terms of the imperative to be globally competitive (Mitchell, 2003). The US President Barack Obama has announced that early learning programmes are ‘an integral component to creating an educational system that is internationally competitive’ (US Departments of Education and Health and Human Services, 2010: 1). Parents, regularly hailed as their child’s ‘first teacher’, are continually called to act as key elements in this national and global project (Nadesan, 2002).

Preparing citizens for the global marketplace has many consequences, however, including promoting flows of skilled citizens away from the countries of origin (Appadurai, 1996). Thus, parents are also invited to become the agents of their child’s formation as a mobile worker, adaptable to new environments and modes of living, unconstrained by national boundaries. Ailwood (2000) refers to this process as the production of ‘tourist’ children, following Bauman’s (1998) discussion of globalisation. As Bauman (1998) argues in the inequitable differences in mobility, tourists are those who choose to move to take advantage of what can be consumed elsewhere, whereas vagabonds are those who are forced to be mobile owing to displacement at the hands of more powerful forces.

This article explores aspects of these dual imperatives through analysis of the accounts of Australian parents and of those who provide information services to them. This analysis was undertaken following completion of a three-year transnational study of the resourcing of early learning (Nichols et al., 2012). It involved returning to some of the project data with the particular focus of examining traces of cultural nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the lived experiences of Australian families of young children. While the original study also included an American cohort and considerable field work in a US site, this article will focus on the Australian parents and their resources. While a comparative analysis would be very interesting, there are sufficient complexities in the Australian context to more than justify this focus.

Within the interdisciplinary field of parenting studies, parents’ beliefs and practices have been investigated from many perspectives (Backett, 1982; Goodnow, 1996; Hopwood, 2014; Loveridge, 1990). However, there are relatively few published studies that focus centrally on either nationalist or cosmopolitan orientations from the perspectives of parents. To compile sources for the brief literature review which follows, it was necessary to search across the fields of sociology, social history, family studies, child studies and cultural studies in order to bring together key ideas regarding these parenting imperatives.

Cultural nationalism

The development, maintenance and protection of national culture are the focus of cultural nationalism (Hutchinson, 1987, 1999; Levey, 2014). Its enactments are necessarily specific to particular national contexts and may include a wide range of projects, movements and programmes which are intended to further this aim. Based on a historical analysis of Irish political and social life, Hutchinson (1987, 1999), the key proponent of the cultural nationalism thesis, argues that cultural nationalism is essentially a community-focused movement, fostered by the activism of cultural agents such as artists, educators and historians. Arnason (1991), however, argues that state nationalism always has a cultural as well as a political dimension and works to actively shape the concept of nation as a collective cultural identity. Certainly, cultural and state nationalism cannot be considered separately, particularly when taking into account the role of modern governments in establishing and resourcing cultural institutions (Ward, 2005).

When considering Australia in relation to cultural forms of nationalism, the progressive period of the 1960s and 1970s is of particular significance. Prior to this time, the Menzies era of the 1950s and early 1960s, named for its long-standing Prime Minister (1949–1966), had strongly maintained the tradition of close ties with England as its former colony. On Menzies’ retirement, one of his successor Holt’s first initiatives was to establish the Australian Council for the Arts (1967), which was clearly understood at the time to be a decisive statement about the cultural independence of Australia from its British roots. The editor of the national Bulletin newspaper wrote that the Council ‘revived many of the national cultural hopes and ambitions’ of Australians, while the Sydney Morning Herald called on the Government to go further and formulate a ‘national cultural policy’ (Ward, 2005: 55–56).

While it is not the intention of this article to present a detailed discussion of the Australian government’s cultural policy, of particular significance is the issue of local content. The domination of Australian media consumption by products sourced from the United States was the focus of a critical report handed down in 1963 by the Senate Select Committee on the ‘Encouragement of Australian Productions for Television’ (Cunningham and Turner, 2006). The report found that 97% of all drama shown was sourced externally and recommended the enforcement of local content quotas. In 1969, a government report argued for direct support of Australian media production on the grounds that film and television were among ‘the most powerful forces in influencing our national character’ (Ward, 2005: 58).

A combination of government policy settings and indirect encouragement for locally-based commercial production achieved a massive expansion of local content. This turnaround is evident from the statement three decades later that ‘the dominant framework for understanding Australian television has been via its contribution to national identity. Australian television drama has been … unambiguously national in its outlook’ (O’Regan and Ward, 2006: 17).

In Hutchinson’s (1987) view, one of the hallmarks of cultural nationalism is the rejection of ‘subservience to other cultures’ which, in the Irish context, took the form of ‘rejecting the hegemony of English values’ (p. 484). This was certainly an element in the argument for Australian local content in the areas of media and publishing. What has been called a ‘disentangling’ of cultural identities (Ward, 2001: 108) tying Australia with Britain, on the one hand, and America, on the other, was sought via the ‘telling of Australian stories with Australian voices’ (Potter, 2013: 25). Of course, this raises the question of what an ‘Australian story’ and an ‘Australian voice’ might be. Later in the article, I will discuss examples of what were considered ‘Australian’ parenting resources by information providers and parents.

A second relevant aspect of cultural nationalism for this article is the role of the child as a figure of national culture. Promoting collective views of childhood is a means of ‘establishing the primacy of a national culture’ in the sense that childhood is presented as the shared foundation of all citizens and the period during which future citizens are formed (Tanaka, 1997: 22 in Lu, 2011: 280). An interesting perspective on the appropriation of childhood to nationalist programmes comes from Taiwan, where the establishment of a highly successful national children’s festival has been described as a ‘critical site wherein visions concerning the desirable national future are articulated in the discourses and programs for and about children’ (Lu, 2011: 272). In Australia, children’s television production has been a key means of fostering a shared cultural experience for young citizens, with the state-funded national broadcasting service providing much of this content (Potter, 2013). The pre-schooler’s programme Play School, established in 1966 and still active, charts the shift from ‘old’ to ‘new’ forms of national identity. It began life as a colonial version of a British programme, with the presenters modelling BBC-approved pronunciation of the shared language, but from the progressive period began reflecting more localised versions of national identity (Harrison, 2012). A recent study found that Australian parents value locally produced children’s television and considered Play School as ‘the most highly regarded’ programme (Harrison, 2012: 140).

In conditions of globalisation, however, which are by no means new to Australia given its colonial history, promotion of cultural nationalist projects is never straightforward. The issue of local content is a case in point. Successive federal governments baulked at regulating for local content, and it was not until 1989 that the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal set a local content quota of 35%, increased to 55% in 1996. However, commercial broadcasters undermined the intent of this policy by screening Australian children’s content in unpopular timeslots, continuing to populate prime time with globalised programming associated with advertisers’ priorities of promoting associated merchandise (Australian Children’s Television Foundation, 2007). Under pressure, the government released a Variation of the Standards with the express purpose of clarifying that the 55% quote did indeed apply to commercial children’s television programming and that such programming was expected to be occurring in children’s waking hours (Australian Communications and Media Authority, 2009).

This background is important in understanding the context of Australian parents and service providers when it comes to the provision of parenting resources in the current times. It establishes that cultural nationalism has been an important driver in the field of cultural production, that influencing the national identity formation of children has been and continues to be a key agenda in Australian cultural nationalism, and that the expectation of local content – Australian stories told by Australian voices – is established as a feature of national life, and that this expectation is constantly under pressure from globalised commercial interests.

Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism is most often defined as an orientation to the broader world beyond one’s immediate local circumstances characterised by openness, engagement and celebration of difference (Imre and Millei, 2009). It is often portrayed as a transformational mode of being which ‘appreciates identity and cultures as fluid’ (Spisak, 2009: 87). The theme of mobility is strong in cosmopolitan theorising, in terms of both embodied movements through cultural spaces and movements of identity away from essentialist notions of selfhood.

Circumstances of globalisation are enabling some kinds of cosmopolitan identities as privileged individuals take up opportunities to become global citizens, working and living wherever rewards are most promising. At the same time, a counterpart trend, which Beck (2006) terms cosmopolitanisation, enmeshes others in non-volitional relationships with trans-local cultures and markets (Wahlstrom, 2014).

Cosmopolitanism has been identified as a middle-class orientation and thus as a perceived responsibility of middle-class parents to inculcate in their children (Vincent and Ball, 2007). Research has identified various strategies deployed by middle-class parents who wish to inculcate cosmopolitan dispositions in their children. They may enrol them in a school with a culturally diverse demographic in order to foster multicultural sociability and appreciation of difference (Byrne and De Tona, 2014; Reay et al., 2007). They may foster ‘international behaviours’ such as learning a foreign language, accessing media about international events, hosting visitors from other countries or organising international travel for their children (Weenink, 2008). They may encourage their children to engage in philanthropic projects addressing social and environmental problems in transnational locations (Byrne and De Tona, 2014).

Backett-Milburn et al. (2010) studied middle-class parents’ socialisation of their children into eating habits. They found that these parents intentionally set out to broaden their children’s food tastes as part of a wider project to orient them positively to diversity. Holidays abroad fulfilled the double role of introducing children to different cultures and to foods that could be consumed once back in the family as a means of enacting this mature sensibility. These parents were pleased when their children acquired a taste for ‘spicier’ foods, which they saw as expressive of openness to difference more generally.

In privileging values such as openness and mobility, cosmopolitanism simultaneously constitutes the ‘other’ to this ideal. Those perceived as lacking in these values may become ‘ideologically associated with backwardness, tradition, parochialism, narrowness, ignorance, simplicity and so forth’ (Scourfield et al., 2006: 16). It has been pointed out that privileging a cosmopolitan outlook can disadvantage whole communities and families belonging to them. Corbett’s (2010) study of a rural community, facing declines in traditional industries, considers this issue. He argues that children in this community were having to compete with ‘floaters’, middle-class city children brought up to be mobile and independent, whose portfolios had been carefully crafted to include travel, volunteering and cultural activities. The rural parents, conversely, valued commitment to a place and a career; they were not only philosophically disinclined, but also economically unable to allow their children to ‘float’. Again, cosmopolitanism appears as an element in a middle-class project in which mobility is a key strategy and mode of being. As such, it may be jettisoned when parents’ aspirations to upward social mobility are threatened. Byrne and De Tona (2014) report the reactions of professional parents who had enrolled their children in a culturally diverse Elementary School only to find that the State’s economic problems resulted in decreased funding. Parents transferred their children to private schools and provided for their children’s cultural education through philanthropic activities which located the cultural ‘other’ as the subject of charity rather than as a social equal.

The relationship between cultural nationalism and cosmopolitanism is not one of mutual exclusion. Both operate within the zone of culture and focus on cultural identity as an aspect of social life worthy of investment. Research evidence suggests that those who take up these causes may share class membership. Hutchinson (1987, 1999) has pointed out that cultural nationalist movements are driven by the intelligentsia drawn particularly from aesthetic and professional fields. Cosmopolitanism has similarly been associated with upward social mobility and higher levels of education (Backett-Milburn et al., 2010; Byrne and De Tona, 2014; Weenink, 2008). In the discussion that follows, I will explore how these strands are interwoven through perspectives on parenting taken by parents and those who provide services for them.

Methodology

Interviews and artefacts analysed for this article were collected as part of a larger study on the resourcing of early learning. This study contextualised the accounts of parents within an investigation of service provision and included interviews with service providers, participant observation in services (such as playgroups), network tracing and analysis of digital and material artefacts. It has been comprehensively reported elsewhere (Nichols and Rainbird, 2013; Nichols et al., 2009, 2012).

This article draws on interviews undertaken with Australian parents and service providers in two phases of the project, a pilot study and the main study. For the pilot study, parents were recruited via a survey which was distributed in 20 metropolitan library branches. Librarians and service providers in a number of branches were also interviewed. The main study focused on two sites: Midborough, a suburb 15 km from the city centre, and Green Plains, a rural area comprising two small towns with contrasting communities.

Following ethics approval, interviews were held in participants’ homes or workplaces and were generally undertaken with individuals. Exceptions were a small number of couples who chose to be interviewed together. Also, in order to extend the number of father participants, one set of interviews was held at a sporting facility while the fathers’ sons were playing Australian Rules football. In total, across the pilot and main study, Australian interview participants included 23 mothers, 7 fathers, 2 grandmothers and 12 service providers (total = 44).

Since the project had a focus on the resourcing of early learning, participants were invited to show and/or discuss specific examples of resources they had used. These included textual resources (e.g. books, pamphlets, web-based information), material resources (e.g. toys, sample bags, musical instruments), media resources (e.g. DVDs and television programmes), services (e.g. playgroups, health checks, parenting classes) and human resources (e.g. family, friends, work contacts).

To investigate cultural nationalism and cosmopolitanism as aspects of parenting, all interviews and artefacts were subjected to focused analysis. The cluster of key terms and images related to nationalism, which were traced through these data, included the following: national pronouns (e.g. Australia, Australian, Aussie), national institutions (e.g. ABC), media identities with known national associations (e.g. Antonia Kidman, Kaz Cooke) and explicit rejection of non-Australian resources. In relation to cosmopolitanism, they included positive references to cultural diversity, direct actions to expose children to ‘other’ cultures and/or languages, and explicit connections between parenting and contexts of globalisation.

Parents and information providers’ rationales for selecting or avoiding particular kinds of resources or activities were examined. Resources which were explicitly associated with nationalist or cosmopolitan parenting orientations were also analysed in terms of the semantic connections made between nation/culture and other qualities. Materials promoting these resources (e.g. publishers’ advertising of books) were also examined for further insights into the ways in which they were constituted as representing national or cultural characteristics.

The following discussion will elaborate on three themes emerging from this analysis. The first two themes are linked with a cultural nationalist agenda and focus, first, on Australianness as a desired quality of parenting resources and second, on attitudes to two dominant centres of Western cultural production – the United States and Britain. The third theme is raising cosmopolitan children, and under this heading are discussed parents’ active strategies to equip their children with forms of cultural and linguistic knowledge associated with global futures and identities.

Australian resources for Australian parents

Those providing and seeking information and resources to parents potentially have a vast marketplace of materials from which to select. Librarians, community workers and family health workers were asked about their decision making regarding the resources they provided and recommended. Several of these workers spoke about their preference for Australian materials and the challenge of sourcing this material.

The Gumtree library, serving a large metropolitan area, had recently updated and considerably expanded its parenting section at the time of interview. These resources had been moved adjacent to the children’s literature section where the library’s popular ‘Baby Bounce’ sessions, which encouraged parents to read to their infants, were held. Aisles had been widened to enable easy access to prams.

To expand the parenting collection, a specialist family librarian was tasked with researching available resources. The chief librarian explained that this person

spent a lot of time in the bookshops going through books, trying to find Australian-based information because we’d noticed that people who read, or who borrow the books, actually want to read about Australian case studies or Australian situations. They don’t want to hear about America or necessarily England …

This preference for identifiably Australian parenting resources was also reported by Meg, who managed a health information website for parents. She reported that one group of users were expatriates living outside the country:

I had a woman sent an email to the web, who was living somewhere on the islands in the Pacific and was having trouble getting a baby to sleep, and they chose to contact us because, like, it’s home.

Liz, a parent in the study, backed this up. Speaking about her attempts to locate parenting information on the Internet, she said,

When I was pregnant I did quite a bit of surfing, and it’s just too subjective … you stumble on chat-rooms where you’ve got sixteen different views, and it’s like ‘so what’. And they’re all in Britain or America.

This suggests a view of parenting as a localised practice where one of the standards of relevance is shared nationality. Nations are essentialised and viewed as inherently separate and different, even those that are often considered as having cultural commonality owing to a shared colonial heritage such as Australia and Britain.

The idea that parenting is a localised practice also contributed to another librarian’s search for Australian parenting resources:

[We are] trying to find information that’s recent but, if possible, Australian as well, because sometimes the approaches are … you know, it’s quite interesting how the approaches vary from one country to another.

Determining whether a resource was Australian was not straightforward, however, since titles seldom foregrounded the national angle. We documented shelves full of parenting books and were struck by their generic nature and the lack of culturally specific signals.

Librarian Lesley favoured media resources for their accessibility and because they more clearly signalled their national identity. In identifying media materials for parents, she selected those produced by the national broadcaster or endorsed by national media celebrities:

There was a series that they had on Foxtel, the Antonia Kidman one, The Little Things. I’ve just recently bought those DVDs because I thought that at least that’s something that’s fairly recent and it’s Australian […] There was a series that was on last year, it was on the ABC, Baby It’s You, or something like that, which we ended up getting a copy of …

Antonia Kidman came to fame as the sister of Australian actress Nicole Kidman and has carved out a career as a promoter of sensible, healthy family life partly owing to her relatively large family of six children. In an interview promoting her book The Simple Things, she was described as

like many Aussie women in that she’s busy and independent but appreciates domesticity is important too. She says it connects her to her children – cooking, gardening and even cleaning chores are all jobs her children are involved in. (Kidmans keep family life simple, 2012)

Australianness is an important aspect of Kidman’s public persona. Although the family is now located in Singapore, she has been at pains to point out that

her children have a typical Aussie upbringing … they have a big garden and most evenings her elder children can be found playing in the park with their friends, until she calls them back for dinner at 7 pm.

We see here some of the elements of a constructed Australian parenting identity that may make resources authored by Kidman acceptable to Australian service providers and parents. Interestingly, some of these themes echo those associated with the television series Burke’s Backyard identified in previous research as a favourite of Australian children (Langer and Farrar, 2003) – a kind of indoor–outdoor suburban family life with loose, but ever-present, supervision of free-range children by domestically grounded adults.

Resisting ‘America’, leaning towards England

We earlier saw that the Gumtree librarian framed the choice of Australian parenting materials as simultaneously involving an avoidance of American and English sources. She stated that parents did ‘not want to hear’ about American or ‘necessarily English’ perspectives. However, while these were both considered non-Australian, on closer inspection it appeared that they had very different associations.

Negative attitudes towards ‘American’ cultural products were expressed by a number of service providers and parents. One community worker, Katrina, whose role involved promoting developmentally appropriate parenting to disadvantaged families, bemoaned the popularity of the television series Super Nanny:

I’m a bit of a cynic when it comes to television. I think it’s more the entertainment, American culture factor, that attracts them to the show [rather] than ‘Honey, sit down, we’re going to learn how to do this right’.

She believed that child discipline tactics promoted in Super Nanny, which she said made her ‘shudder’, threatened the message about play-based parenting which was promoted by her service. Interestingly, in the United States, Super Nanny is associated with Britishness; its introduction emphasises this by depicting the nanny, Jo Frost, arriving in a London cab, dressed in a prim suit and carrying an umbrella (a visual reference to Mary Poppins). Australian audiences seem not to be as attuned to this aspect as they are to the American families that Jo Frost attempts to remediate.

Katrina’s statement set popular culture in opposition to serious parent education and positioned ‘American’ media as a vector for inappropriate representations of parenting and childhood. In contradistinction was Katrina’s description of the play programme she delivered. This programme had been developed in the 1970s through a collaboration between Australian early childhood researcher Professor Staines and a state-based health service. Thus, it had strong national, state and local connections.

Several of the parents also spoke of trying to avoid North-American materials. Helen, a parent, valued her local librarian for being able to recommend ‘local authors too, which is nice, not just North-American’. Jacqui, a homeschooling mother, found that most of the available materials were produced in the United States and, particularly in subjects like history, lacked local relevance. She had begun producing copy for a local homeschooling magazine, Education Choices:

I thought we need something like this in Australia, so I’ll subscribe and write for it. I think there was a bit of a hole there when you only get American things.

Britain was considered by some parents and service providers as more aligned to Australian parenting values. The Gumtree librarian stated that if Australian sources were not available, ‘our preference is England rather than America if we can’. This was echoed by parent Paula:

I tend to prefer things that are written either in an Australian or British way rather than American way. Words and the way things are said are different. Baby Love is written in a very Australian way, so it is sort of comforting and down-to-earth and easy to understand, and easy to relate to anyway.

Baby Love written by Australian author Robyn Barker was popular with a number of the mothers interviewed for this study and was seen in every Australian library. Paula’s statement highlights the role of language as one of the building blocks of national identity (Simpson, 2007).

Raising cosmopolitan children

Parenting is a future-oriented activity. In conditions of globalisation, many Australian parents are consciously preparing children for lives which may involve transnational mobility and intercultural networking. These strains co-exist with attempts to hold to some notion of national identity which we have seen can be expressed through the cultural resources through which Australian childhood and family life are reflected back to parents.

Cosmopolitanism was not particularly evident in the accounts of service providers. Practitioners seemed to identify more strongly with local, state and national organisational agendas. It was also evident that parenting materials available in libraries, clinics and other services were strongly oriented to generic Anglo-Western representations of families. Parents who wished to shape a cosmopolitan childhood for their offspring thus had to proactively network and acquire particular kinds of connections and resources.

Ensuring their children acquired a second language was an important element in some parents’ future-proofing strategies. Alice, a monolingual Anglo-Australian mother who lived in a small rural town, was one such parent. Her stated rationale was

the advantage of the kids learning a second language just opens more job careers later on. You’ve got to – you know.

Managing with a low income, Alice had found a solution which did not involve expensive language classes. The next town was home to a significant community of South East Asian agricultural workers and its school taught Vietnamese to all students. Thus, Alice intended to send her children to that school rather than the local primary school. In this, she was going against the tide in her community which generally kept itself separate from its ethnically different neighbours.

Of the Australian parents, Paula was most enthusiastically committed to bringing up her child to have multilingual capabilities. She had identified Japanese and French as the two additional languages she wanted her son, then 2.5 years old, to acquire to a level of fluency. One of her main strategies towards this end was to join three playgroups:

Dad found a website for the Japan and Australian Friendship Association JAFA which has got a playgroup in Adelaide which we’ve been going to since the beginning of the year. And just knowing that the Alliance Française is in most capital cities, so I just set about finding them and we joined in last October.

When it came to her own cultural identity, however, it appeared that Paula considered herself as Australian, an identity which she maintained as separate from those of other cultures. In describing her membership of the three playgroups, she made this distinction clear:

Now I’ve got a French mothers’ group and a Japanese mothers’ group, and an Australian one, you know, there’s not a lot of cultural diversity in my mothers’ group.

So Paula associated membership status in these groups with country of origin. The ‘Australian’ group was the one she claimed as her own. The cultural distinctiveness of the other groups was necessary and important to her in her project of cosmopolitan parenting. It was through acquiring these other languages, absorbing cultural knowledge and building intercultural social networks that her child would be prepared for a cosmopolitan adult life.

Travel was one of the ways in which some parents purposively oriented their children to cultural diversity (Backett-Milburn et al., 2010; Byrne and De Tona, 2014). Paula planned to take her son to places where he could encounter the languages he was learning: ‘I would like to make it “real” by spending time in those countries.’ Her professional skills as a scientist made her relatively likely to find work transnationally, so she envisaged a residence rather than a visit.

Sarah, like many middle-class Australians, had travelled in her early adult years; the ‘gap year’ (a period between school graduation and tertiary study) is something of a rite of passage. As a parent, however, she identified local as well as global dimensions to her child’s cultural education which could be actively pursued by family travel:

When we were in Asia we were staying with a local family there, and we wanted her to know lots more – like just now when we went it was Ramadan – and we wanted her to know a lot more about those things. While we can tell her what we understand from an adult’s perspective, even from our experience of Asia ourselves it kind of wasn’t even what children there are experiencing now. And stuff that’s relevant to her not only when she is traveling, but for here as well to understand, like if there’s an Indian family in her kindy, to maybe have a better understanding of what he might be celebrating, you know what I mean?

It is noteworthy that Sarah did not want her child to have just a cultural experience, but a learning experience that was meaningful and relevant in childhood terms. She saw her own travel history as not fully adequate to the task of explaining non-Western cultures. The challenge of facilitating this understanding came up again as Sarah referred to a relative who was currently living in Singapore:

I’ve got connection to Asia through family, and I’d like to do more on that with her, so that she understands, like, what her cousin Ashley lives with in Singapore. There’s a lot of that same culture here as well, but it’s quite difficult to explain that.

Sarah was evidently committed to bringing up her daughter with an appreciation of diverse cultures, but this was clearly not straightforward. Since cultural ‘others’ were living ‘here’ and Australians were living ‘there’, it was not easy to define cultures in terms of their location, nor was it obvious how to distinguish what characteristics belonged to what cultures.

For the parent generation, particularly those from the middle-class, the local library has been the place to find information about all kinds of topics, including on other countries. Many parents can remember as children being set a school project and going to the library to find books. The Gumtree librarian told us that even in the Internet age, it was still common for parents and grandparents to come in and say ‘Give me everything you’ve got’ on a country, animal or sport. Sarah looked to the library to provide child-friendly materials on Asian cultures, but was disappointed:

The librarian was very helpful but there is not much around for children on learning about other cultures. I don’t know if that’s just generally lacking or whether I just haven’t been able to find any information on it … We’d develop her more in that area if there were more resources available, but there’s not much available.

Such a statement may seem incredible given the massive proliferation of information and networking on the Internet even six years ago. However, not only was Sarah inexperienced in Internet searching, she also sought a more personalised mediation of cultural resources as she attempted to select those that would support her cosmopolitan parenting goals.

Conclusion

Our sense of belonging to a home and homestead, and our ability to fly away from it are both to be taken account of … (George, 2011: 75)

National identity can be an elusive subject. It has been described as ‘something barely conscious that seeps into one’s core being as one grows and develops’ (Scourfield et al., 2006: 1). This project found that ideas of nation were significant to Australian parents and service providers when choosing parenting resources. While it is not possible to develop a detailed account of the particular version(s) of nation recognised by participants, some broad outlines can be suggested based on the kinds of resources identified as Australian. Being Australian was sometimes defined negatively as being not-American or not-English in keeping with definitions of cultural nationalism that emphasises rejection of ‘subservience to other cultures’, particularly those which represent colonial or globally dominant powers (Hutchinson, 1987: 484). A distinctively vernacular language was recognised as Australian, as was a particular kind of family habitus, associated with the cluster house–family–backyard. Elsewhere, I have explored the notion of Australian parenting as ‘laid back’ (or relaxed), which emerged from some of the online discussions but in which there is insufficient scope to address here (Nichols, 2014a).

There are significant challenges to articulating and resourcing a vernacular orientation to family life, which reflect the challenges of local content discussed earlier in relation to the broader project of cultural nationalism (Ward, 2005). These include the dominance by multinational enterprises of the marketplace for parenting resources, the generic nature of these resources which enables them to circulate widely and the difficulty in defining what an Australian family or parenting style might be. Service providers went to some pains to source local materials. They responded to various signals of authenticity, including production by a national media agency, authorship by local identities and connections with local and national histories of service. US and English materials were, however, plentiful in the catalogues of these services, which underlines the extent to which production and distribution are overwhelmingly dominated by international and multinational players. Thus, providers described themselves in terms of ‘trying to find’ Australian resources. In this quest, they sometimes saw themselves as battling the influx of cultural products from elsewhere.

At the same time, some parents identified with a cosmopolitan orientation to socialising their children. Their motivations were various, including future transnational mobility, conferring advantage in a competitive local job market and fostering an appreciation for diverse cultures. This was a strategic and entrepreneurial rather than a philosophical orientation (Geinger et al., 2013; Mitchell, 2003). Cosmopolitan parenting was challenging to resource, since neither generic placeless global products nor vernacular resources offered sufficient insight into the specificity of ‘other’ cultures. In this quest, networking into cultural communities was one means of providing access to resources that could be drawn on in parenting. This could involve stepping outside of what might be considered one’s ‘natural’ social location. Alice, for instance, was considering sending her children to school in a different town, to access the language programme which has been set up to cater for that town’s South East Asian community.

From this perspective, it appears that a degree of cultural essentialism is a requirement for both cosmopolitan and cultural nationalist parenting. It is as necessary for cultural ‘others’ to clearly signal their national identities (e.g. by naming a playgroup as ‘Japanese’) as it is for vernacular products to signal their Australian credentials. Seeking and selecting resources for parenting involve in part reading the signs that indicate where a thing is from and who it is addressing. This is evident in the way that particular marketised parenting identities (e.g. Antonia Kidman) are consistently referred to as Australian when Australian audiences are being addressed. We are currently seeing another version of cultural essentialism in the parenting realm being played out in the so-called Tiger Mother phenomenon (Nichols, 2014b).

The concept of nation is abstract. It ‘cannot be grasped directly’ but is ‘made meaningful through constantly circulating symbols and images’ (Scourfield et al., 2006: 11). When it comes to parenting, we must look not just at what people say, but at what they view, read and use. This study underlines the importance of paying attention to practices such as resource seeking and use when considering how abstractions, such as nationalism and cosmopolitanism, are enacted in everyday life. The roles of both commercial and civic entities (such as national broadcasters) in producing, circulating and recruiting users to these resources also deserve close examination.