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The pitfalls of positive parenting

a
Helen Reece
a
Department of Law , London School of Economics and Political
Science , London , UK
Published online: 19 Jun 2013.

To cite this article: Helen Reece (2013) The pitfalls of positive parenting, Ethics and Education,
8:1, 42-54, DOI: 10.1080/17449642.2013.793961

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 Ethics and Education, 2013
Vol. 8, No. 1, 42–54, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2013.793961

The pitfalls of positive parenting

Helen Reece*

Department of Law, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK

Contemporary official parenting advice about disciplining children can be boiled

down to ‘Be nice’. I first expand on this claim, drawing on primarily Birth to
Five and secondarily Parentchannel.tv, showing that ‘Be nice’ breaks down into
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the absence of punishment and the expansion of both positive reinforcement and
leading by example, these three components comprising an approach that is
popularly described as positive parenting. Second, I examine the ways in which
such apparently innocuous advice could be damaging: positive parenting is
arduous if not impossible, thereby setting parents up to fail, and partly because
of this onerousness, it is arguably destructive of the spontaneity of the parent –
child relationship. However, the difficulties of upholding a whole-heartedly
spontaneous approach to parenting have led critics to endorse a model of the
good parent as the reflective parent, and in conclusion I warn that this is just as
coercive as the positive parenting model that it is designed to replace.
Keywords: parenting; child-rearing; Birth to Five; Parentchannel.tv; positive
parenting; discipline

Introduction
Contemporary official parenting advice about disciplining children can be boiled down to,
perhaps caricatured as, ‘Be nice’. In the first part of what follows, I substantiate and
expand on this claim, drawing on primarily Birth to Five (DoH 2009) and secondarily the
website Parentchannel.tv, showing that ‘being nice’ breaks down into three separate but
inter-related components: the absence of punishment and the expansion of both positive
reinforcement and leading by example, these three components comprising an approach
that is popularly known as ‘positive parenting’ (see, e.g. NSPCC 2013). In the second part,
I examine ways in which such apparently innocuous advice could be regarded as
damaging: positive parenting is arduous if not impossible, thereby setting parents up to
fail, and partly as a consequence of this onerousness, it is arguably destructive of the
spontaneity of the parent – child relationship. However, the difficulties of upholding a
whole-heartedly spontaneous approach to parenting have led critics to endorse a model of
the good parent who is irreducibly and above all else the reflective parent, and in
conclusion I warn that the reflective parent is just as coercive a model as the positive
parenting model that it is designed to replace.
Let us start with a few words about the sources I draw on. Birth to Five is a book
produced by the Department of Health that provides information for new parents about all
aspects of caring for their child up to the age of five, and is available at no cost from

*Email: h.reece@lse.ac.uk

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

 Ethics and Education 43

primary care services such as health visitors, general practitioners and antenatal clinics, as
well as freely available on the Internet. For my purposes, this book is a useful test bed for
two reasons. First of all, arguably more than any other child-rearing resource, it represents
the accumulation of official, mainstream, advice about how to discipline children:
published by a government department, production and distribution costs are funded
publicly. Given the contemporary proliferation of widely divergent childcare advice – an
era in which we can choose to be a ‘tiger mother’ (Chua 2011), an ‘attachment parent’
(see, e.g. Sears et al. 2005) or the mother of a ‘contented little baby’ (Ford 2006) – I am
interested in exploring advice that comes with a clear and overt official stamp.
There is a second reason that Birth to Five is a rich text to explore. First produced in
1989, this book has been regularly updated to reflect the latest wisdom about childcare, the
last update being for the 2009 edition. Birth to Five thus enables us to track official
childcare advice from 1989 to 2009.
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The supplementary source of childcare advice that I draw on is Parentchannel.tv, which

offers childcare advice in the form of videos on the Internet, at no cost to the viewer. The
relative newness of Internet videos in general and Parentchannel.tv in particular means that
we cannot use this resource to explore shifts in advice. Moreover, the government link is not
as solid as with Birth to Five, although Parentchannel.tv is still to a large extent officially
endorsed: the venture was initially funded by the Department of Children, Schools and
Families, and is currently supported by the Department of Education. Still, these caveats
mean that I use Parentchannel.tv solely to illustrate and expand on points that are already
clearly apparent from Birth to Five: as would be expected, the video format allows the
childcare advice to be elaborated upon.

‘Be nice!’
The demand that parents ‘be nice’ breaks down into three separate but inter-related
components: the absence of punishment and the expansion of both positive reinforcement
and leading by example.
From the ‘word go’ in 1989, one feature of Birth to Five that has been kept constant is
the absence of any discussion of punishment (Furedi 2008, 136). Or more accurately,
punishment is present purely privativly, in that parents are told how not to punish
(principally that they should not smack) (Kohner, Phillips, and Ford 1994, 60; DoH 2009,
95), when not to punish (e.g. when they are angry) (Kohner 1989, 36; Kohner, Phillips, and
Ford 1994, 60; DoH 2009, 94, 97) and reasons not to punish (of which there are many: the
child’s behaviour might be normal, a phase best ignored, or a reaction to significant issues
such as being bullied at school) (Kohner 1989, 36, 40, 44, 45; Kohner, Phillips, and Ford
1994, 58, 61 –63; DoH 2009, 93, 95, 96; Furedi 2008, 138). There is no counterpoising
advice consisting in how, when and why parents should punish. The sociologist Frank
Furedi has drawn attention to and suggested reasons for the official demise of punishment,
which can be summarised as the ‘decline of an authoritarian style of parenting’ (129).
Although he generally sees this as ‘a positive and welcome development’ (129), he worries
that the removal of punishment from parents’ toolbox leaves a troublesome gap, because
effective parenting requires ‘a judicious mix of disciplinary tactics that encourage positive
behaviour and power-assertive sanctions that punish negative ones’ (137).
Contemporary official parenting advice brings the scales down firmly in favour of the
‘disciplinary tactics that encourage positive behaviour’. Positive reinforcement has
 44 H. Reece

marched onwards and upwards with every reissue of Birth to Five. In the first edition of
Birth to Five, parents are advised only in the following terms:
Try to notice the good things. If you feel good about something your child does, say so. It’s
good for him or her, and it makes you feel more positive too (Kohner 1989, 37). . . . Hold on
to what’s good about your child . . . say (or show) when you feel good about something. (41)
But 5 years later, the advice to emphasise the positive has expanded as follows:
Be positive about the good things . . . Make a habit of often letting your child know when he
or she is making you happy. You can do that just by giving attention, a smile, or a hug. There
doesn’t have to be a ‘good’ reason. Let your child know that you love him or her just for being
themselves (Kohner, Phillips, and Ford 1994, 60). . . . Every time he or she does something
that pleases you, make sure you say so. (61)
There are three ways in which the advice to be positive expanded between 1989 and
1994. Most obviously and least importantly, a few more words are devoted to the subject.
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More significantly, parents are expected to feel positive about a greater range of their
child’s behaviour. In 1989, the approach was just to bother to mention when you happen to
find yourself feeling good about your child’s behaviour: if your child has eaten up her
greens or put away her toys, perhaps it is worth commenting. In stark contrast, by 1994,
parents were advised that ‘there doesn’t have to be a good reason’: it is enough that the
children are just being ‘themselves’. Finally, the 1994 reissue makes positive reinforcement
significantly more demanding for the parent. In 1989, parents were just expected to have
praise in their repertoire, but by 1994, every time the child did something pleasing, the
parent had to make sure to say so.
The upward march of positive feedback is further illustrated by discussion of rewards
in the sequential editions of Birth to Five. At first glance, there seems to be a strange
seesawing: in 1989, rewards were treated with ambivalence (Kohner 1989, 41); by 1994,
rewards were out of favour (Kohner, Phillips, and Ford 1994, 60); in 2009, rewards were
flavour of the month (DoH 2009, 94). But this is in fact because the meaning of reward
changes: in 1989, rewards could be concrete, ‘something like a special outing, for
example’ (41); by 2009, emphasising the positive has in itself become the reward:
You can help your child by rewarding them for behaving well, for example by praising them
. . . If your child behaves well, tell them how pleased you are. Be specific. Say something like,
‘I loved the way you put your toys back in the box when I asked you! Well done!’ (94)
The swallowing up of rewards within positive reinforcement is equally apparent on
Parentchannel.tv, specifically in the video ‘Why Kids Misbehave’, in which an
educational psychologist asks: ‘Are you rewarding your child when your child is being
good? You have to catch your child being good.’
Positive feedback imagined as ‘catching your child being good’ has the interesting
implication that the child’s behaviour becomes a matter of perspective, with the parent
irrebuttably having the skewed perspective, in wrongly noticing and accentuating the
negative:
Parents, you know, fall into the trap sometimes of just not noticing when their children behave
well. If they’re sitting quietly reading or they’re cooperating nicely with their brother, you just
don’t think to say anything – you go off to make a cup of tea or something. (Parenting
Adviser, “Why Kids Misbehave”)
In effect, the parent not the child is seen as behaving badly. This forms a bridge to the
third component of ‘being nice’, namely the importance of the parent setting a good
 Ethics and Education 45

example. Simply emphasising the positive in one’s child behaviour could be regarded as
an insufficient strategy for Birth to Five to reject Furedi’s gauntlet that parents cannot
function without sanctions: even if parents should notice when their children are playing
nicely together, what should they do when their children are bashing each other over the
head with toy bricks? The answer is that this need not occur, because children are mimics.
In simple terms, if you do not want your little boy to bash his baby sister on the head with
toy bricks, it is best not to do this to your partner.
Setting a good example has developed into a highly important aspect of ‘being nice’.
In the first edition of Birth to Five, modelling good behaviour does not merit a mention, save
for the sage words of advice: ‘Don’t hit, bite or kick back’ (Kohner 1989, 45). By 1994, Birth
to Five was clear that children learn by example, devoting a paragraph to discussing this, in
the particular context of smacking (Kohner, Phillips, and Ford 1994, 60). In the latest edition,
‘lead by example’ has become no less than a general bullet point that precedes and sets the
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stage for all discussion of discipline. Parents are advised: ‘It’s the best way for your child to
learn everything from how to use the loo to how to resolve an argument’ (DoH 2009, 85).
The paramount importance of setting a good example is strongly reinforced on
Parentchannel.tv:
Parents sometimes say: ‘Oh, you know, who do they think they are? Why should I adjust?’.
But you really have to if you want them to turn out as adults and young people who will think
for themselves and behave well. . . . It’s not ‘Do as I say, not as I do’, because children will
think ‘Oh yeah, right’, and especially as they get older, if they see you swearing or, you know,
talking in a negative way about your friends and all of that, then they think it’s fine to do that.
They will copy. (Parenting Adviser, “Kids These Days: 21st Century Parenting”)
The top tips in written form that accompany this video are to be a good role model and
talk to your child respectfully, the latter gaining independent emphasis in the video ‘Why
Kids Misbehave’, under the banner ‘Give respect to gain respect’:
If you want your children to respect you, it’s important that you give them respect. . . . You
need to, you know, listen carefully to your child, show them that you care about what they
think, and then they’ll act like that back to you. But it’s giving respect to get respect.
(Parenting Adviser, “Why Kids Misbehave”)
Leading by example has expanded in another way for the 2009 edition of Birth to Five.
Prior to 2009, the parameters of the modelling behaviour were restricted to the parent –
child interaction, but in 2009, the behaviour that needs to be exemplary became more
extensive, encompassing the way that ‘you and your partner behave together’, which also
has an effect on the child’s behaviour, as parents are informed by a brand new bullet point
devoted to this issue (DoH 2009, 98).
Furedi (2008) has highlighted the current emphasis on parental determinism, that is,
the belief that how parents behave is the primary influence on the development of children,
but it is noteworthy that ‘leading by example’ takes parental determinism to a cruder level
than he notices. In Birth to Five, it is not ‘be nice to your toddler so that he does not turn
into a gun-toting, drug-taking teenager in 15 years time’, but ‘eat your dinner nicely so that
your toddler will eat his dinner nicely; put away your clothes neatly so that your toddler
will put away his clothes neatly’. This gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘mini-me’.
Noticing the crudeness of the parental determinism in Birth to Five also allows us to cast
light on a tension highlighted by Furedi (2008). He suggested that contemporary childcare
expertise simultaneously relies on two conflicting assumptions: first, parental determinism
and second, treating children as adults (133, 30). But the conflict melts away if children are
 46 H. Reece

programmed to copy their parents. Parents can treat their child as an adult – letting her
decide important questions apparently independently – secure in the knowledge that their
child is a peculiar type of adult who is pre-determined to make a wise choice, so long as
that is what she has witnessed her parents doing.
This conception of children as their parents’ shadows means that with each reissue,
Birth to Five gives decreasing scope to the child’s independence. This is illustrated by an
interesting shift in chapter organisation. In 1994, a chapter called ‘Habits and behaviour’
replaced a chapter in 1989 entitled ‘How do you cope?’, but paradoxically, it is the 1989
framework that treats the child’s behaviour as more potent, because in each case, the
subject of the chapter represents the phenomenon that needs to be explained. So in 1989,
one reason that the parent might not cope was the child’s behaviour. But in 1994, the
causal relationship was reversed, such that it was the child’s behaviour that needed to be
accounted for, perhaps by the parent’s failure to cope. By 1994, the child’s behaviour no
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longer had even potential explanatory force.

The derivative nature of the child’s behaviour is strongly reinforced on Parentchannel.tv.
There is a short answer to ‘Why Kids Misbehave’: they do not. When they appear to be
misbehaving, it is because society has mislabelled their behaviour as naughty, they want your
attention, parental demands are unreasonable, or they are feeling sad about, for example,
being bullied and do not have the words to express this. The same short shrift is given in ‘Kids
Behaving Badly’:
At this stage, children are beginning to realise they don’t have to do everything that the
parents ask, and actually the parents aren’t always right. So they’ll start questioning you;
they’ll start answering back; they’ll start refusing to do things. This isn’t them being
disobedient – it’s just them beginning to explore boundaries and learn about themselves. The
thing to remember is to stay calm, stay cool. Your child isn’t turning into a monster – they’re
just learning to find out things for themselves.
Even when we turn to the provocatively titled ‘My Child is out of Control’, the gist is that
he or she definitely is not, although you might well be.
Because the lack of explanatory force is always framed around the child’s bad
behaviour, this approach sounds nothing but progressive and humane. But if the child is
incapable of bad behaviour then he or she is incapable of any behaviour: being good
presupposes the possibility of a different choice. To the extent that this picture is distorted,
it negates the child’s capacity for independent action. But importantly, to the extent that
this picture is accurate, it involves a manipulation of the child, as Baumrind (1966, 904)
recognised nearly 50 years ago: the less the child is able to withstand the force of the
‘manipulation by the parent of the love relation’ involved in positive parenting, the greater
the threat to his or her ability to make a conscious choice. It is ironic that a picture of
discipline that has come to rely on the child as Pavlovian dog has its roots in a philosophy
that lays emphasis on respecting children’s autonomy (see further Furedi 2008).

The pitfalls of positive parenting

Onerousness of positive parenting
Without doubt, ‘being nice’ is onerous. This is most apparent in relation to ‘leading by
example’, as the sociologist Hays (1996, 60) noted over 15 years ago: ‘If the parents’
example is crucial, then such parents must constantly monitor their actions – never
exhibiting any type of inappropriate behaviour lest the child make it his own’. The
 Ethics and Education 47

corollary is that whenever a child misbehaves, it is the parent’s behaviour that must be
scrutinised and unpicked to discern the ways in which a negative model was imparted to
the child. As the parameters of parental behaviour expand, away from the parent –child
interaction itself, the requirement to behave well becomes ever more onerous.
In this regard, it is instructive that alongside the expansion of ‘leading by example’, the
2009 edition of Birth to Five marks the first mention of ‘me-time’, with parents specifically
advised by a new bullet point to look after themselves and make sure that they have time
for themselves (DoH 2009, 98). The sociologist Bristow (2009) has convincingly argued
that the advent of ‘me-time’ is the flipside of the rise of intensive, child-centred, parenting.
With particular regard to setting a good example, if your child is liable to copy every
aspect of your interaction so that you constantly need to keep your own behaviour in
check, you will surely need ‘time off for good behaviour’.
But it is positive reinforcement that goes the furthest in turning parenting into an
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onerous exercise. This is because being positive exists along a continuum, consisting not in
an action or series of actions, but in an attitude or an approach. It is ultimately no less than a
way of being, involving the parent’s whole identity. Just as nobody can ever proclaim ‘I am
absolutely good’, a parent can never assert ‘I am a positive parent’: the claim can only be to
have moved further along the spectrum. It follows that every parent will inevitably fall short
of the ideal of emphasising the positive (see Lambeir and Ramaekers 2007, 105; Ramaekers
and Suissa 2012, 116). Positive reinforcement is far-reaching and nebulous: extending
infinitely, it is impossible to define or fulfil. This is parenting without limit (see further
Knudsen and Andersen (forthcoming); Reece 2003).
If this is not obvious, just think for a moment about the advice to accentuate the positive
in the latest edition of Birth to Five. Could you actually manage to let your child know every
time she pleases you, especially given that there no longer has to be a good reason, just the
children being ‘themselves’? What do you do if the children are continuously being
‘themselves’, providing a constant stream of pleasing behaviour? Should you respond with
an equally constant flow of praise, or is it sufficient to provide positive reinforcement
regularly, at intermittent intervals, and if so, how often? This might seem no more than a
reductio ad absurdum, but its serious consequence is that any shortfall in a child’s
behaviour can always be explained by the fact that the parent’s treatment of the child was
not positive enough (see further Vansieleghem 2010, 350).
The onerousness of providing positive reinforcement is still more multi-layered.
Because responding positively is an attitude or an approach rather than a series of actions,
the advice becomes more intimate and intrusive: it needs to concern itself with how parents
comply not whether they comply. Even the title of the Parentchannel.tv video, ‘Five ways
to talk respectfully to your child’, points in the direction further illustrated by its content
(see also ‘Six ways to keep your temper’; Ramaekers and Suissa 2012, 50; Knudsen and
Andersen (forthcoming)):
It’s not as easy as it sounds. To listen, first of all you have to think about your body language.
Sit her in one chair, and you sit in another chair, facing her. Make good eye contact; have a
relaxed facial expression; give feedback to show you’re listening; nod in the right places.
(Educational Psychologist)
The fine detail of such advice reinforces the impossibility of success: you may have given
praise, in a positive tone of voice, but did you nod in the right places (see further Rose
1999, 192, 193)?
 48 H. Reece

Even nodding in the right places does not exhaust the layers of onerousness in positive
parenting. As Ramaekers and Suissa (2012) elucidate, contemporary parental
responsibility is understood as the correct application of expert knowledge, which
involves keeping up with the latest research and staying on the lookout for ways of gaining
more knowledge or refining skills. This is Vansieleghem’s (2010, 345) ‘learning parent’,
a figure permanently in need of information, knowledge, competencies and advice:
‘parental expertise (in terms of competencies) is not only something one should have, but
something the parent can never have enough of. It is something in which the parent must
invest to make parenting ever more successful’ (349).
The parent within this discourse is not just someone in need of help, but permanent
monitoring, coaching and feedback to ensure optimal development of the competencies
necessary to maximise learning outcomes for the child (Vansieleghem 2010, 352). Modern
parents thus ‘find themselves in a permanent state of becoming’ (353), which entails that
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parents adopt an attitude of continuous vigilance about their child’s development and a
willingness to do whatever it takes to ensure the best result, ‘to the extent that not actively
looking out for opportunities to enhance one’s parenting skills is almost seen as a
questionable attitude’ (Ramaekers and Suissa 2012, 25). An aspect of the right attitude is
the expectation that parents should reflect on themselves and their approach to parenting
(28; cf. Reece 2003, 154, 155).

Lack of spontaneity
So positive parenting is hard if not impossible work, setting parents up to fail. But some may
see nothing wrong with that: parents are constantly admonished that parenting is both the
most arduous and the most important job in the world (see, e.g. DfE 2011). Another
persuasive objection is a concern with how parenting positively may destroy the
spontaneity of parent – child interactions: ‘I’m praising my child – check; I’ve got a positive
tone of voice – check; I’ve adopted appropriate body language – check.’ The nub of this
point is that it is impossible to tell somebody (how) to be nice, because the very essence of
being nice is that it cannot be forced: coerced kindness is a contradiction.
This is the objection that Hart (1993) made 20 years ago in ‘Children are not Meant to be
Studied’. His point is that a studied approach to children prevents us from understanding
them properly (17), because the type of intelligence you need to interact with children
‘can’t be turned on and off like an electric light, by willing it so. It has to be lit up, from
within, by desire’ (19). To interact properly with the child, you need to be ‘fully caught up’
in the moment (19), but the very essence of adopting a studied approach is that the parent is
withholding himself (20). This has been more recently described by Ramaekers and Suissa
(2012, 28) as ‘the alienation of parents from their own parenting’: ‘The discourse of the
“expert mom” and the “skilful dad” has distanced parents from being a parent and made
them act like good ones’ (Lambeir and Ramaekers 2007, 105). Ramaekers and Suissa
elaborate that, destructively, parents are expected to get a clear overview of the parent –
child dynamic rather than be in the situation (31). But for Hart, it is simply impossible for us
to give freely of ourselves at the same time as being detached:
. . . if we have lost, or never had, the capacity to be surprised and amused by them; if we are
not open to being touched and – it may also be – provoked or wounded by what they do and
the things they say, then there is something missing, perhaps from us and certainly from our
relations with them . . . (20)
 Ethics and Education 49

Hart says, at times very explicitly, that all we need is love. ‘All we need . . . is the child’s
hand in our own. (The image is one of immediacy and trust)’ (21).
A very closely related criticism is that coerced kindness does not count, a point
elegantly captured by Smith (2011, 172):
. . . a father is talking to his baby daughter, naturally and unselfconsciously, as he wheels her
in her pushchair along the street. Another father doing much the same thing however seems to
be putting on something of a show . . . Being a father spontaneously and naturally seems
altogether better than playing at being a father, and ‘better’ here is being used in an ethical
sense.
Writ large, such a system could be inhuman, even as it functioned perfectly (Smeyers
2010a, 282, 283).
Closely connected, yet theoretically distinct, is concern with diversity: telling parents
(how) to be nice to their children presupposes that there is a right way – or at least a
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spectrum of right ways – to react when your child shows you her painting. This point can be
taken in the direction of concern about cultural or other group diversities, or it can focus on
the particularity of this parent, this child, this parent – child relationship and this parent –
child interaction (see, e.g. Boddy, Smith, and Statham 2011, 183, 184). But in all these
forms, the objection is that expert advice ‘not only presupposes that a standard practice can
be identified in an objective manner but also that it can be justified and enforced. This brings
with it the danger that the diversity that could enrich parents’ choices in dealing with their
children is replaced by the straitjacket of the exclusive “to be preferred alternative”’
(Smeyers 2010b, 266).
This dystopia of parent as clone mouthing the officially sanctioned reaction is neatly
theorised by Vansiegelhem (2010):
. . . what is left of the parent within this discourse is an empty vessel or a residual self: an
existing real thing that has gone beyond the difference between norm and life. It could be said
that the discourse of parental services has transformed parenthood into a mechanical process
that lacks the ability to meet real needs. . . . The figure of the residual parent exposes, in other
words, the relation that binds and, at the same time, abandons the parent (354). . . . it becomes
impossible to say, to do, or to feel anything about parenthood. (355)
Creation of this ‘empty vessel’ is destructive of the parent –child relationship, which is
seen by many as the paramount objective of parenting (but see in contrast Ramaekers and
Suissa 2012, esp. 61). So Hart (1993, 25) unfavourably contrasts the ‘successful’ parent
with the one who has a deep relationship with his child:
My main point is that an essential part of bringing up a child is the maintaining and deepening
of the relationship between parent and child. Where that is lacking it is natural to think of the
parent as having failed as a parent, no matter how successfully he or she may have shaped the
child’s development in other respects. And, conversely, where there is love and trust between
parent and child, there is plenty of room for the children to develop in ways which were
neither foreseen or desired by the parents without us having to conclude that, as parents, they
have failed . . .
Ramaekers and Suissa elaborate that it is not so much that parenting advice neglects to
value the parent – child relationship but rather that it is destructive of that relationship,
by instrumentalising it. As they elegantly explain, love is not a pre-existing skill that one
can bring to the parent – child relationship, but a relational quality that can only emerge,
take shape and indeed gain meaning from within the relationship itself: ‘To come to the
“meeting” with one’s child prepared, or, as it were, armed, with “love” . . . prevents
 50 H. Reece

parents from actually meeting their children, from actually and genuinely engaging in a
relationship with their own children’ (33; see also Suissa 2006).
But while the abhorrence we feel towards the ‘residual parent’ is compelling, it is
possible to question whether there is really any such thing as spontaneous interaction. For
Ramaekers and Suissa (2012), it is meaningless to ask parents to follow their intuitions and
just do what comes naturally, because parents’ intuitions are always irredeemably
influenced and informed by a backdrop of complex, normative considerations. But as we
have just seen, they equally reject a technical approach to parenting based on expert
knowledge. As we will see in more detail shortly, the solution they offer parents is to think
things through.
Moreover, even if we manage to salvage meaning from spontaneity, does that imply
that, so long as the parent ‘keeps it real’, any way of interacting with his or her child is as
valuable as any other? Spontaneity might be unproblematic if the parent’s gut reaction is to
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smother his or her child with kisses, but more of an issue if the parent’s heartfelt reaction is to
shout, swear or smack. Few if any would stand by the stance that absolutely anything goes.
Indeed for Hart (1993, 21), part of what is wrong with a technical approach to
interacting with children is that this suggests that anybody can do it, so long as he or she has
the technical knowledge and the appropriate tools and instruments, which any reasonably
competent person can acquire. Expert advice is misguided because it is a ‘pretence that you
can get such understanding on the cheap’ (20). The kinds of understanding that we could
have by virtue of a technique are degraded (21), because the obstacles in the way of relating
to children are not technical but personal (20).
So Hart (1993, 20) is far from saying that it is effortless to relate well to children, but
rather that any failings ‘lie within ourselves’. It matters crucially what sort of a person you
are, what qualities of insight and sympathy you have (21), because being ‘good with
children’ is about self-knowledge and a wider wisdom about life (25):
If an adult is without a spark of imagination in his own life, how can he possibly do justice to
the imaginative life of a child? If he has never known, or has quite forgotten, what it was to be
unsure of and to be searching for his own identity, what sense can he possibly have of
children’s uncertainties about who they are? If he is not a person of some force or complexity
. . . how is he to reflect force and complexity in them (21)? . . . Perfect information – if it
even makes sense to speak of such a thing – doesn’t stop us being, as adults, narrow-minded,
selfish, unimaginative, frightened of acknowledging our own feelings or attached to our own
routine, and it is such as these, rather than any failure to understand children in a theoretical
sense, which prevents us seeing them for what they are. (23, 24)
If a parent does not have ‘force and complexity’ then his or her interactions with his or
her child on this account will be flawed. But because the failing lies within the self,
the answer lies in neither parenting techniques nor spontaneity, but self-reflection
(Hart 1993, 20). The expert approach:
. . . can so easily become a substitute for taking a hard look at ourselves and attending to the
things in our own lives which need changing. It is then not just irrelevant but a positive
distraction; and a means by which we can go on endlessly shirking responsibility for who we
are and for how we behave towards children. (24)
Accordingly, Hart condemns those ‘parents and teachers who look outside of themselves
to child study and its mirage of “information about children” to save them from
themselves’ (24). In finding the solution in self-reflection, it is noteworthy that Hart
reaches the same endpoint as Ramaekers and Suissa, by a different route.
 Ethics and Education 51

For Smith (2010, 361; see also Stadlen 2004, esp. 108), self-reflection takes place in
synchrony with one’s own child, because ‘parents can learn, and in particular learn to be
parents, from their children:’
. . . for example, a child’s fresh eyes can help an adult see anew a snail or an unusual stone, or
the child’s insight can stop in its tracks a particular way of being, or thinking. I give here one
instance: a friend whose five year-old-son told him, the first and only time he smacked him,
‘That’s a really horrible thing to do.’ My friend commented that he had just somehow
assumed that adults smacked their children occasionally, and that his son’s response stopped
him short: it was indeed, he saw vividly, a horrible thing to do.

Self-reflection
The golden thread running through these critiques is the paramount importance of self-
reflection: the good parent is, above all else and irreducibly, the reflective parent. Vividly
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described by Stadlen (2004, 105), the mother creates ‘her own unique moral system
within her own home’, allowing her to ‘learn not just what “works”, but also what her
deepest values are, and how she can express them in creating her family’ (248). Her
family is the very embodiment of her values, ‘both her private affair and also her political
base’ (253).
Meanwhile, Ramaekers and Suissa (2012) draw on the Aristotelian approach of seeing
human activities as part of a tradition with internal goods rather than external standards to
suggest that parents need to reclaim the first-person perspective, which means that for the
parent, any judgement about what to do in a particular situation is inseparable from the fact
that the decision concerns his or her own child. Aspects of the parent – child relationship
thus need to be probed and explored not as contrasting external factors but as emerging
from and inherent in the experience of being a parent. Because the first-person perspective
requires working out parenting for oneself afresh and because intuition is inseparable from
a backdrop of complex evaluative assumptions, parenting undoubtedly requires a great
deal of thought:
. . . being a parent means constantly asking such questions; asking, indeed, an infinite variety
of similar questions that one could not possibly predict in advance; questions that themselves
are thrown up by and derive their meaning from the experience of being a parent; and in
asking them, parents are also asking questions about their own life: its meaning, its value, and
its challenges. (Ramaekers and Suissa 2012, 82; see also Suissa 2006, 73)
While Ramaekers and Suissa (2012) present an isolated image of reflection, others
stress the inter-subjective nature of the enterprise, be it with one’s own child or other
parents (Smith 2011, 177). For Stadlen (2004):
It seems to me that the best antidote to all these large and small pressures on mothers are
circles of mothers, either at regular meetings or in spontaneous gatherings in shops or on the
street. Here a mother can exchange views and have her assumptions challenged (253). . . .
afterwards, mothers say as they leave how much they have learned from the meeting. They
have clearly used the meeting as a way of reviewing their work as mothers. (254)

The pitfalls of reflection

On the purely individual and personal level, reflecting on and discussing parenting
decisions could never be classed as a bad idea. But a policy prescription that the good
parent is the reflective parent has the potential to be just as coercive as any substantive
 52 H. Reece

model of good parenting. The danger is that once reflection becomes an obligation,
unreflective decisions are, ‘by virtue of their status as such, entitled at most to presumptive
respect’ (Sunstein 1986, 1132). Little credence is given to parents’ naked choices because
these choices may depend on norms that they would not endorse on reflection (Sunstein
1997, 51).
Moreover, in the struggle to make decisions through self-discovery, parents may be
regarded as helped not hindered by external intervention. Ramaekers’ and Suissa’s (2012,
48) discussion of an episode of the TV show Supernanny is an excellent illustration of this
point. In this episode, a father asks Supernanny Jo Frost: ‘Why don’t we just lock the
door?’. Ramaekers and Suissa (2012) are highly critical of her response, on the basis that it
comes in the form of a universal prohibition: ‘Because you can’t ever lock your kids up’.
Instead they suggest that this encounter could have:
. . . served as a means to open up a space for ethical deliberation from the first-person
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perspective. Rather than starting from the position that “it’s not OK to lock children in rooms”,
the question posed to Jason could have been: “Do you think it is OK to lock your child in a
room?”, “What makes it OK, or not OK?”, “How would you feel if you were to do it?”, “What
effect do you think it would have?”, “What is it that you want to achieve by doing it?”, and so on.
What makes such reflection still more prescriptive is that it has no endpoint. Meyers
(1989, 20) explains:
Introspection may find a thoroughly conditioned self. Likewise a decision to change may
reflect socially instilled values and preferences, and a meta-decision confirming that decision
may again reflect socially instilled values and preferences. In sum, self-administered checks
on the autonomy of the individual may themselves be products of socialization, and any
review of these reviews may be socially tainted, as well.
The search for the authentic self thus appears to set in motion an infinite regress.
Therefore, even after reflection, Jason’s parenting decision will still be suspect, because he
can never claim to have reflected sufficiently to have achieved clear self-knowledge. This
means that, just like substantive positive parenting, reflection is a life-long process, never
fully achieved. The consequence is that, after reflection just as much as before reflection,
Jason faces an impossible struggle to know what he really wants to decide.
Accordingly, even clear coercion may be re-interpreted as benign, on the basis that all
this coercion really does is to implement the decision that Jason would want to make if
only his ends and desires could become transparent to him. Moreover, given the
impossibility of a measuring rod for reflection, the temptation to class as ill-thought out his
decision to lock the door and carefully considered his choice to leave it open is too strong
ever to be resistible: ‘Supernanny’ can spend hours with Jason discussing how he feels
about locking the door and why he feels this way about locking the door, but the door is
bound to end up unlocked. This leads us straight back into the arms of a substantively
correct approach to parenting, which will inevitably be laid down by experts and officials
(see further Reece 2003).

Acknowledgements
For helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article, the author is grateful to participants at
Monitoring parents: science, evidence, experts and the new parenting culture, Kent, 13 – 14
September 2011; participants at the Annual Conference of the Institute of Ideas Parents’ Forum,
Kessingland, 7 – 8 April 2012; and the anonymous referees.
 Ethics and Education 53

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