Parenting the emerging adult, and caring through the car w/ Jennifer Kent

CTS is very pleased to welcome Dr Jennifer Kent, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sydney to open our series of seminars on Mobilities of Care. Please register to join us online for October's seminar and find more information on the topic of Jennifer's talk below:

Parenting the emerging adult, and caring through the car

Reflecting other life-domains, parenting and care has changed throughout the last 50 years and these changes have been theorised and documented from multiple angles. Central to this shift has been emergence of parental determinism – where the parent is positioned by prevailing cultural norms as intensely responsible for the child, who is seen as fundamentally at risk and in need of protection from an increasingly competitive and precarious world (Furedi 2001, Hays 1996). This well-practiced paradigm places the individual parent at the centre of the safety, success and wellbeing of the child (Faircloth and Rosen 2020), hijacking the instinctive love between parent and child and demanding extreme investments of time and energy in caring for their children (Hayes 1996, x). This is known in the literature as “intensive parenting” (Faircloth 2024, 33).

Intensive parenting shapes multiple practices, including the transport practices of parents (Silonsaari et al. 2024). This study brings the concept of intensive parenting to understandings of practices of parenting emerging adults, with a particular focus on the complex role of the private car in a transitional life-stage. Analysing data from interviews with 26 parents of children aged 18-25 in Australia, it contributes new understandings of the complexity of car ownership as a biographical construct, positioning the car in the mobility biographies of parents experiencing freedom from the direct responsibility of children. Deploying concepts from mobility biographies, accounting for the impact of mode-choice inertia, and using parenting culture studies as an explanatory theoretical frame, the paper interrogates the assumed association between parenting and private cars by asking: what happens to the car in families now that it is no longer ‘needed’ to transport children?

Faircloth, C. (2024). Intensive parenting and the expansion of parenting. Parenting culture studies. E. Lee, J. Bristow, C. Faircloth and J. McVarish, Springer: 33-67.

Faircloth, C. and Rosen, R. (2020). "Childhood, parenting culture, and adult-child relations in global perspectives." Families, relationships and societies 9(1): 3-6.

Furedi, F. (2001). Paranoid parenting. Chicago, Review Press.

Hays, S. (1996). The cultural contradictions of motherhood, Yale University Press.

Silonsaari, J., Simula, M. and te Brömmelstroet, M. (2024). "From intensive car-parenting to enabling childhood velonomy? Explaining parents’ representations of children’s leisure mobilities." Mobilities 19(1): 116-133.