In the last decades parenting interventions have moved to the center of social policies in a number of European and American countries. More recently, international development agencies and NGO’s began to forcefully promote programs to optimize child care around the world. The underlying premise is that poverty and disadvantage are caused and perpetuated by poor parenting and resulting poor developmental outcomes in the next generation. The promise is that interventions to improve parenting will boost brain development of young children which in turn will translate into higher school achievement and adult productivity. Broad application is expected to foster sustainable economic and societal development, especially in so-called low- and middle-income countries. Such parenting interventions are presented as evidence-based. However, ethnographic and any other research that accounts for the diversity of families, childrearing and developmental pathways across time and space is mostly ignored.

The purpose of this conference is to bring relevant ethnographic insights to bear in the knowledge base of early intervention to make sure that our critical perspectives can affect parenting politics.

HOSTED BY
Collaborative Research Center Affective Societies
Subproject A01
Formations of Feeling in Vietnamese Berlin II
Institutional Fields of Parenting Support