Parenting and the psychologized ideals of upbringing: Learning from Hannah Arendt

Much work has been done over the past three decades critiquing the scientific, professionalized and psychologized parenting culture of the neo-liberal risk society. Contemporary parenting culture is characterized by the dominant cultural narrative of “parental determinism,” where it is believed that what parents do with and to their children has significant linear consequences for the later life conditions of their children. This results in a heightened risk awareness, an individualized responsibilization of parents and an expectation that parents purposefully work to optimize their children’s development and learning. The ambition is thus to form the future of the child through applying “good” parenting techniques most often informed by a popularized version of psychology. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, I will contribute to the critique of the psychologization of upbringing by formulating an educational approach to parenting that challenges the ambition of control over the future. I will argue that the hegemonic status of psychology in parenting ideals overshadows the existential and ethical aspects of bringing children into the world. Rather than controlling the future, the quintessential question of parenting is instead related to the generational relationship between continuity and newness. Parenting is about bringing children into a world that exists before them and creating trust in this existing world. Simultaneously, it is also about holding in ones hand the miracle that something new is brought into the world, and this newness must have space to be. Parenting is thus more about the past and the present than it is about the future.