Charlotte Faircloth, PhD, anthropologist and author of "Militant Lactivism? Attachment Parenting and Intensive Motherhood in the UK and France", and I sit down to talk about "parenting culture" and how attachment parenting fits into the larger ideology of intensive mothering.

We discuss:
-Charlotte’s work and how it influenced her own journey through motherhood (and vice versa)
-How developmental psychology in the 1970's played a key role in creating “parenting culture” - and what that means
-the idea of the “natural” being held up as ideal (is/ought problem), and some of the problems this may create for new parents trying to sort out their unique relationship with their child
-defining intensive motherhood and looking at attachment parenting as a subset of this dominant cultural ideology
-our very human need to belong to groups, and find support and validation around the parenting practices we employ
-the difference between criticism and critique - or, how can we analyze various behaviors of parents without necessarily attaching a moral judgment to them?
-how social media can both help and perhaps harm our perceptions of ourselves as parents
-the idea of optimizing “parenting” or “attachment”, and how neurobiological research can be appropriated to inform “best” parenting practices

More of Charlotte's work can be found here: https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=CFAIR39

The book Militant Lactivism?: www.amzn.com/0857457586
The book Parenting Culture Studies: www.amzn.com/1137304634

The Center for Parenting Culture Studies at Kent: https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/parentingculturestudies/

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