Centre for Parenting Culture Studies

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Centre for Parenting Culture Studies Based in the School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Research at the University of Kent. Our website is: http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/parentingculturestudies/

The Centre is based in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Kent but has Associates at many Universities in the UK and other countries. The idea for the Centre was first discussed at an international conference held at the University of Kent in May 2007, called ‘Monitoring Parents: Childrearing in the age of intensive parenting’. From that point onwards, those now involved with CPCS exchanged ideas, developed collaborative research and writing projects, and organised further events. In 2010 CPCS was established formally as one of the University of Kent’s many research centres.

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas this weekend, Jennie Bristow and Ellie Lee in discussion about their new book 'Growing U...
21/10/2026

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas this weekend, Jennie Bristow and Ellie Lee in discussion about their new book 'Growing Up in the Culture Wars: Identity and Generational Conflict', published this Friday by Polity.

🚨 Growing Up in the Culture Wars is available to buy (https://www.p...

Our next CPCS discussion is called Finding Formula; see summary below. We are so pleased to be hosting the research team...
21/10/2026

Our next CPCS discussion is called Finding Formula; see summary below. We are so pleased to be hosting the research team to tell us about their work, and Clare Murphy (CEO, FeedUK) as discussant. Book your place!

Online event
Wednesday, November 18 • 3 PM - 5 PM GMT

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/finding-formula-confronting-insecurities-tickets-1998875655895?aff=oddtdtcreator

Summary

In February 2022, the Michigan-based Abbott Nutrition factory, a key infant formula producer, temporarily shuttered due to a bacterial contamination, instigating a crisis-level formula shortage in the United States (U.S.). Because Canada at the time imported 100% of its infant formula, mainly from the U.S., it wasn’t long before Canadian families were affected. Inflation in both countries have now caused the price of infant formula to skyrocket. Families struggled, and still do, with these co-mingling risks to critical nutrition for infants in both counties. The project, Finding Formula: Confronting Insecurities used sequential methods to engage caregivers in Canada and the U.S. to advance knowledge about the drivers of risk and impacts of these infant food insecurities on families’ lives. Our methods included online interviews and surveys, collaboration with a social justice community choir, and a 6-week digital ethnography using the platform Indeemo, with 39 caregivers across Canada and the United States during which participants responded to weekly prompts about food work, feeding in troubled times, and outside influences that were either creating or mitigating infant food insecurity risk in their lives. Creative contributions from caregivers alongside produced videos and written vignettes made by the research team (sociologists, a documentary film maker, an interdisciplinary team of students) appear on a co-designed public facing website that serves as a story sharing platform. The contributions also serve as a research tool to illicit conversation with institutional and organizational policy actors (the last step of data collection) with the goal to connect everyday experiences of food insecurity to those with the power to enact emergency responses and long-term solutions to infant food insecurity.

Join us for a discussion with the Finding Formula research team (Canada) with Clare Murphy, CEO Feed UK as discussant

Congrats to Prof Charlotte Faircloth!
18/10/2026

Congrats to Prof Charlotte Faircloth!

Nearly 80 IOE academics feature in Elsevier and Stanford University’s 2026 list of the world’s most-cited scholars of their fields.

Here's Jennie Bristow in discussion about the themes of Growing Up in the Culture Wars, written with Ellie Lee, publishe...
15/10/2026

Here's Jennie Bristow in discussion about the themes of Growing Up in the Culture Wars, written with Ellie Lee, published next week

Does Gen Z have it harder than past generations?What’s behind the...

Growing Up in the Culture Wars: Identity and Generational Conflict by Jennie Bristow and Ellie Lee Out next week with Po...
14/10/2026

Growing Up in the Culture Wars: Identity and Generational Conflict by Jennie Bristow and Ellie Lee

Out next week with Polity!

Growing Up in the Culture Wars: Identity Affirmation and Generational Conflict, Today, many criticisms of young people in the West excoriate a self-obsessed, 'snowflake' generation and the indulgent parents and teachers who enable them, cowed by fears of offending, upsetting, or alienating the kids

More on parenting styles, with comment from Prof Ellie Lee
14/10/2026

More on parenting styles, with comment from Prof Ellie Lee

The parenting style favoured by some millennials has been blamed for worsening behaviour in schools, but is this assessment fair? Jasmine Norden investigates

Join us tomorrowBook in here:
06/10/2026

Join us tomorrow

Book in here:

Join us for a discussion with two early career colleagues about their work-in-progress into motherhood

Discussing the problem of parenting; inc comments from Ellie Lee, and a very honest mum.
05/10/2026

Discussing the problem of parenting; inc comments from Ellie Lee, and a very honest mum.

Government research suggests that around two thirds of parents with...

BBC News long read'When parenting advice becomes too much'With comment from Ellie Lee
05/10/2026

BBC News long read

'When parenting advice becomes too much'

With comment from Ellie Lee

Many parents feel overwhelmed by the amount of parenting information available

One week from today; Join us for this online CPCS Autumn term seminar on the theme of Engaging Intensive Motherhood, fea...
30/09/2026

One week from today; Join us for this online CPCS Autumn term seminar on the theme of Engaging Intensive Motherhood, featuring two speakers:

Kate Hague, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, UCL

Mothercraft: Taught and (Re)Made

While historically associated with the teaching of parenting skills, this interdisciplinary research reclaims mothercraft as both craft and craftiness. In other words, mothercraft is not only the formalised instruction of how to mother, but the everyday ingenuity through which care is adapted, improvised, and made to work under constraint. As a first foray into a larger project, this presentation maps the conceptual terrain of mothercraft, opening space for more flexible and plural understandings of parenting expertise, maternal knowledge and care.

Daisy Skirton, Associate Lecturer, UWE

Intensive Motherhood and Food Poverty: Classed Maternal Identities and Food Work

The research is an examination of the food work undertaken by working class mothers who attend a food club, a form of food charity provision, in Bristol. It looks at how the material realities of food poverty run into conflict with the imperatives of an intensive, classed parenting culture and how that shapes experiences of stigma and the identity work of working class mothers managing food poverty.

Book in here:

Join us for a discussion with two early career colleagues about their work-in-progress into motherhood

Address

SSPSSR, Cornwallis NE, University Of
Canterbury
CT27NZ

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+441227827526

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