There is a long and ignoble trend within British social policy making of blaming parents for social problems—particularly when the problem is poverty, and the parents are impoverished. But by the end of the 20th century, parent blaming was assuming a new cultural form. The problem was not framed ‘only’ in terms of those parents who failed to shoulder their responsibilities, such as ‘feckless’ fathers or ‘unfit’ mothers, but in terms of a deficit on the part of all mothers and fathers, who were seen to require official training in the art and (pseudo)science of child rearing. Thus, the New Labour government placed ‘supporting families’ at the heart of its policy agenda, a therapeutic mission that aimed to instruct all parents in the appropriate ways to feel about their children and behave towards them. The Coalition government led by David Cameron picked up the baton, by promoting the adoption of particular parenting styles and practices as a resolution to the problems of poverty and inequality. ‘What matters most to a child's life chances is not the wealth of their upbringing but the warmth of their parenting,’ he told the think‐tank Demos in 2010 (in Jensen, 2018, p. 116).

Jensen's original account situates the new ‘politics of parent blame’ within a wider ‘cultural industry’ of media and social networks promoting a fashionable ‘parent pedagogy’. Inspired by Stuart Hall's classic 1978 study Policing the Crisis, which charted the construction of the ‘mugger’ as ‘a new cultural figure, upon whom street crime is racialised and against whom social anxieties around youth, urban space and control become projected’ (Jensen, 2018, p. 8), Parenting the Crisis maps the construction of mothers, in particular, as a deficient figure against whom anxieties about social inequality and disorder are projected. The ubiquity of a culture that demands the performance of an ‘intensive’ parenting style—one that is ‘reflexive, intensive, expert‐guided, thoughtful and self‐scrutinising’ (Hays, 1996)—results in mothers becoming invested and subjected ‘by the norms and rules of such parenting regimes and by their dividing practices’ (Jensen, 2018, p. 101). In the insecurity generated by such a parenting culture, mothers practise self‐surveillance and judgement on themselves and each other. Thus, policy that projects maternal emotion and behaviour as both a cause and solution to socioeconomic equalities—‘warmth’ not ‘wealth’—gains implicit affirmation.

The strength of Parenting the Crisis lies in the way it reveals this complex interaction between these cultural norms and constructions, and the politics of parent blame, engaging the question of why parents (and particularly, mothers) are receptive to policies that seek to train them to be ‘better parents’. Later chapters explore the ‘weaponisation’ of parent blame in the context of austerity and ‘post‐welfare’. Here, the focus is on the families culturally demonised by ‘poverty porn’ and targeted by policies such as the Troubled Families initiative, where familiar tropes of ‘welfare scrounging’ and the ‘underclass’ are recycled through the image of the deficient parent. Although this is true, it is hardly new; arguably, a more novel and insidious development is the way that parenting practices culturally associated with the ‘respectable’ working class—for example, with regard to food, discipline and relations between home and school—have been problematised through the mobilisation of intensive parenting as a cultural norm. The degree to which ‘dividing practices’ operate against parents whose practices imply resistance to the tenets of the new parent pedagogy would be worthy of further study.

在英国的社会政策制定中，存在着一种长期而无知的趋势，即责备父母承担社会问题，尤其是当问题是贫困并且父母处于贫困状态时。但是到20世纪末，父母的责备正呈现出一种新的文化形式。对于那些未能履行职责的父母，例如“完美的”父亲或“不健康的”母亲，问题并不是“仅”的框架，而是所有母亲和父亲的赤字。要求接受有关育儿艺术和（伪）科学方面的官方培训。因此，新工党政府将“养家糊口”作为其政策议程的核心，这是一项治疗性任务，旨在以适当的方式指导所有父母了解孩子并向他们行事。大卫·卡梅伦（David Cameron）领导的联合政府通过促进采用特殊的育儿方式和做法来接过接力棒，以解决贫困和不平等问题。他在2010年告诉智囊团《演示》（Jensen，2018年，第116页）：``对孩子的一生而言，最重要的不是其抚养的财富，而是他们养育子女的温暖。''

詹森（Jensen）的原始说法是将新的“父母责备政治”置于更广泛的媒体和社交网络“文化产业”中，以促进一种时髦的“父母教学法”。受到斯图尔特·霍尔（Stuart Hall）1978年经典研究《警务危机》的启发，该研究将“抢劫犯”的建构描绘为“一个新的文化人物，街头犯罪由此而种族化，并针对年轻人，城市空间和控制权引发社会焦虑”（詹森（Jensen） ，2018，p.8），育儿危机特别描绘了母亲的结构，将其作为一个不足的数字，可以预测出他们对社会不平等和混乱的忧虑。一种文化的普遍性要求表现出一种“强化”的养育方式，即一种“反身，强化，专家指导，周到和自我审查”的方式（Hays，  1996），这导致母亲被“他人”投资和接受这种育儿制度的规范和规则及其划分做法''（Jensen，2018，p.101）。在这种育儿文化所产生的不安全感中，母亲们对自己和彼此进行自我监督和判断。因此，将孕产妇的情感和行为作为社会经济平等的原因和解决方案（“温暖”而非“财富”）的政策获得了隐含的肯定。

养育危机的力量在于它揭示了这些文化规范和结构与父母责任的政治之间这种复杂的相互作用，从而引发了一个问题：为什么父母（尤其是母亲）会接受旨在训练他们成为“更好的父母”的政策？ 。后面的章节在紧缩和“福利后”背景下探讨父母责备的“武器化”。在这里，重点关注的是在文化上被“贫穷色情”妖魔化并以诸如“动荡的家庭”倡议之类的政策为目标的家庭，其中通过“弱势父母”的形象来回收熟悉的“福利不断增加”和“下层阶级”的比喻。尽管这是事实，但这并不是什么新鲜事物。可以说，更新颖，更阴险的发展是养育实践在文化上与“可敬”工人阶级相关的方式，例如，关于食物，纪律和家庭与学校之间的关系，已经通过动员强化父母作为一种文化规范而出现了问题。“划分实践”与父母的行为程度有关，父母的实践暗示对新的父母教学法宗旨的抵制将值得进一步研究。