Learning Parenting: Family, schooling and childhood in England, c. 1930-1970

This thesis reshapes understandings of how skills, ideas and practices related to parenting were transmitted between generations in mid-twentieth century England. It draws on three collections of schoolchildren’s essays, which span from the 1930s to the 1960s, as its main source material. The thesis argues that in order to understand how parenting identities and practices changed over time, historians need to return to the beginning of life course by examining children’s voices. The thesis examines what adults sought to teach children about parenthood, before exploring the shifting informal means through which children themselves learnt about and made sense of parenting across the period, encompassing popular culture, familial relationships, pretend play and imagination.

The thesis makes three major contributions to the field. Firstly, it demonstrates that shifts in attitudes towards childrearing were driven by the experiences of working- and middle-class children growing up across the mid-century, rather than adults and parents. This period was marked by an ‘intensification’ of motherhood and fatherhood, which children contributed to significantly. Secondly, the thesis expands definitions of ‘parenting’. It disentangles the emotions of childrearing from the biological state of parenthood. Through doing so, the thesis reveals that children developed parental ways of thinking and feeling, long before having offspring of their own. Thirdly, the thesis demonstrates the methodological value of using children’s voices to explore the intergenerational transmission of parenting. Adults recalled learning about parenting as children in passive ways, by observing and helping their mothers and fathers at home. In contrast, children’s voices reveal that girls and boys actively emulated, adapted and rejected their parents’ practices, helping us to understand generational shifts in parenting identities and practices. Through focussing on children’s voices, the thesis contributes to historical understandings of the life course, parenting, subjectivity and emotion.