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POWER STRUGGLES 75

Power Struggles: The Paradoxes of


Emotion and Control among Child-Centered
Mothers in the Privileged United States

Diane M. Hoffman

Abstract In the discourse on contemporary parenting in the United States, the parent–child “power struggle”
is often spoken of as a common event in the everyday lives of parents and children. On the basis of ethnographic
interviews with economically privileged white mothers of preschool and elementary-age children, I analyze the
power struggle as a cultural trope. Despite refusal to be considered “mainstream” and outright denigration of
what they considered to be “mainstream” parenting, mothers’ discourse reveals cultural understandings about
power and its relationship to the self that reflect broader themes of emotional control, choice, rationality, and
individualism that are in fact characteristic of “mainstream” views of child development. Further, although mothers
explicitly valued emotional connectedness and freedom of expression with their children, the actual strategies
advocated for dealing with emotions during the power struggle are centered on control and constraint of
emotional discourse and expression. The article explores this theme in the light of tensions surrounding parental
identities in privileged communities in the contemporary United States [parenting, emotion, self, power, child
development]

There is little doubt that the families we construct in the United States with what
America gives us are some of the most problematic settings human beings have made.
There is not much that is “natural” there, particularly not what makes us feel that we
can bring our guards down and take for granted that things will happen smoothly, that
we won’t have to worry about the effect of our spontaneity.
—Herve Varenne, Ambiguous Harmony, 1992

Over the last 50 years, a powerful global convergence of ideas and practices regarding child
rearing and parenting has emerged. This consensus, supported by a vast array of childrearing
media and informed by expert advice, highlights the desirability of child-centered forms of
parenting, in which parents focus on the developmental needs of the child, respect the child
as an individual, and provide children with ample opportunities to exercise choice to develop
a sense of individual agency (Bloch et al. 2003; Cannella 1997; Cannella and Viruru 2004;
Popkewitz 2000, 2003; Rose 1989).1 In the United States, especially, such child-centered
ideals and practices are widely valued, and have effectively come to constitute a key trend in
the ways U.S. parents raise their children (Penn with Zalesne 2007).

At the same time, however, definitions, perceptions, and potential outcomes of “child cen-
teredness” are topics of intense debate across the popular landscape of U.S. parenting.2 What

ETHOS, Vol. 41, Issue 1, pp. 75–97, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. 
C 2013 by the American Anthropological

Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/etho.12003


76 ETHOS

can be asserted, at the minimum, is that there are important social class-based differences in
the extent to which parents adopt a child-centered approach (Kusserow 2004; Lareau 2003;
Tobin 1995). As the authors just cited illustrate, the ways adults talk to children, as well as
the kinds of behaviors they expect and cultivate in their children, reflect different perspec-
tives on adult–child relationships that are tied into diverging notions of individualism as well
as cultural capital and social stratification. Adults of different social classes relate to their
children with expectations shaped both by present circumstances and by future envisioned
adult roles in society. In this process, both children and adults are shaped by larger cultural
and class-based goals for personhood and identity.

In this article, I deepen this argument by probing the ways in which privileged mothers
confront issues surrounding parent–child relationships by focusing on a key notion in the
landscape of contemporary U.S. parenting: the parent–child power struggle. I explore how
mothers’ articulation of the “power struggle” encodes important insights concerning cultur-
ally situated notions of power, selfhood, and emotional control. Although they consciously
reject what they identify as “mainstream” parenting ideas and practices, the mothers I inter-
viewed hold cultural models concerning the relationship of emotion, power, and the devel-
opment of self that are in fact widely shared in the mainstream parenting advice discourse.
As mothers attempt to follow what they consider as the “right” ways to handle disputes with
their children, it becomes clear that the power struggle is not just about the formation of
child selves, but also about the identities of mothers themselves within contested fields of
mothering.

Parental Ethnotheory in Communities of Practice


Anthropologists have a well developed literature on parental ethnotheories of child rearing
and child development (Goodnow and Collins 1990; Harkness and Super 1996; LeVine
et al. 1994). These ethnotheories are characterized by commonly held and largely implicit
beliefs, values, and practices, influenced by sociomoral ecologies and available resources that
parents use to raise their children. The ethnotheories govern the formation of shared cultural
scripts that can be revealed through observation and close analysis of parental discourses
regarding child rearing. These discourses are broadly distributed across communities of
practice, often extending beyond those groups in which parents situate themselves. For
Americans in particular, as Quinn notes,

We may not recognize how deeply ingrained, indeed embodied, in us is this model
of childrearing. Even the child-rearing manuals middle-class American mothers are so
fond of consulting focus on specific effective strategies for bringing up children (such
as how to deal with a tantrum), or discuss aspects of childrearing that have become
controversial (such as the pros and cons of daycare), leaving unquestioned the most
fundamental tenets of the shared cultural model for raising a child to be a valued adult,
that shapes and motivates these narrower concerns. [Quinn 2005:488]
POWER STRUGGLES 77

In the United States, a multimillion-dollar child-care advice industry, shaped by professional


organizations, researchers, parenting experts, pediatricians, popular authors, parenting net-
works, educators, and schools plays a powerful role in framing contemporary discourse on
child rearing. Though there are intense debates about the best strategies for raising children
and differing positions on almost any topic one wishes to address, I argue (along with Quinn
[2005] and Weisner [1999]) that often the most basic constructs—those concerning what it
takes to become a valued person, a “self” in society—are not questioned; these principles are
widely shared at a very deep and perhaps fundamental level of cultural consciousness.

For the present study, I interviewed ten mothers, all of whom were residing in an upper-
middle-class mid-Atlantic community in close proximity to a major university. Interviews
took approximately 1.5 hours, were conducted in participants’ homes (often with children
playing nearby), or in public locations such as coffee shops. They were semistructured, using
a protocol but also allowing open-ended comments and discussion. The participants were
recruited using an online notice on a local parenting network about a study on mothers’
views regarding child behavior and discipline.

All were white, currently married, and had at least one child ranging in age from one to
seven years old. All had college degrees and seven had professional work experience, either
being currently employed in a professional capacity (one was a lawyer and another was a
professor) or having been employed in the past (three had been private school teachers [incl.
one former Montessori school teacher]; two others had worked in the business field). One
was a LaLeche league instructor and five also had advanced degrees (masters or doctorates).
One was currently taking graduate-level courses toward an advanced degree in education
at the local university. They thus represented an economically and educationally privileged
group.3

When asked during the interview about whether they had heard the term power struggle,
all the mothers readily admitted familiarity with it. Moreover, they could provide examples
from their own experience: struggles over clothing choices and getting children dressed for
school or church; battles over food at meals; contests over cleaning up rooms, taking baths,
or going to bed. The power struggle was a common, almost daily event for some of them:
Interviewer: Would you say that you have power struggles with your son?
Yes, for example we have a lot of power struggles over clothes. He [son] refuses to wear a collared
shirt on Sundays. So if a conflict arises, I get him to tell me how he feels about it. And I can give
him some choices. But if I give in, then everything will be negotiable. We do need rules . . .
Interviewer: So how do you handle the struggle?
Sometimes I just walk away. He needs to know that some things aren’t negotiable. [GC,
November 10, 2007]

Interviewer: Do you ever feel that you experience power struggles with your child?
Yes, a lot of the tantrums are about power struggles. She might have a tantrum over eating a bowl
of cereal, or when I try to put a bib on her. When I put her diapers on she takes them off. Just
about everything can be a power struggle. . . . She just wants to make choices. . . . But then I
sometimes ask, who’s making the choices here, me or her? Sometimes I have to bribe her . . . [CS,
Dec. 14, 2007]
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Another mother says,

Power struggles? Oh yes, definitely. She wants to exert her independence and control.
She knows it is something we want and she knows she can control the situation. . . .
The more I push [potty training] the more she resists. . . . I think of them like who has
control in a situation. [JC, December 8, 2007]

One mother who said her child could not “sit still long enough to eat a meal” and had trouble
getting dressed in the morning offered her reasoning for this behavior: “Kids [his age] just
want to control the environment” (GK, November 8 2007). Another said, in reference to
her son’s food aversions, “It’s totally a power thing” (BG, December 13, 2007). Mothers
considered the power struggle a natural event in parenting, taking it as evidence of the child’s
developing need to assert independence or control over the situation or environment.

The Power Struggle in the Mainstream: Parenting Advice Literature


These mothers participate in a discourse on selves and power influenced by the dominant
frames of child development research and psychology in the United States—a discourse
that has greatly shaped the contours of parenting advice in the contemporary United States
(Apple 2006; Grant 1998; Hardyment 1995; Hulbert 2003; Rankin 2005). In this discourse,
the power struggle is understood as a common (although emotionally trying) event for U.S.
parents that is linked to developmental needs of the child’s emerging sense of self.4 Power
struggles happen whenever a child resists, over a (variable) period of time, a parent’s efforts
to get the child to comply with a rule, request, or desire. It is a wide-ranging category in
which all kinds of daily events can become triggers for emotionally charged contests over
whose will is going to prevail in a given situation:

Because of the emotional link between parent and child, it’s common for parents to get
into power struggles with their children. Most parents know what a power struggle is.
It’s when you’re trying to get your child out the door in the morning and your child
refuses to get dressed. It’s when the parent insists and the child refuses to eat peas . . .
[Faull 2012]

In this popular advice, the power struggle is often framed in terms of a developing child’s
“need for control.” This need to exert control or experience one’s personal power is natural-
ized as a developmental imperative linked to the emergence of an autonomous, independent
self:

The power struggle is an inherent part of growing up. . . . This is because as kids go
through their developmental stages, they need to challenge their parents appropriately
in order to get more autonomy . . . [Lehman 2011]

[When a toddler] gets territorial with toys at a local playground . . . the resistance isn’t
so much about a particular sand toy as it is about establishing control. [Abramson 2005:
96]
POWER STRUGGLES 79

Guiding children toward independence and competence involves a gradual turn over
of power and control from an adult to the child. . . . The key to minimizing power
struggles is to give children a power that is appropriate to their age and development.
[Faull 2012]

Resisting a parent is a toddler’s way of establishing autonomy. For the first time in his
short life, he’s his own little person. He’s carving out an identity for himself . . . [Banin
2005: 93]

Moreover, in the U.S. ethnodiscourse, power and control are constructs of choice for ex-
plaining children’s behavior across a wide range of situations, not just those characterized as
power struggles. For example, the popular parenting magazine Parents brings in the idea of
the child’s need for control in a variety of situations:

Q: I just got remarried, and my 5 year old is suddenly really possessive of all of his toys. What can I do?
A: Find little ways to give him control, like letting him decide on snacks or a family activity. [Lee 2006: 38]
Kids love to play make-believe because they’re in control. [Garisto 2006: 192]
Why do loveys have such magical powers? Quite simply, they help children control their emotions.
[Miller 2012]5

In these examples, the child’s assumed need to assert control is a dominant explanatory
framework for children’s behavior, perhaps because it is tied into implicit understandings
about children’s development that position control and power as key aspects of the develop-
ing self as well as key elements in parent–child relationships.

Yet one of the consequences of this privileging of control and power is that it obscures the
possibility of other equally plausible interpretations of children’s behavior. For example,
why can’t playing make-believe be appealing simply because it is an occasion for genuine
flights of imagination, rather than a chance to “be in control”? Why can’t “the magical
power of loveys” be about desires to be cared for and to show caring, rather than simply
about control over emotions? Why is possessiveness in the case of divorce just about control,
rather than genuine fear of loss? The emphasis on the theme of control precludes alternative
explanations that might capture, for example, the richness of children’s aesthetic sensibilities,
sensory pleasures, and the full range of their emotional and imaginative engagement with
the world.

The Power Struggle as Cultural Trope: Comparative Perspectives

There is something in the transformation of these ordinary events of parent–child interaction


into occasions for struggle and contest over power that is culturally interesting. Why are
these events glossed as “power struggles” but not “attention struggles” or “dependency
struggles?” Indeed, why should parents “struggle” with their children in the first place?
In comparing contemporary Chinese parenting discourses with U.S. ones (Hoffman and
Zhao 2008), we found that the overwhelming emphasis in the U.S. discourse on issues of
power and control was absent in the Chinese case, where there was much more emphasis
80 ETHOS

on mothers being “in harmony” with the child (although Fong [2007] observes that among
some Chinese parents there exist contradictory messages in parent–child communication
that can lead to friction and negative parental evaluations of children’s behaviors). Similar
observations have been made in other comparative studies of Chinese and U.S. parenting
(e.g., Chao 1994, 1995) in which researchers have found Chinese approaches to childrearing
stress not power or control but strategies of training or “guidance” based on emotional
warmth and close parent–child self-identification. Instead, U.S. approaches often oppose
parents and children, an ethos predicated largely on an ethnotheory of independent selves
whose wills are seen to be in conflict.

More evidence for the cultural particularity of the power struggle comes from exploration
of Japanese childrearing practices. Hess and Azuma (1991) and Machida (1996) consider
that the very concept of “parental control strategies” is based on Western assumptions: “As
a construct, parental control strategies fit well within a unidirectional model of parenting
wherein, as scholars have presumed until recently, mothers control children” (Machida
1996:250). As Chen (1996:125) notes, a mainstream Japanese approach emphasizes the
quality of intersubjective feelings of the mother–child dyad by creating an atmosphere
in which the child will feel little psychological discrepancy or discontinuity. There is little
discussion of power or control, but much emphasis on fostering a sense of empathic closeness
and oneness viewed as conducive to learning of desired cultural traits.6

Moreover, there is little in the scholarly literature to suggest that power or the adult–
child power struggle is universally a dominant feature of a developing a socially competent
self, even when there is a consideration for the growth of autonomy or independence. As
much cross-cultural evidence shows, the link between socialization for autonomy and the
exercise of individual power or control in social interactions is never clear-cut. Some cultures
that are the most ostensibly “collective” or anti-individualist in orientation and where the
maintenance of high levels of social conformity and cooperation are important also socialize
for extremely high levels of individual autonomy, as can be seen in descriptions of child
socialization among certain Native and South American groups (Chisolm 1996; Lee 1987;
Rival 1996). In the case of the Navaho, Chisolm writes,

Signs of this huge and abiding respect for individual autonomy are everywhere. . . .
Navahos abhor the idea or practice of controlling other beings in the course of everyday
life, . . . This enormous respect for individual autonomy is expressed nonverbally as
well as verbally. One avoids the appearance of trying to control others by controlling
instead oneself, which one does by showing “restrained” or “nonintrusive” behavior.
[1996:178–179]

Chisolm observes, evoking Witherspoon (1977), that this restraint extends to a strong reluc-
tance to verbalize emotion (again, as well shall see, evoking a strong contrast with the U.S.
case).7 These cross-cultural examples suggest that it is important to consider the principles
that underlie cultural discourses about power and control, and to investigate how these
governing ideas are related to cultural formations of the individual in relation to others.
POWER STRUGGLES 81

Mothers in and against the Mainstream


Mothers in this study claimed they made an effort to distance themselves from practices
and philosophies that they considered “mainstream.” Three defined themselves as part of
the local “holistic” mothers network and half had children enrolled in Montessori schools
or otherwise claimed to be influenced by Montessori philosophy. Others said they had no
specific identity but that they were not “mainstream.”

In an effort to probe what they considered to be “mainstream,” I asked what sources of


information they used in parenting their children. All except one denied that they regularly
read “mainstream” parenting magazines (except perhaps while in the doctor’s office). One
said that she did not like these magazines because they are “patronizing” and that “it always
seems like they’re saying the same things over and over again” (BG, December 13, 2007).
Two mothers, however, said they did read a magazine called Brain, Child (which bills itself
as the “magazine for thinking mothers”). The most important source of information by
far, though, was the Internet. They all said they consulted parenting sites on the Internet
including mom blogs and sites devoted to Montessori and Holistic mothering, and a variety
of Yahoo! groups. (“If there’s any niche in parenting there’s a group on Yahoo!,” according
to one.), All shared parenting information with friends and received information from the
schools their children attended, either through newsletters, individual consultations with
teachers, or through parent education seminars. The mothers also said they read parenting
books; among the titles that were mentioned were Harvey Karp’s The Happiest Toddler on
the Block (2008), Tracy Hogg’s Secrets of the Baby Whisperer for Toddlers (2002), and Thomas
Phelan’s 1–2–3 Magic (2004). Despite—or perhaps because of—the often formulaic approach
of these books, mothers tended to point out that that no one approach will work with all
kids because “kids are just too different” and “you need different strategies for each one”
(GK, November 8, 2007).

What emerged from my interviews was a very critical perspective on what mothers consid-
ered to be “mainstream” parenting. When pushed to define “mainstream” further, one mom
said, “A mainstream mom . . . has a crib. She has babysitters more. We don’t go out a lot or
if we do we take her [2-year-old daughter] with us.” (JC, November 10, 2007). When asked
what was a mainstream mom, another mother said: “Mainstream moms are commercial . . .
and they are more harsh than I’d like to be. It’s top-down, less respectful of the child. There’s
a lot of ‘nos’ without explaining why” (GK, November 8, 2007). For another mom, “Main-
stream is what the doctors recommend” (LD, November 20, 2007). Other moms identified
the discipline technique of giving children “time outs” for misbehavior as mainstream:

We don’t call it “time outs.” We give warnings, with consequences. Time outs are so
trendy. Everybody uses time-outs except some of the people I hang with. [SB, October
29, 2007]
[Parenting magazines] are very focused on mainstream things. I only read them in the
doctor’s office, but [generally] I don’t subscribe to that philosophy. I like a little less of
a mainstream, more alternative style. Like time-outs. . . . I don’t want to use time-outs.
It’s more like a punishment to me, like I wouldn’t be teaching anything. . . . I prefer the
82 ETHOS

Montessori philosophy because it’s more child-based . . . kids are given a choice to be
independent. . . . Mainstream ignores the emotions . . . [CS, December 14, 2007]

The common thread in their views of “mainstream” parenting, beyond the presence or lack
of certain discipline strategies such as time-outs, however, was a sense that “mainstream”
reflected a certain “establishment” or legitimized view of child rearing (i.e., “what the doctors
recommend”) and second, perhaps more importantly, it reflected what mothers felt was a
lack of attention to the individual child and his or her needs and emotions. For these mothers,
in sum, it appeared to be insufficiently child centered.

Handling Power Struggles I: Controlling Emotions


Although denying that they were mainstream, however, mothers participated in a very
prominent discourse, widely available through parenting advice sources in print and online,
about power struggles and especially about the link between power struggles and the emo-
tions. In the popular parenting literature, the power struggle is metaphorically an emotional
battle in which “no one wins and no one surrenders” (Osherson 2007). I argue the power
struggle goes beyond control of a situation to reflect a perceived need for control over one’s
emotions, which is itself part of a much larger discourse about emotion and personhood in
U.S. society (Hoffman 2009). In the advice literature on power struggles, parents are often
explicitly encouraged to “teach kids how to handle their emotions” by labeling emotions for
their kids or using words to describe their children’s feelings. Parents are told, “your child
can’t really understand her feelings of anger or frustration at this age. But it’s still a good
idea to label these emotions for her. Try saying, ‘You must be so mad that Sam took that
yellow bus,’” or, “I’ll bet you’re angry that Mommy won’t let you climb onto the coffee
table” (Lee 2006: 194).

Mothers in this study also believed they should help their children verbalize emotions,
because children don’t yet have the ability to do so. These ideas are captured in the ways
mothers responded to questions regarding the handing of emotions in relations with their
children:

Interviewer: How do you deal with your child’s strong emotions? Do you believe you can or should help your
child handle emotions? In what ways?
Part of [the way I handle my daughter’s emotions] comes from my Montessori training. In my
approach we spend a lot of time on giving kids words to talk about emotions. In Montessori they
have the Peace Table. If you have a conflict you go to the Peace Table . . . [Daughter, age 2]
doesn’t really have the knowledge or vocabulary to explain what she’s feeling, so . . . I talk with
her. I acknowledge her feelings, give her the words, try to get her to express her emotions. [CS,
December 14, 2007]

They did this thing on emotion at school. You should try to talk about [emotions with your child].
If they are sad, for example. They had pictures up at school. We’ve just started to do this [at
home] too. We got the idea from the school. [Before then] we hadn’t really thought about it very
much. [BG, December 13, 2007]
POWER STRUGGLES 83

Something I picked up from Montessori was helping kids with emotions . . . instead of saying
‘quit hitting your sister’ you should say ‘hitting your sister might make her feel bad.’ [GK,
November 8, 2007]

Interviewer: How would you describe your approach to discipline?


Discipline is OK! She will get a time-out or a privilege taken away. A lot of parents are
uncomfortable with this, but when she has been told something and she doesn’t do it, she will get
a spanking. There are some absolutes. And I am authoritarian in some situations. . . . [But] I also
get her to verbalize her emotions. Today for example L. did not want to get dressed for school. I
asked her, “L., why are you upset?” She couldn’t verbalize it at first, but then I asked her again
why are you crying, are you angry? sad? . . . [LD, November 7, 2007]8

For another mom, when her children begin to “get physical,” she believes it’s important
to “explain to them that they need time to sit.” If her children have conflicts, for example,
she says, “I do intervene. I tell [the child] ‘If you hit someone you’re not ready to be your
own person.’ I ask the [other child] to ‘tell him how you feel about him hitting you.’ It is
important to encourage emotions and to validate them” (SB, October 29, 2007). One mother,
ES, explained how she had created a “peace wand” based on the Montessori School’s “Peace
Rose.”9 As I was interviewing her in her living room, her son was playing nearby with two
other neighbor children. At one point he got into a scuffle with one of the other children,
and I had a chance to observe her attempt to get her son to use the “peace wand.” ES said,
“You need to use your words. Do you want to try the peace wand?” The boy defiantly said,
“No!” ES said, to me, “He doesn’t know how to use the peace wand . . . [then, to son]
Why don’t you try to work it out?” For about 20 minutes following, while the interview was
ongoing, the mom continuously interrupted our conversation to try to get the children to
use the “peace wand” but to no avail. For the mother, tellingly, the event was interpreted as
a case of not knowing how to use the peace wand, rather than an outright preference, desire, or
rejection on the part of her son concerning the wand. (There was also something tellingly
symbolic about the “peace wand” too as an item in the parental arsenal for the socialization
of emotional control, as if it could magically instill calm and rational thinking in “out of
control” kids.)

Ironically, however, the strategies that supposedly encourage emotions and validate them
are more about defusing them or dampening their felt immediacy: Verbalization, using
“peace wands” or other material items to encourage calm, thinking about consequences and
alternatives are all ways that both parents and children learn to defuse emotion and rationalize
during power struggles with peers and adults. As GK states above, she was taught not to issue
commands forcefully or directly (and thereby perhaps not to appear overly emotional) but
to talk rationally about the consequences of a child’s action (that someone might be hurt).
Similarly, ES, in disciplining her son during the above incident with the peace wand, never
raised her voice but maintained a neutral, almost “coaching” tone throughout.

In the advice literature, I find a similar emphasis on simultaneously validating children’s emo-
tions yet exerting control over their expression through a variety of “calm down” techniques.
The idea is that parents cannot teach the right lessons about emotions unless they themselves
model emotional control, often accomplished through strategies of disengagement (taking
84 ETHOS

adult “time outs,” isolating the child from others, walking away from an “out of control”
child, counting and breathing techniques) or more powerfully by verbalizing strategies—
providing labels for emotional states or engaging in therapeutic discussions about emotions.
Furthermore, children are assumed not to have the ability to express emotions appropriately
(i.e., using the correct vocabulary); hence, parents need to step in and verbalize for the child
what they cannot express. For example, as in the illustration below taken from a popular
parenting advice book, parents are commonly encouraged to model the kind of Rogerian
active listening one might encounter in a therapist’s office, providing the patient or child
with the appropriate labels for feelings. Here, the parent is having a “emotional coaching”
session with her daughter:

Meg: I don’t want to go to school.


Mom: That’s strange, usually you like school. It makes me wonder if something is worrying you.
Meg: Yeah kind of.
Mom: What are you worried about?
Meg: I don’t know.
Mom: Something is worrying you, but you don’t know what it is.
Meg: Yeah.
Mom: I can tell you feel a little tense . . . [Gottman and De Clair 1998:95–96]

Here is another example from a parenting advice blog on how to help your child deal with
emotions:

Parent: Molly, I can see that you are very angry and frustrated. Is there anything else you are feeling?
Molly: I am SO SO SO MAD AT YOU.
Parent: You are mad at me, VERY mad at me. Are you also feeling disappointed because I won’t let you have
a playdate right now?
Molly: YES! I want to have a playdate right NOW.
Parent: You seem sad. (Molly whimpers a little and rests her head on my shoulder.)
I’ve now helped Molly identify and label several feelings . . . [Carter 2009]10

In interviews, mothers mirrored a similar approach and rationale in their emphasis on the
need to talk to their children about emotions. It was common for a mother to say, as CS
does, “She really doesn’t have the knowledge or vocabulary yet to explain what she’s feeling
. . . ” (December 14, 2007).

Frank Furedi observes that contemporary “therapeutic culture” of child rearing is in fact
deeply ambivalent about emotions, for as it extols the value of emotional expression, it
demands that emotions be kept under strict control:

Child-rearing advice today, in all its forms, is saturated with the language of emotion
and therapy. The management of feelings, learning how to interpret a child’s emotions,
and the art of listening feature prominently in manuals and advice columns. Tutors of
parenting classes are trained to promote the therapeutic approach. . . . Ironically, the
compulsion on parents to adopt the role of a therapist actually undermines the expression
of genuine emotion. [Furedi 2002:85, 87]
POWER STRUGGLES 85

Tobin (1995) also writes about the extent to which contemporary bourgeois approaches to
early education promote a kind of “psychologized narrativity” that stresses the substitution
of techniques of verbal expression for other and perhaps more genuinely child-centered
emotionality. Noting the work of Miller (1982), Tobin observes,

The children Miller studies generally talk about their emotions not by using emotion
words (“I felt sad”) but by using words that refer directly to actions (“I cried”). I suspect
that such action-oriented language is typical not just of working class children, but
of children in general. What varies by social class is parents’ and teachers’ reactions
to expressions of emotion. When preschool teachers insist that children replace their
actions and their action oriented language with a metadiscourse about feeling, when
they outlaw the use of sarcasm, insults, and other aggressive speech acts, and when they
respond to children with “I messages” instead of with direct expressions of feeling, they
are privileging the values and manners of contemporary American bourgeois society.
. . . Working class children who come from homes where such psychobabble is not
the native tongue will find themselves at a disadvantage in early childhood educational
settings where self-conscious, psychologized self-expression is equated with intelligence
and morality. [1995:248]

Although the mothers I interviewed ostensibly value emotions and try to encourage their
expression, they appear to participate in this larger class-bound discourse that effectively
narrows the range of expression and feeling and turns emotions into domains for teaching
skills of verbalization and self-analysis.

Handling Power Struggles II: Choices

Another prominent strategy mothers recommended to defuse power struggles was to use
“choices.” As one said, “[When you’re in a power struggle] you learn to control the environ-
ment, not the child. . . . We use language with them that will give choices” (SB, October 29,
2007). Another said, “You just give the child a choice: Do you want to go upstairs by yourself
or do you want me to bring you upstairs?” (CL, October 18, 2007). One mother went to
her child’s Montessori teacher for advice on handling power struggles with a daughter over
getting dressed:

The teacher’s advice was that the [clothes situation] was just too much for her. So she
told me to pick out the choices for her and let her have a choice but not too much so
she doesn’t get distracted. [BR, December 5, 2007]

Another mom, whose son was now out of toddlerhood, said that now she has fewer power
struggles because “I got creative at offering alternatives and choices” (GC, November 10,
2007).

Using “choice” strategies to defuse a power struggle is also a prominent theme in the
mainstream parenting advice literature. For example:
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I recommend that parents give kids some choices around their responsibilities when
possible. So if there’s an issue around doing chores or homework, for example, a good
way to avoid a power struggle is to offer some options. During summer, you might say,
“You can start your chores when you get home from day camp or other activities, or
you can wait till I get home. You can text message all you want between 3:30 and 5:30
and then do them when I get home. Or you can do them between 3:30 and 5:30 and
then text message during your free time at night. So decide when you would rather be
text messaging, talking on the cell phone, or going on the computer: between 7:00 and
8:30 p.m. or between 3:30 and 5:00 p.m. Those are your choices.” [Lehman 2011]
For example, instead of a back and forth battle to get your child to go to bed, the
situation may be defused before it starts by offering choices to the child: “Would you
like to walk to bed or be carried?” “Would you like to hear the Winnie the Pooh story
or Goodnight Moon?” Offering realistic, positive, and broad choices and allowing them
to choose demonstrates to your child that they do have power in the world. [Family IQ
2007]

Give your child choices. We all like to feel powerful and influential and our children
are no different. Let them make as many choices as they can that will give them control
over what happens to them. For instance, “Do you want to take your bath before I read
you a story or after?” [Kvols 2006]

When she pushes your buttons, try to remember that “You’re not the boss of me” is
really “I’d like a choice.” [Muchnick 2012]

Although Montessori education represents for these mothers an alternative to the main-
stream, Montessori websites, for example, provide advice very similar to that present in
mainstream parenting magazines, emphasizing (among other things) the need to let kids feel
powerful and to give children choices as a strategy to diffuse power struggles:

Give your child choices. We all like to feel powerful and influential and our children
are no different. Let them make as many choices as they can that will give them control
over what happens to them. For instance, “Do you want to wear your red pajamas or
your blue ones?” or “Do you want to take your bath before I read you a story or after?”
. . . Give your child appropriate ways to be powerful. We all want to feel powerful and if
we don’t have opportunities to do it appropriately, we will create ways to feel powerful
that are inappropriate—like power struggles or picking on siblings. In the middle of a
battle with your child, stop and ask yourself, “How can I give my child more power in
this particular situation?” It might be as simple as asking him for his help or giving him
a particular job to do that he is totally in charge of . . . [Lighthouse Academy 2009]

Although giving children choices seems to be aligned with the goal of allowing the child
to exert power over the environment, effectively, there really is no choice for the child
who doesn’t want to go to bed at all—it’s either walk or be carried. In the power struggle
discourse, the adult represents the situation as if it were a real choice to the child, and in so
doing grants the child “power,” but only in a deceptive sense, because the choices presented
to children are nonconsequential in terms of the adult’s ultimate goals in the situation. In
none of the examples in the literature or in mother’s discourses is a child offered a truly
consequential choice in the sense that the child would be designing an option for him- or
herself outside of those structured by the parent and thereby risking that the parent’s aims
POWER STRUGGLES 87

in the situation might not be achieved. The child is thus manipulated into fulfilling adult
desires, while being granted the illusion of autonomy. The difficulty I see is that if giving
a child this kind of choice becomes a way for a child to feel powerful (as mothers and the
literature agree it is), then perhaps not only is the U.S. model one that constructs hollow
power and undermines genuine autonomy, but parents using the model are also teaching
fundamental lessons in how to manipulate others to achieve their own ends via deception.

Offering choices provides a convenient way to “rationalize” what may be a highly emotional
situation; the strategy doesn’t deal directly with the emotions or with a child’s feelings
in any deep way. Similarly, providing labels and verbalization opportunities may appear
to be emotionally supportive, but effectively constrains and channels emotional expression
into narrow, exclusively verbal forms, while delegitimating children’s own expressions (or
lack thereof) of emotion as embodied experience and nonverbal subjectivity. In effect, the
channels by and through which emotion is experienced and made social by parents in an
attempt to avoid a power struggle are increasingly constrained and limited, and in this
manner perhaps even rendered inauthentic. Autonomy likewise is converted into hollow and
nonconsequential action, in which the connection to embodied feeling is severed.

Power Struggles in the Community: Mothers, Difference, and Identity


Although mothers in my study defined themselves in opposition to the mainstream, their
discourse on power struggles revealed that they shared many of the ideas related to power
and emotion that are characteristic of the mainstream advice literature. They shared the
notion that it is important to get children to label and talk about their emotions, and that
giving children “power” to make choices is one way to manage adult–child conflicts. One
question that arises then is, how are these mothers acquiring these ideas? Although they
may not be reading parenting magazines, they explicitly state they are learning from their
children’s schools (as in the examples above) and additionally from online parenting advice
sites and parenting blogs, and from discussions with other like-minded mom groups they
belong to. The consistency of the messages across this sites suggests that there exists a
field of cultural discourse and practice, extending beyond the mothers themselves and their
immediate community, that has positioned power as central to the emerging child’s self
and thus central to the interactions that parents have with children in their daily lives. This
view of the child’s self is based on fundamental assumptions about the place of emotion,
appropriate power, and control at the heart of what an “individual” self should be.

Yet this leaves open the question to what extent mothers’ views are shaped by their particular
class position. As Kusserow (2004) shows, the construct of individualism, although important
in all the communities she studied, also varies by class and can be understood as having
different versions—for example, “hard” individualism or “soft/psychologized” individualism,
that depend partly on how parents see the emerging child’s self in relation to the wider
social world. In the “soft” world of the upper-middle class, Kusserow observes that parents
and teachers carefully manage and intervene in children’s emotional expression, while also
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valuing the child’s “true and natural feelings”:

Great importance is placed on letting the child express her true and natural feelings, and
yet only certain feelings are allowed to be expressed and a great deal of co-construction
and co-narration go into ferreting out the appropriate positive feelings. . . . Sometimes
a child was not allowed to say, “I wanted to hurt Jimmy,” without the teacher saying,
“No, Let’s think about this. That’s not really what you meant. What do you feel? Do
you feel sad [emphasis in original] that Jimmy took your blocks? [Kusserow 2004:165]

The upper-middle-class view of self as a unique constellation of talents and emotions that
require “authentic” expression coexists with a view of developmental deficiency, where
children don’t know what they are really feeling and need the help of adults to figure it out.
In this process, emotions are paradoxically more governed than they appear to be, as parents
and teachers decide for the child what they are feeling and conarrate the “right” feelings. It
may be that what mothers are identifying with in my study is this class-based, privileged self
of the upper-middle class, that is in fact widely disseminated in the mainstream media and
across schools because of the manner in which the latter represent and convey the ostensibly
scientific expertise of the child-development establishment, one that is already intrinsically
linked to and defined by education and social privilege. As many others have observed, this
establishment has been deeply imbued with the ideologies of child centeredness and with
a vision of parenting as an explicitly pedagogical enterprise (Cannella and Viruru 2004;
Hoffman 2009; Popkewitz 2003).

When mothers talk about managing power struggles by narrating emotions and providing
opportunities for children to “feel powerful” via choice, they identify with an expert-guided
“child-centered” view of parenting, in which children’s needs and development are respected
and prioritized. They appear to be supported in these views by the advice from their close
friends, the Internet, and children’s teachers and schools. Furthermore, they distinguish
themselves in their child centeredness from a mainstream that they see as insufficiently child
centered. Yet when at the end of our interviews and I asked about how each mother saw
their community, a profound discomfort and critique would inevitably emerge. This critique
centered on the competitive atmosphere of mothering:

Interviewer: What do you feel are the significant issues in your community with regard to childrearing that you
personally are concerned with?
There is a whole lot of judging going on. Other mothers are the most judgmental. There is a lot
of pressure to do it right. It’s [also] pressure from parenting magazines, books, and the Internet.
You think you’re right but then people will criticize you for anything. . . . There’s an element of
extreme mothering now. [ES, November 8, 2007]
There are lots of ego moms. They take it to the CEO level, over the top, doing all this research.
Very little laissez faire parenting. . . . It’s like cults, sometimes you run into these types . . . I just
can’t deal . . . [GK, November 8, 2007]
You need to find your tribe. I was part of a mom group in every city I’ve lived. Every city or place
is different. In Missouri the mom groups tend to be religious. In Portland, it was like Holistic
moms on crack: Oh my gosh! You eat meat!!!??? [BR, December 5, 2007]
POWER STRUGGLES 89

I never realized how competitive it is . . . you just get these looks from some moms. It’s kind of
surprising how competitive it is. There’s the ideal you have to reach for and we all fail. All the
other moms look so calm and serene in the middle of it. You just don’t want to let people know,
you don’t want to be perceived as a bad mom . . . [CS, December 14, 2007]

It’s really hard to be a mom nowadays. The frustrations can be so great. . . . All the issues of
mothering are very contentious. . . . There’s a hierarchy of moms here—a tyranny—I haven’t
seen in other communities. I’ve heard moms say they won’t send their kids to a daycare because it
has plastic toys. [There are] lots of very educated stay at home moms here, a kind of supermom
phenomenon. No mom wants to admit their kid watches TV. I sometimes feel it’s a little bit like
junior high school all over again . . . [BG, December 13, 2007]

These accounts point to a deep, underlying tension in the mothers’ community that is
centered on mothers’ identities as parents. Here are moms who struggle to enact their vision
of what is best for children, yet who find themselves in a pitched battle with other mothers
over the best way to parent. What is so ironic is that in the end the “power struggles” are not
just between adults and kids, but between parents themselves, as they struggle to carve out
identities in a contested field of parenting, and feel beleaguered when the competition has
them somehow not getting it right. Although the children are certainly the ostensible focus
of their efforts, as they attempt to enact their visions of child centeredness, the mothers
are waging their own battles over who they are, identities that are defined by the choices
they make in the ways they raise their kids. Moms who don’t send their kids to daycares
with plastic toys are making as much a statement about themselves and how they want to
be perceived as what they feel is best for their children. Parenting is, in this sense, a public
activity, with public consequences, in ways that mothers found surprising and disconcerting.

In this light, the avoidance of identification with the “mainstream” can be read in two
slightly different ways. In one sense it can be seen as an identity-choice that mothers make to
define themselves as child centered and thus positioned within a community that prides itself
collectively on being more educated, more aware, more sensitive to the needs of the child—
somehow “better than” moms who have cribs and get babysitters. In this way, it represents
a form of self-affirmation that draws on class-based ideals of privilege. In a second sense,
it reflects a need to define the self as individual, as unlike all other selves. This rationale
is linked to an ideology of individual differences that exerts a powerful influence over the
ways individuals see themselves in relation to others. Although none of the mothers used
the word “unique” to describe themselves or their philosophy, some did convey a similar
idea by talking about how they (and their children) could not fit into a single type or a
one-size-fits-all approach:
Interviewer: How would you describe your parenting philosophy?
Well, I’m not all that holistic, and attachment parenting was so labor intensive it just couldn’t
work for me. Before I was a very avid Ferberizer but now, I don’t know, I’m not one label or
approach . . . [BG, December 13, 2007]11

One mother who said she often goes online for parenting advice (and who identifies as a
Montessori mother), also said that her “philosophy is different from my friends’, it doesn’t
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really mesh with theirs” (CS, December 14, 2007). Another said that although her approach
was informed by Montessori and although she has a few close friends who generally share
her views, all the same she is “probably different from others” (SB, October 29, 2007). Her
children, too, were seen as “different” from each other: “every kid is so different” (SB). As
another said,

Well, the baby whispering model worked well for B (son), but not for E (daughter)—
she’s different, I think she’s going to be a lot more different than he ever was. Different
parenting books work with different children. Kids are just too different . . . [GK,
November 8, 2007]

Some parenting advice is good in theory, but not in practice. Time-outs didn’t work for
my son, but my daughter, she’s even put herself in time-out. . . . Choices, I do use that
approach but sometimes it works for one child but doesn’t work for the other . . . [BG,
December 13, 2007]

Believing that one and one’s children are “different,” perhaps, is a way both to distinguish
oneself from the mainstream and to assert one’s sensitivity to the unique needs and qualities
of the individual child—in other words, to be “child centered.” At the same time, the
ideology of difference enables a certain kind of blindness, allowing mothers not to recognize
how similar they really are to the mainstream that they so vehemently criticize. In this
sense, difference becomes a way to position oneself, but not to see oneself. A further irony is
that this lens can work to undermine a genuinely child-centered lens, in that it can impose
difference on children who may, in reality, be as alike than they are different.12

In this emphasis on difference these mothers are again quite mainstream. U.S. parents on the
whole tend to misperceive themselves, considering themselves more different from others
than they actually are (Penn with Zalesne 2007; Quinn 2005; Weisner 1999). As Penn with
Zalesne observe, in a nationwide study of parenting trends:

You feel this intense divide when you have a child these days. . . . Not planning to
breastfeed? How selfish. Breast-feeding in public? How barbaric. Your child sleeps with
you in bed? How co-dependent. You banished your baby to a crib? How unenlightened,
how pathetically American. . . . Amid these intense factions, it’s hard to find anything
these days that American parents agree on. But I think I’ve found two things. First,
most parents in America believe that they themselves are strict. Second, they are pretty
certain that they are the only ones. [2007:112–113]

This study probably says more about the cultural ideal of “strictness” in U.S. child rearing
than it does about what parents really do, but it illuminates the extent to which every
parent thinks he or she is different from others. It also points to the ways in which parents
have perhaps redefined strictness as sitting down and talking with kids about how they feel
when they misbehave, rather than engaging in other kinds of discipline (Penn with Zalesne
2007:114).
POWER STRUGGLES 91

The larger question, of course, is not so much about whether one is strict or permissive, child
centric or not, mainstream or not, but about the ways in which power itself is a problematic
dimension of parenting, both for the moms in this study and for those in the larger universe
of U.S. parenting advice. Although they articulated a vision of self in which emotional
validation and expression are key, the mothers in the present study did so because they felt
that this was the correct way to support the child’s emerging sense of being a powerful
self, with independence and autonomy. Yet these efforts did not always work smoothly in
practice, as mothers themselves admitted frustrations and difficulties, for example, “but then
I sometimes ask, who’s making the choices here, me or her? Sometimes I have to bribe her
. . . ” (CS, Dec. 14, 20 07). Even as they described how they used choices or emotional talk,
mothers said that it doesn’t always work; for example, “B [son] challenges all the things I
thought were the right way to teach. . . . We are supposed to give choices, but, with him he
has to have more routine, more structure. . . . He needs more traditional techniques” (GK,
November 8, 2007).

I also witnessed these difficulties, during the event with the Peace Wand, as well as on
other occasions during our interviews, as mothers would sometimes have to stop our dis-
cussions to engage in lengthy negotiations with their children over behavior. For exam-
ple, on one occasion, while interviewing two mothers together as their children played,
both mothers stepped away from our conversation for almost 20 minutes each to engage
in a serious negotiation with her child over their behavior. I could overhear both speak
in similar ways, asking repeatedly, “Are you done?” “Do you need to go home?” “You
need to use your words.” “You have to make decisions together . . . ” Certainly, for these
mothers, it was not easy to be “child centered.” The irony is that the methods that sup-
posedly empowered children and validated them—talking about emotions, giving a child
a choice—were still methods of control, and children seemed to know this. They could—
and did—resist them, to parents’ great discomfort. So in the end, the only the power that
was fully legitimated was the power adults chose to “give” to children through emotional
narration and choice, while children’s authentic forms of power and resistance remained
invalidated.

Jung develops a similar argument in her analysis of a U.S. baby boomer community, where
a profound desire to enact an “authentic self” hinges on the work of emotional expression:
To the baby boomers, the betterment of the self through emotional expression was explicit
and central to their accounts of “personal growth work” (Jung 2011:294). Paradoxically,
though, the obligation to express emotion, as Jung points out, is equally a form of con-
trol, as emotions are re-presented in new contexts and managed through this process of
rationalization and verbalization. Rather than a break with the past of rationalized “emo-
tional repression,” the new therapeutic discourses of self reenact rationalized control under
the guise of self-expression. In my analysis, mothers are engaged in a similar activity with
regard to their children, except that here mothers “teach” the right ways to handle emo-
tions and construct the choices that enable children to feel superficially autonomous and
independent.
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Conclusion: Paradoxes of Power and Emotion in Raising Selves for


Society

The ubiquity of the power struggle as trope of choice for framing parent–child relations
in contemporary United States allows or even encourages a masking of the questions of
autonomy, relatedness, and belonging that lie at the heart of producing selves in society.
In the sense that it deflects attention to the questions of management, rationality, and
the techniques of control, it permits disengagement with the ways in which emotion and
power remain embodied, subjective, lived, and unavoidably present in everyday lives, both
in families and in the wider society. It is a discourse about power, but it is a reductive and
deceptive one: reductive, in that power constrains the view of the child’s self, limiting it and
providing an all-inclusive explanation for the child’s being; and deceptive, in that the kind
of power that ultimately is practiced is not that of genuine autonomy but the false exercise
of manipulated choice.

That such a conflict leads to practices that could be called emotionally deceptive—and
that the greater lessons of emotional control may be those of emotional manipulation and
deception—are surely not the ideals that the society at large desires to teach. I was reminded
of this as I interviewed GK, whose son suddenly came into the room where we were talking,
yelling loudly: “Don’t talk about me! I don’t want you talking about me!” His mom had been
mentioning how she thought he had been developing a tendency toward “embellishing” his
stories, so much so that she considered him to be lying much of the time. Obviously, the
boy had been listening or had picked up on this from the other room where he had been
playing with his sister. She tried to salvage the situation by calmly telling him, “You know,
we have to be polite, it’s only because there’s a stranger here . . . ” Emotions had broken
through—most of all, the boy’s—and the mom was placed in the uncomfortable position of
having to defuse them—of all things—via deception.

From my vantage point, the discourse on power struggles in parenting, far from providing
a solution to the problems of parent–child relations, reinscribes mothers and children in
unresolved cultural tensions over the power of emotions to undermine relationships and in
uncertainty over how to harness them for social good. As Jules Henry pointed out in his
critique of U.S. education many years ago, much incompetence in education is because of
fear and a sense of persistent vulnerability (Henry 1966). For the mothers in my study, who
felt vulnerable to the criticisms of others in their efforts to carve identities for themselves
as “good” mothers, struggles were not only with their children but also with the larger
community, and even, one might speculate, with the larger culture and its pressures to
get the job of child rearing “right.” Theirs is a community that celebrates child centrism,
even as it aims to achieve this in ways that risk undermining authentic autonomy and
genuine emotion. In so doing it produces children—and mothers—whose selves remain
always vulnerable, because they can never quite attain the ideals they set for themselves.

This inquiry suggests that exploring mothers’ views about parenting can be a fruitful avenue
for continued work in psychological anthropology focusing on how ideas and ideals about
POWER STRUGGLES 93

what is good in parenting mesh with actual practices. It also suggests that gaps between what
communities and individuals believe about themselves and what they actually accomplish
through their practices are troubling areas that merit continued inquiry. This is especially
important when it comes to ideals that are held up as cherished parts of identity—such
as egalitarianism, honesty, respect for the individual, and emotional well-being. If cultural
practices end up in fact undermining these goals, then parents need better awareness of the
nature of the problem so that they can make changes in the ways they raise children that more
closely align to the ideals they have set for themselves. Particularly in the context of debates
over social privilege, class stratification, and globalizing ideologies, honest awareness of how
parenting beliefs and practices contribute to larger social agendas remains an important
area for further research and for the development of anthropologically grounded social and
cultural critiques.

In the end, this study also illustrates how privilege itself, perhaps, can blind people to
what they actually have in common with others, enabling a kind of false sense of personal
uniqueness or difference. Although wanting to define oneself as different from others can
be seen as in some ways a normal part of the human condition, it can also be a mask for
operations of social power that create and maintain social distinctions. This process is never
clear-cut, however, and entails its own paradoxes. For privileged mothers, at least—those
whom one would least expect to have problems with power—anxieties and fears about power
and emotion in the contested spaces of ordinary family life pose enduring difficulties to the
fundamental tasks of raising selves for “success” in contemporary times.

DIANE M. HOFFMAN is Associate Professor, Curry School of Education, University of


Virginia, Charlottesville.

Notes
1. This child-centered ideology, however, is by no means universally accepted, and even when it is, it may merge
with local cultural understandings of how best to educate children to create new, hybrid forms of ideology and
practice. This has led many anthropologists to consider childhood around the world as an important site of
conflicting political ideologies concerning personhood and education, as Scheper-Hughes and Sargent (1998) and
Stephens (1995) have pointed out.

2. See, for example, numerous online debates on parenting websites concerning the merits and drawbacks of
“child-centered parenting,” such as Gamberg (2010) versus Newman (2011). The historical shift toward more
permissive parenting has generated a modern backlash of critiques (e.g., Shaw 2003) in which the core theme is
parents who are pushovers—who “fail to be parents” and have no authority or control over their children. In this
critique, child centeredness itself creates power struggles because parents abdicate all control.

3. Because I did not ask specifically about political affiliations or religion, I am unable to provide this data except
where it was spontaneously offered. In the interviews, one woman identified as Jewish and another as Christian
[the former in characterizing some parenting books as “sounding Christian” and the latter in talking about power
struggles she faced getting ready to go to church on Sundays]. The community in which they lived, however, is
often characterized as highly educated, democratic or liberal in political orientation. Racially, all the participants
were white, with the exception of one mother who identified as half-Asian. IRB permission was secured for this
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study and all mothers signed consent forms regarding their participation. To ensure confidentiality, I use coded
initials to identify participants. Because the study was interview based, it was not possible to gather observational
data (except while interviews were being conducted). This is an obvious limitation in that it was not possible to
observe how—or whether—mothers in fact aligned their practices with their stated ideas.

4. In an earlier study [Hoffman 2009], covering an analysis of major U.S. parenting magazines from 1999 to 2009,
I found references to power struggles in about one-third of the 27 randomly selected issues; references to the topic
of control were even more frequent, as control figures as an explanatory frame for much of children’s behavior
as they interact with the world. In a second, more focused study of 24 issues of parenting magazines over the
years 2005–06, every issue had at least one article in which power struggles or the child’s “need for control” were
discussed (although this study only looked at behavior management and discipline articles and did not include other
articles in which power or control were mentioned in other contexts, or compare the relative frequency within such
articles of references to control vs. other explanations).

5. Loveys are objects that children attach themselves to and often invest with significant emotional value. The
standard interpretation in child-development psychology is “security object”—such items are thought to make a
child feel safe and secure—and in control—in situations that may be frightening or anxiety inducing. My own
interpretation is that these objects can play a much richer role in children’s worlds than simply providing security;
children can integrate deep affect, imagination, and experiences of giving and receiving care into their relationships
with these objects.

6. It may be that an emphasis on power or control is directly related to the manner in which self is constituted in
particular cultures as “independent” versus “individualized” or as “dependent vs. diffuse” (e.g., Greenfield 1994;
Marcus and Kitayama 1991). The subjective experience of and discourse about power as a defining aspect of intimate
human relationships may perhaps be more common when the experience of self is defined by separation from
another; when others are external to self, power and control then become defining features of the relationship.
In contrast, when the other is experienced as contingent on or continuous with self, there is more stress on
interpersonal harmony and emotional identification.

7. Even in the U.S. case, scholars have observed socialization for interdependence and independence within the
same setting; for example, Raeff 2006.

8. This mother was unique among the participants in the study in admitting her use of spanking.

9. The “Peace Rose” is a method that supposedly encourages children’s problem solving. Typically, a vase holding
an artificial rose is placed on a shelf in the Montessori classroom and available to children at all times. (In this case,
the mother had made a wand by fastening a foil covered star and some streamers to the end of a stick; it was placed
on a low shelf in the living room). When a fight or disagreement arises, children are taught to take the rose and
engage their peers in a conversation expressing their feelings, while passing the rose back and forth as they take
turns speaking, using “I” words (e.g., I don’t like it when you . . . ”). When they resolve their conflict, they place
their hands on the rose and declare “peace” or “friends.”

10. The author, Dr. Christine Carter, identifies herself as “a sociologist and happiness expert” at the University
of California, Berkeley Greater Good Science Center. She writes, “This blog is mostly science-based parenting
advice: since I’m reading all the research related to raising happy children anyway, I thought we might as well make
it useable to parents. My intention is to bring a scientific framing (what does the research actually say?) to our
opinion-based parenting debates and advice. Sorting fact from fiction can be confusing when it comes to parenting”
(Carter 2009).

11. Ferberizer is so-called after the parenting expert Dr. Richard Ferber, who developed the “Ferber Method”
of training young children to sleep through the night by allowing them to self-soothe—also known, according to
some mothers, as the “cry it out” method.
POWER STRUGGLES 95

12. Comparative studies of early childhood education in Japan and the United States illustrate the extent to which
Americans appear predisposed to see children as different, while Japanese have traditionally emphasized (and had
great respect for) the fundamental ways children, having a “child’s nature,” are fundamentally alike (Lewis 1995;
Peak 1991).

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