I turn now to focus upon children and young people in families. Throughout most of the 20th century, psychology and its associated field of child development were lead disciplines in the study of children and childhood, just as psychology led the way in youth studies. Both gave primacy to the life span paradigm. Child development was an influential force in policy and public discourse because it emphasised the effects of early infancy on subsequent developmental outcomes. What Donzelot (1997 [1977]) called the ‘psy complex’ shapes children's lives through the agency of parents, health and welfare and legal services (Mayall, 1994, 2013). In the 1970s child-centred parenting began to be critiqued as a process of ‘intensification’ (Hays, 1996) in which parental skills and behaviour were targeted as deficient and in need of expert guidance (Ramaekers and Suissa, 2011). Parenting remains a key site for social intervention with psychology continuing to emphasise the normative goals of producing the ‘optimal child’ (eg Landry et al, 2008).

These developments also emanate from wider structural and ideological changes as, in recent decades, neoliberal policy and ideas have offloaded much of the responsibility for children's welfare from the state and the community on to parents. One consequence is that those parents who lack the resources to fulfil their responsibilities ‘adequately’ have been regarded as social problems. As Dermott and Pomati (2016) suggest, a dominant discourse that some groups are ‘poor’ at parenting, typically families on low incomes, is sustained because the norms of an educationally advantaged minority are accepted as the standard against which all other parents are evaluated. On the other hand, these ideas are not new. For example, Barbara Tizard, a psychologist, who had earlier questioned hypotheses that what happened in early childhood necessarily led to negative outcomes later in life (1977), had also challenged the dominant discourse concerning the classed effects of parenting on children in the early 1980s. Comparing the conversations of four-year-old girls with their teachers in nursery school and their mothers at home, Tizard and Hughes (1984) found – contrary to commonly held beliefs that working-class mothers failed to stimulate children – a relative paucity of talk at school but a rich learning environment in the home.