"No one wants to be that mother": an ethnography of difference and emotion in Sydney

This research explores Australian middle-class ideals of the “good child” as the source of parental emotional fulfilment and identity. Here, moral constructs of what a child should be and do, are indexed to parental values and definitions of what constitutes the good life. In an intensive and competitive parenting culture, where children’s achievements and good behaviour bring social capital to their parents, how do parents of “difficult” children negotiate the disappointments, shame and often marginalisation that come with being the parent of a difficult child? Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Sydney, Australia, this thesis examines the role of children in the construction of the good life. Placed at the intersection of the anthropology of parenting and psychological anthropology, my work explores the overlap of intensive parenting and the pathologization of childhood, and seeks to understand how the parental ethnotheories of middle-class Sydneysiders, produce a particular socio-moral model of the good child. Through an engagement with the lived experience of parents of difficult children and by attending to parental discourses and the emotions, I shed light on parental experiences of marginalisation. In so doing, I map a path from the macro structures of neoliberalism to the micro structures of everyday experience.