Parent–child relations at the crossroads of care,rights and governance

The parent-child relationship as a social relation

The parent–child relationship is a social relation, not a merely natural or intimate bond (Chávez and Vergara, 2017). It is configured both in everyday life and across a multiplicity of arenas: political and parliamentary debates, legal and regulatory frameworks, judicial and professional practices, and the implementation of social programmes and projects of national and transnational scope, among others.

Within this landscape, relationships between parents and children become a social and moral laboratory in which tensions between freedom and care, dependence and autonomy, are lived and worked through. Parents are expected to accompany and protect, but also to foster independence; children are encouraged to decide, but within visible and invisible limits. The modern family remains a stage on which childhood as social production is rehearsed, again and again (Hendrick, 1997; Heywood, 2001; Milanich, 2009).

The parent–child relationship is also a space of mutual implication through which generations discover one another (Horgan et al., 2020; Wall, 2010). Children inhabit multiple social positionalities—sons, daughters, students, minors, patients—and each affords them a different voice. In family life, these voices and positionalities intertwine and clash: obedience and defiance, care and evaluation, closeness and distance. As Guo and Xue (this number) demonstrate through their ethnographic work with liushou families in rural China, these positionalities operate within complex configurations of power that extend beyond the parent–child dyad, revealing how authority, care, and obligation circulate across multigenerational arrangements shaped by migration.

A complementary relational dynamic is examined by Wang, Chen and Xu (this number) in their study of Chinese migrant families in Norway, where parent–child relationships are shaped through everyday negotiations within co-resident transnational households, as children and parents bring past experiences, present interactions, and future aspirations into dialogue.

This relational perspective does not romanticize the parent–child bond or erase its asymmetries. Children and adults meet within structures of dependency and authority that are simultaneously enabling and constraining. Yet within these structures, both parties actively interpret, negotiate, and contest the terms of their relationship. A parent’s decision about screen time becomes a negotiation over trust and autonomy (Clark l, 2011; Livingstone and Blum-Ross, 2020). A child’s refusal to eat becomes a conversation about bodily boundaries, authority, and care (Ochs and Shohet, 2006; Punch et al., 2010). These everyday interactions are where abstract principles—rights, responsibilities, protection, freedom—take on lived meaning.

The modern regulation of the parent-child relationship

In Western modernity, beginning in the eighteenth century and consolidating throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century—albeit in heterogeneous ways across regions and social contexts—specific modes of caring for and governing family life were progressively structured. At their centre emerged two closely intertwined institutions: protected childhood and responsible parenthood. The former constructed a new figure—the child as a vulnerable subject, worthy of protection and promise—while the latter established a normative moral code that defined parenthood through duties to ensure children’s well-being, education, and security (Ariès, 1987; Donzelot, 1990). Between these two institutions, a moral economy took shape in which authority became inseparable from care and affection was reconfigured as obligation. As social historians of childhood have shown, this configuration was neither linear nor universal, but socially differentiated and historically uneven (Cunningham, 2006, 2014; Hendrick, 1997; Heywood, 2001).

This historical configuration was closely linked to the normalization of a specific family model: the modern Western family—nuclear, heterosexual, conjugal, and co-resident—conceived as the privileged unit for care, moral regulation, and socialization, and deeply embedded in broader projects of nation-State formation (Valdés, 2008). Within this framework, children’s dependency functioned not merely as a justification for protection, but also as an organizing principle for life trajectories oriented toward the formation of future adults deemed socially and economically valuable. Families—and particularly parents—were assigned primary responsibility for preparing children for their eventual participation in the world of work and for regulated forms of citizenship.

In the European contexts where this matrix was first articulated, the interweaving of childhood, family, and citizenship has been analysed as part of the consolidation of the social State and the governmentalization of family life (Donzelot, 1990; Hendrick, 1997). In other historical settings, however, this same matrix unfolded within nation-States shaped by colonial and postcolonial processes, producing highly stratified forms of access to citizenship and reconfiguring the relationships between family, childhood, and nation (Carli, 2011; Milanich, 2009; Rojas, 2010; Szulc and Cohn, 2012). In both cases, the growing centrality of childhood and family can be read as integral to the construction of imagined national communities (Anderson, 2006), in which the regulation of future generations became a key moral and political concern.

From the late nineteenth century onward, processes of moralization and “familiarization” increasingly relocated the governance of childhood to the domestic sphere. Families—especially those from popular sectors—became central targets of State and professional intervention through compulsory schooling, social work, and welfare and protection systems (Lavalette and Cunningham, 2002). Voltarelli and Breda’s (this number) analysis of adult-centredness in contemporary Brazil reveals the persistence of these hierarchical models despite formal legal frameworks such as the Statute of the Child and Adolescent, showing how cultural norms that position children as parental property continue to structure everyday practices and impede the realization of participatory rights.

From this perspective, the consolidation of protected childhood and responsible parenthood did not entail the universalization of lived family practices, but rather the diffusion of a normative model of normality, closely associated with ideals of social order, productivity, citizenship, and national reproduction. As historical research has shown, this model expanded primarily as a regulatory ideal rather than as a shared social experience, even within the Western societies where it originated (Cunningham, 2006).

What circulated globally, therefore, was not a single way of living with children, but a moral and political grammar that articulated childhood, family, and State, grafted onto social realities and historical trajectories marked by profound asymmetries (Llobet and Vergara, 2024). This circulation did not stem from an abstract norm, but from a model of the modern family that functioned as a criterion of moral and social classification, defining who was considered capable of raising children and sustaining legitimate family bonds. In colonial and postcolonial contexts, these classifications operated through hierarchies in which race and class were mutually constitutive: race was lived and regulated through class relations, while class was systematically racialized (Hall, 2019; Restrepo, 2016). Within this framework, the norm of the modern family produced racialized and impoverished populations as inherently incapable of family life, legitimizing State and humanitarian interventions aimed at correcting, replacing, or severing their parental ties (Briggs, 2012). In this sense, the global circulation of the family ideal did not merely generate differentiated translations, but actively reinforced racialized and classed exclusions that became particularly visible in the regulation of childhood.

Attending to these situated trajectories allows us to move beyond simplified oppositions between universalism and relativism, or between North and South, and to understand parent–child relationships as a field traversed by multiple nation-building projects, State forms, and moral economies. Recent contributions within transnational childhood studies have emphasized the need to avoid reproducing epistemic hierarchies in the study of childhood, calling instead for an analytical shift that recognizes childhoods in the Global South not as deviant or culturally homogeneous cases, but as historically and politically situated formations shaped by unequal relations of power and knowledge (Spyrou et al., 2019; Twum-Danso et al., 2024; Twum-Danso et al., 2024a).

Contemporary transformations and neoliberal intensifications

The modern moralities outlined above have intensified under recent neoliberal transformations, becoming increasingly technical, intimate, and socially stratified. Earlier ideals of protection and responsibility re-emerge as demands for emotional competence, self-monitoring, and continuous optimisation, at the very moment when the material conditions that sustain care—time, stable income, and affordable living conditions—have become more precarious and unevenly distributed. Within this context, mothers and fathers are positioned as managers of uncertain futures, expected to act as improvised experts who translate moral responsibility into technical practices of everyday childrearing (Faircloth, 2014). At the same time, children are increasingly constituted as future-oriented projects whose emotional regulation, cognitive development, and behavioural dispositions must be continuously cultivated, monitored, and optimised—a dynamic that places anticipatory responsibility on children themselves as bearers of future risk and success (Shirani et al., 2012).

Discourses of personal freedom and choice thus intertwine with a neoliberal rationality that produces subjects as self-responsible, competitive, and permanently improvable, extending market logics into intimate domains of life (Brown, 2015; Laval and Dardot, 2013). Within this configuration, responsibilities for care, socialization, education, and future prospects are increasingly relocated within families, narrowing the space of collective provision and public accountability. Expert regimes—such as forms of neuroparenting—render parental care measurable and optimisable, while simultaneously positioning children as subjects who must learn early forms of self-regulation, emotional management, and responsibility for their own trajectories (Macvarish, 2016). These historically sedimented expectations take on renewed force in contemporary contexts, becoming profoundly classed and racialized as they are reworked within neoliberal social arrangements (Gillies, 2008). As a result, moral judgements about parenting intensify, while children from racialized and socio-economically marginalized groups are disproportionately exposed to heightened demands to perform autonomy, resilience, and self-control from an early age.

As recent analyses of political and public debates on family life suggest, this reconfiguration is accompanied by a notable shift in the languages through which family norms are justified. Explicit moral claims are increasingly displaced by arguments centred on functionality, performance, and “what works,” articulated through evidence-based and ostensibly technical vocabularies that present themselves as non-ideological (Sembler, 2024). In this process, the languages through which inequality is sustained do not disappear; rather, they become increasingly sophisticated, frequently adopting the authority and legitimacy of advanced scientific knowledge and expert discourse.

Parenthood circulates as technical knowledge shaped by psychology, pedagogy, and biomedicine. It orders differences and measures child-rearing practices against the ideal of “good parenting.” This language travels through manuals, expert advice, early intervention programmes, and, increasingly, digital platforms that promise to enhance children’s development (Faircloth, 2014; Murray, 2015). Leroy and colleagues’ analysis of French upper-class families (this number) reveals how emotional receptiveness itself becomes a form of class distinction. While all parents blend psychological expertise with concerns for social performance, economic and cultural fractions of capital produce distinct parenting styles—demonstrating that even seemingly progressive practices of emotional attunement operate within, and contribute to, the reproduction of class hierarchies.

Yet this universal grammar conceals, and sometimes reproduces, sharp inequalities. Affluent parents are encouraged to cultivate their children’s potential through enrichment and emotional coaching (Lareau, 2011), and are subjected mainly to horizontal forms of scrutiny amplified by social media. Working-class and racialized parents, by contrast, encounter vertical and institutional oversight, often under threat of intervention or child removal. Within contemporary child protection regimes, logics of care and normative models of the child–parent relationship increasingly operate through legal and administrative frameworks that render the parenting practices of the poor visible as risk and, at times, as grounds for criminalisation. Popular, racialized, or less Westernised practices are thus deemed deficient, despite being sustained by moral and affective densities that exceed expert metrics. Parents—and especially low-income mothers—are held responsible for a wide range of social problems (Furedi, 2008; Pain, 2006), as social policies related to poverty, crime, and insecurity become increasingly “parentalised” (Gillies, 2008).

The parent–child relationship is further reshaped by intersecting transformations of labour relations, family diversity, migration, insecurity, and digitalization. Precarious labour fragments time and turns care into a race against exhaustion. Diversifying family forms—single-parent, same-sex, blended, and transnational—expand meanings of belonging beyond blood and law (Bestard, 2013; Cheney, 2018). Migration produces intermittent presences and affections sustained across distance (Baldassar and Merla, 2014; Rosen et al., 2023). Urban insecurity legitimises restrictions on children’s mobility and reorganises spaces of proximity, while simultaneously pushing parents to encourage children’s independent movement as preparation for a feared and unpredictable environment (Brussoni et al., 2022; Joelsson, 2019). Digital technologies multiply forms of presence, surveillance, and intimacy, unsettling the idea of the home as a private sphere and destabilising adult–child boundaries through shifting distributions of knowledge and visibility (Anastasía González, 2023; Livingstone and Blum-Ross, 2020). Meanwhile, in segregated urban contexts such as those examined by Rojas-Navarro and Alarcón-Arcos in Santiago (this number), structural neglect and violence condition the very material and affective terrains on which care relationships must be improvised, revealing how urban infrastructures actively participate in shaping—and often undermining—the possibilities for intergenerational care.

Within these convergent pressures, the parent–child relationship becomes a contested moral and political terrain in which the formation of subjects—and the terms of contemporary childhood itself—are continually renegotiated.

The state, family, and children’s rights

The parent–child relationship is among the most regulated and monitored of social relationships, situated on a shifting border between public and private life where paths of transit—and the limits themselves—are continually negotiated. Through the child–parents–State triad (Minow, 1986), this relationship extends into institutional terrains, adopting different configurations across contexts. Modern history has oscillated between State guardianship and domestic sovereignty, between public and private morality, and between affirming parental authority and replacing it.

Today, globally contested notions of childhood reshape intergenerational dynamics and modify how authority is legitimised. The State retains symbolic power while increasingly delegating responsibility for children’s well-being to families. Parental authority takes the form of an intimate government: a morality of affective efficiency accompanied by the ongoing invisibilisation of the value produced through care (Donzelot, 1990; Foucault, 1991). Within this configuration, the child’s progressive autonomy and the adult’s expected competence mirror one another, as both are called upon to self-govern with responsibility and sensitivity.

At the same time, conservative discourses reassert a dense boundary between family and State through appeals to intimate sovereignty—“don’t mess with my children” (Cooper, 2017; Sembler and Valencia, 2023). These claims seek to shield family life from State intervention and are frequently articulated in opposition to rights-based governance frameworks and institutional oversight. Yet this sovereignty is unevenly distributed. It does not extend to those parents and children marked by class, gender, ethnicity, or racialization, for whom State, police, medical, and judicial surveillance is deemed legitimate on the basis of presumed parental inadequacy.

It is within this uneven terrain—where families are differentially exposed to intervention and scrutiny according to their social positioning—that the contemporary paradox of children’s rights takes shape. Rights are increasingly mobilised as a language of protection, recognition, and empowerment, while simultaneously operating as a framework through which parental practices and children’s experiences are assessed, normalised, and selectively governed. The present moment is thus characterised by an expansion of rights discourses alongside an intensification of the policing of parent–child relations, particularly among marginalised groups. Rather than being contradictory, this configuration aligns with political logics that govern through freedom while sanctioning those who fail to embody the “right” kind of freedom.

Within this ambivalent configuration, children’s rights have become more than a legal framework: they function as a shared—yet uneven—language, the “language of rights” (Hanson, 2022), learned and enacted by parents and children through ongoing interaction with institutional expectations, policy frameworks, and State interventions. As Guo and Xue show, children in liushou families navigate State absence and normative expectations through strategies of selective disclosure, humouring, and silence—tactical forms of negotiation that reveal how rights are enacted relationally rather than claimed individually, particularly in contexts where formal frameworks coexist with deeply embedded cultural obligations. Rights operate simultaneously as institutional mandates for adults, as promises and demands for children, and as criteria for public and private judgement.

In everyday practice, rights take the form of living rights (Hanson and Nieuwenhuys, 2012): they are interpreted, debated, and translated across family, institutional, and public settings. Parents and children draw on this language not only in negotiating their relationships with one another, but also in their encounters with teachers, psychologists, health professionals, social workers, and judicial actors, as they assess fairness, possibility, and permission and negotiate meanings of protection and autonomy (Vergara del Solar et al., 2024).

Alongside and beyond their everyday enactment, children’s rights also operate as socially and politically situated arenas of contestation. Meanings of rights are interpreted, mobilised, and disputed across a range of social and institutional contexts (Joosten, 2024; Llobet, 2010; Magistris, 2016; Twum-Danso et al., 2024b; Villalta, 2021). These contestations unfold not only in interactions between parents and children, but also among professionals, institutions, and policy frameworks, as rights are invoked to justify interventions, claim recognition, resist authority, or redefine legitimate forms of care and responsibility under conditions of structural inequality and asymmetrical power relations.

Yet rights are never self-explanatory (Farini and Scollan, 2024). The “best interests of the child” may justify both shielding children from decision-making and supporting their autonomy. The “right to be heard” can amplify children’s voices while simultaneously placing on them the burden of articulating their needs in legally recognisable terms. Parents may invoke rights to resist institutional overreach or to defend their authority vis-à-vis their children. Children, in turn, learn to speak rights tactically—“You said I have rights!”—as both a genuine claim and strategic move. This ambivalence reveals a core tension: rights seek to protect children from adult power while also subjecting them to new forms of governance (Anastasía González, 2015; Llobet et al., 2025; Villalta, 2021). The task is less to resolve this tension than to trace how it materialises differently across social locations.

A similar interpretive flexibility characterises the mobilisation of the right to a family. While this right has been vital in contexts where State action—through welfare, migration, or protection systems—has historically separated children from their parents, it is increasingly deployed to reinforce an “indiscriminate familism” (Vergara, 2009). The “right to a family” thus becomes expectation and even duty, revealing persistent difficulties in recognising children as subjects in their own right. De Souza and colleagues’ scoping review (this number) demonstrates how Brazilian research simultaneously constructs families as repressive, absent, unprepared, and navigating tensions—highlighting the multiple and often contradictory ways families are called upon as pedagogical agents while being deemed inadequate, particularly around issues of sexuality and gender that expose the limits of family-centred approaches to children’s rights. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child embodies this ambivalence: although it protects children’s identity and diversity, these protections tend to be confined to specific domains (Bhabha, 2014), while children’s cultural worlds are often treated as extensions of parental belonging—whether ethnic, religious, or otherwise (Liebel, 2012).

Childhood studies and the parent-child relationship

Childhood Studies emerged in the 1990s with a key insight: childhood is not merely a natural stage of life, but a social construction that varies historically and culturally. This process of denaturalisation was foundational to the field. Yet the early emphasis on children’s agency—despite important exceptions (Brannen et al., 2000; Brannen and Heptinstall, 2003; Mayall, 2001, 2002)—sometimes produced a limiting binary in which children were positioned as active and resistant, while adults appeared primarily as normative and constraining. Within this framing, the parent–child relationship tended to be approached mainly as a site of domination rather than as a complex field of interdependence, care, and mutual constitution. This limitation hindered efforts to theorise intergenerational relations beyond domination–resistance models.

This limitation is taken up directly in this special issue through contributions that rethink how parenting and parental authority are conceptualised within Childhood Studies. Dermott and Fowler (this number), for example, argue that the field’s emphasis on children’s agency has often made it difficult to theorise parental roles without framing them as inherently problematic, and propose a relational understanding in which authority and agency are situated and co-constituted rather than opposed.

Such an orientation obscured how parents are themselves governed through their parenting—simultaneously sovereign and subject to expert scrutiny—and how moral and affective labour shapes everyday negotiations between adults and children. It also rendered less visible the ways in which children participate actively in caring relations: they worry about adults, devise strategies to ease their burdens, and contribute to sustaining meaningful family life (Frankel, 2017; Henze-Pedersen, 2022; Martin et al., 2021; Siedlikowski et al., 2022). Research across diverse contexts shows that care circulates relationally—contingent, multi-actor, and bidirectional (Baldassar and Merla, 2014)—rather than flowing unidirectionally from adults to children.

It is precisely this empirical recognition of children’s involvement in care that has rendered earlier, oppositional notions of agency increasingly inadequate. More recent debates have reworked the concept of children’s agency by situating it within familial and intergenerational relationships characterised by both structural asymmetry and mutual dependence, rather than treating agency as an individual capacity exercised against adults. From this perspective, agency emerges as relational and negotiated, produced through everyday interactions of care, obligation, responsibility, and moral expectation that bind children and adults together in unequal yet mutually constitutive ways (Esser et al., 2016; Frankel, 2017).

Within Childhood Studies, this reorientation has been supported by relational approaches that challenge earlier conceptions of agency as an individualised property. Instead, agency is conceptualised as produced within networks of interdependence and situated social relations. These perspectives foreground how children’s capacities to act are shaped through ongoing interactions within families and across generational positions, rather than in opposition to them (Spyrou, 2018; Spyrou et al., 2019).

Beyond these internal developments, contributions from adjacent fields in the social sciences have also been influential. Feminist scholarship has foregrounded interdependence as a basic human condition, reframing dependency as mutual rather than deficient (Cockburn, 2005; Ejlersten, 2020). Posthumanist, post- and decolonial, and critical perspectives have further decentered the autonomous liberal subject, conceptualising development as always embedded in networks of human and nonhuman relations (Kraftl, 2020; Tammi et al., 2020). Næss’s conceptualisation of smartphones as “apparatuses of resonance” exemplifies this decentring, showing how digital infrastructures redistribute agency and create hybrid spaces in which the boundaries between adult authority and child autonomy are continually renegotiated through sociotechnical assemblages rather than individual capacities. In addition, critical approaches to parenthood and parenting have contributed to denaturalising parental practices, understanding them as socially produced forms of care and authority shaped—like childhood itself—by historical processes and by dynamics of power and inequality. These dynamics are manifested both in micro-level interactions and in broader macro-social structures (Cruz et al., 2025; Gillies, 2008; Rosen and Faircloth, 2020).

These approaches collectively enable the study of the parent–child relationship as a site where forms of personhood are continually made, where generational knowledge is transmitted and transformed, and where the political meanings of care, authority, and autonomy are negotiated. Bringing Childhood Studies into closer dialogue with these adjacent perspectives illuminates the historical density and political force of this relationship—where the legacies of Western modernity, contemporary inequalities, and possibilities for alternative forms of coexistence intersect. At the same time, recognising the relational turn within Childhood Studies opens space for integrating the analysis of parent–child relationships more fully into the field’s own conceptual developments, positioning them not as peripheral tensions to children’s agency but as constitutive sites through which agency, care, and subjectivity are co-produced (Rosen and Faircloth, 2020). Seen in this way, the parent–child relationship becomes both a mirror of enduring tensions—between freedom and care, love and performance—and a space in which these tensions are actively worked through and, at times, reconfigured. It is here, in everyday life, that childhood takes shape as both institution and lived experience (Vergara et al., 2020).

Rethinking parent–child relationships: Insights from this special issue

This special issue emerges from the work of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) Working Group in Critical Studies of Materpaternities, a network of more than 50 researchers from across Latin America and the Caribbean. Since 2019, the Working Group has developed sustained theoretical and empirical research on parent–child relationships from critical, feminist, and decolonial perspectives. Bringing together scholars from Childhood Studies, social studies of care, gender and sexuality studies, migration research, and related fields, the network has produced a body of scholarship that challenges Northern-centric assumptions about family life while remaining attentive to global circulations of knowledge and practice.

While grounded in this Latin American collaboration, the special issue deliberately extends beyond the region to include contributions from Europe and Asia. This geographical breadth reflects a comparative commitment that neither flattens difference nor treats contexts as radically incommensurable. Instead, the collection shows how parent–child relationships are shaped by distinct historical and political conditions while also revealing shared dynamics that emerge when these relationships are examined as relational, moral, and political sites.

Taken together, the articles examine parent–child relationships as key arenas in which childhood is produced, governed, and lived in contemporary contexts. They demonstrate that focusing on these relationships brings into view dimensions of childhood that remain obscured when attention is limited either to children’s experiences alone or to parenting discourses in isolation. Across diverse empirical settings, the contributions trace how global norms around childhood, care, and rights are translated and negotiated in everyday family life, and how intersecting inequalities of class, gender, generation, and nation shape both normative expectations and material conditions of care.

The contributions are organised to deepen the analytical dimensions outlined earlier in this editorial. A first group of articles rethinks parent–child relationships by challenging teleological and individualised assumptions about parenting and children’s agency, foregrounding relationality, interdependence, and co-production. Dermott and Fowler’s Understanding the nature and importance of the parent–child relationship revisits how Childhood Studies has conceptualised parenting, arguing that the field’s emphasis on children’s agency has often made it difficult to theorise parental roles without casting them as threats. They propose a relational framework in which authority and agency are situated and co-constituted, showing how parental relationships structure the contexts and possibilities of children’s action without presupposing predetermined developmental ends.

This conceptual reorientation is elaborated empirically in Guo and Xue’s article, Power triangle: Power dynamics and children’s agency in Chinese liushou (left-behind) families. Based on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork with children in rural Sichuan, the authors conceptualise a “power triangle” linking migrant parents, co-resident grandparents, and children. Rather than treating power as hierarchical, they show how authority, care, and obligation circulate across this multigenerational configuration. Through an analysis of children’s strategies of selective disclosure, compliance, humouring, and silence—often motivated by affection and concern—the article moves beyond binaries of resistance and submission to reveal ambivalent, relational forms of agency shaped by migration.

This relational perspective is extended in Wang, Chen and Xu’s Chinese migrant children’s constructions of transnational childhood in Norway, which shifts the focus from multigenerational arrangements under separation to everyday parent–child relations in transnational family life marked by co-residence. Drawing on qualitative research with children and parents, the authors examine how children navigate and rework competing Chinese and Norwegian ideals of a ‘good’ childhood within family life, drawing on lived experiences, attachments, and family relations shaped prior to migration. By approaching transnational childhood through the intertwined dimensions of been, being and becoming, the article highlights how children’s agency unfolds over time, as past lived experiences, present negotiations, and future orientations are continuously brought into relation rather than aligned with linear developmental trajectories.

A second cluster of articles examines how contemporary neoliberal transformations intensify and stratify parent–child relationships along lines of class and spatial inequality. These contributions reveal how the moral economies of parenting operate differently across social locations, shaping both privilege and precarity within family life.

Leroy’s Parenting styles and receptiveness (or otherwise) to children’s emotions in the higher social classes analyses emotional socialisation among upper-class French families with very young children. Drawing on interviews with parents, the authors identify two dominant styles—one emphasising emotional receptiveness and psychological expertise, the other prioritising social performance and conformity to class norms—while showing that parents often blend elements of both. Their analysis demonstrates how emotional attunement, often framed as progressive, functions as a mechanism of class reproduction rather than a class-neutral form of care.

At the other end of the social spectrum, Rojas-Navarro and Alarcón-Arcos’s Living Together and Apart: Reimagining Care in a Segregated Neighborhood of Santiago, Chile explores how parent–child relationships are sustained under conditions of urban segregation, structural violence, and institutional neglect. Using ethnographic and creative methods, the authors conceptualise care as emerging from improvisation, friction, and fragile attachments rather than stability or consensus. By attending to more-than-human dimensions such as infrastructure and urban design, the article shows how material environments actively shape the possibilities and limits of intergenerational care. Together, these two articles foreground the deeply classed nature of contemporary parent–child relationships.

A third set of contributions turns to the terrain of rights and governance, examining how children’s rights frameworks operate ambivalently in everyday family life. Voltarelli and Breda’s Adultism and parenting: Challenges for the effective implementation of children’s rights in the Brazilian context analyses adultism as a structural form of oppression embedded in parenting practices. Despite legal advances such as the Statute of the Child and Adolescent, the authors show how adult-centred and punitive models continue to undermine children’s participation, highlighting the gap between formal rights frameworks and everyday practices.

This tension is further explored in da Silva, de Souza, Soares, and Andrade’s scoping review, Family and parenting in the pedagogies of sexuality: A scoping review of the topic in the Brazilian. Analysing Brazilian research on sexuality education, gender norms, and family life, the authors identify recurring representations of families as repressive, absent, unprepared, or navigating tensions. These portrayals reveal how families are positioned simultaneously as pedagogical agents and as obstacles, particularly in politicised debates around gender and sexuality. The review underscores the limits of relying on families alone as sites for the realisation of children’s rights and points to the importance of schools and community networks.

Finally, the special issue examines how digital technologies reshape parent–child relationships and redistribute agency. Næss and Broch’s A matter of logics and practicalities: How the state, parenting, and children connect in a digitalized childhood analyses how digitalisation entangles State expectations, parental practices, and children’s everyday lives. Drawing on assemblage theory and ethnographic material, the article conceptualises smartphones as “apparatuses of resonance” that synchronise family routines with institutional demands for autonomy, competence, and productivity. By shifting attention away from debates on screen time, the article shows how digital infrastructures create new hybrid spaces of intergenerational negotiation.

Together, the contributions demonstrate that parent–child relationships are not merely private or intimate bonds but key sites where care, authority, inequality, and governance intersect. By examining these relationships across diverse contexts, the special issue highlights their centrality for understanding contemporary childhood and opens analytical space for imagining alternative forms of intergenerational coexistence.

Synthesis and future directions

As a whole, the contributions in this special issue illuminate several crucial dimensions of contemporary parent–child relationships. First, they demonstrate the impossibility of studying these relationships outside their structural contexts. Whether examining urban segregation in Santiago, legal frameworks in Brazil, class dynamics in France, or conceptual debates within Childhood Studies in the United Kingdom, each article shows how parent–child relationships are embedded in broader political, economic, and cultural formations. This contextualisation does not reduce relationships to their structural conditions; rather, it reveals how structure and agency, constraint and creativity, operate simultaneously in everyday family life.

Second, the articles reveal the profound ambivalence that characterises contemporary parenting. Parents are positioned as simultaneously sovereign and surveilled, responsible yet under-resourced, expected to follow expert guidance while also honouring children’s individuality and autonomy. Children, in turn, are constituted as both subjects of rights and objects of protection—recognised as competent while still treated as incomplete. These tensions are not the result of individual failure or policy inconsistency, but structural features of how childhood and family life are governed under contemporary neoliberal conditions.

Third, the collection highlights the value of methodological creativity in the study of parent–child relationships. Across the contributions, diverse methods—including walking interviews, drawing exercises, ethnographic observation, and intergenerational interviewing—make visible different dimensions of relational life. This methodological pluralism is not merely technical; it reflects a theoretical commitment to recognising that parent–child relationships cannot be captured from a single vantage point. Different methods foreground different relational dynamics, moral tensions, and material conditions through which care and authority are enacted.

Fourth, all the articles attend closely to the politics of knowledge production. They raise critical questions about who gets to define “good parenting,” which practices are rendered visible and subject to scrutiny, and which remain unexamined. They trace how global discourses of childhood, parenting, and rights circulate, are translated, and acquire authority in specific contexts, often reinforcing existing inequalities. These questions of power and knowledge run throughout the special issue, reflecting the influence of critical, feminist, and decolonial scholarship and underscoring the need to remain attentive to the epistemic conditions under which childhood is studied and governed.

Finally, the contributions point toward several directions for future research. They call for closer attention to how material and digital infrastructures shape parent–child relationships; to the distinctive moral, affective, and socialising dynamics of early childhood; and to how children themselves interpret, evaluate, and make sense of their relationships with parents. They also highlight the importance of examining transnational and translocal family arrangements, as well as the ways intersecting inequalities of class, gender, generation, and nation structure parenting possibilities. Advancing this agenda will require continued methodological and conceptual innovation—approaches capable of capturing relational and more-than-human forms of agency, foregrounding moral and affective regimes, and analysing how State policies and institutional logics co-produce family life.

This special issue argues that the parent–child relationship is not simply one topic among many within Childhood Studies, but a central site for understanding how childhood is produced, governed, and lived. It is within this relationship that abstract principles—such as rights, care, protection, and autonomy—are translated into everyday practice; that structural inequalities become embodied in personal histories; and that alternative futures are imagined and negotiated. Studying parent–child relationships ethnographically, historically, and politically thus offers critical insight not only into contemporary childhoods, but also into how they might be made otherwise.

Taken together, the contributions demonstrate that parent–child relationships are neither private bonds sealed off from political scrutiny nor simple sites of adult domination over children. Rather, they are complex relational fields in which care and control, intimacy and governance, tradition and transformation coexist and come into tension. Attending to these relationships requires holding multiple perspectives simultaneously: recognising children’s agency without denying their vulnerability; acknowledging parental authority without obscuring parents’ own subjection to expert and institutional surveillance; and tracing the universalising force of global norms while remaining attentive to local practices of adaptation and resistance.

Perhaps most importantly, this special issue shows that parent–child relationships are sites of possibility as well as constraint. Despite their deep entanglement with structures of inequality and governance, they remain spaces in which people experiment—often pragmatically and imperfectly—with how to live together across difference and dependency. Through everyday interactions, parents and children negotiate new meanings of care, authority, and autonomy, sometimes reproducing dominant norms and at other times creating practices that gesture toward alternative ways of organising intergenerational life.

We hope this collection will encourage further research that takes parent–child relationships seriously as objects of scholarly inquiry—not as background conditions of childhood or as mere outcomes of parenting expertise, but as constitutive social relationships in their own right. Such research is essential not only for understanding childhood as it currently exists, but also for imagining more just, caring, and inclusive futures for intergenerational life.