| This dissertation project investigates laws and legal practices that influence, shape and coerce parental behavior. Specifically, it is concerned with legal efforts to dictate not only how parents raise their children but how parents live their own lives, beyond the sphere of childrearing. The dissertation argues that parents in the United States are under an ever growing, legally-sanctioned demand, in the name of legally-promoted notions of what is good for their children, to control and change behaviors that are legal, and sometimes pertain to their core self-identification. Thus, governing through parenthood entails legal interventions, varying in degrees from encouragement to coercion, to promote self-monitoring of parents' emotions, social networks, speech and body.;The dissertation is composed of three separate articles that explore different aspects of parental obligation to children; namely, child care, interparental relationship and its implications for children's wellbeing, and the provision of basic needs, as exemplified by proper medical care. Each article revolves around three themes. First, what are the law's implicit assumptions and “common sense” understandings about parents' obligations to children and about the nature of the parent-child dyad. I place these assumptions in legal, cultural and historical contexts in order to challenge their seeming obviousness. Second, how does the law use people's status as parents to govern them. Particularly, what kind of self do legal regulation and legal practices encourage or intimidate parents into developing. Third, what potential groups are likely to be disadvantaged by regulation resulting from the law's hidden assumptions about parents and parenting.;The project fills a lacuna in the research about the state-parent relationship. Traditionally the framework for analyzing the legal regulation of parental conduct is the State-Parent-Child triangle and the focus is on control over children: who gets to decide the content of children's upbringing. This dissertation departs from this traditional framework to ask how having a child renders one susceptible to regulation, what forms does regulation take and what type of person are parents being molded into. |
