Introduction

Abstract

Ellen Key, a Swedish reformer, proclaimed the 20th century to be the ‘Century of the Child’. With a deluge of family policy initiatives and proclamations about how much parents matter when it comes to children’s development and well-being, the 21st century may well be the century of the parent. Parenthood and childhood have been separate domains of social science research, especially in early years, and thus there is little scholarship on their interaction. Traditionally, the focus of social science scholarship has been on families within which children had a limited presence, voice and influence. Over the last decades, however, the focus has shifted to childhood, slowly moving towards parent—child interactions by considering children and parents to be in a dynamic symbiosis. From the late 1990s onwards, a growing number of sociological studies (e.g. Brannen et al., 2000; Ribbens McCarthy et al., 2003; Soloman et al., 2002) have examined parent—child interactions, although most have focused on divorce, step-parenting and teenage children, with fewer studies involving young children. The limited scholarship on the interactions between parents and young children has important implications in that structural inequality, parents’ capability, family protective factors (e.g. resilience) and their influence in early years have been under-researched and under-theorised.