Parenthood as contemporary reproductive governance

Abstract

This article examines the core elements of the means through which reproductive governance has operated based on the exercise of parenthood. The increasingly broad use of the term is associated with ideological debates between its emancipatory dimension and that of strong parental control, which may indicate a shift from the so-called “policing of families” to a “policing of parenthoods”. The article charts the apparatuses of maintenance/support for monitoring parenthood, as well as highlights its infrastructures. It also emphasises how social markers of difference are fundamental to understanding how parenthood is regulated as well as how it is exercised. Finally, we argue the understanding of such hegemonic processes cannot dispense with addressing possible negotiations and struggles regarding parenting and parenthood, highlighting their disputed nature and openness to reflexivity.

Keywords:
parenthood; reproductive governance; anthropology; family

Resumo

Este artigo examina os elementos centrais dos modos pelos quais a governança reprodutiva tem operado a partir do exercício da parentalidade. À crescente expansão dos usos do termo associam-se debates ideológicos entre a sua dimensão emancipadora e a sua dimensão de forte controle paterno, a qual pode indicar um deslocamento da chamada “polícia das famílias” para uma “polícia das parentalidades”. O artigo mapeia os dispositivos de sustento/apoio no acompanhamento à parentalidade, assim como evidencia as infraestruturas de sua existência. Destaca também a centralidade dos marcadores sociais da diferença para o entendimento das formas tanto de regulação quanto de exercício da parentalidade. Por fim, argumenta-se que a compreensão de tais processos hegemônicos não pode prescindir da inscrição das negociações e lutas possíveis em torno da parentalidade e de seu exercício, evidenciando seu caráter disputado e aberto à reflexividade.

Palavras-chave:
parentalidade; governança reprodutiva; antropologia; família

Resumen

Este artículo examina los elementos centrales de los modos por los cuales la gobernanza reproductiva opera a partir del ejercicio de la parentalidad. A la creciente expansión de los usos del término, se asocian debates ideológicos sobre su dimensión emancipadora o su dimensión de fuerte control hacia los padres y madres, lo que puede indicar un desplazamiento desde la llamada “policía de las familias” hacia una “policía de las parentalidades”. El artículo mapea los dispositivos de apoyo en el acompañamiento a la parentalidad y evidencia las infraestructuras de su existencia. Destaca también la centralidad de los marcadores sociales de la diferencia para entender tanto las formas de regulación como el ejercicio de la parentalidad. Por último, argumenta que la comprensión de tales procesos hegemónicos no puede prescindir del análisis de las negociaciones y luchas posibles en torno a la parentalidad y de su ejercicio, evidenciando su carácter disputado pero también abierto a la reflexividad.

Palabras clave:
parentalidad; gobernanza reproductiva; antropología; familia

In July 2023, a provocative article entitled “Culpabilité et épuisement dopent le marché de la parentalité” (Guilt and exhaustion boost parenting market) was published by the newspaper Le Monde. It unfolds the experience of Shiva Shaffii, the creator of the Facebook page Parent épuisé (Worn out parent), that currently has over 526,000 followers, and of a website of the same name. When her first child was born, in 2007, Shiva Shaffii felt liked she had been tricked. “Everybody lied to me. Half of the reality of parenthood had been hidden from me. I was exhausted; my child wasn’t sleeping.” Isolated, as she had had her baby abroad, Shiva would talk to her twin sister, who had become a mother before her and was a display of rosy parenthood; “they were swimming in happiness.” It was only after this talk that she learned her sister had experienced a “major baby blues” that she had never told anyone about: “When I start talking about my breakdowns, people start talking. My friends all think they’re bad parents.”

Shaffii’s story is far from being an isolated one. On the contrary: it addresses parents everywhere. The apparent silence about the challenges the so-called “parenting turn” poses is, in fact, cross-cut by moralizing assumptions that affect all social classes, albeit unequally, because of other social markers, such as race, ethnicity, and gender. We followed public policies on “educational” interventions for parents in vulnerable situations and investigated the proliferation of material on middle- and upper-class women who seek professional help to handle the exhaustion from trying to live up to the standard, as narrated by Shaffii (Borredon; Georges, 2023; Fonseca, 2025a). Shaffii’s candid account is, therefore, just an example of the need to re-examine the core elements of the means through which reproductive governance has operated, particularly within the field of policies for family and community engagement based on the exercise of parenthood (Briggs, 2017; Drotbohm; N’Guessan, 2025; Fonseca; Marre; Rifiotis, 2021; Morgan; Roberts, 2012).

On parenthood and its major debates: Control and/or liberation?

Although the term “parenthood” has only recently emerged in the field of public policy, it goes back a long way in academia. While we do not intend to undertake a genealogy of the term in this text, it seems important to outline the main debates that have marked its emergence in different contexts. In Portuguese, “parentalidade” is a neologism derived from the term “parenthood”, which emerged in the middle of the 19th century and was then wildly reintroduced and debated in the Anglo-Saxon academic circle in the first half of the 20th century. Especially in the early stages, in the context of belief in social progress, the concept was embraced both by a eugenic project and a libertarian and feminist one. From a eugenic perspective, in 1909, the English physician, writer and journalist Caleb W. Saleeby would advance the thesis of limiting marriage (between a man and a woman), not on the basis of law, but of popular and moral (religious, in particular) opinion, only to people capable of becoming parents of “healthy children” (Ben Hounet, 2014, 2022). Even then, this certainly excluded a significant part of the population, especially poor families.

The second strand includes two articles published between 1915 and 1916 by feminist anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons. In those, the author defended the conceptual separation between marriage and parenthood, up until then understood as direct equivalents. Parsons’s argument was based on the idea that marriage, and, more broadly, sexual relationships, were a private matter that should be no concern to the state, whereas parenthood was an affaire of public concern. Therefore, the “marriage contract” should be succeeded by a “parent contract”, the latter within a libertarian perspective. Following this shift, a theory of parenthood, according to Parsons, would also succeed the theory of gender relations. The works of Saleeby and Parsons, albeit very different in their propositions, reveal how the debates around parenthood were, from the outset, particularly marked by moral disputes and by a double dimension: control and liberation (Ben Hounet, 2014, 2022). Although distinct (the former, as a eugenic means of improving the human species; the latter, of female emancipation), both strands saw parents as the “pivots” of social progress, and marriage was the central object of those disputes.

As for anthropology, after Parsons’s articles - which are little remembered, we may add -, in the 1930s we find Malinowski’s work on the family, where he addressed parent-child relationships and their impact on family and kinship systems (Ben Hounet, 2014, 2022; Neyrand, 2019). Following Malinowski, other authors developed the concept in their works. Among them, we particularly highlight those of anthropologist Esther N. Goody, which have become indispensable to the development of the term “parenthood” in Anthropology. In her pioneering work Parenthood and social reproduction: fostering and occupational roles in West Africa, whose 40th anniversary of publication was celebrated in 2022, Goody attributed five functions to parenthood: conceiving children, raising and educating them, giving the child a name and social status, and exercising certain rights over the child (Ben Hounet, 2022).

Jusqu’aux écrits d’Esther Goody, le terme parenthood demeure toutefois peu employé, s’agissant des travaux sur la famille et la parenté en Afrique. Si le concept de kinship, infiniment plus usité par les anthropologues, s’intéresse à l’ensemble des proches, et em particulier aux générations passées, celui de parenthood semble davantage tourné vers l’enfance et les génerations à venir (Ben Hounet, 2022, p. 3).

The reality surrounding the term parenthood has been and continues to be (under other expressions such as parental roles, parental relationships, fosterage¹ - confiage) the subject of much analysis by African studies (Ben Hounet, 2022). Before this neologism appeared in other countries, such as France in the 1960s, Africa (especially West Africa) was already a privileged field for ethnographies on the subject. Goody’s work has influenced the research of Africanist anthropologists, especially Suzanne Lallemand’s (1993) work on the “circulation of children”, as well as those undertaken in complex societies, such as Agnès Fine’s (2002). For Fine, the term “parenthood”, although often used to refer to educational parental functions, as advocated by Goody, encompasses a set of processes and practices beginning prior to conception and continuing until the generations coexist in adulthood. For his part, Maurice Godelier (1993) restores the distinction between the functions concerning parenthood, as proposed by Esther Goody, to underscore what he considers as a fundamental principle of kinship: the distinction between the principle of filiation and the principle of descent. While the Anglo-Saxon school had elaborated the debate, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1974) and Louis Dumont (1972) neglected it. One of the main aims of Godelier’s work is to demonstrate that kinship is incorporated by individuals along with the social order it represents. And, in this process, parenthood could therefore make something of this incorporation explicit. What seems fundamental to us in the contribution of these authors is to demonstrate that the anthropological approach allows us to pinpoint the different reaches of the two terms (kinship and parenthood) and the ways in which they can be articulated in different ethnographic contexts (Neyrand, 2019, p. 41).

These two aspects of the differences in reach and forms of articulation between kinship and parenthood become apparent, for example, in the practices involving surrogacy. Aureliano Lopes da Silva Junior, Mônica Fortuna Pontes, and Anna Paula Uziel (2025) show in their research that when the wish to have children, so, the wish to parent, cannot be fulfilled, surrogacy emerges as an option. However, in the family-affective-parental web underlying the “temporary womb lease”, Brazilian legislation defines that “the temporary womb lessor” must be related within the fourth degree of consanguinity to one of the partners, in order to “guarantee” the existence of “family ties” with those she will carry the baby for. This means that while surrogacy must not extend to parenting, its legal feasibility is conditional on the existence of kinship ties between the surrogate and those who will parent the child. The most interesting aspect of these cases is that prior family ties of kinship will produce parenthood for the couple/person who will be the child’s parents, and also, to a certain degree, for the surrogate mother and her children. Also, as Lilian, one of their interlocutors, shares in her account of experience, the end of the pregnancy marks the beginning of her friends’ parenthood. “It was an emotional moment because it struck me that from then on, I wouldn’t have her there anymore, you know? We were going to split up from then on. So, it was very painful, you know? […] And then she was born, and she was brought straight to me, and I held her for a while until she was taken to her parents so they could hold her.” Even though she acknowledged the bond with the baby (especially because they shared a body), it was not acknowledged as “motherhood”. From Lilian’s point of view, motherhood happens through other ways, such as breastfeeding: this, indeed, produces “parenthoods”.

Parenthood: The neologism expanded

From the 1990s onwards, in France, the term “parentalité” (parenthood), which was limited to specialists in the human sciences (anthropology, psychoanalysis, sociology), gathers momentum in social and political discourse and in the media. The suffix “ité” added to “parental” makes it possible, according to Neyrand (2019), to designate a new dimension, distinct from that of “kinship” (parenté), which would be specific to the relationship between parents and children. As Neyrand (2019) well observes, the relationship between parents and children gains such huge proportions that it becomes a major reference for social action, especially among the most vulnerable part of the population. The concept quickly spread among social workers and psychologists as a way of morally and technically evaluating family ties (Roux; Vozari, 2020). This diffusion of the term shows how much action on and through parenthood has become the “order of the day” and has multiplied in publications, conferences, and training courses focused on supporting, sustaining, and assisting parenthood (Neyrand (2019)).

As Claudia Fonseca (2025a) reminds us, although the term parenthood may sound “strange” or vague to many citizens of the so-called Global South, it is (as many of the ideas imported from European countries) gradually spreading to the rest of the world. In Brazil, debates on parenting and the proliferation of scales to measure parenting styles have gained strength recently, mainly because of the process of judicialization of family relationships. Particularly in the interface between psychology and law, the term has gained so much visibility that it has ended up being “institutionalized” through the “recommendation of the National Council of Justice, number 50/2014,² which discusses the use of parenthood workshops as public policy” (Neyrand, 2018, p. 1). In 2022, the National Congress included the idea of “positive parenting” in official language, according to the Law nº 14.344 (Brasil, 2022), aimed precisely at promoting the idea of child upbringing free from physical punishment, as well as actions to prevent and combat domestic and family violence against children and adolescents (Fonseca, 2025a).

In Argentina, the neologism “parentalidad” has informed many of the changes introduced in the 2015 Civil and Commercial Code regarding the normative structure of the family. Abandoning the archaic formula of patria potestad, parental rights and responsibilities towards children are now called “parental responsibility”. It also establishes that parents who are separated can draw up a “parenting plan” to arrange care, responsibilities, and communication with their children, and that this plan can be ratified by judicial authority. Based on a new conceptualization of childhood, since they are linked to the principles of progressive autonomy and the best interests of the child, these changes lean towards the democratization of family relationships. However, other initiatives regarding parenting have emerged in recent years. With a scientific ring to them, these seek to determine whether parenting is being carried out correctly or not. Guides and tests have been developed to assess good and bad parenting and the “assessment of parenting competence” has been the engine of some institutional initiatives aimed at developing multidisciplinary diagnoses to determine whether parenting is appropriate or not, or, in the words of one of the guidelines used by the Judicial Power of the City of Buenos Aires, “positive”, “limited”, or “chronically incompetent”.

The experiences of different countries suggest that the term “parenthood” translates two paradigms: one related to the process of acquiring socially expected parental roles; the other based on the argument that the legitimacy of parents and family-making no longer depends on marriage or filiation, but on children. Besides these two paradigms, Ben Hounet (2014) notes that parenthood has been the subject of distinct ideological disputes since the beginning of the twentieth century: on the one hand there is the emancipatory parental dimension (through the recognition of new parental figures - in addition to those of legal parents, mothers and fathers - grating them visibility and legitimacy); on the other hand, the dimension of strong parental control. It is important to remember that the emergence of parenthood is also followed by other related concepts, such as mono-parenthood, homoparenthood, coparenthood, pluri-parenthood, etc. (Martial, 2021). Above all, the theme of parenthood has emerged as a viable alternative to “mono-parenthood”, so that such family arrangements are no longer labelled “deviant”.

The “emancipating” and “controlling” dimensions of parents, although seemingly distinct, are simultaneously present, in a kind of dialectics without synthesis in which the presence of one is even capable of awakening/triggering the presence of the other: concomitantly present but nuanced according to the context and the who is addressed. In Brazil, ethnographic research has shown that the veiller sur/surveiller dialectics is present in different forms: in adoption support groups, assisted visits; government programs (Primeira Infância Melhor - PIM, Criança Feliz - PCF, Bolsa Família, etc.); institutional foster care services; support services for families whose children are homeless or in foster care (such as provided by the Protection and Specialized Care Service for Families and Individuals - PAEFI and in Parent’s School of Brazil - EPB); proceedings that culminate in the termination of family authority; and practices of the Guardianship Council (Cruz Rifiotis; Rifiotis, 2019; Fonseca, 2021; Klein, 2021; Lancellotti, 2016; Schuch, 2009, 2013).

The fact is that political discourses on “good parenting” have become increasingly normative. In some cases, assigning blame and/or responsibility to parents, especially in families living in poverty, for a so-called “lack of protection” ends up accelerating the process of terminating family authority and removing babies from their parents (Fonseca; Marre; Rifiotis, 2021; Fonseca; Scalco, 2024; Gomes, 2022; Sarmento, 2020, 2021). Janaína Gomes and Claudia Fonseca (2025) situate institutionalized professional services as part of the circuits of care. They illustrate how “family backing”, especially from the mother, along with factors such as the child’s age and health condition, are determinant for court rulings concerning the outcome of institutional care: family reintegration or removal and placement of the child for adoption. It is interesting to see how the discourses on “good parenting” are followed by a sort of hierarchization between the rights of the child and women’s rights. Similarly, we have also observed the encouragement of voluntary placement of newborns for adoption as a policy that has been prioritized through campaigns and legal apparatuses. Clemente da Denise Silva, Hevelyn Rosa, and Cristiane da Silva Cabral (2025) show that, following the logic of a selective incorporation of feminist struggles regarding the right to have or not to have children, mothers willing to place their children for adoption are portrayed as responsible, conscientious, and generous and that child protection policies end up taking precedence over debates on reproductive justice.

In some contexts, this dimension of control can even reveal its most excessive and dangerous side, as in the case of the United Kingdom, for example, where the 1989 Children Act aims to provide early redress to situations of danger and risk of danger in families - in order to protect children, parents face the removal or threat of removal of their children. The Children Act introduced significant changes to child protection in England by placing the best interests of the child at the heart of interventions, with measures at once swift and effective. As Amossé (2025) justly remarks, fathers may have their children taken away from them at birth because of the prenatal assessment carried out by social workers during the mothers’ pregnancy. This unsettling scenario in the arena of parenthood had already been registered in 2016, in the documentary Les enfants volés d’Anglaterre, by Pierre Chassagnieux and Stéphanie Thomas. The production portrays the stories of mothers like Bethany, 22. Pregnant with her first child, she had to flee the UK for northern France so that social services would not take her child away at birth. Because of her family history (her sister’s suicide), Bethany was under suspicion of becoming a bad mother.

The so-called responsible parenting, as Lister (2003) suggests for the United Kingdom, emphasizes the effective self-control of parents as caregivers and producers of future citizens. The function of the state is then limited to providing re-education and support through educational lessons and workshops for parents and, for the most difficult cases, provides for coercive measures, such as parenting orders and anti-social behaviour orders aimed at both parents and children. This shift towards the imposition of parental responsibility is part of a broader trend that seeks to ensure that new citizens are fit to engage in a vital project of self-improvement and self-discovery, thereby proving themselves worthy of liberal freedoms (Cain, 2011). Val Gillies (2005) also critically examines public policies’ growing interest in parenting as an object of state intervention, especially in the UK. She also argues that since the 1990s, a normative and moralizing turn has been produced around children, whose parents, especially those from popular working-class sectors, are portrayed as individually responsible for social problems such as crime, school failure, or intergenerational poverty.

In Brazil, Schuch’s (2009) ethnography has already highlighted similar processes of an associated investment in educating mothers and fathers on parenthood, which is also part of the creation of new ethics for citizenship, investing in neoliberal notions of autonomy and protagonism. In her analysis of justice practices in the context of management policies for adolescents in conflict with the law, Schuch (2009) learned that parents and/or guardians of adolescents under socio-educational measures were compulsorily required to attend Parent’s School (EPB). The compulsory attendance expected from parents and/or guardians of adolescents under socio-educational measures can be seen as an indicator of the contemporary dynamics of emphasizing parenthood, as the very judicial measure aimed at adolescents was eventually extended to their parents. At the Parent’s School meetings, parents and/or guardians were invited to share their doubts about their children’s upbringing, as well as to reflect on the type of influence they exert on their children. This was followed by the importance of managing emotions through self-control, self-discipline, respect for and observance of privacy and autonomy of every individual. From a liberal rationality, these values constitute responsible citizens who have duties and must be able to manage themselves (Ong, 2003; Rose, 1999, 2006).

As in the studies by Lister (2003) and Gillies (2005) regarding the United Kingdom, the existence Parent’s School in Brazil suggests a close relationship between the emphasis in parenting and the expansion of a neoliberal rationality in contemporary government practices, which invest in the formation of individual skills and capacities for self-government, but leave little room for the problematization of broader political and structural scenarios and processes (Schuch, 2013). It also suggests that parenting can be understood beyond its associations with moralizing discourses about good parents aimed at protecting and nurturing their children and can also be seen as a productive technology of power (Fonseca et al., 2016). On the one hand, this allows us to illustrate the statement that all reproduction is political (Briggs, 2017; Ginsburg; Rapp, 1995). On the other, to offer a rather interesting range of research questions on the subject: What does it produce? What are its effects? How does it happen?

From family to parenthood

As we can see, the investment of public discourse in “parenthood” also reveals the changes in the way the private sphere operates and addresses public authorities on how they should manage the family issue, increasingly centered on parenting. More than ever, we observe, to paraphrase Ouellette and Goubau (2009), “une pénétration jusque-là inédite des pouvoirs publics” in the dynamics of parenthood. It is the state, herein understood in a broad, deontologizing sense and properly the result of various practices of government that go beyond it (different truths, expertise, institutions, and powers), that regulates decisions regarding who can be a parent and what this family and its parenting dynamics will be like. “In this sense, parentality is not just a moralizing discourse that serves as a medium for normalization, it is also an instrument of government” (Roux; Vozari, 2020, p. 11; see also Roux, 2022; Roux; Vozari, 2018).

In South Africa, as Fiona Ross (2025) shows us, so-called “positive parenting” is used as a way of tackling the inequalities and violence historically ingrained in the country. By this logic, public confrontation of social issues involves promoting changes in the behavior of parents, and parental difficulties are primarily situated in the private sphere, defined as the target of intervention. While this sphere allocates emancipatory expectations, it also increases control over parental management of children’s lives. In turn, these children are perceived through a lens of development and progressive autonomy. Hence the proliferation of projects that emphasize early childhood, understood as a critical period (Fonseca, 2012b), projects in which parental behaviors are classified as positive or negative (Szöke, 2020) in terms of the risk they may pose to children’s well-being (Lee, 2014).

Within the range of this risk, we have the expansion of regulations concerning paternal behavior, in a similar logic to the one Fonseca and Cardarello identified in Brazil in 1999. They studied the categories of admission of children and adolescents under protective measures to shelters in Rio Grande do Sul, before and after the Statute of Children and Adolescents (ECA) of 1990. The Statute legally determined that no child or adolescent would be institutionalized for socioeconomic reasons. However, their study noted that, given the lack of robust state infrastructures beyond shelter measures, and in a context of social inequalities as the case in Brazil, children and adolescents remained under the protective measure of shelter due to circumstances linked to social inequalities. Nonetheless, in the absence of legitimate classification categories for this, social workers classified the reason for admission according to categories that emphasized parents’ and/or guardians’ moral flaws, such as “neglect”, “abuse”, “maltreatment”, and “abandonment”. Fonseca and Cardarello (1999) state that even the very definition of these terms had been modified, leaving no doubt as to who was morally to blame for the need for a judicial shelter measure. According to the authors, “This creates a particular situation in which the notion of ‘citizen child’ is almost inevitably complemented by that of ‘negligent parents’” (Fonseca; Cardarello, 1999, p. 107).

Other studies have also highlighted that when it comes to mothers, there is greater stigmatization and the likelihood of judicial or social sanctions in the name of child protection increases (Simmat-Durand, 2007, 2016). According to Bastard (2006), this unprecedented investment in the notion of parenthood translates into a new type of normative production whose originality lies in the fact that it no longer concerns the family and how to fulfill the roles of couples and family obligations, but rather the role of parents. “Tout se passe en effet comme si la régulation sociale avait ‘déserté’ la question familiale pour occuper le terrain de la parentalité” (Bastard, 2006, p. 5). In this sense, it is possible to observe a shift from the so-called “policing of families” to a “policing of parenthoods”. As Bastard (2006, p. 2) suggests, this means attention and social concerns are shifting away from the family issue stricto sensu to focus on the parent-child relationship. If up until then family was understood as the interpretative key to every social relationship, as Bourdieu (1993) maintained, today that key is parenthood (Neyrand, 2019; Rinaldi; Cruz Rifiotis; Marre, 2024).

In this setting, children become the cornerstone of “family ties”, or, more precisely, of the relationships built in the private sphere. It is no longer marriage that makes a family, but the arrival of a child. Children hence become the core of parenthood. This means that their well-being and rights become the major motivators behind the dynamics of vigilance and care of parents. “La question parentale devient un lieu d’investissement majeur, pour les parentes eux-mêmes, comme pour les professionnels et les institutions” (Bastard, 2006, p. 2).

This does not mean that the idea of supervising parents or training them to play this role is new. In fact, these ideas have many antecedents, from the schools for parents, as mentioned earlier, to the mobilizations of various experts and public authorities in the 20th century, which intended to “save the children” and ensure that parenting practices could produce children of the best possible quality, good and useful citizens. In some countries, they even gained eugenic traits, advocating for forced sterilization. The problem with the idea of “salvation”, especially when supported by a universal language of human rights, is that by mistaking “causes and effects” (in this case, child development), it covers up and even denies the factors that are the real barriers to social justice. Let us recall that when one intends to “save someone”, two issues arise. First, the assumed superiority, and even arrogance, of the one who wants to do the saving. Secondly, when one saves someone else, it is presumed that they are being saved from something and to something (Abu-Lughod, 2012). Something that does not necessarily correspond to those families’ wishes and demands or ways of thinking/practicing care.

Parenting and the social markers of difference

Effectively thinking about the demands of families and the viable ways of combining parenting and social justice seems to us to be the challenge of public policies and government programs today, particularly in Brazil. Ranna Corrêa (2025) demonstrates how black women’s daily activism for access to daycare is linked to other demands related to the care of young children and reflects the needs of the whole community, such as the right to piped water, electricity, and basic sanitation. In other words, these agendas are effectively the causes, not the immediate effects, of the broader issue concerning their children’s right to daycare. The political and community initiatives undertaken by these women prove that parenting is not dissociated from access to adequate standards of living and that the development of a child is not limited to a subjective relationship with their mother. Rather, it concerns a set of daily infrastructures that are fully available to middle-class families. Corrêa’s (2025) research also demonstrates how the processes associated with parenthood and parenting are not homogeneous or consensual, but shaped by differentiations of gender, class, race, ethnicity, ableism, and other social markers of difference.

Letícia Hasteireiter and Laura Lowenkron (2025) also observed the link between parenthood and differences of class and race. The authors show how, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the stereotypes associated with “good motherhood” shaped a moral value shared by working-class women, and how these ideals became a desirable prospect. Thus, the positive value associated with staying at home, stimulating child development, having time to look after and have fun with their children is valued by the - mostly black - women interviewed during the research, who then seek to negotiate socially inferior positions within “reproductive hierarchies”. For this reason, as Hasteireiter and Lowenkron (2025) point out, the possibility for some women from popular working-class backgrounds - particularly those who had access to income, even if minimal - to stay at home and look after their children was not experienced in terms of exhaustion, fatigue, or trouble, as was the case for middle-class women who worked from home and did not have access to carers. For the working-class women, at least those interviewed in the research, the pandemic has not only brought a great fear of infection, but also, paradoxically, the possibility of “inhabiting a gender norm” permeated by ideas of “good motherhood”, a motherhood that for many of them is a historically denied right.

It is worth remembering that contemporary initiatives to supervise and educate parents about children are also disguised as new intervention apparatuses and shaped by specialized knowledges that are transmitted, retransmitted, and amplified by the media, particularly the internet. If, for a long time, the constant attention given to children was not the behavior expected from parents, since care and even surveillance were exercised in a diffuse way by different adults, especially in the working classes, as studies on the circulation of children have shown (Fonseca, 1995; Lallemand, 1993), today, and against a backdrop of neoliberal policies, we witness a change in this collective dimension of child protection towards an individualization of responsibility for care (Fonseca, 2025a; Martin; Leloup, 2020). This individualization of care is accompanied by the intensification of parental guardianship over children. Therefore, parental norm takes on a more constant framework and, at the same time, a pedagogical intention that does not give parents any respite (Pothet, 2024). The current belief is that becoming a mother or father, as Fonseca (2025a) reminds us, should no longer be regarded as a “natural process”, let alone as a matter of simple intuition: on the contrary, one must seek advice from the “experts” or the so-called “parenting coaches”. It is in this sense that the culture of advice and recommendations is pervading the social fabric, spreading particularly in digital communities. The creation of a market that brings together specialists around ideal parenting haunts mothers and fathers, corroborating a managerial logic that pursues performance and simultaneous parental control. This arrangement risks overshadowing the broader, structural dimensions associated with raising children, who themselves are chosen as the main focus of concerns and aspirations, under the banner of the best interests of the child.

Parenting, as a heavily moralized social field, brings together multiple actors who participate in a collective construction of what it means to be or become “good parents” and, ultimately, “good children” as well (Drotbohm; N’Guessan, 2025). In their presentation for a special issue of the journal Ethos, Drotbohm and N’Guessan (2025) describe parenting as a specific form of social practice that includes at least three groups of actors: the parents; the experts - professional or self-appointed, and audiences. It is interesting how the authors map out this field, tracing the specificities (desires, modus operandi, expectations, etc.) of each of these groups. First, the parents, regarding the way they work with their own parenting imaginations; then the experts, who assert themselves as representatives of certain knowledge regimes (through observations, comments, control, and even intervention in parents’ self-perception). A third, more diffuse, group, is the audience, which includes not only other parents and experts, but also relatives, neighbors, strangers in the street… in other words, any spectator in an imagined community of people who apparently observes and judges whether parenting is carried out in the right, good, and appropriate way.

This “typification” reinforces the idea that parenthood is a collective construction that is conditional, contested, and, above all, monitored. It also allows us to identify actors who are rarely seen (such as strangers in the street, in the neighborhood, on public transport, in supermarkets, in health care centers), as well as others, such as representatives of the state, who are often present in this collective imaginary about the normalization of parenthood (as the privileged incarnation of policies aimed at parenthood). However, this “typification” obliterates the fact that the boundaries between these groups are very blurred (it is possible to move between groups: there is a permeability between them). Also, due to their contingent nature and depending on the context, a given actor can situate themselves (build their standpoint) within several groups simultaneously. It is precisely the permeability between these groups what enables reflecting on different appropriations of discourses seemingly situated in specific groups. By extension, the idea of a group shifts the focus of the contemporary problematic of parenting, namely, a way of functioning through diffuse knowledges and practices that obviously exceed national borders.

This is why it seems productive to think about how reproductive governance, understood as the mechanisms by which actors in different historical configurations use certain controls and moral injunctions to produce, monitor, and control reproductive behaviors and population practices, has operated through parenting, not with the intention of giving it a finished outline or form, but rather seeking to trace some characteristics that are shared and highlighted, to a greater or lesser extent, by different countries in recent times.

Apparatuses of parenting support

Support for parenting as an apparatus of social management became more widespread at the end of the 1990s, in association with public policies for child protection. Although parenting generally refers to being a parent, policies focused on parenting are mainly aimed at economically vulnerable families. As Jessica Pothet (2015) suggests, support for parents in this context is ambivalent and, as mentioned above, may translate into moralizing criticism of family life, along the lines of what Donzelot (1986) observed in French social policy in the 1970s. In Brazil, parenting support is supposed to be transversal and intersectoral. It is also less institutionalized than in other countries, where support is defined by this very purpose. The transversal and intersectoral aspect observed in Brazil refers to parenting as a basis for public policies in social assistance, health, education, and justice. Observation, as in the case of home visits and assisted or supervised visits, and guidance in groups or workshops for parents are the main actions that reflect the goal of supporting parenting. The emphasis of these practices is on guidance and assessment of parenting skills. The assessment range can be quite broad: it may include the history of the parents’ family relationships, beyond the present time of childcare, and correspond to the assessment of future risks. As we can see, guidance and assessment update practices of advising and giving recommendations as they are legitimized by the intent of guaranteeing rights and prioritizing the best interests of the child.

In addition to the acknowledgment of parents and their role, there is a normative call for parental responsibilities and educational duties. In Brazil, these are expressed in legislation by the Statute of the Child and Adolescent. As the literature referred here (Bastard 2006; Pothet 2015, 2024, among others) highlights, parenting support is ambiguous in terms of valuing parenting competences, which would involve recognizing a plurality of parenting styles/ways of parenting; and assessing parenting competences based on a certain model, which presupposes skills to be acquired. The “good parenting”, advocated in the name of the best interests of the child, or the “positive parenting”, stated as desirable for children’s development, correspond to the prescription of practices that presupposes certain material conditions, as well as a moral regime centered on reflecting on children upbringing and expressing feelings (Fonseca, 2012a; Pothet, 2015; Schuch, 2013).

In a country with deep inequalities such as Brazil, basing the assessment of parenting skills on parameters pertaining to the possibilities and parenting styles of the middle-classes tends to reproduce biases and put some professionals on the spot. In the field of child protection, professional activity is subject to pressures: both social and those related to institutional hierarchies, particularly in the health and justice sectors. The hegemonic representations of the fathers of institutionalized children, for example, even though they have changed historically, remain tainted by very negative stereotypes (Fonseca, 2012a; Ribeiro, 2012). The different ideas of parents of children assisted by the child protection system - perceived either as incapable and guilty, or as people who need help more than anything - in addition to differentiating the recommended modes of intervention, can place professionals in tough dilemmas.

The coexistence between an educational or helping logic and a repressive or punitive one is repeatedly identified as a characteristic of the child protection system and, particularly, of the meanings attributed to actions focused on parenting (Fonseca; Schuch, 2009). In specific contexts, factors such as the scarcity of resources, precarious working conditions, pressure for results, and the need for answers are associated with professionals falling ill. Based on interviews with psychologists and social workers of the Children and Youth Courts in the state of São Paulo, Janaína Gomes (2022) identified the great anguish and occupational illness caused by the distance between the families’ material needs and what professionals can effectively offer, which often leads to the removal of children.

The opposition between the logic of transience that underpins institutional and family foster care and the logic of permanence that underpins adoption also produces dilemmas in the field of child protection. In situations where family reintegration is not considered viable by professionals, this rigid separation exposes the insufficiency and limits of parenting support. Irene Salvo Agoglia and Beatriz San Román Sobrino (2025) address the controversies, inconsistencies, and tensions that are made explicit when the transitional condition expected of foster care does not prevail and adoption by foster families is not on the cards. When the planned itinerary is not followed, these families’ intention to adopt is met with obstacles that expose a state of liminality (legal, institutional, affective, and relational) that lingers on and affects the subjectivities of everyone involved.

Parenthood and the psychologization of the social

The move towards a “policing of parenting” is due to several factors, such as the pressure exerted by the media and the political sphere to flag up and sanction the shortcomings, drifts, and abuses committed by parents, and the spread of psychological knowledge and its radicalization toward the issue of parenthood (Bastard, 2006). In the interests of children’s well-being, and in the wake of a movement towards the “psychologization of the social”, surveillance of parents is becoming even more pronounced (due to the possible risks of dysfunctional parent-child relationships, maltreatment, etc.). Psychologization of the social or society is understood here as the way psychological sciences become part of reproductive governance in the sense of providing not only a whole linguistic repertoire for us to understand ourselves, but also a range of ways of rendering socio-political problems intelligible and qualifying programs to tackle them (Rose, 2010).

The presence of the psychological sciences in the weaving of this grammar of the social is certainly not new. On the contrary, it has already reached its peak throughout the 20th century. The difference today, especially regarding parenthood, is in the combination of these ways of thinking: psychological and neurobiological. In an interview from 2010, Nikolas Rose pondered on the likelihood of the psychological complex being superseded by the neurobiological. However, what we have seen in practices aimed at protecting children and adolescents in Brazil, as well as in other countries, is a rather potent combination (and not supersedure) of these two ways of thinking. In this sense the focus on neurosciences does not exclude the psychological sciences but rather enhances and expands their presence. The projects for early intervention to support children at risk and prevent later issues remain expressed in psychological language as much as they are reinforced, or reframed, as Rose (2010) says, in terms of the implications of mother-child interaction for the development of the child’s brain.

Fonseca’s (2025b) article on science and policies for children in Brazil offers a critical analysis of this articulation. Tracing the movements that led to the implementation of a World Bank program for early childhood development (an ECD program known as PIM - Primeira Infância Melhor) in Rio Grande do Sul, the author notes that by the 2000s some kind of consensus emerged on the importance of early childhood care in terms of developing children’s cognitive and emotional skills. The program is based on weekly home visits to low-income families (with children and/or pregnant women). In general, the program aims to strengthen the emotional bond required for the development of children’s cognitive and emotional abilities. The reflection we propose here is interested in the speeches of the world-renowned advocate of ECD, Canadian medical researcher and creator of the Early Childhood Centers network, Fraser Mustard, regarding not only the importance of maternal affection for the normal development of a baby’s brain, but, above all, parenting as an explanatory key for Brazil’s high levels of illiteracy and poor school performance.

However, this logic of a reductionist fixation on parenting skills, which inspires the program, tends to exclude other considerations, namely: 1) the insistence on teaching parenting skills overlooks the fact that all over the world, and especially in low-income populations, a high number of mothers work outside the home; 2) it seems to ignore decades of research in the fields of psychology and pedagogical sciences aimed at the professionalization of early childhood education in pre-schools and nurseries; 3) the programs are propagated through a universalist model of family organization. Fueled by advances in psychoanalytic research and contributions from neuroscience, PIM disseminates the norms of positive parenting, inviting mothers, especially, to become reflective individuals, capable of “producing” self-sufficient and successful children. Fonseca’s (2025b) work shows us how these educational concepts, forged in other contexts and with universal aspirations, become the ones that progressively prevail in public action and in apparatuses of parenting support (Pothet, 2015).

Among the upper classes, as Viviane Coelho Caldeira Ramos (2025) shows us, parental training becomes yet another source of products and services meant to be purchased. Based on research carried out on two fronts (analysis of materials aimed at parents of young children and the reception of normative discourse by a specific group), the author shows us how the need for parents to be informed in order to perform their caregiving roles has been stressed in recent times, having science, and especially neuroscience, as the basis for its arguments from authority. Despite the diversity of materials analyzed, the author observes the dissemination of a “single science” and, consequently, of an equally single model of care that serves as the benchmark for a series of moral judgments.

Following this process of psychologizing of the social, we observe the emergence of a whole vocabulary associated with parenting. In this lexicon, the systematic presence of two terms draws our attention: trauma and attachment. And at this point, the examples of adoption support groups, as well as the space for meetings to prepare candidates for adoption and follow-up work with families of children who are in institutional care, seem very emblematic to us. It is important to remember that the adoption scenario today, in Brazil and in the world, sees a significant drop in international adoptions and, consequently, a return to national adoptions (Fonseca, 2019). This “inversion” is followed by a change in the profile of the children “available” for adoption: older children, children with (more or less severe, treatable or otherwise) illnesses, groups of siblings, and children with disabilities. This means that these are children who, particularly from the point of view of adoption assistance services, carry memories of a lived experience generally described as painful and traumatic.

Trauma is largely associated with “abandonment” and experiences with the birth family. Little is said about the foster care journey as also being a place of “traumatic memories”. And even more rarely do we hear about traumas resulting from adoptive experiences, that is, about unsuccessful/failed adoptions. Maria Luisa Célia Escalona de Dios and Suliane Cardoso (2025) retrace the journey of a young woman who lived in institutional care, was adopted at the age of six, had her adoption dissolved at the age of fifteen on the initiative of her adoptive parents, and returned to institutional care, where she remained until the age of eighteen. The young woman’s memories and living conditions show the profound emotional and social impacts of the multiple parenting ruptures she has experienced throughout her life, not only relative to her birth family, but also to her adoptive family and parenting in an institutional context.

From the point of view of specialists (especially child psychiatrists) and professionals, “traumas” caused by abandonment make it difficult for children to establish a bond with their adoptive parents. As Anne-Marie Piché (2011) has rightly pointed out, there is a tendency to interpret the establishment of the adoptive relationship from the perspective of the attachment theory, which makes this dimension of the “bond” problematic from the outset from the perspective of what individuals can do and how they create kinship and carry out parenting.

The presence of these two concepts (trauma and attachment) certainly reveals an important movement towards understanding and listening to suffering that was not previously acknowledged. However, this psychologizing perspective poses certain limitations, especially when it comes to its articulation with the broader context of child protection policies. In view of this finding, it seems productive to think about trauma, in dialog with Fassin and Rechtman (2011), not from a clinical point of view, but from an anthropological one, in order to understand how it is thought of, lived and experienced in society, in a nuanced way. This shift in perspective helps us understand trauma not just as an individual phenomenon, but as a “wound” that, although experienced individually, bears witness to something collective. So, it grants visibility and inserts the stories of children available for adoption into the broader event of adoptions as a form of contemporary reproductive governance, which is strongly intersected by social, political, and moral issues, as Laura Briggs (2012, 2017) suggests.

Considering assistance to parents (especially those in situations of vulnerability), we may think that the investment in parenting also operates on the level of the “word”. Instead of a relationship of authority to regulate conduct, we observe a “government by word of mouth”. From this perspective, these parents are called upon to “narrate” themselves, to construct their journey and give it meaning, be it in individual meetings with psychologists and social workers, or in group sessions; before a judge and legal practitioners; at the Guardianship Council, etc. As Fassin and Memmi (2004, p. 83) note: “Il y a là une véritable pédagogie, non autoritaire, cohérente avec celle qui s’exerce par la parole”. It is possible to think of a shift from “body policing” to “report policy”, the aim of which is precisely to biographically monitor individuals so that they can be included in social policies (Memmi, 2000, p. 15).

This means that, today, public authorities which traditionally had the vocation of producing homogeneity in the social body are increasingly penetrating the managing of both biological and biographical existences (Fassin; Memmi, 2004). Public action has become inciting. It solicits subjectivities and also, as (Vrancken, 2008, p. 9) points out: “Elle multiplie les lieux où se voient de plus en plus convoqués les récits biographiques des personnes en vue d’obtenir des prestations sociales”. So, parents are repeatedly invited, in a number of situations and before different professionals, to narrate their family experiences, the reasons that led them to foster their children, what they are doing to become good parents, their commitment and investment in changing their parenting style. And it’s important to say that this process of narrating does not always happen in the same way for everybody:

[…] se dire, se mettre en mots, se raconter, n’est jamais un processus dont la maîtrise est également distribuée. Au contraire, il est toujours le résultat d’une place et d’un rapport au discours (sur moi et sur le monde) socialement positionné (Roux, 2022, p. 103).

Infrastructures of parenthood: “Diagnostic technologies”, documents, and dossiers

How can we detect failures in parental function? How to anticipate and act preventively? Or, rather, based on which dimensions and indicators can we assess whether parenting is being correctly carried out or, on the contrary, is causing damage which, according to the evidence produced, will be irreversible and leave lasting marks on the children? If the “parenting issue” has become central and is currently relevant both to the development of public policies and to the proliferation of advice and prescriptive messages aimed at good parenting, identifying its deficits becomes imperative. Parenting, having become the subject of regulation, public intervention, and analysis, will also be subject to diagnoses that allow the anticipation of risks associated with its poor performance. Thus, not only do interventions tend to be preventive and early, targeting children at an increasingly young age, and their parents, before serious issues arise (Hopman; Knijn, 2015), but also various diagnostic technologies have emerged in the process. In one way or another, these diagnostic technologies seek to attend to these questions. In other words, if the deficits associated with incompetent parenting are directly linked to the future success of children and of society too, one of the concerns raised is: How can we obtain indisputable data that will allow us to tackle and put an end to these parental incompetencies or sanction those who demonstrate deficient or incompetent parenting?

A series of categories have been devised, stabilized, and given meaning. If, as we learned some time ago from Foucault (1996), social practices engender domains of knowledge that not only give rise to new objects, concepts, and techniques, but also to new forms of subjects and subjects of knowledge, “parental skills” have become a measurable object in the process. Defined as the set of psycho-affective, cognitive, and social skills that enable parents or caregivers to guarantee the well-being, integral development, and protection of their children, various works from the psy disciplines argue that parental skills can also be measured, pinned down, and/or evaluated (Barudy; Dartagnan, 2010).

A series of protocols, guidelines, and tests have been drawn up to detect and identify potential deficits in the exercise of parental functions and then develop new interventions within the family group with the aim of guaranteeing “the best interests of the child”. They seek to measure parental skills through scales and classifications that allow them - or so they postulate - to accurately determine the circumstances in which these competences are not developed or cannot be developed, and to register the weaknesses and strengths of parental figures. The aim is to determine whether these competences are enough to meet children’s needs, and to ascertain whether children are or may be in a situation of risk and vulnerability.

One amongst the many manuals on positive parenting designed as a guide for the different institutional agents who attend families once labelled as at risk of violating their children’s rights suggests, it is necessary to identify vulnerability factors and consider various “psychosocial stressors”, such as “poverty, unemployment, family disorganization, violent neighborhoods and relationship crises” (Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar, 2021, p. 6, our translation), which impact good parenting. A quick search reveals that guides, manuals, and tests to determine whether parenting is competent or incompetent have proliferated in several countries and are now part of the resources available to psychologists and social workers who need diagnoses or expert opinions to judicially determine whether these parents are fit to continue raising their children. Although it is safe to assume that these technologies are not applied linearly, their expansion and the replication of terms that structure an arsenal of diagnostic categories are astounding.

There are three main models for assessing parenting skills used in legal contexts (Choate; Lindstrom, 2018), which have been developed in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. All of them are clinical approaches used in family courts and other child protection agencies. They have a series of activities in common, such as background checks; psychometric tests; observations of the father, the mother, and the child; as well as interviews with the child. These activities are used to determine whether parents are competent enough to raise their children, if they need some sort of support or intervention, or whether their parental rights should be revoked.

However, in their analysis of the application of the Parenting Capacity Assessments (PCA) in the context of Canadian courts, Peter Choate and Gabrielle Lindstrom (2018) argue that the ideas of family informing this technology were mostly Euro-Western. Thus, when applied in contexts of ethnic and cultural diversity, they replicate colonial attitudes towards indigenous and peripheral populations, assuming that their parenting practices are inadequate. These psychometric tests do not include indicators that consider the socio-political realities in which these populations live (difficulty in accessing services, poverty, various forms of exclusion, etc.), nor do they consider their family structures and parental arrangements. They focus mainly on the nuclear family and the parent-child dyadic relationship, disregarding relationships with other relatives and the community. It is no coincidence that, in Canada, indigenous populations are significantly over-represented in the child protection system. These are culturally biased methodologies which, inspired by theories such as the attachment theory, are based on a series of theoretical assumptions that limit the possibility of understanding other forms of parenthood. However, they are usually presented under a veil of scientism, or rather, “technocertainty” - in the words of China Scherz (2011) - therefore, with universal and timeless validity.

These assessments, which use standardized approaches to determine the strengths and limitations of parenting skills, are considered valuable in various institutional contexts, especially those where workers are pressed to predict what will happen to the child. Consequently, actuarial risk assessment methods have been gaining ground in the United States as a way of certifying these assessment processes and neutralizing the arbitrariness or lack of transparency that social workers or other actors may have when determining a protection measure. The use of risk assessment tools transforms an essentially political problem into a question of technical diagnosis, reformulating it in the neutral language of science (Dreyfus; Rabinow, 1988). This conversion creates the appearance of rationality, inspires certainty, and generates trust.

However, when assessing parenting in contexts of poverty, it becomes clear that these psychologizing technical-legal discourses can lead to low-income parents receiving stigmatizing diagnoses, which end up justifying punitive interventions or family separation measures. Thus, instead of addressing the material and structural conditions that affect parenting (poor housing, institutional violence, lack of access to health services, etc.), difficulties are pathologized as if they were the result of individual disorders or subjective deficiencies (Llobet, 2014). This psychologization thus turns social problems into clinical problems, lifting the responsibility of the state (Villalta, 2021).

Moreover, as it has already been critically expressed, the term “parenting” is also an effective euphemism for the gender inequalities that permeate childcare and upbringing. Thus, the assessment of parenting competences silences the fact that the mothers are the ones tested, assessed, judged, and, in many cases, incapacitated. As Ruth Cain (2011) has argued, when examining judicial processes in the UK family courts, the majority of so-called “bad parents” are women. In fact, as documented by various ethnographies on the child protection system developed in both Argentina and Brazil (Alves; Rui, 2022; Barna, 2015; Cerletti; Santillán, 2018; Grinberg, 2017; Larrea, 2024; Llobet; Villalta, 2019; Ribeiro, 2012; Sarmento, 2021; Villalta, 2021), there is a frequent use of categories such as “negligent mother”, “unloving mother”, or “mother with pathological traits” reproduced without the least regard for the social, economic, or contexts of gender violence many of these women experience. Therefore, the uncritical use of psychometric tests and protocols to determine parenting capacities provides a technical and professional language that not only depoliticizes social problems, but, more often than not, naturalizes and pathologizes inequality, converting situations of poverty into indicators of “parental unfitness”.

Diagnostic tests and protocols, therefore, do not simply neutrally reproduce certain realities, but are powerful instruments of their construction. This discussion should also consider important infrastructures (Star, 1999) that configure parenting, as they are related to a set of managerial practices of emancipation and/or parental control. However, like any infrastructure, they are not static artifacts. They can only be understood in their relational and ecological dimension, as they have different meanings for different groups (Star, 1999). So understood, they can also be compared to the role of documents in the fabric of parenthood. Be it in guides/manuals and guidelines, or in forms and dossiers, parenthood is permeated by a set of bureaucracies: procedures that are documented and define the lives of parents and children alike.

Dossiers, not in the least neutral agents in this fabrication, convey information about the parents, the circumstances of termination of family authority, hearings, etc. They create and mediate categories ratified by the state and also reflect political and ethical positions, points of view on family, kinship, and parenthood, which circumscribe what was recorded therein to be “found”, while also acting as a backdrop for the institution of such political and ethical positions (Carsten, 2000). As Fonseca and Scalco (2015) have already shown, documents are the product of institutional mediations and, insofar as they are fundamental actors in the making of meanings and effects, they also have biographies that can be mapped and investigated and are not static objects. Likewise, as Ferreira and Lowenkron (2020) caution, documents do not simply find their validity in research due to their content, but in relation to the very activity of documenting. Beyond their informational and instrumental dimensions, document analysis must consider how they also produce unique relationships, knowledges, and effects (Vianna, 2003). In this sense, not only what is present in the documents is relevant, but also what is absent - for example, in a file, lawsuit, or service registration number (Muzzopappa; Villalta, 2011).

In these cases, examining the gaps, silenced voices, and small gestures of resistance from those in the margins of official knowledge evokes an important ethical sense: expanding the limits of hegemonic perspectives and processes and inscribing possible negotiations and disputes over parenting and parenthood. In a way, this is the bet we have placed throughout this article, by critically analyzing parenthood and its complexity in the context of reproductive governance, emphasizing its constitution, fundamental tensions and processes, devices and infrastructures. These contributions are meant to be known, debated, and disseminated, not only to produce greater and better knowledge on the academic domain of parenthood, but also to produce reflective outcomes as regards practices and public policies in this area of intervention.

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• 1
  The term “fosterage” is introduced in Marcel Mauss’s work on the gift, to clarify missionary George Turner’s mistake in calling a “adopted” a child who was taken in to be raised by a husband and his wife after the birth celebrations. For Mauss, it is not adoption, but fosterage [child rearing], since it refers to the displacement or temporary placement (for the purposes of caring for, feeding, and nurturing) of the child with the birth father’s sister and her husband (uterine uncle and brother-in-law).
• 2
  See Brasil (2014).

Data availability

Not applicable.

Edited by

• Editors
  Ruben George Oliven - https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3556-6955
  Arlei Sander Damo - https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4368-6754
  Jean Segata - https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2544-0745

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  10 Nov 2025
• Date of issue
  Sep-Dec 2025