We Don’t Need No Education: Parents are Doing it For Themselves

This paper will provide a brief history of parent education and a postmodern critique of its origins and methods.

Description

Parent education has existed in some form in this country since the early nineteenth century and is considered a typical task of family therapy.  Based on modernist notions of a universal construction of childhood and informed by the theories from which developmental psychology emerged, parent education has been critiqued as representing Eurocentric, middle-class values.  This paper will provide a brief history of parent education and a postmodern critique of its origins and methods.  An alternative narrative therapy practice that brings forward parents’ insider knowledge is reviewed and presented in a case vignette of a session with the parents of a 10-year-old boy.