How (not) to feel: culture and the politics of emotion in the American parenting advice literature

This interpretive critique of the US parenting advice literature explores the underlying cultural values and assumptions concerning emotion and power that are revealed in discourses on child behavior management. The analysis reveals a clear emphasis on the pedagogical and therapeutic role of an emotionally knowledgeable parent in relation to a deficient child. Parents are supposed to teach the child how to handle negative emotions through explicit strategies such as labeling, verbalization, and therapeutic listening, many of which are imbued with cultural and class bias. While emotions appear to be valued, the underlying subtext is one of emotional control and disengagement. The discourse can be read as a window on a contemporary politics of emotion in which freedom of expression and regulation of the self exist in uneasy tension, and in which emotions represent a dangerous terrain of social dis/order.