The Residual Parent to Come: on the need for parental expertise and advice.

In this essay, Nancy Vansieleghem starts from the observation that parents nowadays are addressed as individuals in need of parental expertise and advice. She maintains that the notion that we are living in a permanently changing society has created a context in which parents feel that they no longer "know" what is good or bad for their children. On this view, parents need to learn how to manage their parenthood. Vansieleghem questions the need for expertise and advice that is characteristic of our new mode of understanding parenting. In developing her argument, she borrows from Michel Foucault the notion "figure"-in this case, the type of parents who understand themselves as in need of expertise in order to respond to their children-and she draws further on Giorgio Agamben's analysis of the state of exception. Vansieleghem concludes by detailing the figure of the residual self as one that understands parental care as something that can and should be managed beyond concepts such as "disciplinary power" and "normalization."