The last thirty years of scholarship on parent–child relationships in England have been shaped by Lawrence Stone's narrative of evolution in family life. He identified three successive family types between 1500 and 1800, in which parents' emotional attitudes towards their children played a central role in distinguishing the different stages from one another, changing over time from indifference to devotion. Stone's broader thesis has been dismantled, with patriarchy, courtship, married life, kinship, and relationships between parents and offspring coming under close scrutiny. ‘Revisionists’ attacked Stone's problematic and limited use of sources and demolished his chronological thesis by showing that the early modern family was as affectionate as its eighteenth-century successor. The debate has entered a ‘post-revisionist’ phase in the last decade, shaped by gender, the inter-active relationship between cultural forces and everyday life, and the influence of both material and emotional factors on people's actions, and also by the attempt to uncover historical subjects' agency and dismantle simplistic concepts such as public and private.

Parent–child relationships, however, have still not moved beyond the revisionist phase. Though many aspects of childhood studies have developed in sophisticated and stimulating ways, research into parenting has continued to ‘measure’ the degree of parental affection and emotional intimacy through the same key milestones: pregnancy and childbirth (including infanticide and abandonment); infant-care practices; discipline; child-independence (training and education); marriage-making; and finally death.