Cautious Capitals: Parenting Autistic Children at Mainstream School

Family social class background significantly influences parents’ relationships with schools, yet the intersection of class with disability is often overlooked. This study draws on qualitative interviews with 17 majority middle-class parents of autistic young people attending mainstream schools in England, highlighting how social class and disability shape those relationships. Parents actively engaged in their children’s education, deploying economic, social and cultural capitals, and developed expertise in autism to advocate for necessary support and avoid their children falling behind. However, they often felt their efforts were discredited and that they were subject to schools’ expectations of how parents and children ‘should’ behave. This led to parents internalizing blame, and exercising self-surveillance to uphold their identities as ‘good’ parents and not jeopardize support. Theoretically, integrating a Bourdieusian approach within a Foucauldian framing enhances understanding of how parents’ privileged positionings can be weakened by schools’ interpretation of their children’s difference.