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42 Critical Soc. Pol'y 3 (2022)

handle is hein.journals/critsplcy42 and id is 1 raw text is: Article Nobody's Perfect: Making sense of a parenting skills workshop through ethnographic research in a low-income neighbourhood in Santiago de Chile MARJORIE MURRAY Pontificia Universidad Cat6lica de Chile, Chile DANIELA TAPIA London School of Economics and Political Science, England Abstract Nadie es Perfecto (Nobody's Perfect, or NEP) is a parenting skills work- shop aimed at 'sharing experiences and receiving guidance on everyday problems to strengthen child development'. This article explores this workshop in terms of its relationship with the daily lives of participants, based on one year of fieldwork focused on families with young children in a low-income neighbourhood in Santiago. While caregivers frame their parenting efforts as aiming to 'hacer lo mejor posible' (do their best) under difficult circumstances, our study found that facilitators take an anachronistic and homogenizing view of participants. Embracing a uni- versalistic perspective of child development, they discourage partici- pation and debate, focusing instead on providing concrete advice that limits the potential of the workshops. This article argues that by ignoring the different living situations of families in this socioeconomic context, NEP reproduces a prejudiced view of poor subjects that sees them as deficient and incapable of change. Corresponding author: Marjorie Murray, School of Anthropology, Pontificia Universidad Cat6lica de Chile, Campus San Joaquin, Avenida Vicuna, Mackenna 4860, Macul, Santiago, Chile. Email: mmurray@uc.cl Critical Social Policy 2022, Vol. 42(1): 3-21 © The Author(s) 2021 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0261018320983988 journals.sagepub.com/home/csp OSAGE