Professor Carol Vincent gets the 2012 Professorial Lecture series underway with a thought provoking talk drawing on research projects conducted over the last twelve years. The lecture will explore factors identified in current policy, media, and other social and political forums as the risks and responsibilities of contemporary parenting, with a particular focus on parents' engagement with schooling and teachers. Professor Vincent argues that there is a fundamental need for researchers and practitioners to deconstruct common sense understandings of what constitute "good" parental behaviour in relation to schools and other educational settings, and instead to seek to engage with the diversity of perspectives which families from different social class and ethnic groups bring to the education of their children, and the differential resources with which they equip those children.