Psychology no longer functions as a ‘foundational’ discourse that frames normal and abnormal behaviour, but as Nikolas Rose argued, as a technology to help to construct an autonomous, self-regulating or self-governing citizen. The general aim of education is no longer to help to know oneself in relation to a final end that can be known, instead it is more and more about informing us how to know oneself in relation to an endless accumulation and transformation of knowledge. In this changed experience of time and space the parent does not appear as someone who knows what is good or bad for the child, someone who punishes and disciplines, but as someone who has to supply, demand and use advice and information necessary to learn how to manage oneself in a permanently changing environment. Social science research then, does not in the first place operate as an instrument to constitute the normal, but as a governmental technology (next to others) that serves the permanent need for consultancy and support (to enable and stimulate parents to make the right choices in life). The purpose of the project described in this part of the symposium is to argue that this need and support can be regarded as an effect of a strategic configuration that generates a dysfunctional subject. The need for parental support will be used as a case to describe this particular kind of subjectivity that it presupposes.