Browse
This article analyses how universal parenting courses for first-time parents in Danish municipalities represent measures to cultivate parents’ skills in ‘how to parent’. The aim of such courses is to support all new parents in the transition to parenthood, to teach parents about early child development, and to guide parents in managing their emotions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, we address how the courses end up addressing a particular form of parenting (risk attuned, educated, science based) as well as a particular kind of parental self (reflective, responsible, sensible). We discuss how a therapeutic grammar imposes a new conformity on parents, and how neuro-claims form the basis for recommendations about child development and parent-child interactions. We also critically assess how mothers, in particular, are encouraged to work on and manage their maternal selves.
Centring around the idea of archiving the self, this childhood narrative challenges several dominant perceptions and representations of upbringing in colonial and post-colonial India. Through lived experiences, it registers family-induced trauma that is not a consequence of a larger sociopolitical crisis. After contextualising the childhood narrative as a departure from the prevailing familiar discourse, there are three interrelated motifs in this self-excavating project.
The first is to establish the nature of the humiliation inflicted by a vindictive mother on her husband and children – which sharply contradicts with the much-celebrated compassionate mother figure. This recount documents how gender roles were reversed and the male subjects were dehumanised. Oppression was tolerated and internalised. Criticisms were either denied or condemned, silenced and punished. Second, to document the nature of the oppression through recalling, revisiting and writing, thus recognising and recasting the resistance and resilience through public reiteration. Third, the family is established as a site of coercion, cruelty, suffering and exploitation as opposed to a presumed site of nurture, care and affection.
This recount is divided into two sections. The first narrates the abusive behaviour of the mother towards her husband and son. The other section locates the self – subjected to discipline and punishment, coldness and insensitivity, indifference and abandonment – and devoid of affection, dignity and recognition from both my parents. This article emerged out of an obligation to acknowledge the injustice and to publicise the endurance and defiance through self-excavation. This narrative gives voice to bitter childhood experiences that we are encouraged to forgive or forget, in order to retain silence around childhood trauma – particularly when a mother is the violator of a child’s rights.
This article examines young people’s attitudes towards parental involvement in paid work and their association with two channels of intergenerational transmission – parents’ employment arrangements and gender ideologies – the relative importance of these channels and if young people’s gender moderates the association. The data came from a German two-wave panel study of 609 adolescents (aged 15–21) surveyed in 2018 and their mothers in 2013–15. Analyses show that young people’s preferred weekly working hours for mothers were positively related to their parents’ employment arrangements and gender ideologies four years earlier. In contrast, the more progressive their mother’s gender ideology was, the fewer working hours young people preferred for fathers. The two transmission channels were nearly equally important and their impact did not differ between female and male adolescents. Our findings suggest that the intergenerational transmission of gender roles might be one of multiple factors contributing to stalling trends in gender equality.
Families are an expected haven for their members but can present threats in some contexts. Part of a large-scale PhD study with 101 participants, empirical findings on the roles played by families in encouraging sex trafficking in Edo, Nigeria, are presented here. Using in-depth interviews and group discussions, data were elicited from actors within trafficking in persons. Core findings included the exploitation of roles and responsibilities in families towards enabling sex trafficking, the abuse of shared meanings of family in communities and the exploitation of vulnerable families. Vulnerable families were identified as lacking fathers or those whose parents were older adults and/or uneducated. Thus, poor women in such families were at greater risk of being trafficked. For a conceptual understanding of these family roles in sex trafficking, we employed structure–agency insights. In all, anti-sex trafficking interventions must begin with families as the smallest unit of interventions.
Young people who experience out-of-home care have typically encountered difficult and/or disrupted family relationships. This article reports on a survey undertaken in the US with 215 young adults (aged 18–22) who experienced out-of-home care starting in pre-adolescence. The article examines responses to an open-ended interview question, ‘How do you define family?’ The analysis highlighted that few young people define family as confined to blood relations. More commonly, young people adopted more flexible definitions, prioritising the ‘doing’ and reflecting on their conceptions of family; attempting to ‘do family’ differently from what they had experienced was also evident. The findings encourage consideration of the utility of family as an important concept for child welfare practice, as positive and flexible understandings of family were imbued with a sense of agency, identity, belonging and overall wellbeing.
In Chile, low-income women who are mothers are confronted daily with a normative ideal that exacerbates them as caregivers, together with public demands and social policies that value their hyper-rationality and hyper-austerity in the management of their families. This emphasis on their reproductive roles obliterates their emerging sense of intimacy and significant relations. Based on three case studies, in this article, we reflect on urban low-income women’s sense of and desire for intimacy that exceeds but does not exclude their maternal self. We present our findings based on three heuristic aspects of intimacy: rooted strategies for a renovated desire for intimacy; the desire to enjoy; and life outside the house and the desire for meaningful relations. We observe that these women’s efforts in their search for intimacy require them to orchestrate various strategies involving time and space management, money and relationships while resisting the normative pressures that place them mainly as caregivers.
This paper draws upon a qualitative, exploratory study in Austria, Portugal, Denmark and England to argue that the role of digitally mediated ties in parents’ social networks is significantly shaped by offline contexts, crucible moments and transitional events in parenting journeys. The paper draws upon qualitative interviews conducted with parents across 16 families, four in each nation, to draw out how parents’ abilities to participate in, benefit from, and contribute to online networks – amidst an array of groups, forums and chat groups – is often restrained and shaped by offline factors. Particularly, the paper pays attention to transitional moments – not necessarily formal transitions, but nonetheless key events in parenting journeys which shape the course taken by digitally mediated parent networks, amidst widely uneven contexts of family support systems across the countries in the study.
COVID-19-related social lockdowns had profound consequences in all aspects of social life, yet technology’s role in mediating relationships during lockdown has received little attention. Drawing on a survey of 565 young adults in the UK, we used mixed methods to explore (a) differences in technology use by people in serious romantic relationships (cohabiting vs. living apart together), casual relationships or single; and (b) how COVID-19 influenced long-term, serious relationships. For participants in a serious relationship, technology was used as a strategy to facilitate ongoing communication, enabling partners to achieve ‘intimacy from afar’. Qualitative analysis revealed five reasons (more free time, navigating lockdown restrictions, greater boredom, desire for love and miscellaneous) for online dating profile usage changes. People in serious relationships perceived deeper intimate bonds, boundary issues, less physical intimacy, difficulty with lockdown separation and greater negative impact because of COVID-19. Limitations and implications are discussed.
This study explores how LGBTQ parents in Finland account for the role of financial resources in their family-forming process before the child is born or otherwise joins the family. Semi-structured, thematic, face-to-face interviews (n=18) were conducted, audio-recorded, transcribed and analysed with reflexive thematic analysis. The study expands our understanding of financial resources in the family-forming processes of prospective LGBTQ parents and identifies the diversity of the meanings of financial resources experienced by the informants. It can be stated that the role of financial resources appears not only as a concrete need for money to have children but also as a resource that influences decision making and legal aspects during LGBTQ family-forming processes. However, it is not enough to look only at resources; it is equally important to consider the capabilities of individuals. The reconfigurations of family relations were connected to financial decisions and the importance of society’s support in terms of financial resources was essential.
Presently and historically, working-class mothers have been positioned as problematic. Their children’s low attainment is blamed on perceived deficiencies in their parenting. Tied to this, the concept of the ‘word gap’ has been used to demonstrate a language deficit, which it is claimed leads to working-class children starting school behind their middle-class peers. These concepts are central tenets to the BBC’s Tiny Happy People website which was analysed to ascertain current ‘good’ mothering discourses. This critical discourse analysis considers the authorship of the website and the BBC’s status as commissioning editor, alongside its key concept: addressing the word gap. Tiny Happy People’s target audience are parents from lower socioeconomic groups. Together with the content of the website, this framing will be used to consider Tiny Happy People’s approach to the perceived problem and how that may affect working-class mothers.
