Parenting ideals and (un-)troubled parent positions

Abstract

This paper examines how some Swedish parents constructed meanings of parenthood. The parents had completed a state-sponsored parenting programme and were interviewed about their experiences of the programme, their everyday lives, their need for support, ideas about the societal context, and their understandings of 'good' and 'bad' parents. The study was grounded in a discourse-analytical tradition and concepts from discursive psychology guided the analysis. When the interviewees described good parents as responsible and engaged, they related to dominant discourses where middle-class values of involvement and ideals of intensive motherhood intersect. The descriptions of bad parenting were also classed and gendered, representing bad parents as irresponsible and uncaring, as not setting limits, and as not spending enough time with their children. The parents represented themselves in various ways as responsible parents, i.e. an untroubled subject position, but also handled troubled parent positions related to notions of gender and social class.

An Assessment of Two Parenting Training Manuals Used in Swedish Parenting Interventions

“…A few research studies have concentrated on the content of parenting training manuals. Widding () and Pharès () are two Nordic examples of research that is concerned with values in parenting training. The purpose of the present study was to reveal how current parenting strategies are outlined in two parenting training manuals.…”

The concept of «intensive parenthood» in foreign literature

“…Высокий уровень образования: поскольку матерям в модели интенсивного родительства часто приходится анализировать различные источники информации и консультироваться со специалистами, им бывает необходимо получать новые знания и совершенствовать себя в образовательной сфере. [25] В исследованиях Гименез-Надаль и Севилья отмечается, что матери, придерживающиеся линии интенсивного родительства, обладают высоким уровнем образования [13].…”

Risk, nostalgia and the production of the ideal childhood in online commentary on children’s outdoor play

“…Children's play has also been influenced by neoliberal ideologies that work to reconfigure childhood from a time a time of freedom and exploration to a time to "invest in the future" (Smeyers, 2010, p. 271). Fears of economic insecurity and downward mobility -for themselves and for their children -have encouraged among parents a more highly involved and intensified style of parenting, underpinned by a logic that by spending as much time with their children as possible, parents are able to 'immunize' their children against future problems (Widding, 2015). Children's free time has become increasingly organized with 'productive' extracurricular and enrichment activities -thereby both 'instrumentalizing' (i.e., being purpose driven) (Alexander et al, 2018) and 'institutionalizing' childhood (Holloway & Pimlott-Wilson, 2014;Smyth & Craig, 2017).…”

“…Proper vigilance and supervision is one way that peopleincluding parents themselves -differentiated between good and bad parents. As in Widding (2015), parents defined other bad parents as those who were "unwilling to take on the [supervisory] responsibilities…immature and incapable of acting responsibly and is, therefore, him-or herself something of a child" (p. 56). Smith and Craig (2017) identified very little active resistance among parents to intensive parenting standards, although parents felt conflicted about their "obligation to be vigilant" (p. 120).…”