Staying with the conflict – parenting work and the social organization of post-divorce conflict

Abstract

ABSTRACT When addressed from the third-person perspective of professional and academic expertise, parents in high-conflict divorce are often described in polarized and individualized ways. This is at odds with the complex picture arising from studies exploring parents’ own experience of high-conflict divorce. Inspired by the research strategy of institutional ethnography, this article explores how the work of parents in enduring post-divorce conflicts relates to particular socially organized ways of doing parenthood. It draws on interviews with 20 Norwegian mothers and fathers experiencing a high-conflict divorce situation. The analysis connects parents’ experiences to dominant discourses about symmetrically shared parenting and the importance of parental devotion vis-a-vis their children. Through authoritative documents like laws, policies, and professional guidelines, these discourses are materially present in parents’ everyday lives, contributing to the coordination of experience. The findings show how parents’ struggles to care for their children in accordance with norms for good parenting can sometimes work to keep conflicts alive. It is suggested that organizing policy and professional responses around objectified understandings of post-divorce conflict as instances of parental neglect risks distancing policy and helping initiatives from the experiences of those parents they are meant to address.