Parental Discussion Research Articles

Parental discourses of language ideology and linguistic identity in multilingual Finland

ABSTRACTFinland is officially a bilingual country but it is in practice multilingual. In the current study, we examined how mothers and fathers of mixed-language families linguistically identified themselves and others, and how ideological discourses and concepts historically and socially situated in Finland circulated through the parents’ talk. The parents of three families in which at least Finnish, Swedish and English were used on a daily basis were interviewed. A discourse nexus approach showed that the concept of ‘mother tongue(s)’ played a central role and that although all family members were in practice multilingual, there was a strong tendency across the couples to identify themselves and others as monolingual. Bilingualism was identified with Finnish-Swedish rather than other languages and a native discourse expressed bilingual identity as granted by birth rather than acquired later. The discourses could be traced back to official language registration procedures, the educational system in Finland, as well as to parents’ own lived experiences. The study illustrates the intricate relationships between language ideologies and how linguistic identities are created and performed among parents, and it pinpoints the need for further studies on how linguistic identities are passed on to and experienced by children along their life trajectories.

Когнітивна карта конфліктного типу сучасного англомовного парентального дискурсу

Когнітивна карта конфліктного типу сучасного англомовного парентального дискурсу

Negotiating Closed Doors and Constraining Deadlines: The Potential of Visual Ethnography to Effectually Explore Private and Public Spaces of Motherhood and Parenting.

Pregnancy and motherhood are increasingly subjected to surveillance by medical professionals, the media, and the general public, and discourses of ideal parenting are propagated alongside an admonishment of the perceived “failing” maternal subject. However, despite this scrutiny, the mundane activities of parenting are often impervious to ethnographic forms of inquiry. Challenges for ethnographic researchers include the restrictions of becoming immersed in the private space of the home where parenting occurs and an institutional structure that discourages exploratory and long-term fieldwork. This paper draws on four studies, involving thirty-four participants, that explored their journeys into the space of parenthood and their everyday experiences. The studies all employed forms of visual ethnography, including artifacts, photo elicitation, timelines, collage, and sandboxing. The paper argues that visual methodologies can enable access to unseen aspects of parenting and engender forms of temporal extension, which can help researchers to disrupt the restrictions of tightly time bounded projects.

‘If I was a different ethnicity, would she treat me the same?’: Latino parents’ experiences obtaining autism services

This article reports on an ethnographic study with 12 Latino families of children on the autism spectrum related to obtaining autism services in Los Angeles County. Using critical discourse analysis of interviews, observations, and records, we consider the experiences of the Latino families in relation to: a discursively constructed ‘autism parent’ subject position that mandates ‘fighting’ service systems to ‘win’ autism services for children, originating from White middle-class parents’ socioeconomic resources and social capital; a neoliberal social services climate that assumes scarcity of available resources and prioritizes austerity in their authorization; and a media and institutional ‘cultural deficit’ discourse that attributes disparities in autism services for Latino children to their parents’ presumed culturally-based ‘passivity.’ We argue that parental discourse about fighting, or not fighting, for autism services is engendered by a tension between a parental logic of care, and the logic of competition of the economic market.

Comparison of multiple methods of assessing parental emotion language discourse and their effects on Preschooler’s emotion understanding

ABSTRACTThe current study explored the influence of three methods of parental emotion discourse (structured story-telling, reminiscing, and picture book) and their relation to preschoolers’ emotion understanding. Thirty-seven families participated in the study. Analyses showed that the structured story-telling method produced more emotion words, was high in unique emotion words, and was high for both emotion labelling and explanations. All three methods showed some potential to predict preschooler’s emotion understanding. Structured story-telling was best at predicting role-taking, while reminiscing and the picture book both were better at predicting situation knowledge. Additional studies are needed to further explore the influence of different methods of assessing emotion discourse to enhance validity and reliability of research in this field.

Is Information Power? Comparing Anonymous and Open Egg Donation

Both the Czech Republic and the United States are destinations for cross-border reproductive travellers. For North Americans, including Canadians, who opt to travel to the Czech Republic for IVF using an egg donor, they are entering a fertility industry that is anonymous. This makes the Czech Republic different from other European countries that necessitate open gamete donation, as in Austria, Germany and the United Kingdom. For reproductive travellers coming to the United States for fertility treatment, there is a wider menu of choices regarding egg donation given the vastly unregulated nature of the industry. More recently, professionals in the industry are pushing for ‘open’ egg donation. For intended parents traveling to either location seeking in vitro fertilization using an egg donor, they must choose whether or not to pursue open or closed donation. As pre-conception parents, they navigate competing discourses of healthy parenting of donor-conceived offspring. They must be reflexive about their choices, and protective when weighing their options, always keeping their future child's mental, physical and genetic health in mind. Drawing from ethnographic data collected over the course of six years in the United States and the Czech Republic, this paper will explore both programs, paying special attention to the question of how gamete donation and global assisted reproductive technologies intersect with different notions about healthy pre-conception parenting.

Life Writing by the Gosse Family: Family Portraits in Scientific, Evangelical and Auto/biographical Discourses

ABSTRACTIt is widely recognised that Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907) made a crucial intervention in the transition from traditional Victorian biography to modern life writing. This innovative text became a classic while Gosse’s other literary biographies were quickly forgotten. This article argues that the radical qualities of Father and Son were forged from Gosse’s position of being influenced by, and at the same time resistant to, a network of family memoirs. His father, Philip, constructed an idealised son who listens intently to his lectures about God’s Creation. Likewise, in her evangelical tracts, his mother Emily depicted young Gosse responding obediently to Christian discipline. Even in Gosse’s Life of Philip Henry Gosse (1890), the father’s voice dominates the son’s authorship, despite the latter’s occasional criticisms and veiled allusions. It was in Father and Son that Gosse finally asserted his freedom from those parental discourses that had defined his persona and determined his prospects. Gosse’s struggle to extricate himself from the legacy of textual family enmeshment produced a work of generic, linguistic, narrative, and allusive complexity. By creative misprision, Gosse carves for himself what Bloom terms ‘clear imaginative space’. Having severed himself metaphorically from his biological origins, Gosse embraces a literary kinship.

The Meaning of the Child Interview (MotC) – the initial validation of a new procedure for assessing and understanding the parent-child relationships of “at risk” families

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to report on the initial validation of a new method, called the “Meaning of the Child Interview” (MotC), to assess the psychological meaning all children have for their parents, but which in cases of risk, submerge or distort the child’s identity. The MotC analyses parental discourse using a method developed from the discourse analysis used to classify the Adult Attachment Interview together with patterns derived from the infant CARE-Index, a procedure that evaluates face-to-face parent-child interaction. This allows the MotC to illuminate how the parent’s thinking influences the developing relationship between parent and child.Design/methodology/approachParents are interviewed using the Parent Development Interview (PDI), or an equivalent, and then the interview transcript is classified using the MotC system. The coding method was developed from interviews drawn from the first author’s work with children and families in the family court system, and then tested with a sample of 85 mothers and fathers, 62 of whom were parents drawn from an “at risk” context. The parents were also videoed in a short free play interaction, using the CARE-Index.FindingsThe study found a strong correspondence between the levels of risk as assessed by the MotC patterns of parental representation of care giving, the risk to the parent-child relationship observed using the CARE-Index. There was also corroboration of the patterns of interaction identified by the MotC.Originality/valueThe results of the study provide good evidence for the Meaning of the Child as an identifiable construct, and as an assessment tool to identify and assess the nature of “at risk” parent-child relationships. MotC was developed in a clinical setting within the Family Court justice system, and is designed to offer assistance to child protection and mental health practitioners deciding how to intervene in particular parent-child relationships.

Implicações do discurso parental no desvio fonológico

Resumo O desvio fonológico é uma alteração da fala sem fatores orgânicos identificáveis, que implica o uso inadequado de fonemas após os quatro anos de idade, aparecendo com maior frequência até os oito anos. Dessa forma, constitui-se objetivo deste trabalho relacionar o desvio fonológico e o discurso parental. Empregou-se uma metodologia qualitativa, a partir da análise de conteúdo. Participaram da pesquisa 15 responsáveis por crianças diagnosticadas com desvio fonológico e encaminhadas ao serviço de atendimento fonoaudiológico de uma instituição de ensino superior. Para a coleta de dados o instrumento utilizado foi uma entrevista semiestruturada. Os dados foram generalizados e compararam os participantes quanto à significação parental destinada tanto à criança quanto à patologia. Os resultados apontaram que existe uma relação entre o discurso parental e o desvio fonológico. Além disso, as funções parentais parecem determinar o quanto o funcionamento linguístico da criança é afetado por ele ou não.

The behind-the-scenes activity of parental decision-making discourse regarding childhood vaccination.

Vaccine compliance has long been a cause for concern for health authorities throughout the world. However very little effort has been made to examine parental discourse during the decision-making process. An online survey was conducted (N = 437) to examine predictors of parents' attitudes regarding childhood vaccination. Hesitant parents were 4 times more likely to conduct intrafamily discussion regarding vaccination compared with provaccination parents (Exp[B] = 4.26). There were no significant differences between hesitant and antivaccination parents with respect to intrafamily discussion. Hesitant parents were also 4 times more likely than provaccination parents to report intrafamily disagreements regarding vaccination (Exp[B] = 4.27). They were also twice as likely as antivaccination parents to express disagreements regarding vaccination within their families (Exp[B] = 2.33). Likewise, Jewish parents were significantly more likely to define themselves as vaccination-hesitant, whereas Muslim parents were significantly more likely to be provaccination. To improve the way health organizations communicate information about vaccines and increase parental trust in immunization programs, we should not only look at the level of understanding, perceptions, and biases of different groups, but also thoroughly examine parents' decision-making processes and the discourse during this process. We must communicate risk to all groups, including the provaccination group, to improve parents' decision making and the process of informed consent.

Exploring the depths of gender, parenting and ‘work’: critical discursive psychology and the ‘missing voices’ of involved fatherhood

ABSTRACTThis paper sets out to capture the missing voices of fathers in discussions around gender, parenting and work. Using Critical Discursive Psychology (CDP), a qualitative methodology that frames discourse, language and action as socially situated, the paper sets out to understand the complexities of involved fatherhood. Using data from two distinct research projects that considered managing tensions around parenting and paid work, alongside the move to ‘involved fatherhood’, we examine the ways in which different discourses are operating in order to construct stories around gender and parenting. We are particularly interested in the ways in which participants use language and, specifically, discourses of parenting, working and caring. Through the interview excerpts we analysed how simultaneously participants position themselves in the discourses and were also being positioned by the wider societal discourses. We consider how CDP can contribute rich insights into the ways in which fathers are arranging sharing parenting caregiving responsibilities, using these insights to inform the policy landscape. We finish the paper by suggesting that CDP methodology can be mobilised by researchers wanting to capture missing voices in shifting policy landscapes.

Conflicted cultivation: Parenting, privilege, and moral worth in wealthy New York families

Recent research on parenting and social class has identified cultivation strategies that focus on expanding children’s skills and advantages, but such work has not looked specifically at parenting among elites. Drawing on 50 in-depth interviews, this article investigates the childrearing strategies and discourses of wealthy and affluent parents living in and around New York City. Concerned about raising “entitled” children, elite parents employ strategies of constraint (on behavioral and material entitlements) and exposure (to less advantaged social others) to produce morally “good people.” However, these strategies stand in tension with another significant parental concern: the expansion of both children’s selfhood and their opportunities. Ultimately, though not quite intentionally, parents cultivate an appropriate habitus of privilege, rather than significantly limit their children’s material or experiential advantages. Parents’ discourses about constituting not-entitled subjects are important for two reasons. One, they illuminate the struggles of liberal elites to be morally worthy in an environment marked by extreme inequality, challenging assumptions about the instrumentality of their action. Two, they reveal the affective and behavioral bases of legitimate entitlement more generally: what matters is how people act and how they feel, not what they have.

Motherhood, mobility and materiality: Material entanglements, journey-making and the process of ‘becoming mother’

This paper is about the entanglements or mutually affecting engagements with the material world that occur in the course of trying to becoming mobile with a small baby. Drawing on a rigorous empirical base of 37 interviews with 20 families in East London, we analyse the relationships between discourses of parenting and the material practices of journey-making. Bringing together conceptual work on the new materialism and mobility studies, we advance the concept of mother–baby assemblages as a way to understand mobile motherhood, and consider the emotional and affective dimensions of parenting in public that emerge through journey-making. We argue that the transition to motherhood occurs in part through entanglements with the more than human in the course of becoming mobile (including matter, affects, policies and built form). We further argue that approaching motherhood from the perspective of material entanglements advances geographical scholarship by deepening our understanding of mobility as a relational practice. Finally, we extend conceptual work in Geography as a whole by showing the utility of new materialist philosophy as a means for theorising identity.

‘You can Spend Time. . .But not Necessarily be Bonding with Them’: Australian Fathers’ Constructions and Enactments of Infant Bonding

AbstractGovernments are increasingly implementing policies that encourage early father-infant bonding. However, to date, research has not systematically examined fathers’ perspectives and experiences of early bonding. Using a social constructionist embodiment perspective we argue that paternal bonding is best conceived as a process of repeated, embodied performances that are shaped by gendered parenting discourses. Drawing on 100 semi-structured interviews with a diverse group of Australian fathers of young infants, we argue that most men believe they are capable of developing early strong bonds. They assume that bonding is a product of spending sufficient time with a child, irrespective of the parent's gender. In contrast, a sizable minority of fathers assert that physiology means fathers are ‘largely useless’ to very young infants, and tend to remain distant in the early months. We conclude that social policies promoting early paternal bonding must engage with and challenge gendered/physiological discourses.

Locating Purity within Corruption Rumors: Narratives of HPV Vaccination Refusal in a Peri‐urban Community of Southern Romania

This article locates the symbolic construction of "corrupted purity"-as a key assertion in Romanian parents' HPV vaccination refusal narratives-within a multiplicity of entangled rumors concerning reproduction and the state. Romania's unsuccessful HPV vaccination campaign is not unique. However, the shifting discourses around purity and corruption-through which some parents conveyed anxieties about their daughters being targeted for the vaccine-place a particular twist on the Romanian case of resisting the HPV vaccination. Parental discourses took the form of clusters of rumors about state medicine's failure to provide adequate reproductive health care, additive-laden foods, and exposure to radioactive contamination. In these rumors, corruption becomes literally embodied, through ingestion, consumption, contact, or inoculation. Parental discourses about what is being injected into their daughters' pristine bodies express their uncertainty around navigating the unsettled post-socialist medical landscape.

“A Great School Benefits Us All”: Advantaged Parents and the Gentrification of an Urban Public School

Middle-class, professional, and White families in gentrifying cities are increasingly choosing neighborhood public schools. As critical consumers of public education, these families frequently bring not only new resources to schools but also new demands. This article examines the process of “school gentrification” by analyzing the discourse of a neighborhood parents’ listserv. I find that as they worked to make their local public school “great,” advantaged parents performed the role of careful investors, defined themselves as the source of the school’s potential value, and marginalized low-income families and families of color. These findings raise important questions about educational equity for both educational researchers and urban school and district leaders.

Using interviews to understand parent and family perspectives of the August 2011 London riots

This article presents findings from interviews with London parents and families, to explore their perspective of the August 2011 London riots in the UK. This article is based on a doctorate thesis where the researcher adopted a critical position on constructions of parent-blaming within political rhetoric. A separate paper (forthcoming) presents clinical implications developed from the research findings. The research was influenced by systemic and narrative therapy approaches. Nine parents and three young people, from five families across three London boroughs, were interviewed together to explore how they constructed the riots. A Foucauldian-informed thematic analysis identified themes of inequality and exclusion, rioting as a criminal threat, youth as problematic, parenting and morality, and reclaiming normality. These themes highlighted discourses of crime, punishment, parenting and youth, the relevance of socio-political factors, parent-blaming and community resources within parent and family constructions of the 2011 London riots. 通过面谈理解家长和家庭对2011年8月伦敦暴乱事件的看法 本文呈现了与伦敦家长和家庭面谈的结果, 探索了他们对2011年8月伦敦暴乱事件的看法。这篇文章基于一篇博士论文, 在该论文中, 研究者对政治语境中谴责家长的建构采用了一种批判的姿态。另外一篇文章（即将在2016年发表）呈现了由这些研究发现发展出来的临床应用启示。本研究受系统的叙事疗法的影响。来自伦敦的3个镇上的5个家庭的9个父母和3个年轻人在一起接受了面谈, 谈论他们怎么理解这次暴乱。福柯式的主题分析揭示了以下这些主题：不平等和排外, 暴乱作为犯罪威胁, 年轻人有问题, 父母教养和道德, 以及恢复正常。这些主题强调了家长和家庭对2011年伦敦暴乱的看法中关于犯罪、惩罚、父母教养和年轻人、社会政治因素的相关性、谴责家长和社区资源等话题。 关键词：2011伦敦暴乱；谴责家长；问题家庭项目；家庭；政治语境

The transmission of capital and a feel for the game

We examine parental choice in the context of lower secondary schools in urban Finland by means of qualitative content analysis of interviews conducted with upper-class parents ( n=33). The analysis concentrates on the social construction of selective school choice within a public education system. The families in question were willing and able to choose their selective classes in schools in which intake is based on aptitude tests. This practice was justified on meritocratic grounds and was therefore not considered a class practice in the parental discourse. We argue that the capacity of upper-class families to transform economic capital into embodied cultural capital becomes an asset in the competition over study positions. The process includes the transfer of trump cards acquired in the field of culture – such as via music or sports, with their acknowledged interconnectedness with social position – to the field of public comprehensive education, despite the fact that social background should not define the allocation of pupils to schools in Finland. The role of the transmission of capital in this process is misrecognised, despite the fact that the result is social exclusion.

Partnerships and parents – relationships in tutorial programmes

ABSTRACTThe tutorial system is considered to be a useful pedagogical intervention to improve student retention, particularly in the context of a first-year student’s experience of entering university. For these novice students to achieve academic success, it is important that they are given access to the subject-specific knowledge and practices in their different disciplines, that is, that they acquire ‘epistemological access’. A recent study of the tutorial system in a South African university (Layton, D.M. [2013]. A social realist account of the tutorial system at the University of Johannesburg (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Rhodes University, Grahamstown), sought to discover to what extent tutorials were discursively constructed as being about the enablement of epistemological access. This paper focuses on two discourses that emerged from the study – the parent discourse and the partnership discourse. Both discourses were concerned with relationships between key stakeholders in the tutorial programme. Given that tutorials are considered to be spaces in which more intimate learning can take place than in the anonymous environment of the large lecture hall, an interrogation of the relationships fostered in tutorials is important. The parent discourse, in which students were positioned as ‘kids’ needing care, was supportive of new students but ran the risk of being patronising and reductionist. The partnerships discourse, in which tutors and academics were seen to be working together towards the common goal of student success, was seen to be enabling of epistemological access. But it required a commitment to teaching endeavours that was in tension with the institutional focus on research. Through a social realist analysis of the two discourses constructing relationships in the tutorial system, we conclude that these discourses have the power to both constrain and enable the extent to which the tutorial system can be a site of epistemological access.

Mothering Gender and Sexually Nonconforming Children in Taiwan

How do emerging and enduring conditions of motherhood in Taiwan shape mothers’ interactions with children who are gender or sexually nonconforming? Bridging research on the transformation of mothering discourses in Taiwan and globally with the small but growing body of work on LGBT family of origin relationships, this article argues that women’s experiences of raising gender and sexually nonconforming children are integrally shaped by the conditions of gender and family inequality in their own lives. These inequalities are sometimes challenged but often reinscribed by new parenting discourses and resources that have proliferated in late 20th and early 21st century Taiwan, including new forms of parental labor, accountability for child outcomes, and emerging expert voices on sexuality and parenthood. This analysis is rooted in ethnographic fieldwork and family history interviews with gender and sexually nonconforming people and with their families of origin throughout Taiwan, with emphasis on heterosexual mothers’ narratives.