Parenthood Research Network

The Parenthood Research Network aims to bring together researchers from across the Faculty of Social Sciences, ScHARR and the University to discuss research on parenting, parenthood, childhood and families and build inter-disciplinary networks and research collaborations.

Debates on Parenthood: An inter-disciplinary seminar

September 22nd 2010, 9.30am - 4.00pm. Conference Room, ICOSS Building.

This inter-disciplinary seminar is organised by the Parenthood Research Network, a 'Research Stream' within the Inter-disciplinary Centre for the Social Sciences (ICOSS). The day aims to encourage inter-disciplinary discussions between researchers at the University of Sheffield with an interest in parenthood, family and childhood studies. During the day several researchers, from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, will present papers which explore ethical, theoretical, policy and practice issues.

Presentations will include... (click hyperlinks for full abstracts, below)

The influence of policy on gender divisions of parenting work in France
Jan Windebank, Professor of French and European Society, Department of French.

Theory, practice and contemporary parenthoods
Antony Williams, Lecturer in Educational Psychology, School of Education.

Parenting across ethnic and racialised boundaries: reviewing the research agenda
Joanne Britton, Lecturer in Applied Sociology, Department of Sociological Studies.

Children learn from their parents how to be dirty in the area: parenting in an informal settlement in South Africa
Paula Meth, Lecturer in Town and Regional Planning, Department of Town Planning.

A historical perspective on British fatherhood
Laura King, PhD Student, Department of History.

Fear, fascination and the regulation of sperm donor identity
Dr Jennifer Burr, Lecturer in Sociology of Health and Illness, School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR).

Is the family to be abolished then?
Heather Arnold, PhD Student, Department of Philosophy.

The full programme and schedule for the day is available to download from the menu on the right of this page.

Abstracts:

The influence of policy on gender divisions of parenting work in France
Presenter: Jan Windebank, Professor of French and European Society, Department of French, University of Sheffield.

The term `parenting work´ is used here in its widest sense to include not only those activities and responsibilities undertaken directly with or for children, but also the domestic labour on which the smooth running of the household in which children are nurtured depends. Indeed, the health, development and well-being of children is influenced as much by the everyday household work accomplished by parents as by direct common activities (Bloch & Buisson, 1998; Cresson, 1995).

In much academic research, discussions of the influence of policy on gender divisions of parenting work centre on the extent to which the state facilitates and/or encourages employment for mothers of dependent children (Bettio & Plantenga, 2004). This is unsurprising given that this has been the main focus of attention of welfare states themselves. As Gershuny & Sullivan (2003) note, cross-national comparisons have demonstrated the power of policy to shape mothers´ employment rates and patterns.

Previously, when mothers were on the whole housewives, there was a tacit assumption that as they moved into the labour market, a symmetry within the couple would establish itself whereby the father would make take on commensurable responsibilities for parenting work. This has not proved to be the case. Although some increase has taken place in the participation of men in parenting work, the resistance to change of many aspects of this gender division of labour is remarkable. This lack of `feminization´ of men´s life courses renders the transformations in women´s roles that have taken place over the last forty years an `incomplete´ (Esping-Andersen, 2009) or `stalled revolution´ (Hochschild, 1989).

Although this incomplete or stalled revolution has given rise to a plethora of sociological and economic studies which try to isolate the factors which facilitate or constrain a more equal gender division of parenting work, less attention has been paid to the question of how policy might influence the extent to this work is shared within the couple. First and foremost, this has been because there has been little direct intervention by welfare states to force or facilitate a fairer division of parenting work between parents in the home. Indeed, the range of policy instruments available to policy-makers in this regard is limited in that intervention is required directly into the private decisions made within the intimate relationship of the couple. The only direct intervention made to date by some states (Norway, Sweden, Quebec) to coerce fathers into a more active parental role has been in the form of the `daddy quota´ within parental leave schemes, meaning that a portion of the leave cannot be taken by the mother. Indirect ways in which policy may influence the gender division of parental work include, however, measures which encourage women´s employment, thereby giving them more bargaining power within the couple; measures which organise the working day to liberate time for fathers to participate more in the home; and normative messages regarding the `proper´ roles of mothers and fathers in terms of share of family work.

This paper will discuss the relationships between policy and the sharing of parenting work in the context of a particular nation-state: France. France has been selected because in a number of cross-national surveys and research projects, the mismatch between a narrow gender employment gap due to the full-time and continuous nature of employment for many French women, progressive gender role attitudes in the population and extensive state-provided or subsidised childcare has gone hand in hand with the persistence of a very traditional gender division of parenting work, resulting in high levels of work-life conflict for mothers. This situation is often referred to as the `French paradox´ (Reveillard, 2006).

In a first section, therefore, the paper will review work carried out in the social policy field to date which addresses the question of the influence of the welfare state on gender divisions of labour and the sharing of parenting responsibilities in the home. Second, the paper will describe the situation in France. Third, the paper will ask whether or not France´s situation really is paradoxical in the sense that policies enacted in France should have produced a fairer division of parenting work or indeed could not be expected to have done so.

Theory, Practice and Contemporary Parenthoods
Presenter: Antony Williams, Educational Psychologist, Lecturer in Educational Psychology, University of Sheffield, Wakefield Educational Psychology Service.

How is professional work with parents understood? What is the goal of such work? This presentation seeks to share the consideration of these questions as they were posed throughout an encounter, as helping professionals, with a family system. It is proposed that an engagement that acknowledges the open and inappropriable nature of a family´s unique experience is the ethical goal of such an encounter. The process of utilising theory to inform practice while acknowledging an impossible divide or irresolvable dialectic between the application of such theory and ethical professional practice in the lives of parents will be discussed. Drawing on post-Lacanian theory and a consideration of inter-disciplinary engagements and post-modern theoretical concepts may contribute to the promotion of professional practice with parents which is grounded in ethical relatedness. The focus being the development of parental agency through encounters in which the reduction of the other, the presumption of knowledge is traversed.

Parenting Across Ethnic and Racialised Boundaries: Reviewing the Research Agenda
Presenter: Joanne Britton, Lecturer in Applied Sociology, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield

Parenting across ethnic and racialised boundaries has become a focus of investigation for researchers since the 2001 census indicated that people who categorise themselves as of mixed ethnic origin are one of the fastest growing sub-populations in the UK. Research has aimed to provide insights into parenting mixed children and to inform policy-related debates about family life and associated strategies for support. As a result, dominant racialised and gendered notions of mixed relationships as inherently problematic and prone to failure have started to be challenged. Similar notions of mixed children as having identity issues due to being caught between cultures have also come under much critical scrutiny. The research findings raise a range of important issues that indicate interesting and fruitful avenues for further investigation. For example, in contrast to dominant social assumptions, mixed relationships have high rates of success and mixed children have been shown to have a positive sense of identity and belonging. It therefore appears that many of the difficulties and challenges that mixed families face are outside rather than inside the family. This suggests that research should focus more on structural and institutional constraints in different key areas of social life, such as education, instead of on the parents and children. In other words, a key aim of further research should be to tackle inequality and discrimination. Such an aim would involve challenging false, racialised assumptions about mixed families´ experience, including the assumption of a uniformity of experience. Another example is the limitations of the narrow focus of research on the parents and children alone. Myself and others have drawn attention to investigating the significance of wider kinship relationships and social networks in understanding both how issues of identity and belonging are negotiated among significant others in families and how mixed families succeed in staying together.

"Children learn from their parents how to be dirty in the area": Parenting in an informal settlement in South Africa
Presenter: Paula Meth, Lecturer in Town and Regional Planning, Department of Town Planning, University of Sheffield.

Informal settlements across the global South are often described as spaces of physical and moral inferiority, where social problems abound. Understandings of children´s geographies within such spaces are slowly improving, but less attention has been paid to the experiences of parenting within informal areas. This paper explores the geographies of parenting within Cato Crest, an informal settlement in Durban, South Africa, and considers the interconnections between place, emotion and social relations. A particular emphasis is on parental anxiety in relation to place, focusing on the physical, social, economic, moral and sexual concerns of parents.

A Historical Perspective on British Fatherhood
Presenter: Laura King, PhD Student, Department of History, University of Sheffield.

My thesis investigates fatherhood between 1918 and 1960, and within it I am examining fathers´ roles, their relationships with their children and their gendered identities. Fatherhood within this period changed, with a great deal more emphasis placed on the significance of the father-child relationship by the 1950s. Though the fundamental tenets of a father´s role remained the same – emphasis on the traditional provision and protection that a father could give continued to constitute the core of fatherhood – his influence on his children and family became seen as ever more powerful and important. This can be seen in both the way fathers were represented in popular culture, and in the experiences of men and their families themselves.

My research is based on sources relating to both these dimensions of fatherhood – the representations and experiences. This includes a wide range of sorts of material from popular culture – newspapers, novels and films, for example – and a range of types of individual testimony. This includes oral history interviews (conducted in the 1990s), social surveys, and autobiographies and memoirs.

This historical perspective on fatherhood is significant. Fatherhood has been the subject of much discussion and even controversy in recent decades in Britain, and there are some clear assumptions about the previous nature of fatherhood inherent within these discussions. Such assumptions are almost always based on a mistaken view of the history of fatherhood – and indeed there is no authoritative history of fatherhood in the twentieth century in Britain. I will thus consider some of these assumptions, put them in historical context, and draw some research-based conclusions on the nature of fatherhood in the period 1918 to 1960, by examining the growth in significance placed on fathers´ relationships with their children and the perceived importance of the father as a family member in postwar Britain.

Fear, fascination and the regulation of sperm donor identity
Presenter: Dr Jennifer Burr, School of Health and Related Research, University of Sheffield.

The background to this paper is the medical regulation of sperm donation in the UK and the recent policy change so that children born from sperm, eggs or embryos donated after April 2005 have the right to know their donor´s identity. I draw upon data from interviews with ten women and seven joint interviews with couples who received donor insemination from an anonymous sperm donor and were the parents of donor insemination children. I explore the symbolic presence of the donor and his potential to disrupt social and physical boundaries using the theoretical conceptions of boundaries and pollution as articulated by Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva. I present data to argue that the anonymous donor manifests in various figures; the shadowy and ambiguous figure of `another man´; the intelligent medical student; the donor as a family man, with children of his own who wants to help infertile men father children. Also participants perceive the donor´s physical characteristics, but also see their husband´s physical characteristics, in their children. In conclusion I argue that anonymisation preserves features of conventional family life, maintains the idea of exclusivity within the heterosexual relationship and affirms the legal father´s insecurity about his infertility. I argue that the inherent contradiction in sperm donor practices is that, on the one hand they make possible a whole range of alternative forms of parenting where men are often absent, but on the other hand they also reinforce traditional heterosexual family structures.

Is the family to be abolished then?
Presenter: Heather Arnold.

A central principle in contemporary liberal political thought is that of equality of opportunity. As John Rawls puts it, "those who are at the same level of talent and ability, and have the same willingness to use them, should have the same prospects of success regardless of their initial place in the social system." The family has been seen to be in tension with equality of opportunity because differences between families in terms of, among other things, income and parental care differentially affect the opportunities of children. This tension prompts Rawls to ask, `Is the family to be abolished then?´.

Rawls rejects this option, but accepts that abolishing the family would create greater equality of opportunity. However, I am much less convinced that abolishing the family would indeed achieve this goal. If we try to imagine the best possible alternative to the family from the point of view of equality of opportunity (the Universal, State-run Childcare Institution or USCI), we end up with an institution which is just like the family.

More specifically, I argue that in the USCI either care-giving is to be arranged such that children receive the kind of care they require in order to develop healthily and to be equipped with the tools to make decisions about their own lives, in which case care-givers would be assigned to particular children for the duration of their childhood and the USCI ceases to be a meaningful alternative to the family. Or, care-givers are to be rotated between children, ensuring that no child benefits from better care relative to other children and maintaining the USCI´s status as an alternative to the family, in which case their development would be hampered to the extent that meaningful equality of opportunity could not be achieved.

This discussion emphasises the importance of relationships between caregivers and children for the achievement of equality of opportunity, an aspect of the debate often overlooked by philosophers.

Workshop 1: Developing inter-disciplinary research on parenting and child-rearing - 24th November 2009

The aim of the workshop was to bring people together doing research on parenting, childcare and child-rearing within the Faculty of Social Science and to discuss possibilities for collaboration.

This stream is led by Dr Harriet Churchill of the department of Sociological Studies.
Tel: 0114 2226440
Email: h.churchill@sheffield.ac.uk