From Family Policy to Parenting Support: Parenting-Related Anxiety in Finnish Family Support Projects
Abstract
This study aims to examine parenting support as provided through family support projects. The need to support parenting arose out of parenting-related anxiety, along with public and political attention regarding proper parenting and the wellbeing of children and youth in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Finland. In political and public debates, parenting was perceived as a source of many social troubles, causing multiple problems for children and youth, ranging from depression and irresponsible behavior to social exclusion. Par¬enting-related anxiety became a concrete issue in numerous projects aimed at supporting parenting, of which 310 projects are analysed in this study.
The projects examined here were implemented by public organisations as well as non-governmental organisations, and were carried out between 2000 and 2010 in Finland. The data analysed in this study draw upon diverse project management documents, such as funding applications, midterm and final reports, as well as other project documents, including project plans and brochures. The documents were analysed through qualitative text analysis. Considering the large amount of data, some of the central characteristics of the data were categorised and quantified in order to describe the data at a general level, although the main focus lies on the qualitative analysis.
In this study, I examine how and why parenting support became such an important element in family policy in early twenty-first century Finland. The increased attention on parenting support within family policy is called here a ‘turn to parenting’. This turn to parenting is not a Finnish peculiarity, but was identified in other Nordic counties as well as in many other parts of Europe. This study contributes to the recent critical research discussions around parenting support and parenting determinism. Parental determinism refers to the uncomplicated idea regarding how the absence of particular parenting skills represent a cause-and-effect relationship linked to multiple childhood dysfunctions, and which relate to virtually all that parents do or which remains undone.
This study was also motivated by the question regarding what exactly is supported in parenting support. In my assessment, ‘parenting’ is not taken as self-evident, but as something that needs to be closely scrutinised. By examining parenting support, we can enhance our understanding of what parenting itself signifies, as well as what kinds of responsibilities and com¬petencies parenting requires. Hence, I study how parenting is understood within Finnish family support projects and how it can be conceptualised from the sociological point of view. In this study, I also frame parenting and parenting support historically and place the ‘turn to parenting’ along a continuum within the long history of family, parenthood and childrearing. Furthermore, I emphasise ‘parenting’ as a unique concept in relation to, for example, parenthood, which denotes the kin relationship between a parent and a child. Moreover, parenting also contains certain new connotations different from those related to ‘childrearing’, which are also important to delineate carefully.
My results demonstrate that parenting support is either targeted towards supporting interactions between family members—more accurately, the relationship between the parent and the child—or towards (re)building community and strengthening parents’ peer relationships with other parents in their community. I suggest that there are two different approaches to par¬enting support identified within the family support projects: individualised parenting support and communal parenting support. These two approaches are employed in family support in order to increase the wellbeing of the family in general and specifically to prevent ill-being amongst children and youth. To carry out parenting support, family support projects employ particular techniques such as activation, responsibilisation, empowerment and highlighting parents’ own expertise.
In this study, I indicate how in individualised parenting support these techniques aim to increase parents’ active awareness—their own inner expertise in parenting—and, hence, emphasise a kind of reflexive parental agency. As a consequence, good parenting seems to be connected to parents’ constant reflexive evaluation of all possible options related to childrearing, often from a child-centred perspective. Furthermore, in communal parent¬ing support, parents are encouraged to rely on their contemporaries when addressing parenting issues. This is what I have labelled the ‘horizontal expertise of parenting’, wherein the intention is to strengthen parenting with help from the community and peer relations.
I raise the following sociologically intrinsic question in this study: How can we better study, conceptualise and understand ‘parenting’, ‘childrearing’ and the ‘socialisation of children’ from a sociological point of view? I propose that by turning our gazes from parenting and primary socialisation to the socialisation of children from a broader perspective, we can increase our understanding of childrearing and how the parent–child relationship is also constructed in relation to wider structures within contemporary society.
Authors
Ella Sihvonen
Additional Information
- Peer-Reviewed: yes.
- Open Access: yes.
- Cite as: Sihvonen, E. (2020). From family policy to parenting support: Parenting-related anxiety in Finnish family support projects [doctoral dissertation, University of Helsinki]. Helda. http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-51-3433-2
