© AIA & LFTRC Volume No. 25, Issue 2, 2014, pp. 146-157
Parenting practices – Understood as Situated
Parenting
May-Britt Solem
Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences
In this article, I argue that parenting practices must be under-stood as situated practices in family therapy practices. An un-balanced focus on problem behaviour and diagnosis in family therapy is criticized. When family therapists work with parents experiencing demanding child-rearing situations focus oten be-comes so narrow that only the parent-child interactions in ther-apy are highlighted. I claim that living conditions must be in-cluded in the analysis. Results from empirical studies that give reasons for viewing parenting as situated are highlighted. A critical look at existing theory and research-based knowledge on parenting stress and coping are addressed. hese theories say little about situational inluences, parent’s relexive thinking or meaning making regarding their experiences with their children. I also chal-lenge mainstream assumptions about normal family processes. New knowledge about parental coping from a salutogenic perspective may promote the competence in family therapy. he quality of par-ent-child relationships may be improved if interventions are based on the investigations and identiication of various aspects of parent-ing stress, copparent-ing and important environmental inluences in daily life.
Introduction
In this article I argue that family therapists have to understand parenting as situated practices. I highlight results from studies in my doctoral thesis that give reasons for viewing parenting as situated. I challenge an unbalanced focus on problem be-haviour and diagnosis in family therapy, and also mainstream assumptions about normal family processes.
in-teractions may be strengthened if interventions are based on exploration and identi-ication of diferent aspects of parenting stress in parents’ everyday lives.
In my studies I have highlighted how parents construct and interpret and make meaning of their everyday life and explore how they experience their own lives from an inner perspective (of the involved seen from their position). I was interested in a deeper analysis of the parents’ narratives, but also wished to study the mechanisms in play in the relations between parenting stress, socioeconomic status, resources, coping and social support. A perspective that combined macro social processes with micro psychological processes was a clear need, meaning conducting mixed meth-ods to broaden and deepen the analysis.
Situated parenting is about understanding how socio cultural systems give form and direction to our lives, and give meaning to actions by situating their underlying intention (Bruner, 1990). he concept is directly related to Bronfenbrenners’ eco-logical theory regarding children’s development. he theory is not a phase theory, but a system theory that describes children’s developmental processes by explaining how a child’s interactions with the environment inluence how the child grows and develops (Bronfenbrenner 1979). his system theory facilitates an understanding that links parents’ living conditions, organizing everyday life and children’s devel-opment together to a holistic understanding of the parenting practices. he doctoral thesis challenges existing theories regarding parenting stress and coping from a rela-tional, systemic and transactional perspective. he treatment of avoidance strategies as dysfunctional, in contrast to active strategies is also challenged.
I argue that parents’ life experiences with regard to their speciic life contexts deter-mine their parenting practices. In that frame of reference, this means exploring how parents are living and “doing” parenting in varied social contexts where interactions are understood as developmental processes located in time and space. hese parent-ing practices take place in the families’ everyday life, which are structured as habits, rules, principles and of events where regularities occur.
Situated parenting is expressed by this day-to-day organization and change in time as the child develops. he concept “guided participation” focuses on the varied ways children learn as they participate in and are guided by the values and practices of their local culture (Rogof, 2003). he analytic concepts – “situated parenting” and “guided participation” – must be understood in the context where these actions and interactions take place.
To understand situated parenting means to understand parenting as meaningful ac-tivities, with parents’ embedded in local practices belonging to a social class, under-stood as organizing structures of social experiences. It therefore became important to explore how these results regarding poor living conditions analysed on aggregated level were experienced of those who lived such lives with little support. It became important to narrate how family lives and everyday practices are experienced for the parents who are struggling. I argue that these diferent types of knowledge highlight the picture in relation to say something important and value based about practice, and contribute to the professional basis for practice. In my studies it became sig-niicant to focus on an understanding of parenting practices as situation speciic (quantitatively) and situated (qualitatively).
From Family herapy Practice to Research Studies
From 1990 to 2000 I worked as a family therapist in an intensive/short-time fam-ily department, where seriously ill adolescents and their parents from the whole country were hospitalized. We worked with the interactions in the family during 4 weeks, in addition to the assessments of the adolescent. I experienced a pathogenic perspective in the understanding of the families’ situations as mainstream. I there-fore became interested in salutogenic thinking (health promotion) with a focus on coping in everyday life and not only focus on the interactions between parents and child that were highlighted in the therapy room. hese experiences inluenced the construction of my thesis.
My studies are focusing on situation-speciic parenting, taking into consideration families’ everyday lives from a salutogenic and sosiocultural perspective. From the outset, salutogenic thinking has permeated the whole research process, from for-mulating research questions about coping, choosing the research design, to deter-mining the focus of analysis and writing up the results. To understand the concept health as a continuum made it necessary to go beyond the clinical group (parents with children having behaviour problems) and the comparison group (parents with children having less or no problems) and merging these groups in three out of the four studies that accounted my doctoral studies. I was occupied with parenting stress in families with demanding child-rearing situations compared to families with less demanding situations. I was occupied with the structural conditions in their lives that directly and indirectly inluenced family life and parents’ coping.
ther-apists’ work with parents experiencing demanding situations, focus often becomes so narrow that only the parent-child interactions in therapy are highlighted. I claim that living conditions is not enough included in the family therapists’ analysis. It is strange that therapists have not taken into account a realism position, investigating in risk and protective factors also in the context of family everyday life. It is im-portant to understand parenting practices as situated, and that health promotion thinking must be implemented in child- and family treatment practices. Parenting stress afecting child-rearing situations especially. he links between behaviour and other factors that produce parenting stress need to be explored.
I understand behaviour problems as interactional problems, assessed from a broad, relational perspective that include biological, psychological, social and material aspects in the understanding of the problems. he perspective situated parenting practices is about understanding parents’ actions and interactions in contexts where they take place.
Family therapists need to focus on possible risk factors that prevent parents to con-struct normal family processes, and possible protective factors by exploring parents’ capacities and resources and coping with stress in everyday life. Further therapists should investigate in parents’ meaning making in child-rearing practices, because the parents use these constructions to justify their actions. he concept situated parenting practices is about taking the context into consideration, as with a broad view on parenting.
Analytical Perspectives for Understanding Families
In my thesis, a comprehensive understanding of a child’s life is rooted in three ana-lytical perspectives, most relevant for family work.
According to Antonovsky (1991), the pathogenic perspective is a dichotomous view on health and illness. he salutogenic approach sees health as a continuous variable with a range from very healthy to very bad health. his perspective ofers a new perspective stretching the concept of normality to including more variation and diversity.
coping and health, and represents a broader and more complementary perspective than the pathogenic orientation. Salutogenesis improves our knowledge about par-ents’ and children’s coping practices by strengthen focus on variations in family constructions and expand our concept regarding normality. Health as a continuum expands the concept of normality as containing life’s ups and downs, and includes more variation and diversity.
Finally, family therapy and research also needs a perspective that takes into account our being in the world. Parents’ social and material conditions may be resources as well as hinderers in the parenting situation. Critical realism takes into account both the inluence of external environments on the functioning of families and the perspective that the social world is social constructed (Bhaskar, 1998; Houston, 2001a, 2001b). I argue that the salutogenic and socio-cultural analytical perspectives are compatible with critical realism, held as a position in the theory of science.
he challenge for social work is to integrate a balanced person-in-environment perspective and go beyond the socio cultural focus that hold little emphasis on the individual, and beyond the individual focus that don’t pay much attention to the environment. When the social constructionist’s perspective is the only analytical per-spective, it becomes too narrow. herefore I argue that family therapy needs more than one analytic perspective. To catch the complexity in practice we need theories where these practice situations are embedded in the theories for family therapy. here is little doubt that families’ cultural background, social relations and living conditions inluences parent-child interactions. A close relationship between families’ everyday life and ongoing therapy may promote the therapists capacity to support the child (Dreier, 2008).
It is necessary with more research studies on children with behaviour problems and their families ofering a broad view on their everyday lives. I have not found studies that are focusing on associations between socioeconomic situation, children characteristics, parents’ resources and capacities, social support and parenting stress. Understanding of the concept “sense of coherence” (SOC) as a parental resource in situation-speciic parental coping is also largely unexplored. To explore the dimension of SOC (comprehensibility) as a coping resource in relation to parents’ capacities is important. It is necessary for clinical practice to clarify the complexity and nuances of the association between these aspects in the coping process when stress is involved. It is therefore important to view parenting practices as situation speciic and situated. Only sparse information connecting diicult tasks in parenting to situation-speciic coping strategies has been available in research in recent years. In the quantitative studies included in my dissertation, the questionnaires focus on speciic child-rearing situations and in relation to a speciic child in the family, namely a stateapproach, and not atrait approach.
nor-mal parenting processes, in contrast to meaning making done by parents of children with behaviour problems. he available theory and evidence from the stress and coping literature says little about the contextual and situational inluences, or about parents’ relexive thinking or meaning making about their experiences with their child (Collins et. al., 2010).
It is essential from a family perspective to develop new questionnaires and to study the validity and reliability of existing parental coping and stress questionnaires for use in clinical practice and research. In clinical practice we must identify relation-al stress problems in parrelation-allel with any situationrelation-al stress problems, to help parents strengthen their coping strategies in child-rearing situation. here seems to be no studies that focus on both relational and situational stress. We need for a multidi-mensional assessment of parenting stress that includes questionnaires covering a wide range of children’s problems, parental characteristics and environmental in-luences.
Questionnaires and Self Reports Used in the Quantitative Studies
small children (Sætre, Mathiesen & Nærde, 1996). he scale contains 7 questions: closeness and contact, daily care and support, understanding, respect, practical help with the child, other forms for practical help and belonging to the community Coping resources were measured with the Sense of Coherence Scale (SOC). SOC (Antonovsky, 1979, 1987) contains 29 questions with 3 sections measuring ques-tions with three dimensions; comprehensibility, meaningfulness and manageability. Coping practices were measured with he Coping Orientation to Problems Experienced Scale (COPE) (Carver, Weintraub & Scheier, 1989). COPE contains 14 distinct conceptual coping strategies as potentially answer to stressors, and all have 4 questions. hese are allocated again to four second-order factors, and each with 3 strategies. hese four are (i) active strategies (ii) focus on emotions and seeking social support (iii) reassessing and reframing and (iv) ‘avoidance’ strategies (withdrawal, ignoring, denial). In addition there are two strategies: turn to religion and use of humour. hese were not used in my studies. COPE was linked specially to child-rearing situations in my studies, and the questions were formulated situa-tion speciic and not as global strategies.
All parents were also interviewed after illing out the questionnaires. 16 parents were selected for deeper analysis, qualitatively. hese parents represented the variation of the distribution of their experiences as parents (items on NCSQ (ii) global evalua-tion of the child-rearing situaevalua-tion) and in accordance with variaevalua-tions in civil status, the child’s age and problems.
he parents were interviewed individually after the Life Mode Interview (Andenæs, 1995; Gulbrandsen, 1998; Haavind, 1987). he interview gives possibilities focus-ing on conversations of everyday life, a concrete and detailed conversation form that ask for concrete events and experiences and makes basis for relections and co-con-structing of meaning (Gulbrandsen, 2010).
Four empirical studies are included in the thesis. hey all contributed to the overall objective, each from their own perspective. In 3 of 4 articles: the groups were com-bined to explore more phenomenon rather than comparative studies. he studies and their objective were:
Validation of the Questionnaire Nijmegen Child Rearing Situation Questionnaire (NCSQ) Regarding Parenting Stress
fami-ly interactions. I translated and validated the multidimensional Nijmengen Child Rearing Situation Questionnaire (NCSQ) (Wels & Robbroeckx, 1996), section one, subjective parenting stress scale. he aim of this study was to specify the reli-ability, specify the factor structure and analyse diferent factor models of the NCSQ by means of CFA.
When working with the content of each subscale, the data also seemed to break down into two second-order subscales, namely relational and situational stress. hese two dimensions are of great clinical signiicance as tools to deine dimensions of parenting stress in everyday life when working with families having problems with a child. In clinical settings, the two dimensions may coexist in parents. To understand the parents’ situation and their everyday life helping their child, it is important to focus on both aspects of stress, because they need to be treated difer-ently (Solem, 2011). Appraisals of relational stress may best be treated by means of a good working alliance between parent and therapist, because of either relatedness or attachment patterns developed between the child and parent over time, or because of coercive parenting in response to the situation. Situational stress may be modiied with parent-training programs by enhancing coping strategies in various contexts, helping parents to develop more social support, and perhaps providing economic assistance (Solem, 2011).
Predicting Parenting Stress: Children’s Behaviour Problems and Parents’ Coping
regarding parents’ coping strategies. he signiicant diferences between the groups regarding social support were analysed further by exploring the interviews. Some parents withdrew from families and friends because they were ashamed of the boys’ behaviour. herefore they got less help from the network around them, less than they otherwise would have. Many of the parents also put lot of work in trying to be an ordinary family.
Meaning Making and Avoidance in Parenting
Because of the unexpected results from the studies of analysing parenting stress, the next step was to explore qualitatively parents’ meaning making in parent-child interactions and to challenge the treatment of avoidance actions as dysfunctional in contrast to active coping. In this study also normal family processes were in-vestigated, and avoidance actions were analysed deductively also in normal family processes. All parents used diferent ways of avoiding, ignoring or withdrawing, and these ways have to be understood in the contexts, where they were used, and why they were applied to assess if they were relevant or appropriate in special situations (Solem, 2012). When these avoidance strategies were analysed holistically to the repertoire the parents had, they could also be seen as proactive.
his shows that it is possible to help parents to strengthen the coping practices with every day life and to use resources in a more suitable way. his is useful knowledge for family therapists.
Understanding Parenting as Situated in the Larger Sociocultural Context in Family herapy
Parenting practices was explored and analysed as situated, and challenged the un-balanced focus on children’s problem and diagnoses in child and adolescent psychi-atry. A more holistic investigation around the families living conditions is necessary. Some families received only neuro-psychological assessment, and few received fam-ily therapy. I argue that treatment is often to narrow today. he therapists need to focus more broadly and work more holistically.
that families referred to BUP as seen as they have deviant family processes.
Implications for Family herapy
his article challenges existing theories regarding parenting stress and coping and also assumptions regarding normal family functioning with signiicance for treatment prac-tice. I argue that it is necessary to stretch the concept normal family processes to prevent clinical cases from always being seen as deviant. It is important to study normal family processes, because we do not know enough about those practices.
In treatment a more systematic understanding of parenting practices will make investi-gations of possible risk- and protective factors and special assistance for children more holistically irmly rooted in newer research results. Increased knowledge regarding pa-rental coping from a salutogenic perspective may contribute to a new understanding of parent-child interactions as situated and strengthen the competence in family treatment. It is therefore important to focus on the whole individual/family and not only focusing on the diagnosis to the unique child. his studies ofers new knowledge to the complex interaction between biology and experiences, or parents meaning making.
It is important to go beyond the gap between family therapy and research by using re-search based knowledge in clinical practice and to transform clinical experience to useful research questions (Solem, Tilden & huen, 2008). A model is presented as a tool in family therapy practice to catch living conditions, organising of everyday life and the child’s development from a child perspective in the assessment of the child-rearing situa-tions. It is signiicant to help parents to construct a common understanding of the child’s problems, and to construct meaning and a sense of coherence that includes the children, the families, schools, kindergarden etc.
I have argued that it is important to study parenting practices informed by the parents’ own relections, beliefs and framework and organising everyday life from a salutogenic perspective. In the salutogenic perspective the concept of normality stretches to include more variation and diversity.
he quantitative data described the relationship between stress and parenting practices. he qualitative data gave information regarding possible reasons for the parents’ actions/ interactions by answering why-questions by focus on their interpretations of the situation and their goal and preferences. Both studies may inform family therapy practice. In the qualitative studies emotions regarding shame and relational and situational stress was highlighted. I found it necessary to expand and integrate understandings of parent-ing practices by studyparent-ing parents’ meanparent-ing makparent-ing from an everyday life perspective. In accordance to Collins et al. (2010) we need more knowledge about why speciic coping strategies are used, when, why and how they work. Explorations of how parents experi-ences interactions in everyday life will be the starting point when we will answer why, which refers to parents meaning making processes in the interaction processes.
one discipline. Psychological problems are measured as results of complicated interactions between biological, psychological and social factors. Knowledge is missing regarding the relationship between the many diferent risk factors. Early interventions with an inter-disciplinary approach are also signiicant to promote children’s development of mental health in treatment.
Please addresss correspondence about this article to: May-Britt.Solem@hioa.no
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