Negotiating parenting practices : the arguments and justifications of Finnish couples

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Negotiating parenting practices : the arguments and justifications of Finnish couples © 2021 Policy Press Published version Eerola, Petteri; Närvi, Johanna; Terävä, Johanna; Repo, Katja Eerola, P., Närvi, J., Terävä, J., & Repo, K. (2021). Negotiating parenting practices : the arguments and justifications of Finnish couples. Families, Relationships and Societies, 10(1), 119-135. https://doi.org/10.1332/204674320X15898834533942 2021 Delivered by Ingenta IP : 130.234.242.205 On: Mon, 29 Mar 2021 06:54:35 Copyright The Policy Press 119 SPECIAL ISSUE • Relationality in family and intimate practices Families, Relationships and Societies • vol 10 • no 1 • 119–135 • © Policy Press 2021 Print ISSN 2046-7435 • Online ISSN 2046-7443 • https://doi.org/10.1332/204674320X15898834533942 Accepted for publication 19 May 2020 • First published online 03 June 2020 This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits adaptation, alteration, reproduction and distribution for non-commercial use, without further permission provided the original work is attributed. The derivative works do not need to be licensed on the same terms article Negotiating parenting practices: the arguments and justifications of Finnish couples Petteri Eerola,1 petteri.eer[email protected] Tampere University, Finland Johanna Närvi, [email protected] Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, Finland Johanna Terävä, [email protected] University of Jyväskylä, Finland Katja Repo, [email protected] Tampere University, Finland This article explores Finnish different-sex couples’ (n = 12) negotiations on their parental division of labour. Theoretically, the article is based on the literature on gendered parenting practices and relational negotiations. Our discourse analysis reveals how the couples produced ‘togetherness’ and ‘our family’ by representing their care practices as agreements, irrespective of whether the care was described as equally shared or distinctly gendered. Disagreements reflecting more individualistic tones, and mainly resulting from the mothers’ sense of unfairness, were especially foregrounded when the distribution of household duties was discussed. The analysis also revealed how men cited involved fatherhood as a justification for their lesser responsibility for housework, while women sought to reconcile the contradictory discourses of equal parenting and mother’s primacy. Our results show how personal wishes and preferences, work life, family policies and cultural discourses are reflected in couples’ negotiations on parenting practices and moral identities pertaining to ‘good’ motherhood and fatherhood. Key words parenting practices • negotiation • couple interviews • gender equality • Finland To cite this article: Eerola, P. Närvi, J., Terävä, J. and Repo, K. (2021) Negotiating parenting practices: the arguments and justifications of Finnish couples, Families, Relationships and Societies, vol 10, no 1, 119–135, DOI: 10.1332/204674320X15898834533942 Families, Relationships and Societies 2046-7435 2046-7443 10.1332/204674320X15898834533942 19May2020 10 1 119 135 © Policy Press 2021 03June2020 05December2019 2021 Delivered by Ingenta IP : 130.234.242.205 On: Mon, 29 Mar 2021 06:54:35 Copyright The Policy Press Petteri Eerola et al 120 Introduction Throughout the 2000s, parents and parenting practices in families with young children have been widely discussed by academics, practitioners and the general public. The sociologist Frank Furedi (2014) has even described parenting as one of the most hotly debated issues of the 21st century. First, several scholars have highlighted the intensification of parenthood – a process in which childrearing has become a much more labour-intensive and demanding task for parents – as a key trend in parenting (for example, Faircloth, 2014; Macvarish, 2016; Miller, 2017; Gillies, 2020). Second, there has been global growth in parental time devoted to childcare – explained by intensified expectations of ‘good’ parenting and ideologies such as intensive motherhood and involved fatherhood (Rose etal, 2014; Miller, 2017). Third, fathers’ increased involvement in care has been argued to be a major global trend; researchers have demonstrated how practices and ideals, such as intimate fatherhood and caring masculinities, have emerged and changed family lives throughout Western societies (Dermott, 2008; Johansson and Klinth, 2008). We argue that increased global public attention to parenting and parenthood has also directed the ways and cultural climates in which parenting practices are negotiated in contemporary families. These relational negotiations were explored in this study through couple interviews with Finnish parents. Drawing on Morgan’s (2011) concept of family practices and recent research on the multidimensional nature of contemporary parenting (for example, Doucet, 2006; Miller, 2017), we understand parenting practices as a combination of hands-on care work (for example, putting a child to sleep, playing with and reading to a child), mental labour (for example, making decisions about care arrangements) and household labour (for example, cooking, cleaning the home). Our empirical data comprise qualitative couple interviews with 12 different-sex couples with a child approximately one year of age. The couples were interviewed for the multidisciplinary research project Finnish Childcare Policies: In/equality in Focus (2015–21 for more information on the project, visit the project website: www.jyu.fi/childcare/en) on the childcare arrangements and decisions of Finnish parents. Our research questions are as follows: 1. How are parenting practices negotiated when couples discuss their daily family lives? 2. What kind of understandings on gender and parenting are produced in these negotiations? Theoretically, the study is based on the literature on gendered parenting practices (Fox, 2009; Ralph, 2016; Miller, 2017) and relational negotiations (Finch and Mason, 1993; Duncan, 2011; Smart, 2011). Our analytical framework is informed by a social constructionist approach and discourse studies in particular. Background Gendered parenting practices in families with young children A wide body of research has shown how parenting practices in families with young children have remained gendered, as women continue to do more parental care and household work than men (Fox, 2009; Ralph, 2016; Miller, 2017). Such studies describe Delivered by Ingenta IP : 130.234.242.205 On: Mon, 29 Mar 2021 06:54:35 Copyright The Policy Press Negotiating parenting practices 121 how gender is ‘done’ or constructed, particularly when couples become parents for the first time. Scholars have argued that becoming a parent and developing care practices is a reflexive process, in which complex notions of masculinity and femininity and gendered cultural understandings of ‘good’ motherhood and fatherhood are entwined (Magaraggia, 2013; Rose etal, 2014). Thus, in the transition to parenthood, women and men often adopt conventional gender roles, even if before childbirth they had planned on equality in caring for the child (Fox, 2009). Research shows that, in its later phases, parents often continue with the gendered rationalities adopted in early parenthood (Rose etal, 2014; Ralph 2016). Studies also suggest strong gendered divisions in care even when fathers are actively involved (Rose etal, 2014). That is, mothers do more practical and mundane routine caring tasks than fathers, who spend relatively more time on different kinds of leisure, educational and recreational activities (for example, Craig, 2006; Rose etal, 2014; Ralph, 2016). Rose and colleagues (2014) showed that these gendered divisions are often discretionary and largely taken for granted, and that fathers can opt out of tasks they find too challenging or feel uncomfortable with. Several studies have also argued that mothers ‘orchestrate’ parenting by taking care of the mental labour and managerial side of family life and childcare (Walzer, 1996; Ralph, 2016; Miller 2017). Recent research has revealed how mismatch in partners’ housework reports is associated with lower relationship satisfaction (Ruppanner etal, 2018). The existence of a gap between spouses’ gender-equal ideals and unequal practices may also present a higher risk for partnership dissolution (Oláh and Gähler, 2014). Despite the persistence of gendered parenting practices, a clear shift in cultural expectations has occurred: fathers are expected be more involved with their children’s lives from the very onset of parenthood (Ralph, 2016; Miller, 2017). Studies have suggested that the principles of caring and involved fatherhood have spread across the global north as more sensitive and emotionally involved ways of fathering have gained ground in cultural conceptions of fatherhood (Johansson and Klinth 2008; Rose etal, 2014; Eerola, 2015). However, the expansion of intimate and involved fatherhood has not reduced societal expectations on motherhood: ‘good motherhood’ remains rooted in the idea that mothers should be active in all aspects of childcare and on call to care 24/7 (Vincent and Ball, 2006). The Finnish context Finland is one of the Nordic countries categorised by social policy researchers as dual-earner welfare states (Leira, 2002). It has a long history of supporting shared and equal parenthood, including promoting women’s participation in the labour force and encouraging fathers to take greater responsibility for childcare from the onset of parenthood (Eydal etal, 2015; Lammi-Taskula, 2017). The current parental leave scheme consists of maternity leave (18 weeks), paternity leave (9 weeks) and sharable parental leave (26 weeks). After parental leave, all children are entitled to a place in state-subsidised early childhood education and care (henceforth ECEC) before the start of formal schooling at the age of seven. If the parents of a child under age three do not take up state-subsidised ECEC services, they are entitled to a flat-rate child home-care allowance. Although during recent decades Finland has seen an increase in fathers’ take-up of leave and time spent on childcare, the division of caregiving responsibility between Delivered by Ingenta IP : 130.234.242.205 On: Mon, 29 Mar 2021 06:54:35 Copyright The Policy Press Petteri Eerola et al 122 parents remains far from equal (Ylikännö et al, 2015; Attila et al, 2019). Young children are cared for at home, mostly by their mothers, for longer than in any other Nordic country. This has been argued to be a consequence of the dominant cultural ideals in Finland that favour maternal primacy in early care (Repo, 2010). Fathers continue to take only ten per cent of all the parental leave available to parents, and sharable parental leave is mainly taken by mothers (Salmi etal, 2019). Finnish fathers take parental leave considerably less often than their Nordic peers in Sweden, Norway and Iceland (Eydal etal, 2015). Overall responsibility for daily or weekly routine household chores also often drifts to mothers. Moreover, household chores continue to be gendered; for example, women are most often responsible for cooking and laundry, and men for home or vehicle maintenance and repairs. The division of housework is a more common cause of rifts between spouses than childcare (Attila etal, 2019). Relational negotiations of parenting practices Since Pierpaolo Donati’s (2010) pioneering work in the field of relational sociology, the relational approach has become well established in family studies. A broad body of empirical research has demonstrated how family lives – including parenting practices and negotiations about parenting – are profoundly shaped by relationality (see, for example, Finch and Mason, 1993; Smart, 2011). Parenting practices (on the concept, see Morgan, 2011), for instance, are not only negotiated between the partners but also in relation to the labour market, social policies and cultural values, and are also entangled with power, intimacies and affects. In this article, we understand negotiation as a relational process through which social order – including practices, values and identities – is (re)produced (Strauss, 1978). Negotiations by mothers and fathers on parental responsibilities and the household division of labour can thus result not only in specific parental practices but also in a shared understanding of social reality and its meaning; for example, on the meaning of ‘good’ motherhood and fatherhood. In other words, mothers and fathers negotiate not only over practices but also over meanings (Finch and Mason, 1993). One way of (re)producing meanings is using justificatory accounts, deployed in negotiations. According to Finch and Mason (1993), people strive to legitimise their actions as these are associated with moral worth and identity. That is, in constructing their moral identities, people usually seek to gain others’ acceptance of their actions. Duncan and Edwards (1999) talk about ‘gendered moral rationalities’, meaning that a couple’s division of labour is shaped by relational ties and socially negotiated moral responsibilities. Mothers and fathers, for example, may present justifications for their (lack of) parental or household responsibilities, thus negotiating over both the actual division of labour and what is expected of them as parents. In family research, negotiation has been understood as both explicit and implicit communication about the kinds of actions people regard as reasonable for themselves and other people (see, for example, Finch and Mason, 1993). While negotiation can take the form of open discussion, other types of communication may also occur over time, such as gradually developing agreement or shared understandings and practices that may later seem obvious and unquestionable, as if they had needed no negotiation at all (Finch and Mason, 1993). Delivered by Ingenta IP : 130.234.242.205 On: Mon, 29 Mar 2021 06:54:35 Copyright The Policy Press Negotiating parenting practices 123 Although this broad definition of negotiation has been criticised for viewing even the unconscious routines of everyday lives as outcomes of negotiation (Evertsson and Nyman, 2009), we adopt this broad understanding of the concept. We would agree that parents do not necessarily consciously reflect on their choices; rather, they often prefer familiar, taken-for-granted and pragmatic choices which provide stability and routines (Evertsson and Nyman, 2009; Duncan, 2011). However, even when negotiations between parents seem absent, negotiations in relation to structural and cultural contexts will have taken place. Research design Qualitative couple interviews as empirical data Concepts such as the pair interview and dyadic interview have been utilised in social sciences when two people are jointly interviewed for research. In family studies, researchers have used, for example, family interviews and relationship-based interviews when people connected to each other with a family tie are interviewed (Morgan etal, 2013). Two people in a couple relationship interviewed jointly makes for a special case of such pair/family interviews. In this article, we refer to this type of interview as a couple interview. The couple interviews are unique in that they include pervasive intimate and affective tensions, dimensions that cannot be ‘turned off ’ or excluded when conducting an interview. Some tensions might be individual and related to the couple relationship and hence unrecognisable to the interviewer. Tensions might also reflect broader cultural norms and ideals – pertaining, for example, to gender and parenting – that are familiar to the researcher. A couple relationship is a socially constructed cultural category, and talking as a couple might affect the course of a discussion when a couple acts as a ‘team’ in the interview (Lahti, 2019). In the case of interviewing couples with children, in addition to ‘doing a couple’, parents might aim at ‘doing a proper family’ and reflecting the dominant cultural expectations of parenthood. According to the relatively scarce methodological literature on couple interviews, the recruitment stage is critical. According to Mellor and colleagues (2013), couples with a good relationship, positive experiences and mutual understanding of the topics to be discussed in the interview are easier to recruit than others. They also warn that if only a one member of a couple is contacted, s/he could act as a ‘gatekeeper’, making the decision to participate or not for both partners (Mellor etal, 2013). Moreover, even if both partners are willing to participate, practical obstacles may remain, such as arranging childcare or schedules (Bjørnholt and Farstad, 2014). Couple interviews are useful for studying spousal negotiations and interaction. Bjørnholt and Farstad, (2014) argue that couple interviews can add to the richness of the data, as the interviewees can help each other to remember details and fill in narrative gaps. Furthermore, according to Allan (1980), interview accounts that couples produce jointly might be ‘richer’ than either spouse’s individual account. On the other hand, a risk in the couple interview is that if one partner takes the reins and dominates the conversation, the other’s side of the story could be overlooked (Mellor etal, 2013; Bjørnholt and Farstad, 2014). Ethical considerations in interviewingcouples include, among others, the researcher’s ability to deal with sensitive topics and unpredictable, Delivered by Ingenta IP : 130.234.242.205 On: Mon, 29 Mar 2021 06:54:35 Copyright The Policy Press Petteri Eerola et al 124 challenging situations; for example, if the interview becomes a forum for the airing of grievances. Interviews of Finnish couples with young children In this study, we analysed interviews (n = 12), conducted between 2016 and 2017, with Finnish different-sex couples with young children. Interviewees were recruited through a survey focusing on Finnish parents’ childcare practices and decisions (for details, see Eerola etal, 2019: 6). If both partners had replied to the survey, they were contacted individually, and offered a choice between an individual interview or a couple interview. Of the total of 64 interviews, all those conducted with couples were selected for this study, as our interest was in couples’ relational negotiations on their parenting practices. The couples lived in eight municipalities across Finland, varying in their demographics, geographical location, economic life and local childcare policies. The female interviewees ranged in age between 27 and 42 and the males between 27 and 46. Both partners in seven couples and one partner in two couples had a BA or higher degree. At time of interview, the youngest child of any of the couples was around one year old. Six couples also had older children, either from their current or a previous relationship. The leave arrangements of ten couples followed the gendered patterns of parental leave take-up in Finland (Salmi etal, 2019); that is, individual leave periods were taken only by mothers. In two couples, both partners had taken an individual leave period. At time of interview, both partners in ten couples were working or studying full or part time, and their child/children were in ECEC; in one family a mother and in another a father were on parental or childcare leave while their partner was working. We assumed the interviewed couples shared a general interest in the issues of equality and parenting, as they had responded to the initial survey focusing on these topics. The interviews, which were initially gathered for a study on parents’ childcare arrangements and decisions, were conducted as semi-structured qualitative interviews with narrative features. The interview guide focused on such topics as everyday family life, childcare arrangements, work–family reconciliation and parents’ views on local and national family policies. In this article, we focus on parental practices, including the division of childcare responsibilities and household chores, and on the couples’ negotiations and possible conflicts on these issues. The interviews were conducted in venues chosen by the couples, mostly in their family homes. Interaction between partners in the interviews was varied and complex. They not only agreed with and complemented but also interrupted and contested each other’s accounts. Although the interviewers – a team of one male and five female researchers – had been instructed to consider both partners equally, for example, through eye contact or by directing their words equally to both partners, gendered patterns were observed. The transcribed data show that mothers were often the first to reply to the researcher’s question and that they replied at much greater length than fathers. Mothers were also keener than fathers to interrupt and contest their partners’ accounts while fathers tended to agree their partners’ responses. Delivered by Ingenta IP : 130.234.242.205 On: Mon, 29 Mar 2021 06:54:35 Copyright The Policy Press Negotiating parenting practices 125 Analysing couple interviews Our analysis can be characterised as generic discourse analysis – that is, as a general working procedure aiming to make sense of a specific domain or topic through, for example, interview transcripts (Antaki, 2008; see also Potter and Wetherell, 1987). We began our analysis by reading through the data and using Atlas.ti to select all the fragments in which parenting practices were discussed. Our thematic analysis of these fragments showed that the couples mostly discussed their caregiving practices and household division of labour and rarely referred to mental labour. This preliminary analysis also highlighted how the practices of care and housework were closely intertwined in the couples’ accounts. We then examined to what extent these parental practices were produced as negotiated and how they were negotiated. In this phase, we adopted a more discursive approach and searched for the rationalities, justifications and arguments used by the parents to legitimise their division of labour and parenting practices. Finally, via these rationalities, we analysed the understandings of ‘good motherhood’ and ‘good fatherhood’ that the parents (re)produced. Results Our analysis showed that couples tended to emphasise agreement when talking about their practices as parents. This was especially the case in relation to childcare practices; whether childcare was shared or whether the mother was the primary carer, the interviewed couples described the division of care responsibilities as a result of mutual understanding. The emphasis on agreement might partly follow from interviewing the parents as couples, although, as our results later show, disagreement on the division of labour also arose during some interviews. Thus, methodological considerations alone do not seem to explain parents’ mutual agreement on care practices. We found that the couples produced both agreement and disagreement by reflecting cultural ideals of shared parenting and involved fatherhood but also the mother’s primacy. Agreeing on childcare practices Many of the interviewed couples agreed on equality in childcare as a key aim and ideal of parenthood and, accordingly, described their care practices as shared. Shared parenthood was often an ideal that the parents said they had already agreed on before becoming parents and that their childcare or parenting practices were arrived at by conscious decision making and negotiation. For example, Hanna,2 a mother of one, told how the couple’s parenting practices were “talked through and negotiated” even before the child was born and emphasised that “we made the decisions together”. This was confirmed by Heikki, the father, who added that they did not have separate responsibilities but “both do all the tasks”. The agreement on sharing care – a seemingly satisfying situation without any open disagreement – was thus not reached without explicit negotiation about who does what and how. Such agreement can be based on prior negotiations, either explicit or implicit, that lead to shared responsibilities (see Finch and Mason, 1993), and hence no need Delivered by Ingenta IP : 130.234.242.205 On: Mon, 29 Mar 2021 06:54:35 Copyright The Policy Press Petteri Eerola et al 126 for further or ongoing negotiations. Some couples emphasised agreement in the present but described negotiations over the division of responsibilities in the past. In contrast, Paula and Petri, the mother and father of one child, talked about their ongoing need for negotiation: Interviewer: ‘You said at first that you don’t have clear male and female roles. What do you think – or is this – I assume it works for you as –’ Petri: ‘Yeah.’ Interviewer: ‘As that’s how you do parenting, or how do you see it?’ Petri: ‘Yeah, well –’ Paula: ‘Well it’s not really– I must say that it’s not a given. We do have constant discussions about it of course. […] I don’t know how it has taken this form – we have just somehow agreed in this area as well. And we do talk a lot as well.’ Petri: ‘We do.’ Paula: ‘We don’t stay quiet. So if we’re annoyed or concerned about something or if we’re wondering why we always do things a certain way, we talk about it, fortunately.’ Petri: ‘Yeah, and actually the reason for that is that we’re both active in terms of wanting to spend time with the baby. Somehow the way I see it is that, since I work and study, it would be easy for me to say that, during the time that [the child] is at home with us and not in kindergarten, I could just be doing everything else and not be there. But I want to be there. And I have wanted to be there since the beginning.’ Paula: ‘Right, and then again I was so attached to [the child] at the beginning, or really for the first year, that you can say that it’s actually been nice that Petri has also demanded his own time in quite strong terms. I am – I guess I can be quite strong. I’m a really strong person. So if he hadn’t challenged me, I would perhaps have taken all control and he would have ended up with a smaller role. It’s nice that Petri has deliberately asked for [time with the child].’ This excerpt shows how this father not only had a strong intention to share responsibility for childcare but also had to claim his share of the time spent with the child. In this negotiation, a legitimate argument for sharing care seemed to be the father’s own willingness to be involved in the child’s life. Paternal involvement and care practices that conform to the strong ideal of shared parenthood thus seem to need no other justification. Nevertheless, even the discourse of shared parenting bears traces of the gendered character of parenthood. This appears, for example, in some of the mothers’ appreciative appraisals of their partner’s involvement in care: “Heikki has anyway participated a lot in childcare after work” (Hanna, mother of one) or “I guess he participates in childcare more than the average guy” (Sara, mother of two). The female partners’ expressions of gratitude for their partners’ active role in care work underline the fact that a father’s involvement in care is not something to be taken for granted but rather to be understood as a result of a conscious choice and therefore something for which the mother should feel gratitude. Delivered by Ingenta IP : 130.234.242.205 On: Mon, 29 Mar 2021 06:54:35 Copyright The Policy Press Negotiating parenting practices 133 those related to housework. This might explain fathers’ increased involvement in care. Our results show that fathers, more than mothers, seem able to prioritise being with the child, although mothers remain expected to take overall responsibility for both practical care and household labour. Utilising couple interviews as empirical data may also have shaped the results of our analysis. First, couples who have managed to organise their parenting practices in a way that satisfies both partners may be more likely to participate. Second, although some disagreement occurred in the interviews, most couples probably tried to avoid openly challenging each other’s views. However, the couple interviews revealed certain gendered expectations of parenting: for example, mothers dominated the interviews and positioned themselves as the ‘primary parent’, often replying first to the interviewer’s questions and regularly interrupting their partners’ accounts. Although open criticism of one’s partner’s parenting was minor and discreet, a clear, gendered pattern was observed. While mothers were able to criticise their partners’ lack of involvement in household duties, fathers’ criticism of their partners’ practices was conspicuously absent. Inequality in the division of housework thus seems to be experienced as unfair by some mothers even when both parents agree on the (equal or unequal) division of childcare. This is understandable given that in many families the burden of household duties continues to fall on women. However, mothers’ criticism of fathers’ parenting may also be culturally more legitimate since, despite the changing fatherhood ideals, the expectations of ‘good motherhood’ still appear to be higher than those of ‘good fatherhood’. Notes 1 Corresponding author. 2 Interviewees are referred to by pseudonyms. Funding This work was supported by the Strategic Research Council of the Academy of Finland under Grant SA314317. Conflict of Interest The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest. References Allan, G. 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