Agnes Andenæs

Fra undersøkelseobjekt til medforsker? Livsformsintervju med 4-5-åringer

Until now children have not been looked upon as sufficiently reliable to be included in interview research in social science. This article focuses on the construction and working-out of a way-of-life-interview with small children. The presentation focuses on efforts made to maintain joint attention to the child’s representations of own interactions, and to facilitate the relevant report to the researcher. The conclusion is, however, that age doesn’t change the procedures in any essential way, rather pinpoints the challenges met when doing qualitative interviews.

Neutral Claims - Gendered Meanings: Parenthood and Developmental Psychology in a Modern Welfare State

Psychology, particularly developmental psychology, plays an important role in a modern welfare state. In this article three ‘cases’ within the frame of the Norwegian welfare state are analysed to produce a picture of psychological constructions of care and parenthood. The three cases are: (1) practices within the child welfare system; (2) debates about the cash benefit scheme; and (3) debates about joint physical custody. The argument in the article is that the crucial contribution of feminist psychology is that it deconstructs the ongoing debates on parenthood and childcare, speaks the experience of the actors who are continuously involved in caring for children into existence, and destabilizes naturalized and taken-for-granted understandings of children.

Chains of care

More and more children, even the young ones from the age of one year, attend day care on a regular basis. To investigate how small children are taken care of and live their everyday life in Norway today, and how barnehage is included in their lives, a sample of families were followed from when the children were age one until close to three. The barnehage is seen as a link in the chain of care, for which the parents are the responsible ones. The barnehage thus implies an expansion of parenthood, with specific challenges. The family of one of the children, Adam, has been chosen for the presentation. Seeking information, providing Adam with the equipment and skills that seemed to be necessary of Adams parents and building personal relations with the professional care providers were among the strategies to ensure a high-quality care arrangement. It constitutes parenthood in a way that a) incorporates the life of the child at home and in day care, both practically as well as mentally, b) includes the parents understandings of their own child as the child appears through daily routines and c) makes visible the relevant context for the making and remaking of their standards of care.

Theories of development from the perspective of the children, their parents and the scientists

SUMMARY Interviews with children (4–5 year olds) and their parents, focusing on daily interaction and how it is understood by the participants, constitute the empirical basis for this article. Theoretically, the study is based on sociocultural psychological perspectives. According to the parents, there are the signs of developmental change: better practical skills, increased tolerance to separation from the parents, motivational changes and a better understanding of what is going on. When parents consider their own contribution to their childs development, their first comment is that it just happens by itself. What is necessary is first of all a sensitivity to the childs own motivation and increased social participation. Direct instruction and firm discipline is seen as necessary only if more mature behaviour is delayed, or the childs behaviour is too troublesome for other people. Children see themselves as the agents of the change. Girls, however, giving more credit to the parents instructing role Th...

From ‘placement’ to ‘a child on the move’: Methodological strategies to give children a more central position in Child Welfare Service

Within both politics and research children have been increasingly depicted as autonomous individuals with a right to be heard and have a say. Childrens Welfare Services has been criticized for neglecting to view children as knowledgeable actors in their own cases. In referring to a national Norwegian study with 109 children aged 6–12 years who were placed out-of-home by Childrens Welfare Services, this article proposes strategies to make children more visible in practice as well as within research related to Childrens Welfare Services. By conceptualizing such placement as a change of residency, or, more colloquially, the ‘child on the move’, new sources of knowledge appear to be relevant; namely studies about childrens everyday life, even encompassing knowledge about ordinary moves in ordinary families. The article concludes that importing methodological approaches and substantial knowledge from research on the everyday lives of unremarkable children to the field of Child Welfare Service may help establish children as key agents in their own cases, and even reduce the process of ‘othering’ welfare clients.

PARENTAL REGULATION OF INFANT SLEEP: ROUND-THE-CLOCK EFFORTS FOR SOCIAL SYNCHRONIZATION

The sleep-cycle development of infants is influenced by familial and sociocultural conditions, but there is a lack of knowledge on how parental regulation of infant sleep is related to the specific life situation of a family. This article describes a context-sensitive study of parental regulation of infant sleep that includes the whole 24-hr day, parents intentions, and familial and sociocultural conditions. The results are based on a longitudinal qualitative study in Norway of 51 families. Parents were interviewed in the infants first year of life and approximately 18 months later. An interpretive analysis in four steps was conducted, informed by cultural psychological perspectives on development. The parents were found to perform five types of regulatory actions: facilitating sleep, letting sleep, letting be awake, keeping awake, and waking. These actions were performed continuously throughout the 24-hr day, each to different extents and at different hours in individual families, forming a regulation cycle. We describe patterns and variations in regulation cycles, changes over time as increased social synchronization, and how the regulation cycle is embedded in familial and sociocultural conditions. Finally, implications for clinical practice are discussed.

Parents in high‐conflict custodial cases: negotiating shared care across households

ABSTRACT Understanding the dynamics of custodial conflicts is important for reducing the level of such conflicts and improving the upbringing conditions for the children involved. The parents in these cases care for children living in two households, and our approach therefore draws on the knowledge of how ‘ordinary’ parents proceed in sharing care within and between locations. The paper is based on qualitative interviews with 15 Norwegian parents who were in contact with the child protection service during their custodial disagreements, indicating a high level of conflict and concerns about inadequate care. When describing and reflecting upon their practices of care, the parents speak from two main positions: as a concerned parent or an accused parent. These positions imply different approaches on how to share care, which offer insight into the mechanisms of getting stuck. Although the concerned parent worries about the childs well‐being while staying with the other parent and thereby aims to take a continuous responsibility across households, the accused parent perceives the co‐parents involvement as undue and negotiates increased distance in parenting. Focusing on practices of care may contribute to turning the attention away from conflicts between former partners and towards the childs situation.

‘Heading for Japan’: Prospective narratives and development among young people living in residential care

Young people who live in residential homes provided by Child Protection Services generally have less favourable life conditions and poorer future prospects than young people in general. Repeated interviews with twelve young persons in residential care brought to attention how their prospective narratives are efficacious and significant for developmental processes. The ideas these youths hold about the future are conditioned by both discourses of development and ideas of what adolescence should lead to, their personal history and the context in which the stories are created and told. Studying these narratives shows how narratives of the future are intertwined with the sense of present being. It illuminates the dynamics between the present and the future and exceeds our understanding of development as a linear track from past to present to future. It also shows how residential care both restricts and gives opportunities for some narratives to be told and interpreted. This approach to studying development may be fruitful in understanding why some youths in residential care manage to overcome adversity while others continue to suffer from it.

Sharing Early Care: Learning from Practitioners

Shared care and chain of care are core concepts for analysing empirical variation of care arrangements for small children, involving more than one caregiver. The Norwegian context exemplifies an increased tendency among mothers to share the care of their young child with a co-parent at home, and with professional care providers at day care centres. Instead of drawing on prevailing psychological models and standards to assess the quality of arrangements of care during early childhood, we have tried to learn from how caregivers go about in their practice. In this respect we count parents as well as care providers in childcare centres as practitioners. Based upon parents’ detailed descriptions of their children’s everyday life, the paper analyses how parents involve others in the chain of care that they organise. Three cases of sharing are presented and discussed: same-gendered parents who demonstrate intensive parental sharing, parents who share with professional caregivers at day care and parents of children with special needs who do the same. Setting up care arrangements with more than one continuously engaged participant appeared as a process of gradual adaptation, not a sudden abdication from parental responsibility. Thus, the child is neither constructed as a baton in a relay race, delivered from one caregiver to the next, nor as a task that is easily split into pieces, one for each caregiver. Different caregivers did not necessarily treat the child in exactly the same way, but they coordinated their efforts in order to contribute to the subjectification and development of this particular little person.

Images of Children in Views on Same-Sex Adoption Rights

Child images are negotiated in and through ongoing societal and cultural processes. In this project, the Norwegian same-sex adoption rights debate was chosen as a case in which to study prevalent images of children. The empirical data comprised 437 responses to an open-ended question in a national survey. Four concurrent discourses were identified: (1) children need to grow up in ordinary families; (2) children need dedicated parenting; (3) children are subjects of own individual rights, and (4) the best interest of the child is paramount. Discourse 4 seemingly has a superior standing, both in regard to being widely used and the magnitude of moral strength. This discourse, tentatively, positions children with a privileged moral status. However, such positioning may recycle images of a vulnerable, sentimentalized, and abstract child. Childrens agency, as well as wider aspects of childrens daily lives, may become less visible or be made less relevant. Consequently, various issues of importance for childrens lives and possibilities may remain unrecognized and unaddressed.