engleski

Doing nature, doing nurture: Practiced and symbolic gendered parenting care style in family life

Most theorists perceive the family as a key institution of doing gender, performed and produced through parental/family practices of household organization (division of domestic labor and care), but also through parents’ beliefs, everyday actions and interaction (West and Zimmerman, 1987). Parenting care is one of the central aspects of family life and has been heavily discussed in terms of gendered normative expectations of organizing family life through gendered structures of hierarchy and individual roles. Understanding parenting care as gendered can be significantly improved by the framework of doing gender and by focusing on specific practices which come to play in parenting care. In this perspective, parenting care is gendered not only by enactment of gendered family structures but also by routine performances and accomplishments of specific femininities and masculinities. To unravel the processes of doing gender in the family via doing care, it is necessary to map both the family structure and routine activities in the family life which are recognized to produce and reinforce gendered practices. Also, the issues on the symbolic re/construction of the family structure cannot be neglected. In our research, this has been done by looking into parents’ narratives of the first year parenting experience and caring activities for children, both in relation to the parent’s (absent) partner and emotional and moral projections they display when it comes to the future of their family and children. This paper is based on results gathered through European Social Fund project “Impact of public policies on the quality of family and working life and the demographics of Croatia - Spaces of Change”. The qualitative section of the project was conducted in the second half of 2022. 36 narrative interviews with parents of underaged children were conducted in 6 different regions of Croatia. 4 types of parents were interviewed with the emphasis on the heterosexual family structure: women and men in heterosexual couples and single and/or divorced women and men. We present preliminary analysis focused on the issue of doing gender by interviewed parents.

doing gender, family, parents, care, narrative interviews

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