Fifteen - What parents know: a call for realistic accounts of parenting young children
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2022
Summary
Mothers live in a universe that has not been accurately described. The right words have not been coined. Using habitual vocabulary sends us straight down the same old much-trodden paths. But there are other paths to which these footpaths do not lead. There are whole stretches of motherhood that no one has explored. (Stadlen, 2005, p.12)
At Clifton Park in Rotherham, there is a fantastic playground, including a sand play area. We often go to the sandpit. The children pull off their socks and shoes and play with the sand, and take turns on the fast slide that lands in a pile of sand. We parents sit on the wooden boardwalk next to the sandpit. We take our shoes off too, bury toes or run fingers through the sand as we chat. After a little while, the children will probably come to sit on the wooden boardwalk too, and we will eat our packed lunch. It is a beautiful spot – you can see the hillside of the park rising up behind the sandpit, and the children always seem happy here. It is also a little stressful because it is often quite busy, and we try to keep our eyes on our children as they play and we chat.
This vignette typifies the meetings that took place between us, a group of researchers and parents, during collaborative research over a number of years near Clifton Park in Rotherham. As part of our collaborative ethnography, we organised a series of family den-building events, with community partners, in order to think through how children learn and have experiences in places. We aimed explicitly to draw across and value different kinds of knowledge about young children – professional practitioner knowledge, academic knowledge, and particularly the knowledges gained from everyday lived experiences of being parents and children.
These kinds of everyday knowledges about the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of parenting young children are rarely represented or valued in policy discourses, and therefore risk being overlooked in practical initiatives designed to help or support families with young children in communities. By foregrounding and valuing these everyday lived experiences of families and children, we hope to offer more realistic accounts of what it means to parent young children, which we think should inform policy and practice regarding how young children should be cared for and should participate in communities.
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- Re-imagining Contested CommunitiesConnecting Rotherham through Research, pp. 123 - 134Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2018