‘Ideally, mother would say that I can keep it’: negotiating authority and autonomy between parents and adolescents about piercing

Abstract

Against the background of a discourse about increasing democratisation of parent–child relations the paper analyses how autonomy of children within families is negotiated by investigating the fictitious communication between parents and their children around the controversial topic of piercing. The basis is a Slovenian vignette study confronting 132 first-born children aged 15–18 years as well as their parents with the scenario of the child's piercing without prior consultation with parents. The findings of the systematic exploration of imagined outcomes and developments of this confrontation challenge the conventional assumption that in case of conflict, negotiation is the norm in contemporary Western families. Nevertheless, we find that adolescents actively participate in conflict where it arises. This paper shows the mechanisms of how, in case of controversy, the child's scope of autonomy is still likely to lose out to parental preferences.

Keywords:

• young people
• parents
• parenting
• negotiations
• piercing

Notes

1. After the breakdown of socialism, Slovenia managed to arrive relatively smoothly at a stable economic and social situation. This is connected with its unique Western style modernisation already in the 1970s and 1980s when the country's development was compared to the Scandinavian level of social protection. Slovenia was not directly affected by the Balkan wars in the 1990s and successfully managed the transition to a market economy and nation state based on multi-party democracy. Nevertheless, the conditions of families and young people worsened in comparison to the socialist period; a lack of stable jobs for young people facilitated the trends towards prolonged education that was accompanied by new forms of parenthood and prolonged cohabitation with children (Ule and Kuhar 2002).

2. All percentages refer to the sample; inference to the Slovenian population is not possible on the basis of such a sample.

3. According to the latest Census data 14.3% of 11- to 18-year-olds live in single-parent families, but there is no official data on reorganised families (Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia 2002).

4. According to official statistics, approximately half of the two million Slovenian population lives in urban areas and another half in non-urban areas (Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia 2009), but since the countryside is also relatively developed and mostly non-rural it is not a relevant discriminatory variable.

5. The intercoder reliability coefficients for expected developments, expected and ideal outcomes were, respectively, kappa=0.90, 0.84 and 0.89.