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ABSTRACT
When addressed from the third-person perspective of professional and academic expertise, parents in high-conflict divorce are often described in polarized and individualized ways. This is at odds with the complex picture arising from studies exploring parents’ own experience of high-conflict divorce. Inspired by the research strategy of institutional ethnography, this article explores how the work of parents in enduring post-divorce conflicts relates to particular socially organized ways of doing parenthood. It draws on interviews with 20 Norwegian mothers and fathers experiencing a high-conflict divorce situation. The analysis connects parents’ experiences to dominant discourses about symmetrically shared parenting and the importance of parental devotion vis-a-vis their children. Through authoritative documents like laws, policies, and professional guidelines, these discourses are materially present in parents’ everyday lives, contributing to the coordination of experience. The findings show how parents’ struggles to care for their children in accordance with norms for good parenting can sometimes work to keep conflicts alive. It is suggested that organizing policy and professional responses around objectified understandings of post-divorce conflict as instances of parental neglect risks distancing policy and helping initiatives from the experiences of those parents they are meant to address.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Gert Biesta, Tore Dag Bøe, Ella Kopperud, and Rolf Sundet, who act as supervisors for the Ph.D. study that the present paper is part of, for critical reading and comments on previous versions of this manuscript. I am also grateful for the highly constructive feedback and suggestions from the two anonymous reviewers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
The interview transcripts for this study will not be made publicly available. They have been de-identified, but the content is still personal and cannot be made fully anonymous without changing the content.
Notes
1 While research on parenting values in the Nordic countries generally portray women and men as endorsing an ideal of gender equality, the studies referenced above also highlight a discrepancy between ideology and practice in these questions (i.e., parents do not necessarily behave in accordance with these values). For the purpose of the present study, however, it is the general ideological code (Smith, Citation1999) of inter-parental equality that is of primary interest.
2 The Norwegian Parliament.
3 The groups were run according to the ‘No Kids in the Middle’ model, which is a structured and time-limited (eight group meetings lasting for approximately two hours), multi-family group therapy model for families in post-divorce conflict, originally developed in the Netherlands. The program is based on ideas and practices from systemic and narrative family therapy, dialogical philosophy and trauma psychology (van Lawick & Visser, Citation2015).
4 In a separate article, currently in review, I explore the institutional circuit (Griffith & Smith, Citation2014) of concern and assessment leading up to the referral of families to these groups as itself a part of the ruling relations.
5 Many researchers have explicated gendered aspects of parenting and family policy (see e.g., Andenæs, Citation2005; Forsberg, Citation2007; Lee et al., Citation2014; Plantin et al., Citation2003). The present analysis aims at the social organization against which such gendered patterns are enacted. Thus, gender is not consistently applied as an analytical category.