Manage your Emotions!:Encouraging Parents to Engage in Introspective Analysis and Help-Seeking

Abstract

In the Danish context, a new risk-preventive parent-child policy agenda has recently paved the way for new intimate support interventions that focus on parents' mentalisation capabilities, attachment patterns and their control over emotions. In this article, based on fieldwork and interviews, we show that the policy agenda has been significantly embedded and complied with in the approaches and tone adopted by visiting children’s nurses acting as frontline workers in the Danish welfare state, but also expanded beyond its initial intention and reconfigured in various ways. The article discusses the possible implications of targeting alleged emotional (dis)orientation in parents and defining emotional self-control as a central characteristic of what constitutes ‘good’ parenting. Ultimately, we argue that the current therapeutic self-help approach to parenting education in the Danish welfare state not only constitutes a psychologising of parenting; it also represents a pathologisation of everyday life in ways where more parents than before are positioned as 'troubled'