Busch-Jensen, Line

Jacobsen, Janne Maj Valentin

Weng, Julie Selma Anna Østebø

AbstractThis project concerns the problematics of “Imbalance in families with dependent children’s everyday lives”. The project focuses on the special conditions experienced by the families and how Home-Start has made a difference to them. The analysis is qualitative and the scientific theoretical approach to the analysis is critical psychology.In addition, the project takes its point of departure in the way that knowledge is viewed within practice research, which means that the participants are considered co-researchers in the project. The interviewees are three single mothers and focus is on their parental perspective. Previously all three mothers and their families have received help from the volunteer organization Home-Start. Home-Start offers free help to challenged families with dependent children through home visits from a volunteer family friend. A coordinator from Home-Start in Næstved is also contributing to the study analysis.Two different interview forms are being used in the collection of empirical data. The semi structured interview format is applied when interviewing the coordinator, as a means to establishing an introductory and knowledge creating point of departure for the content matter of the study. The lifestyle interview format is used in the dialogue with each of the three mothers in order to create insights in the conditions of the families’ everyday lives and the importance of the designated family friend.The project contains theoretical perspectives on a series of unbalances that are experienced in modern families with dependent children. The analytic strategy is based on an analysis of conditions, meanings and reasons in which the empirical data is analyzed in depth and interpreted from many different perspectives. As focus of attention in the analysis, we are applying analytic categories that we have identified as relevant for the empirical data.In our conclusion, we emphasize the mothers’ feelings of pressure in their everyday lives and the feeling of not being good enough parents. They feel alone and lack a social network that can ease them in some of their challenges, but they fear being categorized as problem families if they ask for help. The mothers experience specific ideals for parenthood that are not consistent with their actual everyday conditions.The support of the family friend has a positive impact on the mothers. However, we observe a duality in the fact that the family friend provides practical help that enables the mothers to live up to the ideals, but at the same time they break with the ideals through physical support of the mothers. We observe a connection between the ideals of the mothers and social media’s portrayal of family life. In addition, we observe a correlation with a societal, dichotomic understanding of families with children being either unproblematic or socially marginalized. On a societal scale, we reckon that it is necessary to create a more realistic and detailed understanding of families with dependent children in order to increase the well-being of families with children in their everyday lives. <br/

Imbalance in families with dependent children's everyday lives

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Roskilde Universitet