“Do you want more happy moments with your child?”: The role of Danish welfare workers as mediators of parent’s emotional self-work in the quest for happiness and well-being
Author(s): Stine Thidemann Faber
Thursday 15 | 10:40-11:00
Room: TP45
Session: Parenting in the Nordic countries
On the front page of the brochure, it reads: "Do you want more happy moments with your child?" The brochure introduces an education programme available to parents to small children (under the age of three) in Danish municipalities. Inside the brochure, it says: The programme will provide parents with new tools on how to interact with their child and accommodate to its’s needs and behaviours. It further states that the parents will learn how to better understand their child’s emotions and how to adjust their own emotional responses accordingly. The communicated message in the brochure is that, by receiving professional assistance and by making use of specific techniques and tools in everyday interactions, parents will not only become more skilled in ‘how to parent’; they can also learn to manage and carry themselves in ways that reduces conflicts in parent-child interactions. The reward promised to parents if they participate is appealing: Who wouldn’t want to have more happy moments with their child?
In this paper, I ask how we can understand this turn to happiness within the context of parent education programmes in the Danish welfare state? I try to understand, from the professional viewpoint, why emotional self-work and emotion management on the parts of parents have more recently come to play such a prominent role in supporting well-being and building resilience in families. As part of this, I analyze the ways in which the welfare professionals aim to teach parents to change their ways of thinking and acting to create more happy moments.
The paper builds on a combination of extensive empirical data such as policy documents, ethnographic fieldwork, observations and interviews. This I bring together with recent social theories, such as Ahmed (2010) as well as Cabanas and Illouz (2019). The paper raises some critical questions of the ways in which parenting has become linked to a quest for happy moments and how this may end up reshaping how parents come to understand and think about themselves and their child(ren) and what it means to live a good family life.