Key practices of the transition to parenthood: The everyday figuration of parents’ and children’s bodies and personalities through the lens of a new materialist ethnography

Abstract

At the transition to parenthood humans become parents or children. Sociology traditionally defines the transition to parenthood as the attainment of a new role or a new cultural identity. Recent new materialist redefinitions of the human and human relations have consequences for the empirical and conceptual view on the transition to parenthood. Parents and children become figurations within material-cultural practices. Their bodies and personalities solidify in those processes. Research from this perspective has often focused on the conception and birth of children (and parents) within techno-scientific practices (e.g. IVF). The research presented here focuses on everyday material-cultural practices during the transition to parenthood to explicate how parents and children are produced during the transition to parenthood. This article gives detailed descriptions of four key practices that allow humans to gain the status of parent or child: gaining evidence over an existing pregnancy, the normalization of the foetus and the parents, the sexing of the child and the official registration of the child. These situated practices form ‘real’ parents and children and their living conditions.