‘They are Alone in Their Parenthood’: Parenting Support and (Re)building Community

Abstract

This article uniquely contributes to critical discussions about parenting support in contemporary social science research that has examined the recent political and public attention on parenting. The studies highlight the increased attention on individualised parenting support focused on the parent–child relationship. Based on an analysis of 310 family support projects initiated in Finland, this research found that another orientation exists alongside individualised parenting support, which has gained only little attention in recent studies about parenting support. That alternative focuses on a communal parenting support, wherein parenting support is conducted by means of community (re)building. This article summarises how anxiety about parenting overlaps with discussions about community as well as ‘the family decline’, creating a need for community (re)building. In this study, I show how concern within family support projects is harnessed to establish ‘communion’, representing a third category alongside the more common sociological notions of ‘society’ and ‘community’. However, fundamental tensions appear as projects attempt to build community, which I also discuss in this article.

Introduction

Why are children nowadays staying out late at night? They are looking for their parents. (From ‘The sketch’ by Toinen Mies, Helsingin Sanomat, 5 February 2001, 2)

The above quote from the leading newspaper in Finland consists of a play on words and illustrates the parenting-related anxiety witnessed in the early 2000s in Finland. Parenting-related anxiety crystallised in a well-known Finnish expression: ‘parenting is disappearing’. This quote obviously pokes fun at the presumed disappearance of parenting. In public debates, parenting-related anxiety was closely related to the ill-being of children and youth (Jallinoja, 2006; Sihvonen, 2008). A need to support parenting was firmly amalgamated into Finnish family policy and promoted by a plethora of family support projects, 310 of which I analyse here.

Parenting anxiety is not a Finnish peculiarity, but something identified in many parts of Europe (Daly, 2013b; Faircloth et al., 2013b; Lee et al., 2014; Sihvonen, 2018). Indeed, multiple state-supported parenting programmes have been implemented in Western Europe (Daly, 2013b; Knijn and Hopman, 2015; Martin, 2015), including in the Nordic countries (Littmarck et al., 2018; Sundsbø, 2018; Widding, 2018). Social science scholars studying parenting support have pinpointed how support for parenting relies on ideas about parental determinism, that is, ideas about how parents’ behaviours potentially cause multiple problems related to children’s development determining their future lives (e.g. Faircloth et al., 2013a; Lee et al., 2014). I have also identified this kind of support within the Finnish parenting support discourse, naming this the individualised parenting support approach. I apply this label because it is firmly related to the parent–child relationship and relies on the parents’ capabilities and competencies to bond properly with their child or children (Sihvonen, 2018). In parental determinism, the parent– (or, often, mother–) child relationship is viewed as the reason for, as well as a solution to, childhood dysfunction (Faircloth, 2010; Furedi, 2014; Lee, 2014).

However, based on significant empirical evidence from Finland – namely, documents from 310 family support projects – I argue here that alongside the individualised parenting support approach another approach exists. This alternative is communal parenting support, which has received much less attention in studies on parenting.

The individualistic framework is deployed specifically by parenting support practices that adopt early intervention (Edwards et al., 2015; Sihvonen, 2018) or by biosocial (Gillies et al., 2016) or neuroscientific approaches to parenting (Macvarish, 2016). In short, from the point of view of an individualised approach, parenting support is targeted to supporting the parent–child relationship, which is often reduced to the relationship, interaction, and affection between a mother and her child (Daly, 2013a; Faircloth et al., 2013a; Gislason and Simonardottir, 2018; Macvarish, 2016).

In the communal parenting support approach, community and other types of support, including peer support provided by other parents, are emphasised as supportive resources for parenting. In this article, the communal parenting support approach is analysed by drawing from sociological insights and theories about parenting as well as the community to investigate how parenting support and community or communal support are blended into discussions about the need to support parenting.

In what follows, I first introduce the theoretical framework of this study. To understand reasoning behind communal parenting support, critical insights regarding the erosion of family relationships (Edwards, 2004; Edwards and Gillies, 2006; Gillies and Edwards, 2006), as well as a turn to the community recognised by many sociologists in the early 2000s, are discussed. Furthermore, a critical examination of community (re)building and theorising about ‘communal being-ness’ introduced by Studdert and Walkerdine (2016) provides a mirror wherein I can reflect upon and evaluate aspirations of projects that support communities (see also Studdert, 2016). Finally, Berger and Luckmanns’ (1966) insights regarding the socialisation of children through primary and secondary socialisation, supplemented by Schmalenbach’s (1977) introduction of communion along with community and society, provide sociologically novel perspectives for the interpretation of communal parenting support. After providing the theoretical framework, I introduce the data – that is, documented parenting support projects. The sections that then follow provide the results, wherein I primarily concentrate on one particular family support project – here, referred to as the Lumo Project – and its aims related to communal support. In short, two main themes were identified within the communal approach: parents as rootless and parents as sharing the same life phase. However, there were tensions identified in projects’ attempts to (re)build a sense of community. Theses tensions and parents’ unwillingness to adopt projects aims are further discussed in the final section of this article in relation to theoretical framework and categories of society, communion, and community.

Theoretical framework: a critique of community decline and rebuilding

Increased interest about parenting support identified from the 1990s onward in family policy has been called a ‘turn to parenting’ (Daly, 2013b). Alongside this turn, another turn, here referred to as a ‘turn to community’, took place, which could be interpreted as a countermeasure to individualism stemming from a concern related to community decline witnessed by many sociologists in the 1990s (Bauman, 2001; Coleman, 1988; Delanty, 2003; Etzioni, 1993; Putnam, 2000). Rather remarkably, ideas about community decline often overlap with claims about family decline, as noticed by Edwards (2004). The notion of family and community decline has relevance for family support projects, as the projects also embrace the idea about collapsed community and family decline, and propose parenting support as the solution to both problems. Discourse about community decline in the context of families often relies on ideas about detraditionalisation, family decline, and the erosion of family relations, such as through divorce and single parenting (Beck, 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995; Giddens, 1992).

In the family support projects I examined here, a turn to parenting overlapped with discussions about community decline. The interconnected elements of these two turns represent ideas about isolated and unsupported contemporary parents, who given a lack of communal support remain ‘lost’, which ultimately weakens their parenting competencies. Therefore, the ambition of family support projects to restore communities relies on the ideas of detraditionalisation and individualisation processes gone too far, causing ill-being among children and youth; thus, lonely, vulnerable, and unqualified parents need support based on a strengthened sense of community (see also Gillies and Edwards, 2006).

What family support projects refer to vis-à-vis community decline, however, remains rather vague. Notably, studies about families’ social networks provided no evidence that contemporary families are disconnected or isolated (Edwards and Gillies, 2006). Furthermore, the culturally hegemonic nuclear family, often referred to as the traditional family, has been identified as generating ‘exclusive family intimacies’ in relation to other kinds of family settings, which may be more inclusive, specifically in terms of intimate and supportive relationships (Castrén and Ketokivi, 2015; Castrén and Widmer, 2015; Ketokivi, 2012).

My research was also inspired by another critical approach to community introduced by Studdert and Walkerdine (2016). Based on relational theories, they argued that relational linkages should serve as a starting point for community studies and consider community as an empirical question to be scrutinised. In their theorising, community is not a thing created by people who happen to share a location or interest, but represents a set of processes as well as practices and actions that are constantly moving and changing. Instead of using the concept of community, they prefer to use ‘communal being-ness’ to indicate the action of existing in common (Studdert and Walkerdine, 2016).

However, community as an object – something to build, pull down, and restore – is often the target of government entities and funding bodies as well as actors such as family support projects, an observation also made by Studdert and Walkerdine (2016). Rather than thinking of this critique as an obstacle, here I demonstrate how analysing community as a concept, introduced in and emphasised by empirical material, may reveal interesting dilemmas related to community restoration when examined critically.

In addition to discussions about parenting and community decline, it is important to define how parenting is conceptualised within sociological perspectives. Parenting refers to a specific activity related to particular social relationships between a parent and a child. In sociology, this activity is referred to as primary socialisation, a form of socialisation occurring at an early stage of childhood. The theoretical discussions of Berger and Luckmann about primary and secondary socialisation are important here. According to Berger and Luckmann (1966), socialisation is denoted as

. . . the ontogenetic process by which [internalisation] is brought about is socialisation, which may thus be defined as the comprehensive and consistent induction of an individual into the objective world of a society or a sector of it. (p. 150)

Society is understood in terms of an ongoing and constant dialectical process composed of three moments: externalisation, objectivation, and internalisation (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). Primary socialisation, as the first type of socialisation an individual undergoes during childhood, is highly charged emotionally, whereas secondary socialisation is a process that inducts an already socialised individual into new sectors of the objective world of her society (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). As Berger and Luckmann (1966) write, a child is born into an objective social structure and an objective social world, mediated by significant others often composed of parents who modify objective social worlds by mediating through an emotional attachment. In this study, it is noteworthy that anxiety about parenting – that is, the capability of parents in this specific task to mediate the social world during the process of internalisation – is the principle subject of concern emphasised by family support projects. One dilemma that emerges from the perspective of these projects is that ‘one must make do with the parents that the faith regaled on with’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 154). For family support projects, this becomes a dilemma because parenting is necessary for successful primary socialisation, yet projects doubt parents’ capacities. Through the lens of parenting support, anxiety regarding parenting is precisely the critical juncture that projects compulsively try to impact.

However, in communal parenting support, parenting-related anxiety does not focus on the parent–child interaction and relationships nor on how parents conduct the primary socialisation of their child. Focus instead aims at addressing anxiety about parenting as it relate to parents’ social relationships, specifically with other parents and adults in a community. Therefore, anxiety relates to the socialisation of parents into a proper culture of parenting. Within the framework of socialisation, concern addresses parents’ competencies and knowledge of the objective social world (cf. Berger and Luckmann, 1966). However, family support projects do not provide support from society nor from social institutions, at least not directly or explicitly. Furthermore, as already discussed, community remains something that the projects consider lost. This creates a dilemma, solved by family support projects through highlighting the importance of restoring a community in a particular way.

This specific form of community restoration, wherein emphasis is placed on parents’ relationships with other parents and adults in a community, relies here on Schmalenbach’s ideas about sociality. By redefining Tönnies’ categories of community (Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft), Schmalenbach introduces communion (bund) as a third category, alongside community and society, to describe human sociality (Lüschen and Stone, 1977; Schmalenbach, 1977). Communion for Schmalenbach represents a way to overcome definitional incompatibilities he considers within the concept of community (Lüschen and Stone, 1977).

One of the most important incompatibilities in a community relates to emotions, which Schmalenbach identified as significant bedrocks for communion. Although emotions are often important to a community, Schmalenbach (1977) notes that emotions are not necessary ‘in the realm of natural things’. For example, in the realm of family, as a prototype for Schmalenbach’s (1961, 1977) notion of community, the kin relation of parenthood exists regardless of emotions, whereas communion requires conscious emotions to emerge and remain. Conscious emotional experiences, togetherness, and like-mindedness serve as the constitutive strength of communion (Schmalenbach, 1961, 1977). In a way, family support projects attempt to develop a form of community – a parental communion – to strengthen parenting. It is these requirements of conscious emotions that render communion a fascinating category for this study. Specifically, within the communal parenting support, the awakening of consciousness regarding parenting issues and relationships supporting these issues play a primary role.

Analysing communal parenting support within family support projects

The family support projects (n = 310) analysed in this study represent a heterogeneous group of projects implemented between 2000 and 2010 in Finland. During that time, the government carried out a few influential national family policy programmes funded by the Ministry of Social and Health (hereafter, MSAH), the primary implementer of family-related programmes in Finland. MSAH provides transfers for the projects implemented by local governments and municipalities. Furthermore, projects conducted by non-governmental organisations (hereafter, NGOs) are granted support from the Funding Centre for Social Welfare and Health Organisation (STEA) ¹ . First, the potential projects were collected from the funders’ records and grant database using relevant key words. Second, the documents from potential family projects were skimmed to determine if ‘parenting support’ was mentioned as a project aim. All the projects aimed at parenting support were included in the dataset. Parenting support projects implemented by governmental organisations comprised 51%, and the projects implemented by NGOs comprised 49% of the projects in the dataset (see also Sihvonen, 2020).

The data analysed here consist of project documents such as funding applications, project plans, midterm and final reports, as well as other documents produced by the projects’ staff (n = 517). Considering the large amount of the data, some characteristics were entered an SPSS file, which provided a matrix for organising the vast quantity of information, while the text analyses were conducted in Atlas.ti (Sihvonen, 2020).

The text analyses ² employed here were based on adaptive (Layder, 1998) and abductive (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012) methodologies aimed at theory construction. An abductive approach relies on the theory of inference from pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Peirce (cf. Timmermans and Tavory, 2012). This approach highlights the importance of observational surprises as well as the importance of familiarity with existing theories at the outset and throughout each research step (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012). In many respects, the abductive approach is similar to the adaptive approach introduced by Layder (1998). Both fall between a deductive or theory-testing approach and an inductive approach (cf. Timmermans and Tavory, 2012). These methodological principles are well-suited to the aims of this research, which attempts to scrutinise the unique empirical finding of a communal parenting support approach. Yet, these findings are reflected in critical insights about family collapse and sociological insights about the socialisation of children and restoring community or communion as favoured by family support projects (Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Edwards, 2004; Edwards and Gillies, 2006; Schmalenbach, 1977).

While the philosophy of the adaptive and abductive approaches differs from grounded theory, they take advantage of the grounded theory’s methodological principles, which I also use in the text analysis. These include techniques such as coding and memo-writing, employing phases of open coding, axial coding, and selected coding – that is, checking certain passages belonging to one or more categories or themes (cf. Strauss and Corbin, 1990). The text analysis and interpretation of the documents allowed me to understand the ways parenting support is discussed at a particular time in the particular culture (cf. McKee, 2003). First, open coding was carried out to understand what is supported when parenting is supported as well as how support is organised (e.g. attachment between a mother/father and a child, family interaction, parents’/mothers’ /fathers’ inner parenting capacities, advices, peer support, and family cafes). Second, axial coding was directed to the interconnections between the categories wherein, for example, two main categories, intervention projects (32%) and prevention projects (68%), were identified and projects divided into those two categories. The next step was selected coding, wherein the two main approaches – the individualised parenting support approach and the communal parenting support approach – were identified and into which different subcategories – created in the previous process of open coding – were included (Sihvonen, 2020).

This specific study aims to present results of the communal parenting support approach, whereby support targets parents’ social relationships in their local communities. ³ Most of the projects following the communal approach are preventive projects often targeted to all families in a municipality or other selected area. Intervention projects targeted families in child protective services who were experiencing serious and urgent problems (see more Sihvonen, 2018, 2020). Expressions of communality in relation to parenting support serve as the analytical units examined here.

I identified two main themes within the communal approach – parents as rootless and parents as sharing the same life phase – describing how community (re)building is justified by the family support projects. Furthermore, I also identified a third theme revealing tensions while the projects try to build community.

In the following sections, I structure the analysis around a more careful description of one particular project, the ‘Lumo Project’ ⁴ , which serves as a representative example of how the idea of communality figures in the data. However, I also utilise the documents produced by many other projects following the communal approach to parenting support to explain how a need for communality is justified by the projects, as well as rejected by the parents living within a community. However, by focusing more carefully on one project, I could provide a contextualised story of how communality is tried to (re)build in a certain time and context.

Rootless parents and community (re)building: ‘it takes the whole village’

Community prevention and parenting support can partly be a response to a rootless and lonely generation’s cry for help. (Project 216, project plan)

In a small Finnish town with high levels of population mobility, parenting-related anxiety increased in the 2000s. Families with young children became the target of intense parenting support initiatives as municipal social services implemented the Lumo Project. This project was not designed in a vacuum, but originated from the national family programme, funded initially from 2005 to 2007 by the national Development Project for Social Services (cf. Kallinen-Kräkin, 2008) and subsequently from 2007 to 2009 by the national FAMILY project (cf. Viitala et al., 2008). Over the years, the specific activities changed. During the first stage, the project concentrated on developing particular child protective services, but, in the second stage, the project focused more intensively on preventive parenting support and vigorously adopted the vocabulary of communality.

In the Lumo Project, similar to many other family support projects, myriad changes in family life were assumed to explain the ‘disappearing parenting’, thereby providing the bedrock for parenting-related anxiety:

Over the past few decades, there have been changes in the everyday lives of families with small children, for example, moving far from familiar and supportive relationships such as kin and friends as well as an increasing number of divorces and blended families. (Lumo Project, final report)

Many of the projects discussing communal support were preventive by their nature. Anxiety stemmed from concern over increased children’s mental health problems as well as an increased number of children taken into custody. Although the reasons related to mental health issues as well as increased number of children taken into custody are manifold (Forsberg and Ritala-Koskinen, 2011; Heino and Pösö, 2003), the projects were built around parental determinism, that is, ideas regarding how parents’ behaviour represents the causes of multiple childhood dysfunctions (Sihvonen, 2020; also cf. Lee et al., 2014). Furthermore, the reasoning embraced by the Lumo Project closely aligned with the fear of family collapse manifested in statements about divorce, as well as migration far from places of origin and close kin. These changes to close family relationships were expected to reduce the support that parents could obtain. This line of reasoning – namely, the fear of eroding family relationships (cf. Edwards, 2004) and detraditionalisation – appears in other projects in my dataset. For example, a project organised by a large southern Finnish city made a strong statement and explained the need to rebuild the community, relying on the idea of collapsed, natural structures of society: ‘Natural structures of society have changed and, therefore, we need new kinds of services for children, youth, and families, as well as new kinds of premises that guide our thinking’ (Project 23, final report). The structures labelled ‘natural’ by that project referred to in the quote above mirror those emphasised also by the Lumo Project: namely, intimate relationships organised around the nuclear family and close kin.

These new kinds of services for families referred to in the project documented above foremost represented opportunities for families to meet other families within a community. In particular, projects implemented by municipal organisations often highlighted the involvement of municipal services in establishing opportunities and constructing premises for supplementary social networks and community-building. Opportunities to meet other parents in a community also emerged as an important feature in the Lumo Project: ‘The fundamental idea of the project is to strengthen and support families’ own resources by creating opportunities for peer support, social networking, and community’ (Lumo Project, final report). Along similar lines, a pioneering city in the construction of specific family centres – particular places for families to meet other families – describes the problem of migration as follows:

Due to increased migration, families might feel rootless and their social networks may seem weak. Families lack the support provided by kin and a close community, and, therefore, their attachment to a residential area might be difficult. (Project 7, final report)

Indeed, one of the most influential initiatives in parenting support in the 2000s in Finland was a specific model for a family centre. The development of family centres related back to the objectives of the nation-wide FAMILY project, which aimed to instil the importance of family centres for most municipalities in Finland (Halme et al., 2012; Viitala et al., 2008). The idea of a family centre was also adopted by the Lumo Project, which hoped to fix problems associated with rootless parents. Rootless parents were afraid of being isolated in their parenting practices, which was prevented by providing them with opportunities to meet other parents and increase their sense of community:

The roots of many citizens lie elsewhere, which creates special needs. The town needs forums and activities, which can address rootlessness and a lack of social networks amongst parents caused by a high level of migration [. . .] The family centre supports families so that they become rooted, and the sense of community may increase in the town, the town which is well-known for its high level of mobility. (The Lumo Project, final report)

The idea of the family centre focuses on increasing and (re)building a sense of community in the town, particularly so as to increase peer support provided by other parents in the community. In that way, projects performed exactly the opposite of what Studdert (2016b) presented regarding the essence of communal being-ness, which lies in the actions of communing, not (re)building places with people who presumably share interests (p. 613). Project workers, developers, and professionals in municipalities were positioned within projects as enablers of the community, whereas parents were supposed to feel empowered through a sense of togetherness shared with other parents in a community:

The purpose of the family centre is to establish its position as a living room for families with young children, a place which weaves together social networks and builds community [ . . . ] The project strengthens and supports children’s and families’ own capacities by providing opportunities for peer support, social interaction, and community. (The Lumo Project, final report)

Concern about moving far from one’s place of origin specifically focuses on not only a lack of interaction and support by close kin and family members, but also parenting support provided by peers. Therefore, it appears as though being too detached from a parental communion represents a threat to parenting and, therefore, the socialisation of children. Putting this in sociological nomenclature, family support projects, then, viewed this parental communion as a valid arena for the internalisation of a ‘sub-world’ of parenting (cf. Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 158). According to the family support projects, parents’ intuitive knowledge about parenting is insufficient, requiring strengthening within the larger community. It seems as though, within communal support, anxiety about parenting specifically relates to the lack of opportunities to share experiences and, therefore, increase one’s knowledge about childrearing and how to be a parent. Fears surrounding the disappearance of parenting emphasised strengthening the local parental communion, as illustrated by the case in the following project conducted in one of the largest cities in Finland. Interestingly, in that project, peer support was even suggested as strengthening parents’ knowledge of child development, often viewed as specific knowledge held by professional parenting experts (e.g. Lee et al., 2014):

There are lots of parents with young children who live far from their families, and their network of friends might be still underdeveloped. They are alone in their parenthood and they do not have opportunities to share parenting experiences with peers and, thus, they cannot increase their knowledge about children’s development and childrearing with help from peer support. (Project 276, other project document)

Besides providing new kinds of services for families, such as a family centre, the family support projects demanded a new kind of thinking and reasoning to support parenting. For example, one of the most influential projects in the dataset, representing multiple pilot projects implemented in different areas of Finland, explicitly described the vanishing ‘consciousness of parenting’, a lack of shared values, and the shared responsibility of the entire society:

Childrearing should be a shared task within society relying on a shared value system. The traditional value system has been dismantled in recent decades without creating something new that one can rely on [. . .] Our goal is to establish a shared value system and strengthen communal attitudes in childrearing relying on a particular principle: ‘It takes the whole village’. (Project 2, final report)

As a solution to improving children’s welfare, the project reported that ‘In order to support children’s rights to their parents and a healthy development, the project emphasised the importance of a healthy lifestyle and an increase in parents’ consciousness regarding parenting’ (Project 2, final report). The emphasis on parenting as a duty of the entire village certainly stands as a counterpoint towards the individualisation and detraditionalisation of family life (cf. Edwards, 2004; Edwards and Gillies, 2006). Moreover, projects considered the consciousness of parenting to be something to be explicitly developed within the parental community, binding parents together, thereby resembling what Schmalenbach (1961, 1977) calls communion. Therefore, the consciousness of parenting represents not an individual process, but rather a thoroughly social and communally confirmed process within the parental communion.

The basis of a parental community: ‘opening the heart to those in the same life phase’

The quote in this section’s title highlights the focal point for communal parenting support and for building a communion – that is, sharing one’s emotions. To share their emotions, family projects presupposed that a shared life phase represented an essential precondition for shared emotions, and ultimately for community restoration. In many ways, family projects consider having a first child a shared life phase, a transition towards something unknown that requires support. The projects described this life phase among families with small children as a specific phase featuring shared feelings and viewed as important seeds for developing communion. Therefore, peer groups among families with small children were highlighted: ‘At best, experiences with people in the same life phase are shared in the peer groups; in the peer groups parents can feel as though they are part of a community’ (Project 19, final report). This idea regarding a shared life phase represented the key to establishing a communion. Again, family centres played a central role as the site for sharing experiences, strengthening the sense of community, and restoring community:

The family centre is aimed at creating a homely living room and meeting point for children and parents, where they can meet people who share the same life phase, where parents can share the distress and joy that everyday life brings them. (Project 63, final report)

Sharing the same life phase also emerged as vital within the Lumo Project. For example, the feelings of parents were described in the project documents as follows: ‘Most of the parents participating in the family club explained that before taking part in the club they did not know anyone in town who shared the same life phase’ (the Lumo Project, final report). Not knowing anyone experiencing the same life phase in the residential area was viewed as a threat to parenting and, hence, the well-being of children. The Lumo Project staff felt responsible for providing opportunities to parents during which they could meet other parents in peer groups. Organised groups were intended to make getting together easier, especially for those parents who recently moved to the city.

The development of a new kind of family training system for parents expecting their first child was closely linked to the development of family centres and building communion. While family training or coaching is not a new form of family support in Finland, it experienced profound changes in the 2000s (Pietilä-Hella, 2009; Sosiaali-ja terveysministeriö, 2003, 2004) also influencing the aims of family support projects. In addition to traditional forms of training, which includes information about pregnancy, childbirth, and care for first-time parents, a new focus within family training centred around peer group activities and peer support between participating families. For example, in the quote that follows from a project that established a family centre and employed the new family training system in a rural area of northern Finland, peer support from other parents is highlighted alongside informational support provided through professional parenting expertise:

The goal of the training is to improve knowledge and skills about parenting so that everyday life at home would work out fine. Growing up to be a parent and being a parent are themes discussed during the group meetings [. . .] Group trainings are empowering and based on interaction and peer support. (Project 222, final report)

Family training seeks to foster relationships between families and parents of newborns who all share a similar life phase. In this way, the projects hoped to increase communality and build communion based on shared emotions and knowledge of parenting. Knowledge of parenting provided by peers here is labelled horizontal expertise of parenting, highlighted by projects that rely on communal parenting support. Horizontal expertise of parenting lies in contrast to vertical expertise of parenting provided by professional parenting experts. Sharing experiences and, thereby, strengthening the horizontal expertise of parenting represent the core components of the parental community, and remain important to the consciousness of parenting. While sharing the same life phase as the parents of young children, and sharing parenting-related emotions and expertise on parenting are vigorously highlighted in the data, further analysis revealed tensions within these discourses.

Tensions when building communion

Within the Lumo Project, the family trainings for parents expecting their first child or with a newborn were also arranged on the premises of the family centre. The project staff hoped that following official family trainings and group meetings parents would join other activities and peer groups arranged through the family centre. One such group included the family club, a club for parents, and young children from ages 1 to 3. Furthermore, parents were encouraged to meet with one another outside events arranged by the project. Therefore, for instance, the Lumo Project inspired parents to create social networks that were assumed to continue after the project ended. Indeed, the ultimate aim of the family projects focused on providing facilities, a concrete physical place, as a stepping stone for further community-building activities among parents.

However, tensions existed between the idea of the shared life phase and varying life situations across families in real life, as revealed through careful analysis of project documents. Indeed, the first tension emerged from doubts raised about the consistency of the life situations of families in the community and whether a common denominator existed among peer groups: ‘The challenge of peer grouping is as follows: What is the common denominator of the peer group?’ (Project 14, final report).

The developers of the Lumo Project also expressed doubts, even while bringing together parents who shared the same life phase remained highly emphasised and was frequently mentioned as the primary motivation for arranging parenting support. An analysis of these doubts reveals a second tension in the discourse of shared life phases. Specifically, doubts were raised whether family training and other open preventive peer group activities really reached those parents who the professionals working within the project thought needed support the most. For example, the project developers were concerned that the universal basis of the project would not reach marginalised families who instead might feel guilty rather than empowered through the project initiatives:

The most relevant question for the future development of the project is as follows: Does family trainings reach those families who would benefit from the content the most? We know that in universal services families who are doing well are often over-represented. It is important to reach those families who are burdened by things who might risk their well-being and possibly parenting, who experience things such as mental health problems and other diseases, alcohol misuse, single parenting, unemployment, or needy families who have problems stemming from the parents’ own childhoods. (The Lumo Project, final report)

Hence, a kind of double standard persists in the communal parenting support approach. On the one hand, projects wanted to increase the sense of community, build a communion, and ultimately restore community, but, on the other hand, projects specifically aimed to focus on so-called marginal families and the parenting skills of such parents: ‘The problem is how to reach those who really need help; those parents who attend the peer groups are those who are typically active beforehand’ (Project 36, final report). Therefore, the focus within projects lies not only on increasing the consciousness of parenting and the sense of community, but also on support parenting competence among marginalised families, wherein the expertise of professionals – that is, the vertical expertise of parenting – was highlighted. Harnessing communal aspirations to reach marginalised families was also recognised by other studies on family support (e.g. Gillies, 2005). Nevertheless, this reasoning reveals that building parental communion was not, after all, available to everyone in the community. Parents within marginalised families emerged as a target for intervention rather than as equal members of a prospective parental community, which constructed a consciousness towards parenting in an ongoing dialectic process (cf. Berger and Luckmann, 1966). That is, marginalised families were not invited to such dialogues.

This line of thinking becomes clear when examining the circumstances surrounding the further development of a family centre within the Lumo Project. During the first stage, many open peer groups based on universal, preventive principles and available for all families in the community were organised. However, over time, project staff noticed that there was a need for more exclusive peer groups and peer support. Therefore, the project staff decreased the number of open peer groups and increased the number of exclusive and closed peer groups, such as peer groups for the families of children diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorders (ADHDs), groups for mothers with post-partum depression, groups for single mothers, and groups for exhausted mothers, as well as specific groups for fathers and children. Thus, exclusive peer support became the prevailing mode of parenting support, and aspirations related to shared experiences and communion fell into oblivion.

Furthermore, while the prevailing discourse regarding parenting support, as well as community strengthening and peer support, aimed to reach all parents in the community, a closer analysis of project documents reveals that alongside marginalised families and exclusive peer support, mothers often became the target of parenting support initiatives. Therefore, yet another tension lies in the gendered nature of communal parenting support. For example, one project described the function of parenting and peer support in a family café as follows: ‘[Family café] provides the opportunity to meet other mothers of infants and discuss things related to parenting and family life in general with other people “along the same wavelength”’ (Project 37, final report). Thus, while open activities were per se available to both genders, mothers were often in mind when activities were developed.

However, the Lumo Project arranged a special activity only for fathers, a father’s week, which aimed at increasing the culture of fathering within the community: ‘The aim of father’s week is to strengthen the culture of fathering, to increase respect towards fathering and equal parenting, and to provide friendly communal activities for parents with their children’ (the Lumo Project, final report). Yet, fathers were still mostly seen as assistants to mothers, even among fathers themselves, rather than impacting and participating in dialogues about the parenting culture within the community: ‘According to participants [in the father–child groups], it was also important to enable regular free-time for mothers by attending father–child activities and groups’ (Project 23, final report).

As indicated by other parenting support scholars, parenting support is not a gender-neutral concept, but a gender-blind concept, since it focuses on practices that concentrate on mothering rather than considering both genders, let alone fathering on its own (Daly, 2013a). In the family support projects, this manifested in the large number of specific peer support groups for mothers rather than fathers, as well as the implicit ideas about parenting, referring specifically to mothering if fathers were not specifically mentioned as a target of support. Sharing the same life phase, speaking the same language, or being on the same wavelength, as well as other expressions, was employed by projects to describe cohesion, which neither concerned parents in so-called problem or marginalised families nor both mothers and fathers equally within the community.

Finally, the fourth and final tension found in the family support projects lies between the overall aims of the projects, those focused on activating parents by resorting to the community, and the parents’ general unwillingness to participate in communal actions provided by the projects. Indeed, the majority of those projects focussed on (re)building a community failed, since there was little interest among parents in the community to participate in open groups and other communal actions arranged by the projects. This does not necessarily mean that parents did not need any support. Rather, it indicates that the support some parents preferred was quite different from that offered by the projects:

It is not a respite for me to drink coffee with someone or participate in some peer group. It would be a relief if someone could come to my house and cook lunch for my kids or hang laundry up to dry or if I could go to the grocery store by myself without the children. (Project 37, final report)

For some parents, parenting support resonated differently, and they preferred support for parents rather than support in parenting by strengthening the community. Moreover, perhaps parental communion and the consciousness of parenting evolved beyond the range of family support projects, through a process of shared practices and actions as put forth through the foundation for a community, as proposed by Studdert and Walkerdine (2016).

Conclusion

Anxiety about parenting increased in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Finland, leading to the establishment of numerous family support projects, 310 of which form the basis of the analysis presented here. As already discussed, parenting-related anxiety is not specific to Finland, but represents a phenomenon identified in many parts of Europe. However, most of the critical studies about parenting support have focused on support provided for the parent–child relationship and which I have named individualised parenting support (Sihvonen, 2018). Some elements of parenting support are not reflected in the majority of studies about parenting and parenting support, which I identified as important in the discourse of Finnish family support projects. In this article, I argue that along with individualised parenting support another approach exists which highlights the importance of parents’ social relationships with other parents in a community serving to increase the sense of community.

Some scholars previously showed how concern about family decline often overlaps with a concern about community decline (e.g. Edwards, 2004). This line of thinking relies on the idea of the erosion of family relationships and, therefore, a decline in support that parents can obtain from their close relationships. Thus, a heated discussion about parenting and the need for communal support can be interpreted through the concern about family decline, well-described by many sociologists (e.g. Smart, 2007). This becomes evident in the analysis of the family support projects studied in this article, which linked anxiety about parenting to anxiety about the family, such as by expressing concerns related to divorce and lone motherhood. However, the overlap between anxiety about parenting and community decline contains particular elements not comprehensively explained by concern for family decline.

One of these elements refers to how projects attempt to rebuild community in a unique way. In this article, I have theoretically relied on Schmalenbach’s (1961, 1977) categories of community, communion, and society. In family projects, emphasis is placed on parents’ relationships with other parents in a community. I label this parental communion, which family support projects attempt to build and wherein emotional experiences, togetherness, like-mindedness, and the horizontal expertise of parenting represent the constitutive strengths for communion as well as for parenting. From the point of view of socialisation theory, parenting-related anxiety lies in communal parenting support targeting the socialisation of parents into the proper culture of parenting. According to the family support projects, this was best achieved by supporting parents with young children, who should ‘share the same life phase’, be on ‘the same wavelength’, and ‘speak the same language’.

However, as indicated in this article, tensions exist in the discourse about shared life phases. For example, family support projects implicitly destroyed the delusion about shared life phases, since some initiatives targeted marginalised families and disregarded the gendered practices of communal parenting support initiatives. Furthermore, some of these tensions stemmed from the parents’ side, since parents did not identify their life phase as similar to others and, therefore, preferred more targeted peer groups – if they preferred any groups at all. Indeed, many parents did not feel a need for togetherness and communion, but preferred other kinds of support services from social institutions (cf. Sihvonen, 2018).

This last conclusion regarding the services that parents preferred beyond communal parenting support leads to the paradox that the family support projects confronted as they attempted to build communion. This paradox interestingly relies on and among the categories of society, communion, and community. Although family support projects attempted to build communion, they continued to target aims typically connected to the aims of society and those in power, such as targeted support for marginalised families. As Schmalenbach (1961) indicated, communions often transform into community, and also aim at communal parenting support, since the projects hoped that parents would get together following official family trainings and create a sense of community with continuity and without the presence of the project agencies. In this vein, I conclude that the community that the family support projects attempted to build represented a hybrid composed of elements of all three categories of social support, which, perhaps, inflicted failure to (re)build community.