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CHAPTER 13 Doing Parenting in Post-Socialist Estonia and Latvia ——————————————————————————————————— Ingegerd Municio-Larsson Introduction This chapter is about parenthood, about the rights and obligations that come with being a mother or a father.1 In order to find out what is thought to be proper for a woman or a man in relation to her/his children, parents who have divorced are interviewed and asked about how they organize their lives. The idea is that when a couple divorces, it becomes necessary to spell out how to share duties and responsibilities that previously did not require explanations. The concept of doing parenting in the title denotes a post-structuralist approach to studying differences between women and men as to parental rights and obligations. This is parallel to how the concept of doing gender is used in feminist post-structuralism, that is, as opposed to being a woman or a man (West and Zimmerman, 1987, p. 137). This approach encourages a study of the processes by which social practice, cultural patterns, and individual identities are constituted. Post-structuralism differs from structuralism in that, instead of trying to establish law-like structures that order both language and society, it turns to discourse. In this context, discourse is about meaning, “what we mean and how this influences our acting” (Lenz Taguchi, 2004, p. 15); how we constitute our world, our lives, and our relations in specific ways and in accordance with the meaning indicated by the discourse. In feminist poststructuralism the focus is not only on discourse per se, but on the thinking and acting of subjects within discourses and practices (Søndergaard, 2006, p. 67). Thus it is assumed that the way people talk about family life after divorce provides a frame of reference for acting. It is also assumed that studying divorce with a focus on discourse will illustrate family life in general as well as parenting in stable families. The aim is to get access to the discourses on family life and parenting that are present in society. What is possible to say; what is considered to be a problem; and what is a reasonable solution? (Bacchi, 1999). Here the focus is on the following questions. How is parenthood defined and worked out after divorce when there are children involved? Are the rights and obligations of women defined differently than those of men? How do mothers and fathers understand the obligation to care for their children in relation to the need to provide for them economically? Is there a specific “Eastern” way to understand family life after divorce, in comparison to what is conceived as a “Western” way? Every naming and acting has to be put into context. In this case it has to do with political, economic, and social transformation, but also the Soviet legacy as to social norms and accustomed ways of organizing everyday life. The assumption is that when people describe their universe of meaning, they relate to both formal and informal practices and institutions and combine ideas and concepts that are seen as new with what is handed down by tradition. In this case the “new” is a turbulent and rapidly changing society, while the “old” consists of well-known strategies of coping with everyday problems. We know from research that in the process of transformation, political and economic issues were given priority by the governments of these years as they set about “establishing a market economy and reinforcing political independence” (Aidukaite, 2004, p. 88). Less effort was invested in solving social problems, and there are many reports that testify to the loss of welfare (Gassman, 2000; Narusk and Hansson, 1999). This resulted “in expanding differences in the living standards” and an increased “risk of falling below the poverty line,” especially for families with many underage children and single-mother families (Hansson, 2001, p. 14). A second context of the naming and acting studied here comes from global discourses on parenting. It is assumed that when parents in Estonia and Latvia talk about family life, children, and divorce, they have access to a wide range of repertoires (Ekström, 2005). Some are specific to their local or national milieu; some are given by tradition, either from Soviet times or from the period of prewar independence, while others reflect interchange with discourses from other post-Soviet countries or from the West. The narratives of the interviews are therefore compared with what other research endeavors tell us about discourses in other...

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