Essere genitori: modalità di presentazione di sé e natura dilemmatica del discorso parentale nell’intervista a madri e padri

This paper examines discursive data from two different sets of interviews with working parents, collected in Rome and Acilia, a small village close to Rome. The interviews focused on topics related to family life, childcare and child socialization. Previous studies of belief systems and ethnotheories have explored, by means of interviews, the content of the parents’ responses, relating them to their preferences with regard to their children’s growth. This study, on the other hand, analyses parents’ discourses as a result of them ne- gotiating their positions in the context of the interview itself. Analyses focus on three dif- ferent themes: the reflexive and moral quality of the parental discourse, by which parents describe themselves as constantly struggling to reach ideal models of parenting (such as intensive parenthood; the dilemmatic nature of the discourse, which results from the simultaneous consideration of opposite stances with regards to a variety of themes, reve- aling the parents as fundamentally uncertain of their role; and the discursive construction of parents as agents constantly involved in an interpretive and strategic work, adjusting their behavior to their children’s needs. These analyses also suggest gender differences to the extent that these three aspects define parents’ responses during interviews. Key words: dual earner parents, morality, interview, discourse analysis, identity.

L'articolo presenta l'analisi di interviste semistrutturate somministrate a genitori a doppia carriera su temi relativi alla scuola e all'educazione dei figli; vengono identificate strategie discorsive di costruzione del ruolo del genitore e dellle implicazioni morali