Parentalidade e políticas públicas

: experiência e visão de pais e mães que adiaram a entrada na parentalidade

Abstract

This research has the objective to understand the delay of parenting through the biography and experience of fathers and mothers and their vision relating to public policies that promote and support parenting in the Portuguese context. For the comprehension of this problem the theoretical perspectives of the “life course” and of the risk society and uncertainty were mobilized. Thus, it is considered the importance of deepening the study of individual biographies from the starting point of the subjects' life course, in the perspective of the bifurcations they face, through the mobilization of the concept of “turning point”. It should be noted that part of the biographical itinerary of the subjects and the processes of postponing parenting, take place within the framework of a European society deeply affected by the problem of natality reduction that finds explanations in macrosystemic factors in a society of risk and world uncertainty. And that, cumulatively, is also the time of individualization, the expressiveness of individual identities, in which the subject's ontological security is challenged. Through a qualitative methodology inspired by Lahire's orientation in the context of dispositional sociology, we proceeded to the elaboration of the biographical portraits of mothers and fathers who moved late to this phase of the life course, reoriented by bifurcations that reveal the (un)security and the (un)certainty in its most improbable forms. The results point to the importance of thinking about parenting as a “politics of time”, socioeconomic, cultural and political representation for a society that reconciles personal professional-family lives, in a diachronic perspective that contributes to an inversion of the dynamics of fertility. This vision equally implies a policy of empowering the individuals throughout the life course, through policies transversal to different areas and contexts of socialization which facilitate the development of provisions that predispose the subject to manage risk in a social context of uncertainty, in which parenting can be understood as one among many others. This research is also a contribution to a political reflection on the individuation of parenting in which medically assisted procreation appears, on the one hand, as a potential to counter the voluntary or involuntary postponement dynamics and, on the other hand, to think about the process of metamorphosis in the consequent individual identity of the new generations.

Date of Award	3 Apr 2022
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Francisco Branco (Supervisor)