Family, parenting and time: one that does not exist

• Grant number: 13/50695-5
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants - Publications - Books published in Brazil
• Start date: November 01, 2013
• End date: October 31, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Education - Fundamentals of Education
• Principal Investigator: Rinaldo Voltolini
• Grantee: Rinaldo Voltolini
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Educação (FE). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Parenting is a neologism that has been achieving consistency over the last years and that tends to replace the term family. It is possible to identify this concern in various authors, from different disciplines; extracting different consequences from the possible replacement of the term, would there actually be such an aspiration in this new term and in its underlying speeches? Would parenting implicate a risk for the familial transmission? Questioning such issues was the starting point from which I initiated this research. The initial unease was provoked by the understanding that the new term would be inseparable from the intervention of the specialist in the sphere of the family and by the mistrust that it would secure its basis in the lack of differentiation and sepsis in the familial transmission. The investigation of the origins of this neologism, of its underlying speeches and of the practices that it authorizes has enabled the identification of three streams through which it appears today how to nominate the parent, as a means to handle the changes in the sphere of the family and shaped as a public speech conveyed by the family specialist. To evaluate each of these aspects individually, to recognize the consistency that the term parenting continues to achieve in current times as symptomatic of today's scenario, and to circumscribe the family in its function of residue reduced to the minimum necessary conditions for existence of subject was fundamental in order to establish bases for the articulations among family, parenting and age. (AU)