Producing gendered parenthood in child health clinics

This study examines whether and how equally shared parenting or gendered parenthood is produced in and through institutional interactions between professionals and parents in preventive child health clinics in Finland. The data consists of 17 video-recorded encounters in child health clinics between parents and public health nurses, and the method is conversation analysis. The analysis indicates that the primacy of mothers as parents is typically presupposed by participants when they discuss topics related to shared parenting. However, we also demonstrate that in many cases participants deviate from the presuppositions of gendered parenthood. We discuss our results with regard to questions of how institutional and cultural understandings of parenthood are co-constituted in talk-in-interaction, and how institutional interaction may provide an arena for negotiating these understandings.