Sammendrag
As part of an ethnographic study on young people and learning (the
knowledge in motion across contexts of learning project, set in Norway),
we interviewed a diverse sample of parents of young teenagers, many of
whom were active in organized sports. The parents described their level
of involvement in sport in a way that contrasted sharply to our own
experiences participating in youth sports in the 1970s and 1980s. Back
then most parents were absent from the sports fields. This new role of
sports in the practice of parenthood is what we investigate in this study.
The purpose is to further the understanding of the cultural processes
that drive what we see as a marked generational change in the
relationship between organized sports and the practice of parenthood.
In contrast to previous studies, we also focus on the relationship
between generational change and classed patterns in parenting. Our
data suggest that across social classes, parents see involvement in sports
as normal, and as a way to connect to the child emotionally and to
further the child’s development. We interpret the significance of sports
in the parent–child relationship as related both to the normalization of
youth sports that the parents experienced when they grew up, and to
the new cultural ideas of parenthood that they encounter as adults. We
find that there are tensions embedded in this new form of parenthood
that are particularly evident in what we call ‘deep involvement’, an
intensified form of parental engagement with youth sports that is
practiced primarily by fathers in the economic fraction of the middle
class. We conclude that the new role of sport in the practice of
parenthood is a classed as well as a generational phenomenon.
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