Psychology, particularly developmental psychology, plays an important role in a modern welfare state. In this article three 'cases' within the frame of the Norwegian welfare state are analysed to produce a picture of psychological constructions of care and parenthood. The three cases are: (1) practices within the child welfare system; (2) debates about the cash benefit scheme; and (3) debates about joint physical custody. The argument in the article is that the crucial contribution of feminist psychology is that it deconstructs the ongoing debates on parenthood and childcare, speaks the experience of the actors who are continuously involved in caring for children into existence, and destabilizes naturalized and taken-for-granted understandings of children.

A B S T R AC TUnderstanding the dynamics of custodial conflicts is important for reducing the level of such conflicts and improving the upbringing conditions for the children involved. The parents in these cases care for children living in two households, and our approach therefore draws on the knowledge of how 'ordinary' parents proceed in sharing care within and between locations. The paper is based on qualitative interviews with 15 Norwegian parents who were in contact with the child protection service during their custodial disagreements, indicating a high level of conflict and concerns about inadequate care. When describing and reflecting upon their practices of care, the parents speak from two main positions: as a concerned parent or an accused parent. These positions imply different approaches on how to share care, which offer insight into the mechanisms of getting stuck. Although the concerned parent worries about the child's well-being while staying with the other parent and thereby aims to take a continuous responsibility across households, the accused parent perceives the co-parent's involvement as undue and negotiates increased distance in parenting. Focusing on practices of care may contribute to turning the attention away from conflicts between former partners and towards the child's situation.

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A B S T RA C T Methods are not neutral instruments but construct the phenomena under investigation and convey meaning about what is important.This paper explores a methodological framework to investigate parental care for children. As part of the results, the following characteristics of how parents take care of their children are presented: continuous responsibility; predictable routines that are adjusted to the child; and interpretations and negotiations about developmental goals. The argument is that methodological approaches that analyse larger temporal units of contextualized practices as presented by the participants themselves open up for more context-sensitive knowledge about the task of taking care of children. Thus, the understanding of the process of development is widened and specified in a way that may be useful for fields of practice where developmental psychology is 'at work'. bs_bs_banner

More and more children, even the young ones from the age of one year, attend day care on a regular basis. To investigate how small children are taken care of and live their everyday life in Norway today, and how barnehage is included in their lives, a sample of families were followed from when the children were age one until close to three. The barnehage is seen as a link in the chain of care, for which the parents are the responsible ones. The barnehage thus implies an expansion of parenthood, with specific challenges. The family of one of the children, Adam, has been chosen for the presentation. Seeking information, providing Adam with the equipment and skills that seemed to be necessary of Adams parents and building personal relations with the professional care providers were among the strategies to ensure a high-quality care arrangement. It constitutes parenthood in a way that a) incorporates the life of the child at home and in day care, both practically as well as mentally, b) includes the parents' understandings of their own child as the child appears through daily routines and c) makes visible the relevant context for the making and remaking of their standards of care.