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Parenthood is a normatively regulated category with distinctly loaded moral expectations about "good parenting". These normative expectations are lived through the body in gendered, classed and ethnicized ways. We examine the ways in which parents representing majority and minority ethnic backgrounds construct an image of themselves as respectable parents; a construct that is intertwined with the idea of decent citizenship. The parents drew on middle-class, professional and familist discourses on assertive parenthood, characterized by close scrutiny of their children's activities and friends, and the clear boundaries imposed on them together with democratic, dialogical relationships with them, as the preferred way of parenting. Describing one's own parenthood as respectable included an implicit or explicit definition of "Others", who were less respectable as parents in ways that carried gendered, ethnicized and classed meanings. The qualities required of "a respectable parent", besides physical and material characteristics, were also connected with the idea of "inner fitness" in the form of the right kind of moral values.

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Background: Children's habitual physical activity, including active travel and catching public transit (walking and cycling to and from destinations), and independent mobility (mobility without an adult) have decreased.

In Nordic welfare states, the indications of the social exclusion of young adults are addressed with measures and services aimed at getting them back on the «right» track. In this paper we aim to emphasize young adults' own viewpoints on their relationship to the services, which we consider vital for the development of the service system in a more empowering and inclusive direction. To this end, we apply the concept of affordance to explore how 18-to 29-year-old NEETs perceive what the service environment can offer and provide for them in order to get by and to advance in life. Drawing upon interview data, we claim that while the welfare services can afford young adults the opportunity to find a job, for example, there are other affordances that remain unarticulated but that may be significant from the young adult's point of view. Our analysis identifies four types of affordances -beneficial, pressurizing, false, and hidden. We conclude that the affordance perspective is one way to go beyond the deficit-oriented perspective often ascribed to young clients of the welfare services; it shifts the evaluative focus away from young adults towards the service system, identifying both the enabling and the less explicit aspects.