Introduction: Doing Good Parenthood

Family memory trips – children's and parents’ planning of adoption return trips

“…Family memory tourism argues for a heterogeneous concept of family (Obrador, 2012). To generate this, we need to unpack the concept into parts like: parent, father, mother, child, son, and daughter (Lind, Westerling, Sparrman, & Dannesboe, 2016). This facilitates the exploration of family dynamics and who influences whom in the process of planning an adoption return trip.…”

“…As pointed out by , family tourism is also an outcome of ideological processes delineating how families are enacted through travelling (cf. Lind et al, 2016). However, a fluid concept of family is not enough to account for this; tourism research also has to distinguish between families and the importance of the position of the child in adoption and family tourism.…”

‘So that we don't spoil them’: understanding children's everyday mobility through parents’ affective practices

“…Finally, although this article is not primarily dealing with children's perspectives and practices but parents', stressing the agency of children and the ambiguity of parental influence on children's mobility is of fundamental importance (Mikkelsen and Christensen 2009). The parenting cultures that arise are not only constructed in relation to parent-child bonds, but also parent-parent and to the broader sociocultural context, and they have moral and normative implications (Holloway 1998;Lind et al 2016). For instance, parents contemporary 'over-parenting' due to popular parenting ideals has been analysed as 'paranoid' (Furedi 2002) or 'anxious and narcissistic' (Hendrick 2016), and emerge in relation to what Furedi (2002) has termed parental determinism, i.e.…”

Parents with troubled upbringings and their perception of childhood

“…Parenthood is to be understood in relation to childhood, and what is considered “good” parenthood should be situated in relation to notions of children's interests and rights (Lind, Westerling, Sparrman, & Dannesboe, ). Within contemporary Western thought, there are certain expectations for how children should be positioned as participants, building on children's rights to be considered as independent actors and not as parents' property (Alanen, ; Bekken, ; Gulbrandsen, ).…”

“…Recent studies show that expectations towards parents have changed over the last century, and thus, how parents view their children has also changed over time. In Scandinavia today, the “involved father” and the “intensive mother” could be seen as the overall parental ideals (Hays, ; Lind et al, ; Stefansen & Farstad, ).…”