"It's been a roller coaster of emotions": A phenomenological study of the lived experience of couples' first-time parenting and the mothers' return to employment. A New Zealand and Malaysian study

Abstract

<p>The purpose of this study is to examine New Zealand and Malaysian couples’ lived experience of first-time parenting and women’s experience of returning to work. Although each member of the family has different individual experiences of a particular event, families make decisions about parenting, employment, and childcare collectively. First-time motherhood and fatherhood have been researched separately, and motherhood, extensively from a variety of disciplines. However, the holistic study of the lived experience of first-time parenthood and employment from a couple’s shared narrative is still sparse. This research explores the shared experience of both parents after the arrival of a first-born, thereby adding a new perspective to the existing literature. In this thesis, I utilise an original synthesis of transcendental and interpretive phenomenology, guided by the works of contemporary phenomenologists Max Van Manen and Clark Moustakas. This phenomenological framework and methods aim to unpack the shared experience into two components; the essence and the peripheries. The essence of the experience is shared by all the participants, whereas the peripheries are socially and culturally dependent. Transcendental phenomenology serves to filter out the essence, and interpretive phenomenology investigates the peripheries. As part of the phenomenological analysis, I adopt epoché or bracketing through a written personal narrative. In addition, twenty-four longitudinal dyadic interviews were conducted with eight first-time parent couples from Malaysia and New Zealand. Each couple was interviewed three times to capture the experience before, during, and after the mothers’ return to employment. Following this, focus group interviews with three separate groups of eleven mothers were conducted to validate the analysis. The thesis findings show that the lived reality of first-time parenthood for twenty-first-century couples in Malaysia and New Zealand, including breastfeeding and return to work, is an adventure into the unpredictable and the unknown, and a constant learning and emotional experience. The overall experience for the participants was a negotiation between the dissonance of the ideation and idealisation of parenthood, and the lived reality of parenthood. The landscape of parenting beliefs surrounding the family affects the families’ expectations and experience in a significant way because families make employment, childcare, and feeding arrangements pre-birth based on these beliefs and expectations. A series of recommendations is generated based on the thesis findings. Among the recommendations of the thesis is further exploration into shared couple narratives for a better understanding of familial life experience for first-time parents.</p>