Guest pen | Equal parenting requires cooperation between parents

Finns parents want equality in their family life. When aiming for this, in addition to sharing parenting responsibilities, attention must be paid to cooperation between parents: the commitment of both parents to the care and upbringing of the child, and to the fact that parents support and value each other as parents. Supporting cooperation between parents, i.e. joint parenting, is an important means of achieving equality, but so far it has been little utilized.

Achieving equality requires cooperation and negotiation between parents. The public discussion about parenting is often narrow: it focuses on dividing housework, caregiving responsibilities and family leave between parents. Expanding the examination from shared parenting to joint parenting emphasizes the importance of cooperation between adults raising a child in building equality. Effective cooperation also serves as a growth platform for the equal use of family leave in Finnish families.

Central is whether the parents support each other when the other has little strength, whether the parents trust each other and whether they give each other space. It is also important whether the parents are able to discuss the upbringing of the children and find a consensus on it. International research on joint parenting shows that, when working well, cooperation between parents supports not only equality and the reconciliation of work and family, but also the well-being of both parents and the child.

According to a recent study, Finnish parents of first-born children hope for equality and flexibility in their cooperation. Both parents want to form a relationship with the child, and the parents do not consider the division of roles according to gender to be important, but more individually.

Parents are aware that there may be obstacles on the way to good co-parenting. They may have to shake off the traditional role models given by their own parents. Action models can also form between parents, where one limits the other’s opportunities to act as a parent or is left in the background in the role and responsibilities of a parent.

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The public discussion about parenting is often narrow.

Factors outside the family, such as stressful work, can also become obstacles to building a functioning co-parenting relationship.

Parental the construction of cooperation and equal parenting between children is not only an internal issue of the family, but the structures and attitudes of our society create conditions and obstacles for it. One obstacle is the attitudinal climate regarding parenting, which can be, on the one hand, belittling the value of parenting and caring, on the other hand, performance-oriented and demanding, especially for mothers. At the same time that the ideal of equality is widely shared in Finnish society, the perception of the mother as the primary parent is still strong.

In Finnish families, cooperation between parents is also colored by the fact that the responsibility for children is often limited almost exclusively to the parents. Relatives may live far away, and unlike in many other countries, families in Finland often do not have other close people to share the responsibility of raising.

Parental the value of working cooperation between and the importance of supporting it is often recognized in our services in the case of divorced families. However, co-parenting support should be a central content in services for all families and family forms.

During the pandemic, spouses’ participation in consultation visits and births was limited, which evoked in parents the experience of shutting their spouses out as outsiders in the important first moments of parenthood. The transition to parenthood is an important period in terms of building joint parenting, when parents want to be involved in matters concerning the child. Family services and policy and working life should work as one front to encourage parents of families with babies to find their own way of working as a team.

Anna Rönkä and Kaisa Malinen

Rönkä is a professor of education at the University of Jyväskylä. Malinen is a docent of family psychology at Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences.

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