First-Time Parenting Journeys: Expectations and Realities - Softcover

Riggs, Damien W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 100907704X ISBN 13: 9781009077040

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2025

Synopsis

All too often heterosexual first-time parents are treated as the unmarked norm within research on reproduction. First-Time Parenting Journeys maps out what it means to be situated within the norm, while providing a critical account of how social norms about parenthood shape, regulate, and potentially delimit experiences of new parenthood for heterosexual couples. Based on qualitative longitudinal research, this book tells the story of journeys to parenthood, highlighting the impact of gender norms, moral claims, emotion work, and generativity. While drawing on Australian data, the critical conceptual framework has broader applicability across Western contexts in terms of understanding normative family structures and parenting practices. By focusing on expectations about, and the reality of, new parenthood, it explicates the ways in which institutionalised norms about parenthood are internalised and explores what this can tell us about the broader contours of parenthood discourses.

About this title

About the Authors

Damien W. Riggs is a Professor of Psychology at Flinders University, Australia. He is also a Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society and a psychotherapist who specialises in work with trans children. He has authored more than twenty books, including Diverse Pathways to Parenthood: From Narratives to Practice (2020).

Clare Bartholomaeus is an Adjunct Research Fellow at Flinders University, Australia. Her previous books include Home and Away: Mothers and Babies in Institutional Spaces (with Kathleen Connellan, Clemence Due, and Damien Riggs, 2021) and Transgender People and Education (with Damien Riggs, 2017).

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 100907704X
• ISBN 13: 9781009077040
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224