Positioning parenting differently: The need for southern perspectives

Abstract

Despite the importance of the caregiver role in children's development and the reliance on caregivers in the therapy process, parenting has enjoyed limited attention in Occupational Therapy research. While it is gradually gaining more attention and being appreciated for its complexity, little is known about how parenting unfolds in the margins. Dominant parenting norms promoted globally are largely Eurocentric¹ and the resultant white, middle class positioning of professional discourse may offer a limited perspective on parenting. This may sustain incoherence between how parenting unfolds in context and the therapeutic understanding of, and response to, families' needs. This opinion piece aims to promote the importance of appreciating and exploring southern parenting perspectives for meaningful work with families.

Emerging southern epistemologies reveal several relational and contextual complexities, situated within persisting structural inequalities, that characterise everyday life for many families. Along with cultural and intergenerational influences to be navigated in context, these factors create a cumulatively challenging parenting experience and shape families' subsequent occupational engagement. These insights not only demand the broadening of the parenting knowledge base but may hold implications for how parenting is understood as an occupation in the margins. Appreciating and pursuing plurality in parenting perspectives is essential to facilitate knowledge generation that speaks to those routinely excluded from the theorising process and to inform more responsive intervention.

Keywords: parenting, human occupation, southern epistemologies, human relations, structural inequality