Family and socio-cultural changes: Educational practices and social representations of gender and sexuality among parents

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a research carried out in the Campania region,  which aims to investigate the ways in which parents relate to the emotional and sexual lives of their adolescent children, considering the changes occurred in the configuration of current families, both on the relational and structural level. The former considers the quality of relationships among family members, while the latter refers to the new family forms currently appearing within the social scenario, disarranging the traditional way of thinking about the family and originating new ways of conceiving the roles of male and female, of being together, of the idea of couple and – last but not least - of sexuality and the various ways of living and experiencing it.
Boys and girls construct their experience on the way to think about the opposite sex within the family context, and they also identify it drawing on the ways in which parents interpret their marital roles, reproducing or contradicting gender-related social expectations. While traditional families gave scarce possibilities of reciprocity and negotiation of roles and rules, today's emotional families – with pacified relations and timid signs of reflection on feelings and sexuality – become the preferential area in which boys and girls decode and record reference models related to gender and sexuality.
Inspired by grounded theory [as a research methodology], we will try to present the findings to date, emerging from in-depth interviews with parents, trying to highlight “conformities” and “differences” at both the inter-conjugal and inter-generational level.