Conference Agenda

Becoming a parent is a significant life milestone that can bring both positive experiences and substantial challenges. Although research has long recognized the crucial role parents play in shaping their own development, their children’s development, and overall family well‑being, most studies have focused on how parents influence children rather than on parents themselves (See review by Yan et al., 2021). In recent decades, parenting expectations in many European countries have shifted toward a more child‑centered orientation, placing additional pressures on parents and affecting their mental health (Roskam et al., 2021). Consequently, child development and inclusive family well-being will be affected because parents function as interdependent subsystems within the broader family unit, where emotional well‑being, identity processes, personality traits, and relational patterns mutually influence one another, based on Family Systems Theory (Minuchin, 1974; Cox & Paley, 1997). This framework aligns with the idea that parental identity interacts with well‑being and personality to form integrated patterns of functioning, derived from the Identity Theory which conceptualizes identity as a multifaceted system of meanings, emotions, and behavioral commitments that shape how individuals interpret and respond to their roles (Stryker & Burke, 2000). Complementing this view, Jay Belsky’s process of parenting model (1984) and the updated process of parenting model (Taraban & Shaw, 2018) situates parents within nested environmental contexts that shape and are shaped by their internal characteristics. Additionally, Bronfenbrenner’s ecological and later bioecological models argue that development emerges from interactions among personal attributes, proximal processes, and contextual conditions across multiple system levels (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006). This ecological lens reinforces the need to conceptualize parents as whole persons‑in‑context, whose identity, well‑being, and personality are inseparable from their environments. Therefore, it is important to understand parental subsystem as whole in promoting all family members’ development and well-being.

Moreover, gender differences permeate the relational mechanisms among family members, shaping both the magnitude and nature of parent-child interactions. Specifically, men and women experience different feelings towards being parents (Rönkä et al., 2003). Also, parental gender plays a critical role in parent-child interactions: mothers often report greater stress and emotional reactivity to adolescent internalizing behaviors (e.g., anxiety, sadness), likely due to societal expectations positioning mothers as primary emotional caregivers (Chaplin et al., 2020). Fathers, by contrast, exhibit stronger reactions to externalizing behaviors (e.g., rule-breaking, impulsivity), potentially reflecting cultural norms linking paternal roles to discipline and authority (Endendijk et al., 2017). Despite these insights, prior research often overlooked paternal perspectives or conflates maternal and paternal experiences, obscuring nuanced gendered pathways. Finally, person‑oriented approaches argue that individuals should be studied as coherent configurations of interacting attributes rather than as independent variables (Bergman & Magnusson, 1997). This methodological perspective provides direct justification for modeling parents using multidimensional profiles that capture real‑world complexity.

Together, these highly cited frameworks offer a robust theoretical foundation for examining parental subsystem as whole, integrated individuals, supporting the use of inclusive, multidimensional profiles to understand parental psychosocial functioning.

Research questions:

1. What kind of parental subsystem profiles (parenting styles, parental belief and well-being etc.,) can be identified among fathers and mothers?
2. How stable are these profiles across time?
3. Are stability and change in terms of profile memberships associated with some covariates, such as contextual factors, child factors (academic self-concept, motivations, well-being)?

1. Introduction

In international literature, many parents, regardless of their nationality, socio-economic status, and cultural background, are reported to embrace high educational aspirations for their children’s academic performance. Especially in the “credential societies” wherein credentials functioned as a stepstone to middle-class occupation, parents attach great importance to children’s academic achievement.

While existing research consistently documents high educational aspirations per se among parents, far less is known about how such aspirations are communicated, negotiated, and embodied in everyday family life under conditions of structural disadvantage.

This study examines how educational aspirations are transmitted within rural-to-urban migrant working-class families in China, a group that has been widely reported in the literature to hold high educational expectations for their children. Particular attention is paid to the affective mechanisms through which such aspirations are conveyed and negotiated within the family.

Whereas middle-class families typically articulate high educational aspirations to enable their children to become like themselves, working-class families often express high educational aspirations with the explicit intention that their children should not become like them. Compared with middle-class families, the transmission of educational aspirations (TEA hereafter) in working-class families therefore appears to be more complex. Middle-class children grow up within a middle-class habitus, possessing everyday familiarity with middle-class occupations, lifestyles, and educational pathways, which allows them to more readily interpret and negotiate parental expectations. In contrast, for children in working-class migrant families, middle-class life often exists as a vague and abstract imagination rather than a lived and experientially grounded reality.

Specifically, the study wants to explore what kinds of educational aspirations migrant parents transmit to their children. And how are these aspirations communicated, negotiated, and sustained through everyday parent–child interactions?

2. Theorizing educational aspiration transmission

Theoretically, the study builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s theories to reconceptualize educational aspiration as a classed and embodied practice, rather than a stable cognitive belief or verbalized goal. From this perspective, educational aspirations are not simply transmitted through explicit encouragement or rational planning, but are gradually inculcated through routinized practices, moral narratives, and affective cues embedded in everyday family life.

Existing psychological and educational models of intergenerational value transmission—such as value internalization frameworks—tend to assume that parental expectations are clearly articulated, accurately perceived, and meaningfully negotiated within relatively resource-secure family contexts. This study argues that such assumptions are inadequate for understanding aspiration transmission in structurally disadvantaged families. Among migrant working-class parents, aspirations are often characterized by ambiguity, hesitation, and experiential gaps: parents strongly desire upward mobility for their children but lack first-hand experience of middle-class educational trajectories and occupations.

To capture this dynamic, the study conceptualizes aspiration transmission as a process of de-embodiment and re-embodiment. Parents seek to detach children from identification with manual labor—often through exposing them to the physical hardship, instability, and stigma associated with working-class work—while simultaneously encouraging an orientation toward education as the sole legitimate escape route. Crucially, this process operates less through positive vision-building than through negative affective mobilization, particularly the cultivation of fear of failure and fear of becoming “like us.”

Analytically, the study identifies three recurrent modes of aspiration transmission—verbal saturation, bodily exposure to labor, and staged occupational experiences—which function not as deliberate strategies but as practical schemes shaped by parents’ own classed life histories. These practices generate what the study terms a “negation–fear–discontinuity” mechanism: while effective in distancing children from manual labor, they often fail to provide concrete images of a good life or usable tools for navigating educational obstacles, potentially producing anxiety, self-doubt, and fragile motivation.

This study examined the roles of parental emotion regulation strategies and child temperament in children’s socioemotional functioning. In this study, children’s socioemotional functioning is defined through five key dimensions: emotional symptoms, conduct problems, hyperactivity/inattention, peer problems, and prosocial behavior (Goodman, 1997). Adaptive socioemotional functioning enables children to understand and regulate their emotions, build positive relationships, adopt socially appropriate behaviors, and cultivate empathy, all of which enhance their ability to engage effectively in social interactions (Hirvonen et al., 2018). Parents play an important role in this developmental process (Denham et al., 2009). Previous research has indicated that difficulties in parental emotion regulation and alexithymia associated with higher levels of emotional symptoms, conduct problems, and hyperactivity/inattention in children (Davodi-Boroujerd et al., 2021; Scarzello, 2023; Wang et al., 2025).

According to the emotion socialization theory (Eisenberg et al., 1998), the way parents regulate their emotions influences their parenting behaviors, which in turn affects their children’s emotional arousal. Furthermore, within the framework of the role of parental emotion regulation in emotional socialization, the strategies parents employ, which include differentiating between adaptive and maladaptive approaches, impact children’s internalization and externalization issues (Havighurst & Kehoe, 2017). Despite this knowledge, there remains a gap in understanding how different parental emotion regulation strategies relate to specific aspects of children’s socioemotional functioning. Notably, strategies such as cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, rumination, problem-solving, seeking social support, overall emotion regulation difficulties, and alexithymia (Preece et al., 2022) have not been examined collectively in relation to children’s socioemotional outcomes.

Children’s individual characteristics may further influence these associations. According to the child-environment model of adaptation, the type of environmental support best suited to children, as well as the types of environmental risks to which they are particularly vulnerable, depends on their individual characteristics (Nigg, 2006). The goodness-of-fit theory (Thomas & Chess, 1977) suggests that the relationship between children’s temperament and their socioemotional functioning is affected by the compatibility between their temperament and their developmental environment. although child temperament has been shown to moderate the relationship between personal or caregiving aspects of parenting and children’s socioemotional functioning (Çelebi & Acar, 2024; Hirvonen et al., 2018), little is known about how different temperament traits influence the associations between parental emotion regulation strategies and children’s socioemotional functioning. To address the limitations of previous research, this study aimed to explore how various parental emotion regulation strategies relate to the socioemotional functioning of children aged 4–17 years and how temperament may moderate these relationships.

This study’s research questions are:

1. How do parental emotional regulation strategies (i.e., cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, rumination, problem-solving, social support seeking, overall emotion regulation difficulties, and alexithymia) relate to their children’s socioemotional functioning?
2. How does a child’s temperament relate to socioemotional functioning?
3. To what extent does a child’s temperament moderate the associations between parental emotion regulation and children’s socioemotional functioning?

This narrative study aims to describe how Finnish parents construct their agency during school mornings when their children face emotion-related school attendance challenges (ER-SAC).

For many families, school mornings are already a site of schedules, negotiation and conflict, and ER-SAC often make them even more demanding. Attending school regularly and finishing upper secondary education provide a strong basis for a good life (Kearney, 2021) whereas school absenteeism has been linked to a range of factors that undermine well-being (Gubbels et al., 2019). SAC often leaves parents unsure as to how best support their child or which resources are the available for them to do so (Chockalingam et al., 2023; Havik et al., 2014; Smout et al., 2023). Still, the parents’ perspective is scarcely visible in research on school attendance challenges (Hamadi et al., 2024; Havik et al., 2014). To strengthen parents’ confidence to act as active agents when facing their child’s ER-SAC, and to support their sense of parental agency, we need to understand how parents make sense of their children's ER-SAC and construct their agency. In this research we focus on how this is told in morning context by asking: How do parents construct their parental agency when narrating morning transitions with children facing emotion-related school attendance challenges?

Within this research, parental agency is conceptualized as narrative agency. Narrative parental agency can be seen as the ability to use, (re)interpret, and engage with narratives that are culturally available (e.g. master narratives of good parent), as well as to be able to analyse and challenge them (Meretoja, 2023). Thus, when constructing their narrative agency, parents give shape to their past experiences and their own position in them, integrate them into their life stories as well as contextualize past habits and imagine alternative possibilities (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Ochs & Capps, 1996; Riessman, 2008).

The research data consisted of narrative interviews with 19 Finnish parents. The parents told mornings of 22 children with ER-SAC during interviews. In this research, the term child is used to refer to the relationship between a parent and their child, not to an age category. Children were betweeen 8 and 18 years old.

The interview data was analysed through Bamberg’s (1997) narrative positioning theory and meanings given to mornings by focusing on small stories in which parents narrated their children’s ER-SAC mornings. The findings showed that the parents constructed the following four meanings to their parental agency in the morning narratives: 1) Reactive Parental Agency, 2) Compelled Parental Agency, 3) Eroding Parental Agency and 4) Withdrawing Parental Agency. In the research article, these parental agency interpretations are presented through word images synthesized from quotes (Clandinin et al., 2006; Ely et al., 1997).

Reactive parental agency was constructed through narration of frantic repeated attempts to support children’s school attendance. Compelled parental agency contained a lot of first-person narrative and modal verbs to highlight the parents’ narrated obligation to facilitate the school attendance. Eroding parental agency was a combination of narratives of unpredictable mornings and parents hoping for their children’s school attendance. Withdrawing parental agency brought out poignantly ER-SAC’s threat to parents’ mental health (see McGahan et al., 2025) with narrations that framed the need for stepping aside for the sake of parents’ or family’s well-being.

The parents’ narratives revealed that parenting was compared both to the personal ideal of good parenting and to social and cultural expectations of what constitutes good parenting. On ER-SAC mornings parental agency did not always align with parents own ideals of parenting. These ideals seemed to be influenced also by social and cultural normative discourses.