Rethinking Parent and Child Conflict
By Susan Grieshaber

Reviewed by Sarah-Eve Farquhar

There is a chasm between what children and parents say, think, mean and do and how the parenting ‘experts’ on television, radio, and in books and magazines portray the ‘good’ parent and the ‘good’ child and the ‘family’. Susan Grieshaber has brought this chasm strongly to light in Rethinking Parent and Child Conflict. An unusual accomplishment for an academic expert, but Grieshaber chose to get into the lived reality or the fabric of four families. Her approach to researching, analysing and reporting shows an untiring capacity to seek knowledge of, to understand, and to explain. 

I am impressed also by the amount of time and effort that Grieshaber would have had to put into recording and transcription – audio and video tape.  How she achieved obtaining the data that she did within the close social and physical space of the home, vehicle and family life shows commitment and skill as a researcher in building relationships of trust with the study participants.  

Chapter 4 “Researching with Families” is a must read for anyone contemplating researching within settings such as the home, early childhood centre, and classroom where there is a defined culture, closeness, and social intimacy.  In this Chapter Grieshaber covers and discusses many issues such as: negotiating access, making difficult decisions on what aspects to focus analysis on, the roles she adopted and why and when, and effects of the recording equipment on participants.

The first three chapters provide a well-written comprehensive overview of literature from developmental psychology and discuss postmodernist theories.  The material covered is relevant reading for anyone with a professional interest in parent and child support or education as well as graduate students and others researching in the area of parent-child relationships.

In Chapters 6 to 9 (Food to Go, School’s In, Tidy Houses and Bedtime Stories, and More than Sibling Rivalry) Grieshaber examines parenting discourses.  It was a strange experience to read, with such clarity of expression, about the families, their interactions, values, beliefs, and practices as they occurred within every-day incidents such as children waiting for dinner to be ready.  As a parent and as someone who supports other parents I found myself reading the transcriptions closely while skipping through bits of the discussion to locate contextual details and find further explanations to those I held. It was a reaction to the reality inherent in the reporting. Grieshaber writing style enables the reader to simultaneously identify with at the personal level and think about at the professional-support level the interactions reported.

The material presented in Chapters 6 to 9 could be extended and form a book written specifically for parents and for people who provide family support and parent education.  Because what Grieshaber has observed and recorded in the families are not only conflict situations, but also examples of family functioning in general, love, learning, and parents and children co-constructing knowledge and understandings together.  This would provide much-needed reading from an alternative perspective of the realities of daily life grounded in critical, social, and discourse theory, from the current literature on parenting.

ISBN 0415930790
Paperback 228 pages
http://www.routledgefalmer.com

Written By: Susan Grieshaber

Publisher: Routledge Falmer (Taylor & Francis Group

Date of Publication: 2004

Price: Contact publisher

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