Crescere “ad alto contatto”, tra nuove pratiche di parenting e insicurezze genitoriali: il ruolo dei servizi per l’infanzia

Abstract

This paper offers a reflective framework to understand new parenting practices considered as spies of the transformations underway in the processes of interpretation and “appropriation” of the parental role. This interpretations can be taken as attempts to re-establish the parent-child relationship, keeping in mind the pressures to which families are subjected, the innovations coming from the globalized and multicultural horizon in which we live, the new technologies that guide and condition the daily communication exchanges. In particular, some practices that characterize the relationship between parents and young children in a growing number of families will be taken into consideration: breastfeeding on demand, self-weaning, co-sleeping, babywearing, which have direct educational implications and consequences on the creation of the original bond. These behaviors are on the sidelines of childcare services, which do not enter it and therefore are not, in general, object of specific reflection. And yet they can report on experiences and new relational ferments among the new parents generations.Since the practices of care of the services for early childhood graft on those parental, try to reflect on the meaning of these behaviors that can not be generalized but in any case more widespread can open new prospects of recognition, spaces for mutual understanding and collaboration between families and services for children, thus extending the areas of interaction and making the border between public and private more permeable, because the rigidity only creates distances and mutual exclusions.