Learning to ‘Parenting’: Peer-to-Peer Educational Actions in the Italian Associations of Adoptive Families

Abstract

We hardly associate parenthood to a state that must be learned or taught according to classical educative models,
rather we think that it is an embedded condition arising “naturally” when we become parents. Nowadays, however, with the rise
of the so-called “psy” sciences, the certainty and solidity of a noun - parenthood – has been progressively replaced by the
proceedings of a verb - parenting. The idea of parenting as a process of learning (emotional, cognitive and behavioral) finds its
most concrete expression in the construction of the adoptive parenthood. Based on a two years’ ethnographic research, my
paper aims at highlighting the training action carried out by adoptive associations towards the infertile couples who have decided
to adopt. In a society that is still deeply family-based, such as the Italian one, where kinship ties are grounded in the hegemonic
action of the blood paradigm, a widespread cultural belief claims that a failed bio-reproduction deprives the couples of that
natural embedded knowledge necessary to be good parents. So, if the rule allows to legitimize the shift from a legal status (the
couple) to another (the family), the associations of adoptive families are authorized by the State to carry out an intensive
educative action so that the prospective parents can better learn all the qualities, behaviors, responsibilities and emotions typical
of good adoptive parents, according to the “natural” model of the biological parenting.