Protecting and preparing children: Peace activist parenting in a post-9/11 world

In the United States in post 9/11 context, American mothers perform a daily struggle to both protect children from indirect experience of the war on terror and other dangers, and prepare children to enter into the social world safely and successfully. How mothers manage this everyday dilemma in parenting is the puzzle that lies at the heart of this project. Five Midwestern peace activist women and their children, ages 8-17, were interviewed about how they make meaning of the U.S.-initiated war in Iraq and domestic anti-war opposition. Discursive psychology, a discourse analytic qualitative methodology, is used to address the following research questions: (1) how do peace activist mothers negotiate the fine line between sheltering their children and readying them to enter the social world, and (2) how is this process of everyday decision-making enacted in the mothers' and children's words. The boundary between protecting and preparing children is shaped by three elements: (a) the women's constructions of their children---as agentic individuals or through an interpretive repertoire of child development; (b) their constructions of the world---as a place of violence, of citizenship rights and responsibilities, and of multiplicity; and (c) their desires---for their children to be independent thinkers, to know the relativist nature of the social world, and to grow up to be active and responsible citizens, or even activists, like themselves. This study makes three primary contributions to social work and developmental psychology: (a) it demonstrates the value of using a non-cognitivist discourse analysis methodology and attending to processes of everyday decision-making about parenting; (b) it contributes to the field of parental beliefs and cognitions in developmental psychology; and (c) it serves as a concrete illustration of how to use discourse analysis to increase self-reflexivity for social workers in practice.