Making Sense of Parenthood, Caregiving, and Gender - Prof Tina Miller

Despite the growth of discourses around ‘involved fatherhood’ and ‘work-family balance’, parenting remains highly challenging and inequitable, with expectations of parents intensifying and much of the load continuing to fall on mothers. This is despite men demonstrating in a variety of settings their capacity to engage in caregiving just as effectively as women. So what can we can do to make it easier for men to take up care work in its different forms, and to support parents with raising children and building gender equity in the home?

Prof Tina Miller discusses over two decades of research she has conducted on family life with parents, including a recent study on the experiences of Syrian refugee fathers in the UK and Sweden. This provides a very different picture of the struggles faced by refugees from the negative portrayals that habitually dominate media narratives.

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Tina is a Professor of Sociology at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She has been an expert advisor to the World Health Organisation, thinktanks and political parties in the UK and EU.

• Profile: https://www.brookes.ac.uk/profiles/staff/tina-miller
• Twitter: https://x.com/proftinamiller
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tina-miller-8784a322/

She has published several books on parenthood with Cambridge University Press.

• Motherhood: Contemporary Transitions and Generational Change (2023): https://www.cambridge.org/au/universitypress/subjects/sociology/sociology-gender/motherhood-contemporary-transitions-and-generational-change
• Making Sense of Parenthood: Caring, Gender and Family Lives (2017): https://www.cambridge.org/au/universitypress/subjects/sociology/sociology-gender/making-sense-parenthood-caring-gender-and-family-lives
• Making Sense of Fatherhood: Gender, Caring and Work (2010): https://www.cambridge.org/au/universitypress/subjects/sociology/sociology-general-interest/making-sense-fatherhood-gender-caring-and-work
• Making Sense of Motherhood: A Narrative Approach (2005): https://www.cambridge.org/au/universitypress/subjects/sociology/sociology-general-interest/making-sense-motherhood-narrative-approach

Tina has also authored/presented a series of BBC Radio 4 Analysis programmes.

• What's changing about childbirth: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001n2h0
• Why do we assume women care?: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001f53p
• Modern parenting: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000k2tv

Episode timeline

• Introduction
• Syrian refugee dads: Representation v reality (02:15-06:33)
• How services treat refugee mothers and fathers (06:33-09:53)
• Differences in refugee experiences in Sweden/the UK (09:53-12:42)
• Syrian dads’ relationships with Western notions of ‘involved’ fatherhood (12:42-15:21)
• Tina’s experience of interviewing refugee families (15:21-21:16)
• First-time fathers in the UK (21:16-30:24)
• Transitions in parenting (30:24-34:19)
• Break
• The intensification of parenthood (34:25-38:09)
• Illusions of work-family balance (38:09-42:40)
• How we can get men more involved (42:40-45:26)
• Older men’s caregiving (45:26-48:22)
• Recruiting more men to the social care sector (48:22-53:10)
• The beginnings of Tina’s career in the Solomon Islands and Bangladesh (53:10-56:32)
• Conclusion - Class inequities and parenting; Different family types; Ken Loach’s ‘The Old Oak’; Climate change and refugees; The riots and refugee ambivalence about sharing their stories; Shifting the discourse on migration (56:32-01:03:53)

Explainers

• Edgar’s Mission: https://edgarsmission.org.au
• ‘Men and Welfare’ book: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003178811
• Damascus Rose Kitchen, Oxford: https://www.damascusrosekitchen.org
• ‘The Old Oak’ film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Oak