Research assistant wanted

In my last post I mentioned our success in attracting ESRC funding for a new research project on gender and young men, to be carried out in partnership with Action for Children. We’re hoping to get started on the project in May, and we’re currently looking for a part-time Research Assistant to join the team.

If you have experience of social research and of working with young people, and a good understanding of gender issues, we’d be pleased to hear from you. The closing date is 16th May and you can find further details here.

Funding success!

Just before Christmas, Brigid Featherstone, Sandy Ruxton and I received the long-awaited news that our funding bid to the Economic and Social Research Council had been successful. This means that we can finally begin work on our research project, tentatively entitled ‘Do Boys Need Male Role Models? Gender Identities and Practices in Work with Young Men’.

The two-year study, which we’ll be undertaking in partnership with Action for Children, a national voluntary organisation, aims to examine whether the gender identity of workers makes a difference in developing effective relationships with vulnerable young men, and to explore how gender interacts with other aspects of identity, such as class and ethnicity, in those day-to-day relationships. We’re hoping that our findings will contribute to academic debates about the development of young masculinities and young men’s transitions to adulthood, and also have an impact on policy and practice in relation to boys perceived to be ‘at risk’.

The idea for the study arose from a seminar that Sandy and I organised a couple of years ago, and builds on work that all three of us have been doing on various aspects of the relationship between masculinity, care and welfare services.

I’ll be posting updates about the study here and on Twitter, and we’d love to hear from anyone with an interest in our work, or working in similar areas. You can leave a comment here, send me a tweet, or email me at: Martin.Robb@open.ac.uk

Thinking aloud about mums and dads

This week’s Thinking Allowed on Radio 4, presented by Laurie Taylor, focused in part on the subject of men and childbirth. I was asked to write a short piece about my research for the linked Open University website. I was quite pleased that, in under 800 words, I managed to mention the riots, absent fathers, my past research studies on fathering and on maternal relationships, and my current interest in the ‘male role models’ debate. And I managed to plug two of the OU modules to which I’ve contributed…

You can find my article here.

‘Mummy’s boys’: my interview on BBC Radio Lancashire

Yesterday I was interviewed on the Ted Robbins show on BBC Radio Lancashire, about my research on boys’ relationships with their mothers. At the time of writing, you can still listen to the programme at the station’s website.

The programme’s focus on the issue was prompted by new research, reported in the press this week, which purports to show that boys who have a close relationship with their mothers make better husbands.

In my contribution, I tried to make clear my own dislike of the pejorative term ‘mummy’s boys’ and to widen the discussion beyond the familiar stereotype of the suffocating mother and emotionally dependent son. The newly-published research provided a helpful pretext for talking about my own interest in the possible connection between maternal relationships and attitudes to parenting.

I hope I managed to get across some useful points about the often-overlooked importance of mothers for boys’ emotional development, and to provide a balance to some of the emphasis on fathers’ role in boys’ lives and pathologising of the contribution of mothers, especially lone mothers.

I even succeeded in squeezing in a passing reference to the recent outbreak of social order in London and elsewhere, and to challenge the emerging consensus that it’s all down to absent fathers, single mothers, and a lack of strong male role models.

Study for a PhD with the OU

Interested in the topics discussed on this blog, or in other issues relating to work with children, young people and families? Want to take it further, perhaps by doing some research of your own? Then why not consider studying for a PhD with the The Open University?

Here’s the ad:

The Faculty of Health and Social Care at The Open University is seeking high-quality applications for funded full time studentships and self funded part time students.  The Faculty’s research focuses on issues such as ageing and later life; reproductive and sexual health; death and dying; living with a disability and/or long term condition; children and young people; parenting and families. Our research draws on various methodologies and forms of analysis andmuch is based onmultidisciplinary work across the social sciences, in particular drawing on medical sociology, critical psychology, anthropology and other critical, applied social sciences

The Faculty has a lively post-graduate student community undertaking wide-ranging research both in theUKand internationally. Studentships commence from autumn 2011. Applicants must normally reside in theUKfor the duration of the studentship.

For detailed information, and to apply online, go to http://www3.open.ac.uk/employment; or contact Faculty Research Office, Tel: 01908 858373 or e-mail hsc-research-enquiries@open.ac.uk  Closing date: 12 noon on 31 August.  Interviews to be held in October.

Equal Opportunity is University Policy

Mothers, sons and masculinities

In this third post in my series on boys’ relationships with their mothers, I want to explain how my interest in the topic came about, and why I made it the focus of a research study.

I first became interested in young men’s relationships with their mothers, and the influence of those relationships on young masculinities, in the course of my research into men working in early years childcare (1). A number of the male childcare workers that I interviewed talked about having had particularly close relationships with their mothers, as well as with other maternal figures such as grandmothers and aunts. My sample was quite small, so my conclusions were by no means scientific, but it seemed that a significant number of these (mostly young) men had also been brought up by lone mothers.

Given the negative way in which single mothers’ influence on their sons is often viewed, this seemed to represent a fresh and more positive insight. Could the decision to work in a traditionally ‘feminine’ occupation, and the development of a more affective and expressive masculinity, have something to do with a strong maternal influence in a boy’s life? (I tried this idea out on parenting guru Stephen Biddulph, when I had the chance to chat with him after a seminar, but he was quite dismissive, suggesting that closer examination might reveal a deeper emotional deprivation in these young men’s lives, resulting from the absence of strong father figures. But then Biddulph, whose work I quite like in many ways, often appears to endorse the ‘new masculinism’ and gender essentialism of Robert Bly et al.)

In a later research study exploring fatherhood and masculine identity, I interviewed men who saw themselves as ‘involved’ fathers (2, 3). Although all of these men spoke at length about their (often deeply ambivalent) relationships with their own fathers, very few of them regarded their fathers as a strong influence on their parenting, and a significant number cited their mothers as having had the greater impact on the way they were bringing up their own children.

More recently, I supervised Jane Reeves’ PhD research on young fathers who were also service users. Among other findings to emerge from Jane’s study, it was striking that many of the young men she interviewed talked about having particularly close relationships with their mothers and grandmothers, and about how these relationships had contributed to their decision to stay with their partners and be a ‘good father’. (4)

Around the same time, I was writing about gender for the Open University’s ‘Youth’ course (KE308) (5), when a colleague introduced me to Diane Reay’s case study of Shaun, a working-class boy caught between the influence of his male peer group and that of his single mother (6). Reay quotes Shaun’s teacher as saying about him:

…of all the boys he’s the one most in touch with his feminine side, believe it or not. I do think he’s more in touch with his feminine side but then he lives with three women, his mum, who he idolises, his elder sister, who he idolises, and his baby sister, who he idolises, so his feminine side is very much to the fore.

Reay’s work, like Jane Reeves’ research, also touched on the issue of class and mother-son relationships, something I was keen to explore further.

All of these studies suggested some kind of link between the nature of a young man’s relationship with his mother and the development of masculine identity, with a hint that close maternal relationships might play a part in the emergence of alternative and more ‘caring’ masculinities. I decide that I wanted to explore these questions further, and began to cast around for existing research in this area.

I found that very little had been written on relationships between mothers and sons, and most of what had been written was from the perspective of mothers, such as Andrea Reilly’s edited collection (7). There didn’t seem to have been much written on how boys viewed their relationships with their mothers, and how those relationships impacted on their developing identities as young men.

So I decided I wanted to explore the issue further, and I came up with two possible research questions:

• How do young men talk about their relationships with their mothers?

• Is there any connection between the nature and quality of these relationships and young men’s developing gender identities?

With regard to the second question, I was particularly interested in the impact of maternal relationships on boys’ emerging attitudes to parenting, and their sense of themselves as future fathers.

Fortunately, around the time that I was beginning to explore these issues, ‘Inventing Adulthoods’, the longitudinal study of young people’s transitons to adulthood based at South Bank University, was reporting its findings and making some of its data available via a public online archive. I was aware of the project via my colleague Rachel Thomson, who was a member of the project team, and because we had collaborated with the team in producing a film about young people’s lives for the OU course. (8)

I negotiated an agreement with the South Bank research team to carry out a small-scale study, drawing on the interviews with the seven young men in the public archives, possibly as a first step towards a larger study.

Having negotiated access, I then set up about familiarising myself with the data on these seven young men. In another post, I’ll summarise what I concluded about their relationships with their mothers, and the impact on their emerging masculine identities.

References

(1) Robb, M. (2005) ‘Men working in childcare’  in Foley, P., Roche, J. and Tucker, S. (eds) Children in Society: contemporary theory, policy and practice, Basingstoke, Palgrave/The Open University

(2) Robb, M. (2004) ‘Men talking about fatherhood: discourse and identities’ in Robb, M., Barrett, S., Komaromy, C. and Rogers, A. (eds), Communication, Relationships and Care: A Reader, pp. 121-130, Routledge/The Open University

(3) Robb, M. (2004) ‘Exploring fatherhood: masculinity and intersubjectivity in the research process’, Journal of Social Work Practice, Vol. 18, No. 3, November (Special Issue: Psychosocial Approaches to Health and Welfare Research)

(4) Reeves, J. (ed) (2008) Inter-professional approaches to young fathers, M&K Update Ltd

(5) Robb, M. (2007) ‘Gender’ in Kehily, M. (ed.) Understanding Youth: perspectives,identities and practices, Sage/The Open University

(6) Reay, D. (2002) ‘Shaun’s story: troubling discourses of white working-class masculinity’, Gender and Education, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 221 – 34

(7) Reilly, A. (ed.) (2001) Mothers and Sons: feminist perspectives, Routledge

(8) Henderson, S., Holland, J., McGreelis, S., Sharpe, S. and Thomson, R. (2007), Inventing Adulthoods: a biographical approach to youth transitions, Sage/The Open University

Young men, mothers and family relationships

In this second post in my series on boys’ relationships with their mothers, I want to say something about the background to my research on this topic. As I noted in the last post, studies of young masculinity have until recently overlooked the family as a site for the development of young male identities. This has also been true of youth studies more generally. In the words of Aapola, Gonick and Harris, ‘the realm of family life as the context for young people’s growing up process has been a neglected area of youth research.’ (1) Val Gillies has suggested that part of the explanation might be the location of research on young people, and work on the family, in separate academic disciplines – youth studies and family studies. But she argues that this division has also reflected ‘the assumption that youth is a period marked by increasing autonomy and independence from family ties’. (2)

With a few notable exceptions, the main sites for studying the lives and changing experience of young people generally, and boys in particular, have been the school and the peer group. The picture is beginning to change, as more studies emerge that consider young people’s experience of family life as a vital component of their experience of the transition to adulthood. Studies that adopt a biographical approach – such as the longitudinal ‘Inventing Adulthoods’ research which provided the data for the study I’ll be discussing later – have begun to consider ‘home’ and ‘family’ as key contexts for young people’s unfolding lives. (3)

Val Gillies’ own work, with Jane McCarthy and Janet Holland, on the family lives of young people, went a long way to redressing the imbalance. Countering the stereotypical image of young people as increasingly alienated from family life, they found that the vast majority of young people ‘describe their family relationships in positive terms, emphasising the supportive and emotionally meaningful nature of their lives together’. (4)

The fact that research on boys and young men, in particular, has emphasised the importance of friendship groups and overlooked family life, partly reflects the dominance of the subcultural tradition in youth studies. But it also reflects the dominant assumptions of developmental psychology which, as Aapola and colleagues point out, has tended to see girls as more dependent on other people, and particularly their families, than boys.

This is not to say that work on young men has completed ignored family relationships. For example, Stephen Frosh, Ann Phoenix and Rob Pattman, in their major study of young masculinities (5), though basing their research in the school context, talked to young men about their relationships with their parents, as did Martin Mac an Ghaill in his groundbreaking study (6). But we still lack research that takes those parental and other family relationships as a primary focus for exploring the development of young men’s identities, and which sees relationships with mothers, fathers and siblings as key factors in the shaping of young masculinities.

Where young men’s family relationships have come into focus, whether in research or in policy discourse, there has been an almost exclusive emphasis on boys’ relationships with their fathers. This reflects the influence of what we might call the ‘male role model’ discourse in discussion of young men’s gender formation, something I discussed in an earlier post.

Briefly, I would argue that a great deal of debate around family policy – whether it’s about single mothers, absent fathers, or young men and anti-social behaviour – has rested on assumptions about the necessity of strong male role models for boys’ healthy development. There’s a conservative or traditionalist version of this – seen in the work of New Right thinkers such as Charles Murray in the USA (7) and Dennis and Erdos in the UK (8)– which argues that the presence of fathers is essential for the development of responsible young masculinity, and the absence of strong father figures to blame for rising youth crime, welfare dependence, and so forth.

But there’s also a ‘progressive’ or egalitarian version of the male role model discourse, which lies behind much of the advocacy for greater involvement by men in hands-on fathering and in early years childcare. The assumption here is that alternative male role models are necessary to ensure that boys develop more caring and expressive masculine identities.

In both versions, the influence of mothers – and female professionals – on young men’s development tends to get left out of the picture. There’s an assumption, not only of a rather simplistic social learning model of gender development, but also that this learning has to be from a parent or professional of the same sex.

I would argue that we need a more complex, relational model of how gender identities develop, in which the multiplicity of relationships in which young men are situated is taken into account – including the potential for cross-gender identifications. This will mean paying greater attention to boys’ relationships with adults (parents, carers, professionals) of both genders.

It also means putting mothers back into the picture, as I tried to do in my own small-scale study. In the next post, I’ll explain what prompted me to undertake the study, and how I set about it.

References

(1) Aapola, S., Gonick, M. and Harris, A. (2005) Young Femininity: Girlhood, Power and Social Change, Basingstoke, Palgrave

(2) Gillies, V. (2000), ‘Young people and family life: analysing and comparing disciplinary discourses’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 211-28

(3) Henderson, S., Holland, J., McGrellis, S., Sharpe, S. and Thomson, R. (2007), Inventing Adulthoods: A Biographical Approach to Youth Transitions, London, Sage/The Open University

(4) Gillies, V., Ribbens McCarthy, J. and Holland, J. (2001) Pulling Together, Pulling Apart: The Family Lives of Young People, London, Family Policy Studies Centre/Joseph Rowntree Foundation

(5) Frosh, S., Phoenix, A. and Pattman, R. (2002) Young Masculinities, Cambridge, Polity Press

(6) Mac an Ghaill, M. (1994) The Making of Men: Masculinities, Sexualities and Schooling, Buckingham, Open University Press

(7) Murray, C. (1994) Underclass: The Crisis Deepens, London, Institute of Economic Affairs

(8) Dennis, N. and Erdos, G. (1992) Families without Fatherhood, London, IEA Health and Welfare Unit