Every year, approximately 10,000 parent couples in Norway separate. If they have children under the age of 16, it is mandatory to attend mediation. Over the past ten years, it has become a highly valued goal that children should participate in mediation, and the starting point for this thesis is the mediations in which children participate.
One goal of the study has been to broaden the understanding of what kind of event mediation is, by contextualising the mediation: in a timeline course by drawing on experiences that parents and children brought with them into the mediation, how the family talked about the mediation afterwards, and in the family's social and cultural context. By considering families who experience separation as one of many ways of being a family, rather than as a separate type of family, knowledge of contemporary family life, for example how they share custody of their own children with each other and others, becomes a source of understanding of "divorced families" as well.
The dissertation is based on qualitative interviews with children (6-12 years) and parents in 15 families, and has a sociocultural theoretical approach, where meaning-making in context is central. Childhood research has also been a theoretical source of inspiration, including its discussions of child agency as a relational issue. The interviews with children and parents are inspired by the "Lifemode interview", which has a specific day as a starting point, where specific events are explored; what is happening, how it has come to be, and what meaning the events are ascribed to.
In divorce research, there has been the greatest interest in families with extensive conflicts. At the same time, we know that most parents figure out how to continue co-parenting after a divorce without ending up in prolonged conflicts. This project explores how families in contemporary Norway, who define themselves as having a low to moderate level of conflict, "do divorce." What can we learn by adopting an exploratory approach to how parents and children describe and understand their handling and understanding of the breakup process, and the mediation in which children participate? The results are presented in three articles.
The first article is based on analyses of interviews with both children and parents, and shows that both the invitation to, and the implementation of, children's participation in mediation are characterized by an unclear professional understanding of what should come out of this part of the mediation. The parents were unsure how to inform the children about the mediation, and the children were poorly prepared for what they were supposed to talk about with the mediator. The conversation between the children and the mediator was characterised by the fact that it is largely up to the mediator how the conversation should be conducted. The mediation itself resembled more of a therapeutic conversation, focusing on the children's feelings rather than their legal rights. The article concludes that the mediator's conversation with the children has become an overloaded conversation.
The second article, based on interviews with the parents, highlights the efforts involved in navigating a breakup without ending up in major conflicts. The parents were focused on protecting their children from the negative consequences of the divorce, even if it meant going to great lengths and spending time and energy working through their own difficult emotions. A prerequisite was that they trusted each other as parents. This trust was based on their experiences with each other as co-parents while they lived together. These experiences allowed them to trust that the children were well taken care of by the other parent, and that they could intervene in each other's parenting to some extent, based on a shared interest in making the overall situation as good as possible for their children.
The third article is based on interviews with the children and highlights divorce as an event that is part of modern family life, rooted in social and cultural living conditions. The analysis of how children act and how they understand the family change they are experiencing, showed the importance of relationships with other children. Classmates with divorce experiences, along with TV series and movies, became sources of knowledge about how both adults and children handle divorce nowadays. Additionally, it was important to have a story about their own divorce that was understandable and could be shared with other children.
By focusing the research on children's meaning-making, we became aware of some key challenges for the children: understanding what was happening and being able to maintain their usual life, eventually in two homes. This became problematic for the children who struggled to understand what was happening and did not receive help with their meaning-making. If they also did not receive support in bringing their experiences between the two homes, and thus creating coherence in their everyday life, their existence could become both fragmented and lonely.
To be able to support children and parents going through a divorce process, knowledge is needed about the landscape they are moving through and different ways to navigate this landscape. This is knowledge that must be continuously updated. The three articles offer both knowledge about the current situation and how to proceed to update the knowledge.