Parentality

General information

The parentality became a word of the usual vocabulary since the end of the XXe century without the substance being questioned which it recovers. It does not profit to date from any definition recognized in the dictionaries of current language.

This term takes its bases in a widened médico-psycho-social sphere and tries to define the function “to be relative” by also taking account of the aspects legal, political, socio-economic, cultural and institutional. The exercise of the parentality becomes increasingly complex. Recomposed families, pluri-parental families, single-parent hearths, beautiful-parentalité, adoptive parentality, homoparentality, procreation médicalement assisted, legal evolution and new rights, etc, question our habits as parents, future parents, professionals of childhood.

Fields of application

In the political and social sphere of activity towards the families (“material aids and financial with the parentality”). Parentality is there an equivalent of the word family.

In the laws, of the legislative , the parentality term, even of Coparentalité, is used in the relations between law and parental authority in the direction of a legal division of its exercise. The advisory Commission of the human rights defines the parentality by its legal aspects, with the duties of the parents and their rights relating to the parental authority and filiation.

In the sociological field it rather describes the new forms of conjugalities and family lives. It is thus rather within the meaning of family structures that it should then be heard. One speaks from now on about single-parent family , about family homoparentale and even about pluri-parental family in the case of the recomposed families. It can also indicate a mode of filiation (adoptive parentality,…) or the situation of the parents on arrival of a child (late parentality)…

In the educational field, the term of parentality includes the educational practices intended for the Enfants, with a preoccupation of prevention of the Maltraitance and a promotion of a well-treatment. The paradox is that these various shutters are binding on any adult charged with child without no bond of family being necessary to make them desirable towards the child.

In the fields psychiatric and psychological, the term is used to indicate with negative connotations, aspects of parental failures pathological.

In a report/ratio of the conference of the European ministers in charge of the family businesses with May 2006, " Positive parentality in Europe contemporaine" , it is specified: " Concerning the terminology, the report/ratio indicates by the term of “parentality” not only the activities of the biological parents, but also those of the people who are not the parents of the child but take part in her assumption of responsibility and its education. In a sense, the words “parentality” and “parents” are used here like a kind of short cut including all the activities and the people related to the fact of raising a enfant."

The parentality is thus not a term which defines only the attachment parents children.

Some definitions

According to a definition given in 2004 by the Center “Research in health systems” of the School of public health of Huy-Waremme, the parentality is “the whole of the knowledge-being and know-how which are declined with the wire of the daily situations in words, acts, divisions, emotions and pleasures, in recognition of the child, but also, in authority, requirement, coherence and continuity”.

This definition extremely well describes the extent of the task and the difficulties to which the parents and future parents will have to face. One is not born relative but it is become…

Article 18 of the International convention of the Rights of the child consolidates the principle according to which the two parents have the common responsibility to ensure education and the development of the child. The father and the mother of a child would be those which commit themselves assuming firstly and mainly these responsibilities, those attached to the relationship and in the bond of filiation. The right does not make it possible to pass from the relationship to the parentality, but the concept of parentality is extended to any person having load of child, including the structures of prevention and promotion of health in order to improve “the environment” of the families and the actions of the relationship for the benefit of the child.

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