Coming into the World Social environment at Birth, Family Structures and Early Education – VENIROMOND

The aim of the project is twofold. 1) To analyse caring and educational practices during the first year of life, and the development over time of the relations that mothers and fathers establish with their children. 2) To capture the diversity of these relations and practices through the mothers’ and fathers’ social trajectories, their standard of living and family structures on the one hand, and through the sex of the child and his/her place among the siblings on the other.

A specific focus will be placed on the processes of pauperization, on new family situations, on the emergence of new ideals in terms of gender equality and individual autonomy, and their consequences on the upbringing of infants . The whole program is based on a strong assumption: the current trends are leading to a reshaping of social relations and norms, more than to a levelling of social differences or the collapse of old social frames.

In order to analyse the social and psychosocial processes at work around the time of birth, we need to draw upon knowledge and methods from the fields of sociology, demography, economics, political science, and psychology. Thus, we will study the environment of early childhood, from the parents’ trajectories and their feelings of justice or injustice to the transmission of moral preferences; from the parental views on the future and changes over time in the family structure to the concrete environment of children’s education. This will allow us to frame a model of educational practice and socialisation of infants taking into account both stable social forces and the contingent context, leading to a new representation of the concept of habitus and of early socialisation among social groups.

To do so, we will use very diverse scientific methods. The data from the ELFE cohort will provide an exceptional amount of information on our topics of interest. Furthermore, we will put the sociodemographic and economic data into context, using a set of complementary statistical datasets presenting the living conditions of infants today. We will also make wide use of qualitative methods of investigation. In order to understand the meaning of parents’ trajectories after the birth of a child, within the family and in their dealings with institutions, we will conduct a series of iterated qualitative interviews on a representative sample of parents, and ethnographic studies in maternity hospitals, mother-and-child clinics (protection maternelle et infantile), day nurseries and other child-oriented services such as the Maisons de l’enfance. Finally, an experimental project will be devoted to measuring the first psychological attachments between parents and children.

In the current national and international scientific context where research on early childhood is mainly based on paradigms from the life sciences and cognitive science, we wish to contribute to a sociological study of the genesis of gender- and class-based social identities. This new approach is based on the assumption that the process whereby children appropriate the social habits resulting from the primary and secondary socialization of both parents starts in the first days or months of life.