The Snowball Effect: the paradoxes of modern gender roles of the middle-class parents of Copenhagen

Abstract: This thesis explores access to central knowledge platforms of middle-class parents within the context of Copenhagen. Through a qualitative approach, including interviews and participant observation, access to the 3 main knowledge platforms is explored: firstly, direct contact with municipality health care visitors in the home; secondly, maternity groups constructed according to homogenic ideals and finally, the online community of Facebook. Analysis revealed that the municipal offers to parents fail to include the fathers, and that health care visitors through facilitation and guidance toward ideologies of parenthood exclude the fathers. Furthermore, homosocial communities are preferred by the parents, creating further challenges for the fathers in access to the online communities dominated by women and though more inclusive masculinities emerge allowing the men to identify further with fatherhood, the father is excluded from the central knowledge platforms. The exclusion of the father in parenthood leaves the women in the same position we saw her in 50 years ago: trapped in the domestic sphere, unable to live out other ideologies of self than intensive motherhood. Concluding that this modern welfare state governs its population in a manner that underlines traditional gender roles which perpetuate inequality in parenthood, oppressing both the fathers and the mothers.