In recent decades the bourgeois family model has lost its general validity claim in several respects, especially with regard to gender differentiations. The justifications (traditional, biological, historical) of the distribution of labor between the sexes were widely criticized. Women’s growing participation in the work force and the gradual institutionalization of a general norm of female occupation made it impossible to refer to factual gender relations for justification. This development was accompanied by a process of “democratization” of family relationships: A growing importance of ideas of equality and justice related not only to the couple but to parent-child-relationship as well. The style of interaction became less hierarchical and more egalitarian, and the parents became more oriented to an equal treatment of boys and girls and to facilitate the individual qualities of the child.
Despite these changes there is a persistent importance of a discourse emphasizing gender differences and conceiving them as naturally given. And there is also a persistent gap between new egalitarian normative standards and factual behavior. Even explicitly egalitarian parents don’t always act up according to their orientations, and their children often exhibit dispositions quite similar to old gender stereotypes. Against this background, we assume that nowadays at least three normative foci play a major role in family relationships: the idea of equality, the imputation of gender differences, and the orientation towards the individuality of the child. Relating to interviews and video recordings of parent-child interactions the project exemplarily studies to what extend these three normative foci are present in parents’ everyday theories about their behavior towards their children, what kinds of friction can arise in these interpretations, and how the normative orientations reflect in factual interactions.
