Being an adult son in contemporary Poland. Sonhood in narratives of men in their twenties, thirties, and forties

ABSTRACT

Sonhood in the narratives of men in their twenties, thirties, and forties aims to analyse the experience of being an adult son, as well as the relationships between adult men and their parents.

The MINIATURA project seeks to explore the following research questions in greater depth:

(1) What images of parents – mothers and fathers – emerge from the sons’ narratives?

(2) How does having siblings affect the experience of sonship?

(3) What visions of masculinity emerge from interviews with men?

(4) How does theexperience of sonship influence men’s perceptions of different forms of masculinity, and their relationships with other men and women?

(5) How are the masculinities embodied by sons shaped by the experience of sonship?

Do they serve to legitimise hegemonic masculinities in a given, polarised society, or do they allow for their contestation, or perhaps even inspire it? As part of the project, we plan to conduct 30 interviews with adult men (10 interviews each with men aged 20–29, 30–39, and 40–49) living in medium-sized and large cities in Poland. Such a way of urposive sampling is due to the project’s limited timeframe, which dictates the number of feasible interviews. The influence of parents on their children and their role in raising and preparing them for adult life is an important topic in the social sciences. However, the experiences of adult children in their relationships with their parents have received relatively little attention from a synchronic or diachronic perspective. In the social sciences, the family experiences of adult men are primarily analysed in the context of their own fatherhood and relationships within intimate partnerships. Yet, given that an individual's relationship with their parents changes over the course of their life, attention should also be paid to the influence that parents have on the formation of gender attitudes and practices in adult men.