Heidegger and parenthood: A theoretical and methodological shift from instrumental to ontological understanding

Introduction: Being a parent in a time of crisis

We wrote this article in the midst of the COVID-19 global health and economic crisis. It seems a conceit to even think about theoretical and research understandings of parenting at such a time when lives, livelihoods and entire societies are threatened. It may seem irrelevant, but perhaps this crisis is throwing the nature of being a parent into the sharpest possible relief. It is not melodramatic to note that the world has changed and that our relationships are also changing. Parents long to see and hug their older children but cannot as they may live in other states or countries or because all parties must stay at home. Parents with young children face daily parental agonies: how to explain to them, how to protect them, how to educate and engage them, often how to isolate from them and indeed, how to ‘be with one another’ (Heidegger, 2001: 111) at this time. Grandparents face being kept apart from both their children and their grandchildren. Health professions are struggling to maintain health services while being ever conscious that they may themselves become infected and transmit the virus to their own families. Adults with older parents face almost insoluble human dilemmas, for example should non-infected children sit with a dying parent who has the virus? This is the background against which we write of what it means to be a parent.

Background: A different ‘research method’ approach

There are no research instructions delineated or prescribed in this article. Our aim is to open up parenthood, following Heidegger’s caution that ‘You must keep the usual meaning of mere research technique separate from our concept of method’ (Heidegger, 2001: 110). For decades, researchers have been urged and expected to have a theoretical or conceptual framework in their methods section to ‘undergird’ their study. Such a framework, it is proposed, provides organisational context for the study, directs the most appropriate research methods, frames study questions and shapes analysis. Heidegger, however, had no truck with such linear instrumentalism or theoretical foundationalism, referring to such ‘dominance and primacy of the theoretical’ as having ‘messed up philosophy’ (Cooper, 1996: 19). We ask here if it has also failed nursing and health research. It is not an outlier aberration, especially in qualitative research, to read the claim that the study has ‘used’ Heidegger, only to see Heidegger stand as a theoretical totem at the start of the study, barely to be seen again as the work progresses inexorably into interviews and ‘interpreted themes’ derived from existing psychological or sociological sources. Heidegger’s warning that we should not ‘throw a “signification” over some naked thing which is present at hand’ (Heidegger, 1962: 190) is often ignored. As Petrovskaya notes of some attempts at ‘philosopher summaries’ in nursing research, ‘they do not seem to create a salient change in the actual research activities’ (Petrovskaya, 2014: 65).

Valuable research has brought Heidegger to bear on particular dimensions of parenthood such as birth (Crowther et al., 2014a, 2014b) and teenage parenthood (SmithBattle, 2006). While these are important works, we propose in this article a different kind of thinking around parenthood and what it means to be a parent, a meditative thinking that is as valuable as the more commonplace calculative thinking, for each are ‘justified and needed in their own way’ (Heidegger, 1966: 46). For Heidegger, calculative thinking was the dominant thinking that ‘computes’, that ‘never stops, never collects itself’ and that does not ‘contemplate the meaning which reigns in everything that is’ (Heidegger, 1966: 46). Meditative thinking in contrast is no soft option and is never ‘high flown’, it ‘requires greater effort and demands more practice’, but it takes more time and requires ‘delicate care’ (Heidegger, 1966: 46).

Why Heidegger?

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was a German philosopher, widely accepted as one of the most important and influential yet controversial thinkers of the 20th Century. We cannot overstate the importance of nurse scholars such as Patricia Benner (Benner and Wrubel, 1989), Nancy Diekelmann (Diekelmann, 2001) and others in introducing Heidegger and his thought into nursing. The nursing literature highlights many of the debates and disagreements surrounding the use of Heidegger and his work, see, for example Crotty (1997), Darbyshire et al. (1999), Horrigan-Kelly et al. (2016), Paley (1998) and Petrovskaya (2014). Reading or thinking through Heidegger is likely to provoke bewilderment, brain pain, new insights and certain dissonance, but just as understanding the meaning of childhood is crucial for child health professionals (Darbyshire, 2007), so too is grasping the complex ontological meaning both of being a parent and of the practices of parenting (Darbyshire, 1994: 167).

Enframing understandings of parenthood

Child health professionals have been taught for decades that it is impossible to understand or work with children without a concomitant understanding of and ability to work with parents. Numerous philosophies and theoretical frameworks centre parents as crucial to any child health research approaches whether they be ‘family-centred care’ (Al-Motlaq et al., 2018), ‘parent participation’ (Blower and Morgan, 2000) or more.

It is tempting, but ill-advised, to leap ahead into parenting practices and what may be called the ‘technologies’ of how these can be engendered, optimised (Lao, 2017), taught, or assessed prior to appreciating the profound ontological significance (Guignon, 1983: 65) of the meaning of becoming and being a parent. Heidegger regularly cautioned against such a technological understanding or ‘enframing’ of Being, where ‘The essence of modern technology lies in enframing’ (Heidegger, 1977d: 25). Enframing and a technological understanding of parenting are such ubiquitously encountered ways of viewing parenthood that they may scarcely raise an eyebrow, yet they are profoundly problematic. As Lovitt notes, ‘Enframing is a mode of revealing (...) Yet precisely under its dominion nothing whatever, including man [sic] himself, appears as it intrinsically is; the truth of its being remains concealed’ (Lovitt, 1977: xxxiv). So too with the concealment of the meaning of being a parent, it is important to note here that the ‘technological enframing’ that Heidegger warns against is not technology in the commonly accepted sense of automation, computers, internet, etc. Contemporary technological enframing is a normative ‘normality’ that demands ‘maximum bang for the bucks’ from everything, not only machinery but also people, systems and the entire world. All become mere ‘resources on hand to be ordered and used with maximum efficiency’ (Guignon, 2006: 20). A forest cannot simply be nature but becomes an energy source. Hospital staff cannot be nurses or doctors but become ‘human resources’. Parents cannot simply love, nurture, protect and support their children, they must become ‘our most valuable resources’, ‘effective’ at parenting. The parenting ‘project’ thus becomes a series of problems for both parent and child that demand management, mastery and control. Any parent searching ‘parenting’ on Google™ now has around 355 million sites to visit as Carter’s (2007) ‘glut’ has become a deluge. Parenting as a ‘competitive sport’ now abounds as do entire new media genres of ‘Tiger moms’, ‘Dance moms’, ‘Hockey moms’ and their ilk. Even children’s nurseries and kindies promise to ‘fast-track’ pre-schoolers whose parents want them to have ‘an edge’ in the world (Fastrackids, 2020). Cities like New York are notorious for the obscene spectacle of parents ingratiating or buying their child’s way into a ‘baby ivy league’ nursery that will presumably smooth their path into a ‘top university’ one day (Gross, 2018). The calculative thinking that understands being a parent as a series of correct or incorrect strategies, nested under the rubric of ‘scientific parenting’, that will ensure optimal child rearing could, as Heidegger warned, ‘so captivate, bewitch, dazzle and beguile man [sic] that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking’ (Heidegger, 1966: 56).

Understanding parenthood through Heidegger

‘The existential relationship does not consist of molecules’ (Heidegger, 2001: 155).

We propose a different approach for maternal and child health nursing researchers. In contrast to technological and instrumental understandings of parenthood, we propose that parenting is a particular way of what Heidegger calls ‘Being in the world’ (Heidegger, 1962) and not merely a life event, important though these events may be. A special birthday, a major promotion, a move to another country and even an engagement or wedding are important life events, but they do not share the ontological and world-defining power that parenthood brings. People have an almost instinctual understanding of the magnitude of such change. The joy experienced at the birth of a new baby can be almost beyond description (Crowther et al., 2014b). When parents hear their pregnant friends describe how they are excited about the arrival of their new baby, but also hear how ‘this new baby is not going to disrupt our lives and we’re not going to let it change us’, they smile inwardly and metaphorically shake their heads, thinking, ‘you have no idea what is about to happen to your world’.

Historically, parenthood was understated to the point where it was almost given that women would have babies and that somehow these children would be ‘raised’ and become adults. While early child-rearing advice did exist, the parenting industry or ‘mom market’ (Paul, 2008) that is today worth somewhere between $46 billion and $1.7 trillion dollars (Klich, 2019) was not even a glint in capitalism’s eye.

What would a Heideggerian understanding of parenthood or parenting look like, with all of Heidegger’s complexities and neologisms, and why could this be important for children’s nurses, family researchers and other child health professionals? Heidegger had very little, if anything to say specifically about either parents or children in his entire oeuvre (see, e.g. (Donohoe, 2012; Hatab, 2014; Langfur, 2014). However, his discussions of mood, situatedness, being in the world and technological understanding provide a challenging and potentially valuable alternative to the many lenses through which parenthood is currently viewed.

While Heidegger said little about children or parents directly, his phenomenology and ontology are profoundly social. Human ‘Being’ or the ‘meaning of being’ is co-openness. As Sheehan (2001: 200) notes, ‘Human openness is always co-openness (Mitdasein)’. We are created by our parents, shaped by their genetics, moulded by our environments, impacted by our siblings, influenced by friends and family, and immersed in our language and culture. Dasein as potentiality, as openness, is nothing if not social. ‘Dasein is Being-possible’ (Heidegger, 1962: 183). Being-with as a relation to others is not merely proximal or spatial as in ‘I am sitting with my partner’, it is world-defining. Dreyfus (1991: 148) noted that a non-social Dasein makes no sense. Just as ‘Professor’ makes no sense without students and colleagues, and ‘clinical nurse’ makes no sense without patients, clients or communities, so ‘parent’ makes no sense without children, whether they be 2 days, 2 years, 32 years old, or even memories.

Dasein is the kind of being for whom things matter and show up as important. Being a parent is not therefore an external ‘role’ that one enacts or performs. In Heidegger’s account, parenthood is not primarily a social or biological event but a way of being ‘attuned’ so that particular things show up as important. Heidegger calls this ‘affective attunement’, ‘Befindlichkeit’ (Sheehan, 2001: 161). Becoming a parent throws things into the forefront of our existence that may scarcely have been noticed before, for they lacked parental significance, such as power outlets without safety covers, childhood illnesses, road traffic, nearby kindies, small items on the floor, hot drinks on low tables, what Donohoe calls parenthood’s ‘salient objects of constitution’ (Donohoe, 2012: 185) and what novelist Hanya Yanagihara described in ‘A Little Life’ as how ‘The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors’ (Yanagihara, 2015: 145). Heidegger describes this ‘worldhood’ as ‘that referential totality which constitutes significance’ (Heidegger, 1962: 160). This is not the world of the planet, the natural world or the built environment. World is a ‘system of purposes and meanings that organizes our identity and our activities’ (Polt, 1999: 136). This is the worldhood and significance of being a parent, inextricably bound with the world of a child that extends far beyond any learned skills, competencies or child-rearing strategies. Heidegger stressed that ‘One’s own Dasein, like the Dasein-with of Others, is encountered proximally and for the most part in terms of the with-world with which we are environmentally concerned’ (Heidegger, 1962: 163). Parents are often hyper-attuned to their child and their slightest nuances of sleep, feeding, mood and more because this child matters so much. Every child’s nurse will have heard parents say that they are worried about their child because ‘something’s just not right’ or that they ‘are not themselves’, based often on an inarticulable hunch. An early study of parents living in with their hospitalised child (Darbyshire, 1994) showed that parents ‘kept vigil’ (Darbyshire, 1994: 97) beside their child’s bed, bearing witness to the child’s injury or illness in ways that involved the most intense observation and scrutiny of the child’s every movement or change in condition.

We agree with Donohoe (2012) that while Heidegger focused extensively on primordial ‘mood’, such as anxiety and our being-unto-death, he overlooked the joy, wonder and awe that can be equally constitutive of parental Dasein. Whether it be exploring every finger and toe of a new baby, celebrating a baby’s tiny movements, a toddler’s learning or a teen’s greater maturities, there are moments in parents’ lives that leave them ‘struck with wonder’ as they ‘experience themselves as a newborn child for whom the light of the world has just dawned’ (Held, 1993) cited in Donohoe (2012): 191. Many parents understand these things as they are now an ineluctable part of their new way of being. Having a child, being part of the shared world of parenting, developing parental comportment, all mean that ‘One is no longer simply being, but is being for another’ (Donohoe, 2012: 190). Members of a new mothers’ or fathers’ group will not require to lay any groundwork nor read any introductory notes about sleeping, feeding, travelling with babies or ‘managing grandparents’, for they are already members of this shared world of parents, and the understanding and practices that constitute what Heidegger would call a ‘common background of intelligibility’ (Guignon, 1983: 111). Crucially, these are not some ‘other parents’ but ourselves, in the sense of an anonymous public normativity.

Dark side of parenthood

Many involved in child health and especially those working in child protection are painfully aware that not all parents experience or exhibit a loving and involved attunement to their child(ren). At its most extreme, malevolent parenting involves overt child torture, cruelty and killing. A litany of reports from coroners and inquiries worldwide, spanning decades, describe the ‘avoidable deaths’ of galleries of children, whose pictures gaze out towards us almost timelessly (Parton, 2004). Each report promises changes and improved ways of working that seem to evaporate like the children’s faces as we wait for the realisation of all of the inevitable ‘lessons that must be learned’.

As if to confirm Heidegger’s concerns regarding the ‘enframing’ of being and his explanation of how it can be mobilised as a resource for ever more effective consumption, a burgeoning literary genre called ‘misery lit’ ‘has wholly infected the bestseller charts’ (Addley, 2007). Real or invented tales of the unspeakable horrors visited upon children are now formulaically written and strategically installed in entire bookshelf sections called ‘Painful Lives’ or ‘Tragic Life Stories’. Childhood trauma has now been commoditised to benefit booksellers, authors, publishers and the public. In an especially revealing recommendation about the meaning of parenthood, the coronial inquest report into the killing of 4 -year-old Chloe Valentine in South Australia described the ‘utility’ that Chloe had for her mother:

Some people, including Ashlee Polkinghorne, (Chloe’s mother) regard children as possessions. Chloe represented nothing more to Ashlee than a means by which her income could be enhanced by obtaining support payments not available to a childless person. She also used Chloe as a bargaining chip to manipulate her friends and Families SA workers. The concept of family preservation should only apply to parents who treat their child as precious – not a mere possession to be used for their own benefit. Section 21.18: 151 (Johns, 2015)

Chloe existed only as the ‘Gestell’ or ‘Enframing’ essence of a technological understanding of parent and child, where everything shows up as a resource to be used, even a 4 -year-old child.

Understanding parenthood through poetry

In his later works, Heidegger turned to the poets, proposing that art ‘is truth, setting itself to work’ in ways that can ‘open up the Being of beings’ (Heidegger, 1971: 39). Poetry, for Heidegger, was never about aesthetics or literary criticism, it was ‘the saying of the unconcealedness of what is (...), that which ‘brings the unsayable as such into a world’ (Heidegger, 1971: 74). Poetry, in other words, ‘says more than it speaks, means more than it utters’ (Hofstadter, 1971: xii).

Poetry can help uncover some of the meanings of parenthood that Heidegger’s philosophy alludes to. The death of a child, for example, surely merits the poet Seamus Heaney’s description (from a different murderously inhumane event) of being ‘like a moment of exposure to interstellar cold’ (Heaney, 1997: 91). This is a loss of such magnitude that words often seem incapable of bearing its weight. Parents worldwide and in every epoch have struggled, and usually failed, to find any way of describing ‘what it was like’ when their child died. This sheer, existential, dread horror cannot be captured by any ‘objective’ qualities of the child or by any parental grief rating scale. It would be as offensive as it is pointless to ask, outside the bounds of feminicide, if it is worse to lose a son or a daughter? Is it a more traumatic death if your child is 3 weeks, 3 months, 13 or 30 years old? The question makes no sense, it literally ‘does not compute’ because this realm of parenthood cannot be approached or understood from any objective or instrumental stance.

In Alice Meynell’s ‘Maternity’ (Available at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=12659) she starkly describes the changing of her world as she was ‘born’ a mother even though her baby was stillborn, and despite well-meaning platitudes, never forgotten. Becoming a parent is world defining and in a very real sense, permanent. As long as a child has a parent, they are forever someone’s child, regardless of their age. Our children may need us more and less, or in different ways, love us or hate us at different stages in their lives, but that parent–child connection is forever. In Meynell’s poem, not even death can dissolve it. Many working in child health and government statistics will be aware of the complexities surrounding the seemingly simple census question of ‘How many children do you have? For parents whose child has died, this question is profound and complex. The simple, arithmetical answer is, of course, the number of live children, but the loss of that other child will not be so easily or officially airbrushed out of existence. ‘Do you have where?’, may be their inner response. Parents have reported including the dead child in their ‘numbers’ because in their parental world, this child is still very much alive to them and to deny them numerically may seem like forgetting them existentially.

In William Wordsworth’s poem, ‘We are seven’, (available at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52298/we-are-seven), this existential battle between scientific rationality and the power of love and memory is played out through the adult interlocutor’s quizzing of an 8-year-old ‘simple child’ about exactly this question of how many brothers and sisters has she? This should be a ‘no contest’. In Heidegger’s words, the immature delusion of this child that ‘we are seven’ should ‘dissolve if it is placed in the cheap acid of a merely logical intelligence’ (Heidegger, 1987: 26). The little girl explains to her questioner that she has two brothers and sisters living in Conway, two are away at sea and her other brother and sister are buried here in the churchyard, which makes seven in all. Her questioner summons all of his adult maturity to point out what he sees as the unarguable, objective reality, that ‘If two are in the church-yard laid, Then ye are only five’. The little girl’s reality is quite different however as her brother’s and sister’s graves are near her house and she regularly plays there, sees them daily and even goes to knit, sing or eat her supper beside their graves. They are integral and utterly real in her everyday public world and in her regular social practices. The questioner persists, growing more frustrated, ‘clinging to what is readily available and controllable even where ultimate matters are concerned’ (Heidegger, 1977a: 134). ‘But they are dead; those two are dead!’, but to no avail, for ‘The little Maid would have her will’ and will not be shaken from her world of seven brothers and sisters.

Is there anything that a parent would not do to protect, help or save their child? Probably not, for being a parent means that there is no balance sheet of pros and cons to be consulted. There is only the visceral, roiling love for this child that would make any ‘sacrifice’ almost instinctive. It is a telling paradox in children’s health care that something so elementally important as parental love has been abstracted from professional discourse in favour of an almost exclusively ‘technical-scientistic’ (Heidegger, 1998: 56) focus. How else can we understand the almost incomprehensible finding by (Gillis and Rennick, 2006: 165) that there is a ‘remarkable absence of discussion of the importance of parental love in the pediatric intensive care literature’.

In Jeanne LeVasseur’s poem, ‘Danny Boy’, (Available at: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2527150) his parents keep vigil beside his hospital bed, tempting, hoping, working at anything they can think of that will arouse Danny from his coma. His mother would ‘chain herself to an oven and feed it with splinters of her own bones’. His father would ‘swap places with the headlights of the car that crashed’, if only he would awaken. From an instrumental perspective, such parents may well be seen to be ‘just sitting there’, what Heidegger calls a ‘standing reserve or ‘bestand’ (Heidegger, 1977d: 17) of potential help and assistance, waiting to become ordered or categorised, perhaps by medical and nursing staff. In the early history of parents’ fight to become involved in their child’s care or even to be allowed access to their child in hospital, such dismissiveness was commonplace. In Darbyshire’s study of live-in parents, he described such ‘keeping vigil’ as ‘a bearing witness that often involved the most intense emotions’ (Darbyshire, 1994: 97). This was a way of ‘dwelling attentively and receptively with their child’ (Darbyshire, 1994: 99) that drew on Benner’s Heideggerian understanding of ‘presencing oneself’ (Benner and Wrubel, 1989: 13). Such human presence in nursing, education and health care and its importance are currently threatened by numerous contemporary changes that demand exploration but that cannot be addressed in this article.

Lastly, in ‘The Two Parents’ by Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid, (Available at: https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/the-two-parents-by-hugh-macdiarmid-26218892.html) we see a distillation of presence, being a parent, the terror of a child’s illness and a glimpse into Heidegger’s extremely complex exploration of ‘the nothing’ (Heidegger, 1977c). For Heidegger, ‘the nothing’ is not merely the absence of a something; it is intimately tied to our very Being and sits beyond even extreme fear or anxiety. Heidegger says that ‘The nothing is the complete negation of the totality of beings’ (Heidegger, 1977c: 100). This sounds linguistically or scientifically unfathomable, which perhaps explains Heidegger’s view that ‘Science wants to know nothing of the nothing’ (Heidegger, 1977c: 98). Perhaps however, it can be grasped poetically. At first blush, the poem seems almost sexist, with the two parents reacting quite differently to their son’s illness. The father needed ‘something to do’ and to reconnect with his wider interests, while the mother ‘sank without another care to that dread level of nothing but life itself’. Closer reading suggests almost an envy on the father’s part that he is unable to be with their child in the same way. The mother is able to ‘sink’, but this is not an aimless downward floating but rather a focused and uninterruptible descent, ‘down’ to the existential side of her child, the side that is not simply geographically beside his bed. She does this ‘without another care’, with a laser-focused vigil that is able to set aside all and any other considerations in order that she can ‘be with’ her son, ‘day and night, till he was better, there’. This ‘dread level of nothing but life itself’ is a description that Heidegger himself would surely recognise. He wrote that ‘The nothing rises to meet us’ (Heidegger, 1977c: 104). This ‘dread’ is truly nothing. The world is stripped of all feelings, all meaning, all possibilities, all sense of self, and here, we see what is commonly depicted as ‘every parent’s worst nightmare’, the potential loss of their child. As Derrick notes ‘We realize that everything is slipping away, ourselves included’ and ‘we come face-to-face with that Nothing’ (Derrick, 1986: 34–35).

Implications for child health, nursing, midwifery and research

Works of art like great poems do not simply offer a representation or image of being a parent and ‘what this is like’. They also uncover and highlight the shared worlds and understandings that are often hidden and reveal something of parenthood’s unarticulated cultural practices because ‘for everyday practices to give meaning to our lives and to unite us in a community, they must be focused and held up to the practitioners’ (Dreyfus, 1993: 297). Heidegger argued of poetry’s ability to articulate a people’s or culture’s reality that, ‘What before had been humdrum and self-evident suddenly stands forth as strange and challenging as a result of this reconfiguration of the world’ (Guignon, 2006: 23).

So it is with the phenomenon of becoming a parent and the lifetime panoply of parenting practices. We do not claim that existing theories and frameworks regarding parenting are ‘wrong’ or irrelevant. In keeping with Heidegger’s approach, we caution against their proposed universality and potential prescriptiveness – their enframing – applying to both parents and child health professionals. We propose an approach to understanding parenthood that is more ontological and foundational, that does not mistake the openness to Dasein for inconclusiveness or the refusal to fit and framework for irrelevance. We concur with Polt that ‘The simple opposition between activity and passivity is too crude’ (Polt, 1999: 173). While eschewing demands that nurses and researchers develop ever more detailed skills and strategies, our dwelling thinking around parenthood is far from ‘inactive’. It requires listening, thinking, attuning and receiving what parents have to tell and show us and in this way, stay true to Heidegger’s phenomenology, his way of ‘letting something shared that can never be totally articulated and for which there can be no indubitable evidence show itself’ (Dreyfus, 1991: 30).

Conclusion

Heidegger’s work can seem daunting and often obtuse, but we show in this article how it can also challenge accepted wisdom regarding parenthood and parenting and reveal more profound ontological meanings than a focus on skills and assessments alone can offer. Heideggerian approaches to thinking and understanding could benefit both child health professionals and family researchers, while turning to poetry provides insights into parental experiences that may otherwise remain unappreciated. Many avenues opened here merit further exploration, such as the poetics of the everyday oscillations that parents experience between joy and happiness and anger and frustration. It would also be valuable to investigate how Heidegger’s thought could help us understand parental love or the nature of parents and children of various ages ‘being with’ each other.

Authors’ Contributions

Both authors made substantial contributions to all of the following: (1) the conception and design of the paper, (2) drafting and critically revising the paper’s intellectual content and (3) final approval of the version as submitted.