Childhood Care Stories

Childhood experiences, especially the ones based on our intimate care relations, have been held responsible for the development of personality traits and lifelong relational dynamics. Within sociology and developmental psychology our primary socialisation experiences derived from our family life are understood as especially significant, and psychoanalysis gives great weight to the complex outcomes of interpersonal parental-child dynamics. Attachment theory has been particularly influential in linking early loving bonds to lifelong abilities to form loving relationships (Bowlby 1969). Attachment and separation issues are explicitly linked to gendered personality development within feminist object relations theories in how early childcare dynamics shape lifelong caring identities (Chodorow 1978). Within sociology, gender role theory has framed our understanding of how parental roles model behaviour for boys and men to follow (Pleck 1976). Simplistic accounts of object relation or role influences on behaviour and identity are no longer viewed at tenable (Chodorow 1994; Carrigan, Connell, and Lee 1987), primary childhood socialisation experiences are nonetheless significant in how we construct a narrative of self, including a caring self, throughout our lives (Giddens 1992). This chapter considers how the men narrate their intimate lives as children, how these stories frame their present understandings of care, and it speculates as to how these understandings have shaped their caring practices and equality in their lives.