Parents’ perceptions of and engagement with their daughters’ martial arts and combat sports: a Foucauldian discourse analysis

Abstract

This thesis investigated parents’ and coaches’ perspectives of parenting girls in martial arts and combat sports (MACS). It explored discourses of parenting in and around MACS clubs and examined how participants engaged with these discourses to reflect on behaviours and construct their subjectivities. Sport parenting had been explored in previous research, but limited attention had been given to gender dynamics and perspectives of risk and violence. There had also been limited comparison of coach and parent accounts. Foucauldian theory underpinned the thesis providing an interpretation of how knowledge and power informed parenting philosophies and practices. Specifically, the concept of discourse was used to interpret data from interviews with 17 coaches and 28 parents of girls aged 8-18 who participated in MACS in the UK. Discourse analysis was used to explore the different ways in which sport parenting was performed and the philosophies that contributed to it. Foucauldian concepts of technologies and techniques of power, governmentality, technologies of the self and ‘limit’ experience were used to investigate parenting discourses. The concepts outlined contributed to original interpretations of sport parenting practice. Coaches and parents had distinctive views about what parenting was or ought to be. These views were derived from multiple discourses. Dominant discourses of ‘good’ MACS parenting informed parenting philosophies and practices. Participants described how they sought to regulate girls’ behaviour to develop them in the ‘right way’. Children were prioritised and given opportunities to be physically active and embrace contact play. Parents utilised different techniques of power to socialise girls into practices through which they could construct their own subjectivities in the sports. They discussed how they had to encourage children and manage their own engagement with the sport space. Gender discourses informed participants’ perspectives of spaces, behaviours, and subjectivities. Accounts emphasised sameness, but participants' constructions of gender difference often undermined this. Participants felt this had implications for girls’ and women’s inclusion, retention, treatment, and identity expression. According to participants this meant girls and mothers often had different or ‘harder’ experiences. Parents drew on discourses about risk and violence differently based on their proximity to the ‘sportsnet’. They had to reframe ‘outsider’ discourses. However, ‘insider’ discourses could be challenged when watching girls fight as parents were pushed to the limits of their own emotional boundaries. This thesis highlights that sport parenting is a phenomenon engaged in through complex practices that are informed by multifaceted contextual discourses.