Fathers and mothers' discourses about friendship within families with teenagers

Abstract

Contemporary family transformations brought significant changes, especially in parents and their children relations. Friendship discourse seems be one of the strategies used by parents do deal with adolescence specificities. Presents here this teenagers parents discourse by three perspectives: relationships between parents and sons, parents with theirs children's friends and among siblings. From the quality research based in life histories done with nine middle-class teenagers parents, in marital situation or not, this paper debates how these relationships happens, what are their possibilities and limits. There is a contradiction between what is the ideal of a family's relationship and that of a friendship. If, in one hand, friendship can make a parent-son relationship easier, on the other hand, it can mask possible conflicts, be it between parents and sons or among siblings. In order to maintaining the family together and without conflicts, parents search for solutions which guarantee their intention.