Today’s parents are subject to strict rules about how to raise their children. Some rules focus on parents’ emotions: Parents are bound by emotional display rules, according to which “ideal parents” should be “emotionally perfect” – showing positive emotions and refraining from negative ones while interacting with their children. This chapter introduces Lin and colleagues’ pioneering efforts in borrowing the emotional labor framework to shed light on the consequences for parents of their subjection to these emotional display rules. The emotional labor framework, initially proposed by sociologists, holds that employees must consciously align their feelings with emotional display rules when interacting with customers. This framework provides insight into the mechanisms underlying the relation between emotional labor performed by employees and their well-being. This chapter presents the application of the emotional labor framework to the parenting context and outlines future research directions that this approach opens. We believe that extending the emotional labor framework to the context of parenting opens a promising research avenue in the parenting field.

Building on Chapter 3, in Chapter 5, we explore the emotion work that women undertook in becoming parents. Using the work of Hochschild (1979,1983/2003), we focus on how new parenthood creates feeling rules that women are expected to adhere to, and are also compelled to encourage men to engage with. To examine feeling rules associated with new parenthood for women, we first return to the topic of breastfeeding and explore how women are expected to persist with breastfeeding and expressing milk, and what it means when it comes as a significant challenge physically and emotionally. We then turn to consider the emotion work that women engage in to encourage their male partners to contribute to caring for a newborn child. Finally, we look at the moral work associated with caring for a new child, and how for some women the expectation that this would be a joyous time was in stark contrast with the monotony of new parenthood.

Chapter 2 outlines our approach to the study in detail. It provides an overview of the study participants, how we sought participants, and some of the challenges we faced in finding participants. The chapter also explores what it means to undertake qualitative longitudinal research with a relational focus. We explore time and emotional burdens on participants, the emotion work of interviewing people trying to conceive a first child, the gendered dimensions of the project, and our rationale for interviewing women and men separately. The chapter also explores how we analysed our data, focusing on sharing the detailed narratives of the participants across time and between and within couples and their parents.