Atmospheres of Parenthood

Anyone who has visited the home of parents with a newborn baby can recognize from the outset a specific kind of atmosphere that seems to fill the space. It is often an atmosphere of anticipation, exhilaration, chaos, and apprehension that is tangible and felt “in the air.” The parents themselves seem to be expressions of the atmosphere, weighed down by fatigue if not anxiety but simultaneously awestruck by their new arrival. Both parents and visitors can perceive and feel the atmosphere even if both parties interpret the phenomenon differently.

Such experiences raise the question of what kind of a phenomenon parenthood is. From a historical perspective, this question seems straightforward. Traditionally, parenthood has tended to refer to biological, legal, and moral categories. While these categories are vital to the concept of parenthood, parenthood is nevertheless irreducible to them. We can also think of parenthood as a “transformative experience,” one that cannot be fully grasped in advance, because becoming a parent constitutes a new kind of self. But parenthood involves more than the transformation of one’s sense of self; it also involves a transformation of the world. To claim that parenthood is situated in the world means recognizing that parenthood is as much a role one assumes, laden with duties and responsibilities, as it is an enduring affective atmosphere shaped by the presence (actual or anticipated) of the child.

The term “affective atmosphere” might have an enigmatic quality, but in varying degrees of intensity, an atmosphere is present in all we do and manifests in the particular things that we encounter. We enter rooms or encounter situations, and they strike us from the outset as joyful, unsettling, homely, unhomely, and so forth. We speak of the lifeless feel of an airport departure lounge or the electric atmosphere of a city at night. At its core, an affective atmosphere is a phenomenon that mediates between two concepts or otherwise unifies them. The atmospheric quality of a situation, event, or place belongs as much to the surrounding world as it does the subjects inhabiting that world. Likewise, the atmospheric quality of an affective state is as much felt “in the air” as it is grasped in the body.

How can this concept be applied to the lived experience of parenthood? Can we speak of an atmosphere of parenthood? For that matter, can we even say there is a set of emotions specific to parenthood? The complex and diverse emotional reality of parents would suggest not. Just as there is no singular parental style, so there is no singular feeling of parenthood that integrates all experiences. Nevertheless, for all the divergence within parental experience, there is a set of structural conditions that tend to characterise this experience, and which can be understood in atmospheric terms.

One inroad into the atmospheric nature of parenting is to consider how parenthood is often described in terms of being an “all-encompassing” experience. “All-encompassing” in this sense tends to refer to how parenthood involves a totalizing shift in our experience of the world, such that our attention, time, identity, and emotions are all constituted by being a parent. This sense of parenthood as an all-encompassing sphere of influence is predicated on a diffuse affective atmosphere, which underpins how the world is perceived and felt as a parent. Indeed, the very notion of an all-encompassing experience attests to an atmospheric scope.

Unlike emotions and moods, parenthood is not a short-term episodic state that one can transcend. Parenthood permeates all aspects of the world in a porous and non-containable way. While specific phenomenal features may well present themselves in a more focal way than others as being imbued with a “parental” quality (the child’s bedroom, the playground, the school run, etc.), those features are expressive articulations of an atmosphere that exceeds the objects themselves.

Consider here how a break from the parental milieu does not extinguish the parental atmosphere but instead reinstates it as a form of continued presence, as one parent tells me: “By day four, my mind couldn’t help but be with my kids, even though they were up in Wisconsin.” Atmospheres are porous in this respect; they leak into other aspects of life seemingly of their own accord. Even when we seek a break from parental life, the respite is framed by the presence of being a parent on an affective, existential, temporal and bodily level (e.g., we feel guilty when not present, drained at work after a stressful school run, limited in terms of our possibilities, etc.).

Does the porous nature of atmospheres mean that they are formless? In fact, the literature on first-person reports of parental experience tends to revolve around similar themes. One such theme is the heightened prominence of fear and danger in the world. In a questionnaire study I carried out, one parent puts it succinctly: “I’m much more acutely aware of danger and mess. What was once an affordance can now be a hindrance.” This is a telling observation. To be “more acutely aware of danger and mess” does not mean adopting a set of beliefs or propositional attitudes about the world. Nor is it reducible to projecting danger onto an otherwise neutral environment. Rather, danger is disclosed from the outset in accordance with how the parent is affectively attuned to the world. For this reason, the transition from affordance to hindrance is pre-reflective in orientation. The objects themselves remain unchanged; what shifts is the total relational structure within which those objects appear. Atmospheres capture precisely this condition: these transformations belong neither to the world taken on its own nor to the subject in isolation but to the affective space that emerges between them.

Atmospheres often carry a kind of authority, persisting in places and situations such that we brace for them or anticipate them in advance. This sense of atmospheric authority has important implications for parenthood. While the lived experience of parenting is shaped by the atmospheres one inhabits, parents are also themselves generative of atmospheres. In this sense, each parental arrangement (and parental style) carries a specific durable atmospheric tonality, which parents and children inhabit and share. The child returns from school and settles into a familiar atmosphere, which can either be neutral, uplifting, stifling, and so forth. Even when the family takes leave of their home and travels elsewhere, they find the atmosphere can accompany them, albeit in attenuated form. As scholars in pedagogy have argued, children are highly attuned to atmospheres, to shifts within them, and to the ways in which these shifts are grasped in a bodily way.

If atmospheres are partly autonomous and authoritative, one might be led to conclude that both parents and children are largely passive in relation to the atmospheres they find themselves in, an impression that may help explain the sense of being “overwhelmed” often reported by new parents. Yet this is clearly not the case, given that we tend to the atmospheres we find ourselves in, cultivating and augmenting them where necessary. We lower the lights to create a calmer atmosphere, arrange and tidy toys to reinforce an orderly atmosphere, and so forth. But what exactly are we doing in these practices? The atmosphere still inheres despite these changes, so what is at stake is not the matter of creating or destroying the atmosphere. Nor are we exterior to the atmosphere, plotting its design, as it were, from a third-person perspective. The concept that best captures this in-between activity is staging.

The term “staging” may evoke theatrical scene-setting or even the sense of atmospheres as contrived or at worst manipulative. Thus, we can think in pejorative terms of the atmosphere of a wedding, a museum, or an entire home being staged to achieve a specific affective outcome. But this view falls short. To stage an atmosphere does not mean to fabricate it out of nothing, nor to manipulate it in a fully top-down manner. Nor does a staged atmosphere necessitate a deficient or manipulative atmosphere (after all, in a theatre, the audience knows the atmosphere is staged, but this awareness does not impede their affective involvement).

What, then, does staging make possible for parents? Staging makes possible the conditions under which a shared affective atmosphere can be orchestrated while recognizing how the outcomes exceed these conditions. In turn, this view can play a powerful explanatory role in accounting for the affective lives of parent and child and of their shared environment.

First, staging accounts for the role parents play in shaping and tending their affective environment while also recognizing that they themselves are not the authors of atmospheres. Consider here how a parent can stage a calm evening, only for it to dissolve into chaos. Conversely, a parent can stage nothing in particular and find the atmosphere suddenly luminous. This view straddles a line between constructivism and determinism, that is, between the view that the shared affective space of parents and children is constructed from nothing and the view that the affective space is determined by forces outside of parents (class, trauma, culture, etc.). Staging recognizes the ambiguity of how parents can tend and arrange atmospheric conditions, while registering how the atmosphere itself has a partial autonomy from these conditions.

Furthermore, staging also discloses that atmospheres can be inherited. The child who grows into a staged atmosphere receives it as atmosphere, not as staging. They do not experience the parent’s effort; they experience the room, the evening, the felt tonality of the home. In effect, the staged dimension recedes into the atmosphere’s givenness. This is why parental atmospheres are formative in a way that ordinary atmospheres are not; namely, the child takes the staged world as the world and, only much later, if at all, recognizes that the world was tended. Everything that gets called “atmosphere of childhood” in retrospect (and sometimes in nostalgia) was, at the time, just atmosphere. For this reason, the question of atmospheres of parenthood concerns affectivity as much as it does pedagogy.