Hope As a Social Practice: Insights from Naturally Living Parenting and Children's Oral Health
We position our research at the intersection of the sociology of hope and the sociology of parenting, addressing two key points in Scribano's (2024) agenda for advancing the sociology of hope: rethinking multiple ontologies and a renewal of methodological approaches.
Our study examines how hope manifests in naturally living parenting approaches to children's oral health, studying the interplay between utopian ideals, growing individualisation, the mundanity of daily life and the romanticisation of the natural as a means of “doing” hope.
Using Social Practice Theory as a theory-method package, we consider hope as both an emotional practice and a connecting element between practices. Our data comes from a practice-based study of naturally living parenting and children's oral health, using qualitative methods to interpret how social practices constitute naturally living parenting.
We explore how hopefulness of a "natural" utopia is reproduced through practices like food choices, health interventions, and resistance to mainstream norms in online and offline spaces. Within these connections, hope is entangled with love, care, responsibility, and guilt, reproduced through daily parenting practice.
Our findings support Day's argument that hope emerges in the messiness of the mundane and extend it by revealing how hope is both a social practice and a connective tissue between practices. This research advances the sociology of hope by demonstrating its applicability to everyday parenting practices and contributes to the sociology of parenting by illuminating the role of hope in shaping alternative parenting approaches.