Unknotting the ‘paradox of empowerment’ in parent education: A multiple-case study

Abstract Although parent empowerment has been widely recognized to address intensity and uncertainty in parenthood in late modernity, the challenge of empowering parents while responding to their educational needs and the power imbalance between parent trainers and parents poses a ‘paradox of empowerment’. Based on a parent empowerment project conducted in Hong Kong, this study adopted a multiple-case design to explore the possibility of navigating the empowerment paradox via a transformative learning approach. In this multiple-case qualitative study, we adopted participant observation and interviews to collect data from seven parent education practitioners and twenty-four parents recruited from four social service organizations. The qualitative findings indicated that the integration of transformative learning and empowering approaches contributed to unknotting the ‘paradox of empowerment’ by encouraging both practitioners and parents to frame themselves as reflexive co-learners who could flexibly combine professional and experiential parenting knowledge. This further enabled the co-existence of parent training and parent empowerment elements which helped to meet parents’ pedagogical expectations while empowering them to negotiate with the mainstream parenting ideologies through self-understanding, contextual understanding of parenting knowledge, and reflexive as well as collaborative learning. The findings also yielded implications for future research and practice in parenting and family service fields.