Everyday life and parenting in poverty in Finland

Poverty and economic hardship in families with children is persistent across the globe, including the Western world. Poverty places significant pressure on parenting and the management of family life. Using the dataset Everyday Experiences of Poverty: Self-administered Writings 2019 (Turunen & Isola, 2019) we analyse poverty as lived experience. In particular, the study is interested in how poverty contextualises everyday life and how parents describe parenting in the context of poverty. Using content analysis, we found that poverty affects everyday life in various ways, including how activities take place and how emotions relate to it. Parents search for ‘normality’, and parenting can be described as a careful act characterised by struggling and planning that is challenged by adapting to unexpected difficulties.