In oral history we ask people to tell us about the past. By doing so, we get firsthand knowledge of their lives, particular events and their experiences. This gives us access to information that we not often find in documents (Janesick, 2023). Especially in education, oral history can provide an insight in ‘ordinary’ practices that were too mundane to be recorded in any other way, for instance day-to-day parenting practices. In the case of ‘the inner workings’ of the family, such as child rearing, oral history can often prove to be the only source of information; since the highly private nature of what happens inside the family home – in perhaps the most emotionally charged relationship conceivable – makes the collection of empirical data on parenting practices particularly difficult (Cuyvers & Van Praag, 1997).

However, oral history has been critiqued as being unreliable as a source, because it is based on human memory, which is susceptible to change due to mental deterioration, emotions such as nostalgia, personal selection by and bias from both the researcher(s) and the respondent, and the theoretical framework, design and context of the study in which the memories are collected and/or used. In addition, individual memories can be influenced by public narratives (Maynes et al., 2008; Peniston-Bird, 2009; Somers & Gibson, 1994). According to the Australian historian Patrick O’Farrell in 1979 oral history was moving into: “the world of image, selective memory, later overlays and utter subjectivity. […] And where will it lead us? Not into history, but into myth” (cited in Thomson, 2007, pp. 53-54).

Indeed, personal memories of past events or experiences that are collected for research purposes can be influenced by a large number of factors. However, when memory itself is seen as the object of study, oral history’s supposed weaknesses – such as its inherent subjectivity – become resources as opposed to problems (Portelli, 1979). The analysis of personal narratives on past events or experiences can produce valuable insights on the way: “…people make sense of their past, how they connect individual experience and its social context, how the past becomes part of the present, and how people use it to interpret their lives and the world around them” (Frisch, 1990, p.188).

In this paper, we will present findings resulting from the analysis of narratives from three successive Dutch generations (grandparents, parents and youngsters) on how they experienced the way they were brought up by their parents, focusing on perceived educational norms in particular. These narratives give insight in how these respondents experienced the way their parents gave them direction, the rules they imposed and how they enforced them, but they also describe the love, warmth and affection the respondents experienced from their parents. The narratives recount the memories of the respondents on the way they experienced their upbringing. We propose that in these memories both previous and current educational norms, such as that of ‘authoritative parenting’ (Maccoby & Martin, 1983), influenced the way respondents told their stories and evaluated their upbringing. However, the challenge remains: Can we untangle the past and the present in oral history narratives with respect to educational norms?   

Between 2012 and 2016, 321 youth narratives were collected containing information about the way respondents were raised by their parents. These narratives were collected in a study concerned with the individualization of youth as a social phenomenon by students studying Pedagogical Sciences at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The students involved in this study interviewed a young person around 18 years old, one of their parents and one of their grandparents, which led to the formation of three generations of respondents based on their role (‘the grandparents’: born between 1920 and 1950, ‘the parents’: born between 1950 and 1975, and the ‘the young’: born between 1990 and 2000). Because the students recruited the respondents from their own social network the majority of these respondents came from, and grew up in, the three most Northern provinces of the Netherlands. In addition, most of the respondents in the three generations were female and respondents mainly grew up in religious (mostly Protestant) households. Differences across generations were in line with secularization and upwards social mobility. For this paper, we analyzed the way these three generations discussed their parents’ parenting behavior using grounded theory techniques, comparing experiences in and between generations (Charmaz, 2014; Corbin & Strauss, 2015). The analysis provided information about the way these respondents made sense of their past upbringing experiences, and how the present influenced their recollection and evaluation.

The oral history analysis of parenting experiences from these three generations indicated that the present day educational discourse, including the norm of authoritative parenting, likely influenced the way respondents recounted and evaluated their upbringing. The oldest generation overall described a fairly strict upbringing, with fixed rules, few opportunities for negotiation, and self-evident obedience, sometimes even referring to their upbringing as authoritarian. However, they were often quick to add descriptions of the love and care they received from their parents, their trust in their parents, contextual explanations of their parents’ behavior, and by referring to the educational norm at the time. Most of them viewed the authoritative norm to be a present day norm, although the norm as such can be found in parenting advice guides from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards (Bakker, 2009; Wubs, 2004). Their stories mostly seem to endorse a public narrative of a change in parenting across generations, from authoritarian to authoritative. Contrary to the mainly positive evaluation of the oldest generation, the middle generation was more often critical about their upbringing, suggesting that their parents violated norms that should have been honored; norms in line with authoritative parenting. The youngest generation in turn, mostly described an upbringing fitting the authoritative educational norm at the time of the interview; an upbringing in which they felt supported and loved, but also experienced a large degree of personal freedom and autonomy. These experiences grounded an overall positive evaluation of their upbringing. These findings show the interrelatedness between present and past, since present day norms are used to evaluate parenting practices of the past. However, by taking the narratives as the object of study and by paying attention to how memories are framed at the time of recollection, the researcher can untangle past and present to some extent.

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