This narrative study aims to describe how Finnish parents construct their agency during school mornings when their children face emotion-related school attendance challenges (ER-SAC).

For many families, school mornings are already a site of schedules, negotiation and conflict, and ER-SAC often make them even more demanding. Attending school regularly and finishing upper secondary education provide a strong basis for a good life (Kearney, 2021) whereas school absenteeism has been linked to a range of factors that undermine well-being (Gubbels et al., 2019). SAC often leaves parents unsure as to how best support their child or which resources are the available for them to do so (Chockalingam et al., 2023; Havik et al., 2014; Smout et al., 2023). Still, the parents’ perspective is scarcely visible in research on school attendance challenges (Hamadi et al., 2024; Havik et al., 2014). To strengthen parents’ confidence to act as active agents when facing their child’s ER-SAC, and to support their sense of parental agency, we need to understand how parents make sense of their children's ER-SAC and construct their agency. In this research we focus on how this is told in morning context by asking: How do parents construct their parental agency when narrating morning transitions with children facing emotion-related school attendance challenges?

Within this research, parental agency is conceptualized as narrative agency. Narrative parental agency can be seen as the ability to use, (re)interpret, and engage with narratives that are culturally available (e.g. master narratives of good parent), as well as to be able to analyse and challenge them (Meretoja, 2023). Thus, when constructing their narrative agency, parents give shape to their past experiences and their own position in them, integrate them into their life stories as well as contextualize past habits and imagine alternative possibilities (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Ochs & Capps, 1996; Riessman, 2008). 

The research data consisted of narrative interviews with 19 Finnish parents. The parents told mornings of 22 children with ER-SAC during interviews. In this research, the term child is used to refer to the relationship between a parent and their child, not to an age category. Children were betweeen 8 and 18 years old.

The interview data was analysed through Bamberg’s (1997) narrative positioning theory and meanings given to mornings by focusing on small stories in which parents narrated their children’s ER-SAC mornings. The findings showed that the parents constructed the following four meanings to their parental agency in the morning narratives: 1) Reactive Parental Agency, 2) Compelled Parental Agency, 3) Eroding Parental Agency and 4) Withdrawing Parental Agency.  In the research article, these parental agency interpretations are presented through word images synthesized from quotes (Clandinin et al., 2006; Ely et al., 1997).

Reactive parental agency was constructed through narration of frantic repeated attempts to support children’s school attendance. Compelled parental agency contained a lot of first-person narrative and modal verbs to highlight the parents’ narrated obligation to facilitate the school attendance. Eroding parental agency was a combination of narratives of unpredictable mornings and parents hoping for their children’s school attendance. Withdrawing parental agency brought out poignantly ER-SAC’s threat to parents’ mental health (see McGahan et al., 2025) with narrations that framed the need for stepping aside for the sake of parents’ or family’s well-being. 

The parents’ narratives revealed that parenting was compared both to the personal ideal of good parenting and to social and cultural expectations of what constitutes good parenting. On ER-SAC mornings parental agency did not always align with parents own ideals of parenting. These ideals seemed to be influenced also by social and cultural normative discourses.

The research data was comprised of interviews with nineteen parents (17 mothers, 2 fathers) conducted 2024 in Finland. Participating parents had children who faced or had faced significant challenges with school attendance, either refusing to attend school entirely or struggling with regular attendance. The interviews, conducted by the first author, were narrative in nature, meaning the researcher sought to collect stories by asking open-ended questions and allowing space for participants to share their narratives freely. Such narrative interviews are understood to both convey lived experiences and reveal the ways in which participants organize and make sense of events (Ochs & Capps, 1996). To capture parents’ agency construction during ER-SAC mornings, we searched for parents’ small descriptive stories of their children’s waking up (or attempting it) to going to school (or attempting it) inside parents’ narrations. We are interested in how parents used small stories to construct a sense of who they are and how they want to be understood and how this formed their agency (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008). The participants were recruited through parent peer support groups focused on parents with children facing SAC. Participation in a peer support group meant for parents with children facing SAC was considered a prerequisite for inclusion in the study. This ensured that participants would not be left without support after the interview, should any painful emotions arise during the discussion. These groups are not common in Finland, and they are organized, coordinated and structured in various ways. For the analysis, the first author identified small stories inside the narrations, including three key aspects: morning, ER-SAC and parenting. After identifying small stories and categorizing them by using narrative positioning analysis (Bamberg 1997), we summarized each of these four parental agency narratives into core narratives. Further on, to present participants’ voices and the mornings in the vivid way possible, we synthesized parents quotes into word images, as research poems (Clandinin et al., 2006; Ely et al., 1997). These vivid poems capsulate the essence of an event and has its advantage in representing speaker’s voices rather than the mere practice of quoting selected excerpts.

This research focused on parental agency on school mornings when children have emotion-related school attendance challenges (ER-SAC). The aim was to describe the different dimensions and manifestations of parental agency during these mornings. The parents’ narratives reflected their sense of parental agency in which their own parenting was compared both to their personal ideal of good parenting and to social and cultural expectations of what constitutes good parenting. It can be stated that the parental agency described by the parents on ER-SAC mornings did not always align with their own ideals of parenting. These ideals seemed to be influenced also by social and cultural normative discourses. Parents described both their efforts to help their children and their own sense of helplessness. The four types of parental agency that emerged in this study illustrate how diverse ER-SAC mornings are within different families. When positioning themselves, parents had to either react for the needs of their child, or they felt compelled to fulfil their responsibility to maintain school attendance, or they were powerless to act, or they had to consider their own mental health as well as the overall situation and well-being of the entire family and therefore step aside. It is important to understand the parental agency on ER-SAC mornings to be able to plan targeted support for the child and family when planning support on school attendance.

Bamberg, M. (1997). Positioning between structure and performance. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7(1–4), 335–342. https://doi.org/10.1075/jnlh.7.42pos Bamberg, M., & Georgakopoulou, A. (2008). Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis. Text & Talk, 28(3). https://doi.org/10.1515/text.2008.018 Chockalingam, M., Skinner, K., Melvin, G., & Yap, M. B. H. (2023). Modifiable parent factors associated with child and adolescent school refusal: A systematic review. Child Psychiatry & Human Development, 54(5), 1459–1475. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-022-01358-z Clandinin, D. J., Huber, J., Huber, M., Murphy, M. S., Murray Orr, A., Pearce, M., & Steeves, P. (2006). Composing diverse identities: Narrative inquiries into the interwoven lives of children and teachers. Routledge. Ely, M., Vinz, R., Anzul, M., & Downing, M. (1997). On Writing Qualitative Research: Living by Words. Routledge. Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency ? The American Journal of Sociology, 103(4), 962. https://doi.org/10.1086/231294 Gubbels, J., Van Der Put, C. E., & Assink, M. (2019). Risk factors for school absenteeism and dropout: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 48(9), 1637–1667. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-019-01072-5 Hamadi, S. E., Furenes, M. I., & Havik, T. (2024). A systematic scoping review on research focusing on professionals’ attitudes toward school attendance problems. Education Sciences, 14(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14010066 Havik, T., Bru, E., & Ertesvåg, S. K. (2014). Parental perspectives of the role of school factors in school refusal. Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties, 19(2), 131–153. https://doi.org/10.1080/13632752.2013.816199 Kearney, C. A. (2021). Integrating Systemic and Analytic Approaches to School Attendance Problems: Synergistic Frameworks for Research and Policy Directions. Child & Youth Care Forum, 50, 1–42. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-020-09591-0 McGahan, J., Fraser, H., Campbell, A., Wright, N., Hearn, J., Braithwaite, E. C., Bowes, L., & Pearson, R. M. (2025). Exploring the bidirectional relationship between school attendance problems and maternal mental health. In Review. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-7129553/v1 Meretoja, H. (2023). Implicit narratives and narrative agency: Evaluating pandemic storytelling. Narrative Inquiry, 33(2), 288–316. https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.21076.mer Ochs, E., & Capps, L. (1996). Narrating the self. Annu. Rev. Anthropol., 1996(25), 19–43. Riessman, C. K. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Sage Publications. Smout, A., Chandrasekara, D. T., Wu, L., Melvin, G., Seguin, J. P., Olivier, P., Cardamone-Breen, M. C., Bartindale, T., Mcnaney, R., & Yap, M. B. H. (2023). Enabling digital parenting interventions to promote empathic partnerships among parents, educators, and adolescents targeting school refusal. Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581312