Parenting in the Polycrisis : How sustainability-engaged parents navigate everyday practices, tensions, and trade-offs in family life

Sammanfattning

This research explores how sustainability-engaged parents navigate everyday practices, tensions, and trade-offs in family life amid the compounding pressures of an intensifying polycrisis, addressing a gap in the sustainability leadership literature, in which the household as a site of sustainability practice has remained largely unrecognized. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with thirteen parents who are students or alumni of the Master's Program in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability at Blekinge Institute of Technology, the study adopts a qualitative, interpretive design and analyzes data through thematic analysis. Findings indicate that these parents enact a form of informal sustainability leadership within the household by deliberately transmitting values, modeling relationships, and intentionally developing their children's sustainability-related capacities. Participants consistently described an interlocking system of structural pressures, including financial strain, care-work overload, inadequate infrastructure, and the erosion of community, all compounded by the psychological weight of deep sustainability awareness. Many participants also reported withdrawing from wider collective sustainability action after transitioning to parenthood, revealing a systemic loss of capacity that the field has not yet adequately addressed. Limitations include a homogeneous sample drawn from a single program and the absence of cross-cultural comparison. Future research should pursue longitudinal and cross-national comparative designs to extend these findings.