Mots-clés: sociology, adolescence, family practice, TV serie, family trajectory, family reconfiguration, longitudinal analysis

Research Framework: In Switzerland following a comprehensive reform of Adoption Law, in force since January 2018, it is possible for a child to have two legal parents of the same sex through the adoption of the partner’s child. While adoption is an important opening for the recognition of the doble filiation of existing parentalities, it is proving to be a very trying process and not devoid of considerable problems.

Objectives: This article looks at the family trajectories shaped by these procedures. It seeks to measure the impact of this major legal change on these families. Based on accounts of the experiences of lesbian mothers who have started adoption procedures for their children, this article sets out to analyse what these procedures do to these parents, to the couple and to the family.

Methodology: The sample consisted of 15 interviews with couples who had started adoption procedures for their children in the cantons of Geneva and Vaud; 5 individual interviews with mothers who had started the first adoption procedures; and a focus group with mothers involved in a same-sex parenting association. The interviews were analysed using an inductive thematic approach.

Results: The results show that adoption procedures, although aimed at recognising these families and making them legitimately ordinary, tend to take them out of their normality and highlight their minority status.

Conclusions: Our analyses show that the acquisition of legal rights does not guarantee that same-sex couples will be protected from stigmatisation and discrimination. On the contrary, these couples often face discrimination and institutional violence.

Mots-clés: lesbian family, intra-family adoption, recognition, discrimination, Switzerland

Research Framework: Starting in the 1970s, contraception gave women and couples greater control over when and how to become a family. Around it, a broader transformation of the couple, the family and human lives and existences took place, imposing new constraints, especially temporal ones, on contemporary begetting. At the center of this new normative model, the conjugal project and parenthood are no longer immediately self-evident, and we describe how they emerge and are realized, or not.

Objective: To shed light on these new temporal constraints, the article will look at late parenthood, i.e. having a child at an “advanced” age (over 40 for women). As “late parenthood”, it is a good indicator of the new constraints and demands that are weighing on contemporary childbearing. As a “later-in-life” parenthood and under pressure of the “biological clock”, it exacerbates and makes visible logics that are usually diluted in everyday life. In this way, late parenthood is a good indicator of contemporary forms of begetting.

Methodology: The original survey was based on statistical analysis and 49 biographical interviews with parents from different generations. This article takes up the main results of the survey and discusses them in the light of recent literature and through the prism of life courses’ sociology.

Results: This article highlights the plasticity of the forms of transaction that enable people to enter into a project of begetting and becoming parents. Begetting cannot be reduced to a ballistic schema. We need to think of it as a performative process: hazards, events and interpretations can induce bifurcations or reformulations, making it possible to becoming parents. It underlines the importance of age, which, far from being forgotten, is a benchmark calculated and mobilized by women, men and couples, to situate themselves and act in the course of their lives and existences.

Conclusion: The article highlights the need to think about contemporary begetting in terms of constraints but also of agency and, more broadly, in terms of models of achievement.

Contribution: The proposed analysis of the normative model of begetting, its temporal framing and the transactions between spouses is a contribution to a sociology of human lives and existences.

Mots-clés: begetting, couple, journey, parenthood

Research Framework: In France, child protection tends to promote the involvement of fathers and mothers, and more recently that of relatives, in the lives of young people in care.

Objectives: Our objective is to understand the temporalities of relative’s involvement in the placement process, and the impact of their involvement on the situation of young people when they come of age.

Methodology: Young people aged 17 to 20 at the start of this research were interviewed in five French departments of Ile-de-France and Hauts-de-France. Following an initial questionnaire made to 1,622 young people aged 17-20 year-olds in child protection, a second questionnaire was also given to 501 young people aged 18-19 year-olds. This longitudinal research (ELAP) was followed by two semi-structured interviews with around a hundred young people. In this article, we draw on the comments made in the interviews with those who declared that they had been accommodated by an adult who had played a parental role for them during the initial wave of questionnaires.

Results: The periods of parental involvement are either prior to the care, or alternating with it, or overlapping with the placement. Each temporality corresponds to a distinct form of care (substitution for relatives, alternation with the family or delegation to a third party) and is accompanied by the continuation or absence of contact with the father and mother.

Conclusions: In cases where family ties are maintained, mainly in the last two forms (alternation or delegation), the young person is more inclined to leave the child protection system without mobilizing care arrangements between the ages of 18 and 21, in contrast to cases where child protection is their only option.

Contribution: This article provides an analysis of the temporalities and forms of mobilizing parental figures in the extended family, described by young people leaving child protection. It may be useful in considering the developments brought about by the 2022 reform

Mots-clés: life course, extended family, longitudinal study, young adults’ words, child protection, coming of age