A phenomenological approach to understanding the experience of parenting adolescent children

• Main Author: Wagner, Dale A.
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/5563

A phenomenological methodology was utilized to investigate the lived parental experience of raising adolescent children. Five female and five male coresearchers participated in two taped interviews during which they were invited to describe their experiences with this phenomena. The transcripts were analyzed concurrently with the process of data collection with the objective of discovering the immanent meaning of the experiences to the parents who lived them. The study yielded seven dominant themes and nineteen subthemes which were deemed to represent the essential features of the experience of being a parent of an adolescent child. The seven dominant themes identified were: the experience of the loss of being needed or wanted; the experience of bewilderment; the search for confirmation of reality; the experience of the transition of power; the experience of disappointment and frustration; the experience of anxiety; and the experience of mutuality. Implications for counselling and further research were included in the discussion of the results. === Education, Faculty of === Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of === Graduate