This presentation is derived from a thesis chapter, that focuses on parenting among parents with intellectual disabilities. The study involved interviews with twenty-three parents, examining on how parenting is done in interaction with the child, with significant ‘others’ and the surroundings. 

The presentation is focusing on how order and routines in the everyday life are important to the parents, to be able to practice the good and caring parenthood they strive for. Repeated time-specific routines and little geographical mobility create predictability, independence and reduce feelings of stress and anxiety, and promote the experience that life is safe. In the short term, this promotes experiences of autonomy. The parents also describe very stable arrangements for how partners in a relationship distribute tasks and chores between them. This means that the parents have different roles and responsibilities regarding the children, which also contributes to clarifying expectations and creating order and stability. This is important to be able to display a functioning parenthood that is not questioned. 

However, over the longer term, these gender roles seem to lay the foundation for a rigidity regarding mothers’ and fathers’ care that limits their autonomy. Women, carrying the primary practical responsibility for the child, find themselves constrained in other aspects of adulthood, with fewer opportunities for own income. This contributes to financial scarcity in the family and increases women’s dependence. Through these routines, created in everyday life, there is a systematic subordination of mothers to positions where they have less power.