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FACTORS THAT SUPPORT INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSFORMATIVE LEARNING AMONG PARENTS
Authors: Laurenţiu ŞOITU, Liliana - Camelia PAVEL

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The major changes regarding the roles of family in the current society determine the more and more stringent need of parents to be educated or to self-educate in order to exercise their parental role. The article starts from the hypothesis that transformative learning – a phrase coined by Mezirow – can explain to a great extent the parent’s choices in parenting actions, through the critical reflection process, which involves discovering and overcoming the limits of the individual’s thought and action. The hypothesis will be assessed through a study, which consists in the interviewing of 15 families, each comprising three generations of parents (G1 – grandparents, G2 – parents, G3 – children who have a child, in their turn), with a total of 45 participants. The purpose was a better understanding of transformative learning by pointing out the factors supporting parents to give up on the behaviours considered dysfunctional in their relationship with the child. The instrument on which the research was based was a narrative interview, through which parents narrated differences and similarities in their parenting style, strategies that helped them overcome the obstacles in order to fulfil successfully their parental role. In addition, they assessed the impact of experimenting family violence in their becoming as parents. Outcomes show several factors that determined the parents to acquire a transformative thinking: social support (dialogue with the couple partner, dialogue with other persons – relatives, family and specialists), critical reflection on their personal experience, context, education level and parent’s motivation.