# The mutuality account of parenthood: a subjective approach to parent-child relationships

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a new way to understand parenthood based on mutual trust and shared life stories, not just biological or legal ties.

## Contribution

The paper proposes a novel 'mutuality account' of parenthood based on ontological security and shared narratives.

## Key findings

- Parent-child relationships can change over time and are not fixed at birth.
- Mutual ontological security and shared frameworks of reality define parenthood.
- Objective ties like biology or causality are not essential for parenthood.

## Abstract

Stimulated by development of reproductive technologies, many current bioethical accounts of parenthood focus on defining parenthood at or around birth. They tend to exclude from their scope some parent-child relationships that develop later in a child’s life. In reality, a parent-child relationship can emerge or dissolve over time: the parents of person A as an adolescent or adult may be different to her parents when she is a young child. To address this aspect of parenthood, we propose a new ‘mutuality account’ of parenthood, grounded in the concept of ontological security. We argue that in most cases a parent-child relationship exists if there is mutual ontological security between the parent and child. We suggest that this mutual ontological security is constituted and sustained by shared frameworks of reality and cohesive personal narratives. Our intention is to broaden the conceptual understanding of parenthood, to include parent-child relationships that do not fall neatly into current bioethical accounts, and to argue against the notion that objective physiological, causal, or social ties are necessary to ‘make’ a parent.