Learning to 'parenting'. Peer-to-peer educational actions in Italian adoptive families associations

We hardly associate parenthood to a state that must be learned or taught according to classical educative models, rather we think that it is an embedded condition arising ‘naturally’ when we become parents. Nowadays, however, with the rise of the so-called 'psi' sciences, the certainty and solidity of a noun - parenthood – has been progressively replaced by the proceedings of a verb - parenting. The idea of parenting as a process of learning (emotional, cognitive and behavioral) finds its most concrete expression in the construction of the adoptive parenthood. Based on a two years’ ethnographic research, my paper aims at highlighting the training action carried out by Adoptive Associations towards the infertile couples who have decided to adopt. In a society that is still deeply family-based, such as the Italian one, where kinship ties are grounded in the hegemonic action of the blood paradigm, a widespread cultural belief claims that a failed bio-reproduction deprives the couples of that natural embedded knowledge necessary to be good parents. So, if the rule allows to legitimize the shift from a legal status (the couple) to another (the family), the associations of adoptive families are authorized by the State to carry out an intensive educative action so that the prospective parents can better learn all the qualities, behaviors, responsibilities and emotions typical of good adoptive parents, according to the ‘ natural’ model of the biological parenting.