Balance and conversation: How competitive dancers and their parents navigate parental Involvement


Dawn Zinga, Brock University; Natalie Tacuri, McGill University

Many competitive dancers are required to spend significant amounts of time practicing in the studio, typically training and rehearsing between 8-20 hours each week. Participating in competitive dance yields substantial costs and personal demands on both dancers and their parents, including competition fees, studio tuition, and time commitments. As is the case for many competitive athletic pursuits, there are additional costs and time commitments associated with traveling to competitions, all of which make it necessary for parents of competitive dancers to be dedicated and highly involved. Our research focuses on how dancers and their families manage these commitments and navigate parental involvement. Additionally, as the environment of the competitive dance world is highly gendered and is, unlike many other athletic contexts, heavily dominated by girls and young women, we are also interested in how gender shapes the ways in which mothers and fathers are involved. According to Schupp (2017), dance competition culture can send clear messages about how gender should be performed. We argue that what is often overlooked in research is that those messages are not restricted to the stage. They also permeate how dancers are supported and view their parents’ involvement. Sandlos (2015) argues that there is an implicit understanding that mothers will be highly involved and devote themselves to supporting their children’s competitive dance experiences. In this analysis, we use Butler’s concept of gender performativity to help inform us about the expectations that competitive dancers have of their mothers’ and fathers’ involvement as well as how they characterize the involvement of other dance parents in studio and competition contexts. We conducted an exploratory study examining the experiences of young competitive dancers across three types of studios: Competitive (e.g. acro, ballet, contemporary, hip hop, jazz, lyrical, modern, musical theatre, tap), Highland, and Irish. There were 41 dancers who participated in the study - Competitive (13 participants, 12-17 years), Highland (15 participants, 12-19 years), Irish (13 participants, 12-19 years). Through semi-structured interviews, we identified the convergences and divergences existing between dancers’ competitive experiences in these three dance contexts. In this paper, we discuss dancers’ identification of strong convergences across contexts in terms of how dancers and their parents negotiated parental involvement and four themes resulting from our qualitative analysis: Parental Support and Involvement; Parental Knowledge of Dance; Expectations; Decision-making and Autonomy. These categories emerged from the dancers’ reflections on how they have navigated their own parents’ involvement as well as their observations of other families. While dancers indicated some convergences around what they believed to be too much or too little involvement, they predominantly agreed that parental involvement was a type of balancing act that needs adjustment for family situations and the individual preferences of dancers and their parents. Essentially, dancers and their parents must work to find the level and types of parental involvement that are right for them. Parental involvement was not seen as static but as something that must be continually adjusted to context, including parental capacity/preference and dancer need/preference. Dancers reported typical gendered stereotypes around the ways in which mothers and fathers tend to support their children’s dancing, with far more involvement being expected of mothers. Discussions about fathers’ involvement revealed that they tend to participate differently than mothers and, while many dancers viewed father involvement in a stereotypical way, several wanted a different level of involvement from fathers. Our discussion centres around how gender performativity can be applied as a theoretical framework to understand these gendered dynamics and consider how parental involvement in competitive dance might shift as attitudes about gendered parenting roles continue to evolve in the future.

Non-presenting authors: Lisa Sandlos, York University; Danielle S. Molnar, Brock University

This paper will be presented at the following session: