The thesis explores how parents narrate their experiences of caring for a child living with chronic pain, and how these narratives intersect with education, health and family systems. Using a critical realist ontology and interpretivist epistemology, chronic pain is understood as both materially real and socially mediated, while parental accounts are viewed as situated meaning-making rather than objective reports. Narrative Oriented Inquiry (NOI) provided the methodological framework. Three mothers, recruited through schools and a parent–carer forum across two English regions, participated in in-depth narrative interviews about their child’s pain, schooling, healthcare contacts and family life.
Findings show that parents undertake substantial “narrative labour”: cognitive, emotional and relational work to make their child’s often invisible pain legible to professionals, schools and extended family. Diagnostic visibility and “professional parental capital” shape whose stories are regarded as credible, raising equity concerns for families without these resources. Parents also drew on carer-specific illness narrative typologies that extend existing illness narrative frameworks by foregrounding caregiver perspectives and system-facing storytelling.
The thesis makes three contributions. First, it demonstrates the value of Narrative Oriented Inquiry for understanding how mothers of children with chronic pain construct and negotiate caregiving stories across education, health and family systems. Second, it develops the concept of narrative labour to describe the work involved in making a child’s invisible pain legible to others, showing how this labour is shaped by diagnostic visibility and professional parental capital. Third, it extends illness narrative frameworks by identifying carer-specific narrative typologies and highlighting how mesosystem trust across school, health and family systems can erode or sustain parental confidence. These contributions position educational psychology as having a distinctive role in recognising parental expertise, reducing repeated retelling and addressing epistemic injustice through systemic practice.
