ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates how parenting appears to be informed by confessional modes of speaking, in the widest sense, about oneself to oneself and others. The detailed excerpts show how the techniques of comparing, sharing and contrasting operate to create and constitute people as selves in and through confessional talk. The chapter presents an analysis of interview talk and, in particular, explores what happens when these adults display, objectify and act upon themselves as parental selves. Confessional activities appear in manifold practices, activated and operating through, for instance, reflective dialogue, career guidance and learning portfolios. Confessional talk implies that one speaks the truth about oneself, which in its more secularized form has been replaced by self-work in terms of inspection, examination and regulation. With mobilizing the dynamics of sameness and difference always at work, it becomes possible to produce and establish the crucial otherness.
