Shame and silences: children’s emotional experiences of insecurity and violence in postwar Finnish families

The Second World War had long-lasting impacts on families in all of the belligerent countries involved, including Finland. Parents’ preoccupations with their own worries and war-related mental health problems increased the risk of inadequate parenting and domestic violence. In Finland, this subject was relegated to the margins of history writing and public remembrance for decades. However, since the 1990s the experience of troubled family life has gained more recognition in research and memory culture. This article examines how children experienced war-related psychosocial problems in post-Second World War Finnish families, and how contemporary emotional regimes and more local emotional formations affected children’s emotional experiences. We propose that shame, and the fear of it, was a key social mechanism that produced silences in families and posed barriers to disclosure. The source material for this research consists of personal written narratives about family life in post-Second World War Finland. The narratives were written in 2015–2016 by people who were children or adolescents at that time. The interpretation of these narratives is based on historical contextualization and sensitive reading, and we apply concepts and insights from the history of emotions framework and shame studies.