BALANCING THE THREE-LEGGED STOOL: SUSTAINABLE CHILDREARING ROUTINES, FAMILY, AND WORK IN TWO AMERICAN CITIES

Family;Child care;Mobility;Inequality;Gender;Work-life balance;Sociology

Talbert, Elizabeth MaryStrobino, Donna ;

Johns Hopkins University

关键词: Family;    Child care;    Mobility;    Inequality;    Gender;    Work-life balance;    Sociology;   

Others  :  https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/60125/TALBERT-DISSERTATION-2018.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: JOHNS HOPKINS DSpace Repository

【 摘 要 】

Within a policy regime built on an ideal of ;;implicit familialism,” American parents experience a great deal of conflict between the spheres of work and family. By using childrearing as the potential realm of social inequality or mobility, this research looks at how the geographic and economic structure of work and kin relationships play together in the daily lives of individual parents and their children as they balance the ;;three-legged stool” of work, home, and child care or schooling arrangements. The research uses data from the How Parents House Kids qualitative interview study, which sought to understand choices parents of children between the ages of three and eight make about where they live and send their children to school. In 2014 team of interviewers questioned 126 parents in areas around Cleveland, Ohio and Dallas, Texas about their daily childrearing routines and many other aspects of their lives. Transcripts were coded for themes of work, home and housing, and child care or schooling. Findings show that making the three-legged routine sustainable shapes choices parents make about where to work, where to live, and where to send their children to care and school. Parents also create or alleviate gender inequalities through their choices about childrearing, with higher-income mothers often ;;supermomming,” or carrying major responsibilities in both parenting and work, and lower-income parents ;;cooperatively” parenting to accommodate economic and time constraints. Additionally, the majority of families of all classes and races in this sample rely on extended family members to aid in childrearing at least weekly, with differences depending on employment status and local child care policy. Finally, transitions in the three-legged stool affect social inequality. Lower-income families experience more non-volitional ;;push” transitions, and these transitions often precede or happen at the same time as transitions in other legs. Higher-income families experience mobility through volitional ;;pull” transitions that are more often isolated. These findings suggest that the ideal breadwinner/homemaker nucler family, is no longer an accurate model for American research and public policy, and that choices that parents make daily about childrearing are related to social inequality and mobility.