Scheduling, worrying, and stepping up Working parents' strategies for providing care to middle-school children

Scheduling, worrying, and stepping up

Working parents' strategies for providing care to middle-school children

Kaplan

Elaine Bell

Kaplan, Elaine Bell

Author

Davidson

Christopher

Davidson, Christopher

Author

University of California, Berkeley

Center for Working Families

University of California, Berkeley. Center for Working Families

Sponsor

text

working paper

Berkeley, CA Center for Working Families, University of California, Berkeley 2002 2002 monographic

Berkeley, CA

Center for Working Families, University of California, Berkeley

2002

monographic

English eng

English

eng

electronic application/pdf 34 p. born digital

electronic

application/pdf

34 p.

born digital

The thirty working parents interviewed for this study offer three unique strategies for raising teenagers ages 12 to 14 years old. This study draws on the literature on care and on parents' perceptions of their teenagers' needs, on their own abilities to perform the necessary caring tasks, and on their appraisals of their spouses' commitments to caring for their teenagers. Rather than produce strategies that are based on negotiations with family members, parents in this study tended to develop their own individual strategies when confronted with a set of problems in caring for young teenagers, principle among these is the contested nature of teenagers' need for care—contested by the educational institution, by employers, by spouses and teenagers themselves. We conclude by suggesting that these parents' strategies lead to unequal divisions of physical and emotional care that are shaped by gender, race and institutional intransigence.

Elaine Kaplan is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. She was a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Working Families. Christopher Davidson was a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Working Families and received his Ph.D. from the Sociology Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Berkeley Center for Working Families Working Paper No. 52

Berkeley Center for Working Families Working Paper

No. 52

Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons "Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States" (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/)

wfn_bwpaper_35.pdf

MChB English eng

MChB

English eng

English

eng