Some men upped their caregiving game during the pandemic, research finds.

Reprinted from Psychology Today

Key points

• During COVID, more time at home didn’t necessarily mean that men stepped up their domestic labor.
• Some fathers did step up to the plate and shared the extra domestic work and childcare during COVID.
• Workplace flexibility during COVID allowed people who held feminist values to create more equal marriages.
• Gender equality requires both feminist values and policies that allow us all to do paid and family work.

It is hard to believe that only a few years ago many of us were sheltering at home for months, even years, on end. Life was turned upside down and inside out.

Daycare centers shuttered, schools closed, restaurants closed, and many other workplaces closed as well. We were divided into those of us sheltering in place and “essential” workers who braved death simply by going to their jobs.

We lived through this seriously dramatic and traumatic event. But did we learn anything from it? It’s too early to know for sure, but the first research projects are beginning to provide some clues.

As Editor of Gender & Society, in 2021 I published a special issue on “The Gendered Impacts of COVID-19.” We published articles that suggested the effects of the crises were not equally distributed, but rather that women with caregiving responsibilities were bearing the brunt of the pandemic both in the U.S. and across the globe.

Other research showed the devastating impact of COVID on gender equality. For example, mothers with young children reduced their work hours four to five times more than did fathers.

Jessica Calarco’s new book Holding it Together argues that in the United States, we have come to rely on women as our safety net, because a real safety net does not exist to catch families that need help to survive. And despite large numbers of men working remotely and being home during the day—some for the first time in their adult lives—many did not quickly or fully become responsible equal partners as husbands or fathers by handling the increased domestic labor that the lockdown created. For most heterosexual parents, women took the brunt of the burden that COVID dumped on families.

But not all is grim. Many women went back to work the moment daycare centers and schools opened once again. We learned, through experience, that many jobs can be re-designed with more flexibility for employees, with remote and hybrid options—and we know parents think this increases the quality of their lives tremendously.

During the pandemic, my colleagues Kathleen Gerson, Jennifer Glass, and Jerry Jacobs read the polls, even helped to create one of them, and found the dire predictions about women being pushed out of the labor force and the burden of homeschooling falling on mothers to be alarming. We wondered how parents, both mothers and fathers, were experiencing their day-to-day lives beyond the statistical trends.

So we designed a research project to try to understand the experiences of caregivers during COVID. We recruited graduate students from each of our universities and began interviewing parents from across the country, asking them to reflect deeply on the changes occurring in their lives.

Our sample was drawn from respondents who were part of a nationally representative National Opinion Research Center (NORC) panel. For the research discussed here, our subsample consists of 49 women and 32 men, ranging from 23 to 59 years of age. Everyone was married or cohabiting with a partner who also worked full-time in the labor force. They came from every region of the country.

While we found many of the same trends as others—more women taking on more of the household tasks than their partners—we also have some good news to report. Our new article, authored by Michelle Cera, Golda Kaplan, Kathleen Gerson, and myself has recently been published in the journal Social Sciences.

In our sample, as in others, most couples remained in their habitual patterns even when the context changed, with children at and often their own work, now at home all day. The couples that had been egalitarian before the pandemic remained so.

Most of the mothers in our sample did more than their fair share of housework and parenting. Some were very angry about it. Others sounded resigned.

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But that is not the whole story. The diversity of family processes often gets lost in reporting the majority trend. While knowing the most common response to any event is important, knowing the variety of responses is equally so.

We found that some heterosexual couples did use the flexibility of remote or hybrid work during the pandemic to become more egalitarian partners, with fathers stepping up to the plate. Of course, this was the minority. But what makes their unusual choice possible?

Our qualitative interviews allowed us to explore what made these couples different from the norm. And the answer was clear: These were couples who already held feminist beliefs, and wanted to share equally the responsibility of earning a living and caring for their children.

But in the pre-pandemic era, their jobs made that very difficult. The husband often worked longer hours and earned more money, so his work had to be prioritized. When both partners had the flexibility to do their work at least partly from home, they could put their values into practice.

In one of my co-author’s (Kathleen Gerson) previous books, The Unfinished Revolution, she suggests that many Americans today want to have egalitarian marriages but that economic and social forces, like their workplaces, make that very hard. The pandemic made it possible for some of them to walk the walk, as well as talk the talk.

What This Means for Couples Going Forward

What lessons should we take from the natural experiment of sheltering in place?

If couples did not hold egalitarian values before the pandemic hit, the new workplace flexibility meant that heterosexual women usually shouldered the extra burden of domestic work that comes with everyone at home together—for some families, all day every day, learning and working online. In contrast, for those couples who had egalitarian beliefs but were stymied by inflexible workplace policies from living their own values, the pandemic experience allowed them to put into practice what they already believed, that men should be equal domestic partners at home.

There is a vital lesson for use as a society here, for social policy in the post-COVID era. Changing workplace rules don’t necessarily promote gender equality at home. Without feminist values, workplace structure has minimal influence on gender equality in families.

Nor are values alone enough. For gender equality to be possible, we both need workplace policies that allow flexibility for workers who are wage earners and involved parents and the desire of those workers to have egalitarian marriages. Only when those who are committed to gender equality are provided by workplace flexibility and social policies that support families can heterosexual couples reach their own goal of equality in marriage.

References

Michelle Cera & Golda Kaplan & Kathleen Gerson & Barbara Risman, 2024. “A Case of Sticky Gender? Persistence and Change in the Division of Household Labor during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 13(4), pages 1-19, March.

Barbara J. Risman, Ph.D., is a sociology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure.

Online:

Barbara J. Risman, Facebook, Twitter

Reprinted from The Conversation

You work a full day, drive the kids to various after school activities, make a mad dash to the supermarket to pick up something for dinner, check emails … and then remember you need a gift for Aunty June’s birthday tomorrow.

Sound familiar?

Our new research shows the “mental load” of managing a household on daily basis falls disproportionately to mothers. This means all the remembering, planning, anticipating and organising that keeps family life running “sticks” to mothers in partnered, heterosexual couples even when they work full-time, earn high incomes, or are the family breadwinner.

While mothers who earn and work more do less of the physical domestic tasks, the mental load remains unmovable. This reveals a less recognised or seen – but nonetheless enduring – barrier to gender equality at home that persists across different work and income patterns.

What is the domestic mental load?

The domestic mental load is the essential emotional thinking work that keeps family life functioning. We measured it by 21 distinct tasks, ranging from keeping track of when children’s nails need clipping, to ensuring the fridge is stocked for the next meal. We asked more than 2,000 US-based parents living in a heterosexual couple which partner is mostly responsible for each task.

On average, mothers report being mainly responsible for 67% more household management than fathers. As the figure below shows, we observed the largest gaps for “core”, routine tasks that often crop up daily, including family scheduling, managing the cleaning, organising childcare, managing social relationships, and taking care of the food.

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While fathers report greater responsibility for cognitive tasks related to household maintenance and finances, these gender gaps are comparatively small. These are also tasks that are typically less urgent and done less frequently.

So, while fathers are contributing to mental labour tasks, they are much less likely to say they are primarily responsible for them. This is an important distinction because primary responsibility means accountability – it’s who gets blamed when things go wrong or are forgotten.

But cognitive labour is only one piece. We also found that, on average, mothers are doing 85% more of the physical childcare and housework, too. These patterns are not just a US parent phenomenon – our interviews with Australian parents demonstrate a similar pattern. Mothers are carrying heavier domestic loads both in their physical labour and in their minds.

Mothers’ ‘sticky’ situation

We know from decades of research and the results from our own survey that mothers who work longer hours spend less time in housework and childcare on average. Earning more money is also a key bargaining tool for mothers to reduce their domestic contributions.

Crucially, though, we do not see these same patterns when it comes to the mental load. Instead, mothers who work and earn more still do significantly more than their fair share of the mental load, even as their physical workloads lighten.

We call this “gendered cognitive stickiness”: once the mental load is socially assigned to mothers – and, given gender expectations of mothers’ role as primary caregivers, it almost always is – it tends to “stick” to them regardless of their employment status or how much they earn.

This reflects how different the mental load is from physical childcare and housework. Cognitive domestic labour is not seen, acknowledged, or discussed in the same way as physical chores. This is precisely because it happens inside our heads — anywhere, anytime — and is usually only visible when something goes wrong, such as a forgotten appointment or a key ingredient missing from the cupboard.

The fact mothers do so much more of this cognitive labour than fathers even as employment and earnings increase reflects how much harder the mental load is to outsource, offload, or devolve to others than physical chores.

Because of this, no amount of money or career success frees mothers from the unseen and constant need to remind, anticipate, and coordinate everything that needs doing for the family.

We do find that when fathers earn more, they take on more of this thinking work. For example, fathers earning more than $100,000 reported 17% more involvement in “core” mental tasks, such as arranging extracurricular activities. We suspect this reflects new norms that expect fathers to be more involved in the primary care of children as well as the flexibility more common in high-paying jobs.

However, fathers’ increased contributions do not offset mothers’ overall burden. Mothers are still shouldering the bulk of the mental load.

These findings indicate a plateau in progress towards gender equality. While women have achieved high rates of education and workforce participation, men’s participation in household work – especially the mental load – has not kept pace.

The enduring domestic mental load helps explain why mothers, including those working and earning healthy incomes, feel stretched thin, stressed, and short on time. They are holding down paid jobs and keeping on top of all the household needs in their heads. This has negative implications for women’s wellbeing, careers, and families.

Equalising the mental load is not just about fairness. It is also about ensuring that families can thrive and that progress toward gender equality continues rather than stalls.

Leah Ruppanner Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of The Future of Work Lab, Podcast at MissPerceived, The University of Melbourne

Ana Catalano Weeks Associate professor in comparative politics, University of Bath

Helen Kowalewska Lecturer in Social Policy, University of Bath

Reprinted from Council on Contemporary Families Brief Reports

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University. This is an updated version of a paper published previously at The Conversation.

May 8, 2025

There are many complex reasons behind America’s falling birthrates. Many Americans feel freer today than in the past to construct enriching lives that don’t include parenting. But it’s also true that on average, Americans are having fewer children than they say they would prefer. Economic uncertainty and the lack of social policy supports for parents in the U.S. are clear contributors. In addition, parents report concerns about global instability and climate change.

But there may be another less obvious factor in Americans’ reluctance to become parents or to have larger families. Parenting has become the source of so much anxiety for parents, particularly mothers, that it can seem impossible to do it right. When 20-something women in my neighborhood and among my students discuss their ambivalence about becoming parents, much of the anxiety revolves around the fact that they have set the bar so high for “good parenting.” 

Even armed with a Ph.D. in developmental psychology, I too worried about whether I could meet that bar. I vividly remember the frightening first moments after bringing my newborn daughter home from the hospital. I wasn’t sure what to do—and not at all confident that I was capable of being the parent she needed me to be. Every little decision about feeding and caring for this helpless human seemed momentous and fraught with anxiety. What if I don’t make it a full year of breastfeeding? Would feeding her formula result in a lower IQ? Should I turn off the TV whenever she is in the room to avoid passive screen exposure? When would it be OK for her to enter full-time day care? I worried that if I was too tired to read to her one evening before bed, she would never learn to read. As she grew into early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence, the content of the worries shifted (When is it OK for her to have a smartphone? Should I be tracking her location on Life 360?) but the sense that I wasn’t quite good enough for the “most challenging job in the world” didn’t quit.

My personal experiences as a parent are in part why I study the experiences of other parents. In my New Parents Project, an ongoing longitudinal study of nearly 200 dual-earner couples who welcomed their first children in 2008-2009, I have found that this kind of “parenting perfectionism”—holding oneself to impossibly high standards for parenting, and, perhaps even more important, believing that other people hold such high standards for you—is common among mothers and related to lower confidence in parenting and even feelings of depression.

Pressure to Be Perfect

Mothers didn’t always feel this perfectionist pressure. In the 1960s, for example, when far fewer mothers worked outside the home, mothers spent about half as much time in direct interaction with their children as mothers do today.

Yet, since the last decade of the 20th century, even as mothers entered the workforce in greater numbers and for greater numbers of hours, norms for mothering evolved toward an “intensive mothering” ideal. This norm dictates that mothers’ parenting should be time-consuming, emotionally absorbing, and guided by expert advice. This pressure is particularly intense for middle-class mothers, who often practice a childrearing style called concerted cultivation, an approach identified by Annette Lareau in the early 2000s. This style focuses on deliberately providing children with experiences and activities to help them develop intellectual and social skills that will serve them well in an increasingly unequal and competitive society. More recent research, however, indicates that intensive parenting ideals have now become pervasive across social classes in the U.S.

Striving for Perfection Can Harm Parenting

Ironically, however, the felt pressure to be a “perfect” mother may actually harm a mother’s parenting. In my lab’s research on new parents, we found that mothers showed less confidence in their parenting abilities when they were more worried about what other people thought about their parenting.

The popularity of social media has likely exacerbated this phenomenon because parents can look at what other parents are doing—even in ostensibly private moments—and judge themselves in comparison. In my research, when we asked new parents about their Facebook use, mothers who were more frequent visitors to the site and who managed their accounts more frequently reported higher levels of parenting stress. New mothers who were highly perfectionistic about parenting were the ones who used Facebook more frequently, and this greater use was linked to increases in depressive symptoms. Decades of research have demonstrated that mothers who experience depression act in more negative and less positive ways toward their children.

Thus, the irony is that in seeking perfection in parenting, parents are less likely to actually parent effectively. Worrying about what others think of their parenting saps mothers’ confidence, leading them to experience parenting as less enjoyable and more stressful. When faced with inevitable parenting challenges, mothers with lower confidence and more parenting stress give up more quickly. Perfectionistic mothers may also engage in gatekeeping by correcting or criticizing fathers’ interactions with children, which can push fathers away from active involvement in parenting, thereby increasing the burden on themselves. Mothers may end up feeling burnt out—emotionally exhausted and distanced from their children.

What Does a ‘Good’ Parent Look Like?

There may be disagreement among child development experts about issues such as screen time or sleep routines, but there is striking agreement about the key elements of “good” parenting, even if consensus is less likely to make headlines than the latest parenting controversy.

Good parenting has a lot more to do with the “how” than the “what.” Good parents are those who are sensitive to their children’s needs, and “in tune” with their children such that they parent in harmony with their child’s unique characteristics and shift their parenting in response to changes in their child’s development. Children thrive when their parents are consistent, warm, hold high expectations for children’s behavior, explain the reasons behind their rules, and negotiate when appropriate.

Greater stress about parenting further depletes parents’ psychological resources, which may in turn affect their ability to adapt to the changing needs of their children and regulate their own emotions and behavior when parenting their children.

In other words, when you lack confidence and feel chronically stressed about parenting, it is hard to be sensitive, warm, and consistent. You are more likely to yell when you intended to explain calmly to your toddler to stop banging their plate on the table for the millionth time. You may find yourself mentally “checked out” when your baby looks at you and gurgles or when your teen wants to tell you all about the latest season of Ginny & Georgia. You may give in to your preschooler’s endless demands for more Squishmallows.

So, this Mother’s Day, whether you are a mother, expecting your first child, or are thinking of becoming a mother someday, don’t shoot yourself in the foot by holding yourself to impossibly high parenting standards. Remember that the big picture is what is important. Be aware that what other mothers post on Facebook or Instagram may not represent the reality of their parenting experiences. View the latest parenting advice or fad with a skeptical eye. On Mother’s Day—and every day—the best gift you can give yourself and your (future) children may be permission to be imperfect.

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank the staff at CCF for their assistance with the production of this article and Stephanie Coontz for her helpful comments in drafting this brief.

For More Information, Please Contact:

Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan
Professor, Department of Psychology
The Ohio State University
schoppe-sullivan.1@osu.edu

Nina Bandelj is Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She is an economic sociologist interested in how relational work, emotions, culture and power influence economic processes and has published widely, including in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Nature Human Behavior, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Social Forces and Socio-Economic Review. She is the author of From Communists to Foreign Capitalists (2008) and Economy and State (with Elizabeth Sowers, 2010), and co-editor of Money Talks: Explaining How Money Really Works (with Frederick Wherry and Viviana Zelizer), among others. Bandelj served as President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics and as Vice-President of the American Sociological Association. She was a longtime and first woman editor of Socio-Economic Review and an inaugural associate vice provost for faculty development at UC Irvine. You can find Nina on Twitter @BandeljNina. Here, I talk with her about her new book, Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting, published on January 20, 2026.

AMW: Your research shows that parents today treat children as both emotional treasures and financial investments. What did you learn about how this dual framing actually shapes day-to-day decisions about spending, saving, or even going into debt for their kids?

NB: What really struck me over the many years of research on this topic is how deeply the idea of investment has seeped into everyday parenting. What’s key is that “investment,” and “to be invested into something” has a revealing double meaning. Yes, it is about money, and parents need to pay ever escalating costs of childcare, of extracurricular activities, of college. But investment is also about emotion and identity: the belief that a good parent pours not just financial resources but their whole self into raising children.

We take it for granted that we need to be super invested to be good parents and forget that this hasn’t always been the case. For much of U.S. history, children contributed to the welfare of families, working on farms or through household labor. As Viviana Zelizer famously showed, the social value of children changed around the turn of the 20th century, from economically useful to emotionally priceless, as she called it. But today’s parents are tasked with taking an additional step: we are told we must invest in our precious children, especially their education, to build their human capital, as if children are assets that will appreciate and yield returns in adulthood. We have begun to treat children as investment projects.

In a country where schooling from preschool to college is enormously expensive, that imperative to build children’s human capital quickly becomes about financial resources. And many people assume that how parents save, invest, and yes, also borrow, for the sake of children is a matter of economic calculation. But when we talked to parents –my research team helped conduct 119 interviews– about what they do for their children, parents didn’t talk like economists about investments and returns. Rather, their narratives revealed how much they are devoted to their children and to being good parents. In this context, money has become a language of love. Parents do relational work, as economic sociologists would say, by using money of various forms (savings, expenditures, financial assets, and loans) to express care, commitment, and the kind of bond they want with their child. And it is “heartbreaking,” as one father said, “where the finances are such that you want something for the kids that you cannot afford to get.”

AMW: Across your interviews, you found that parents increasingly view parenting as the “most important job” and feel compelled to give their “entire selves” to it. What social forces most powerfully drive this sense of obligation, and how does it affect parents’ mental health and family well-being?

NB: What I appreciate about this question is that it lets us step back and see parents’ struggles not as individual shortcomings but as reflections of larger cultural forces. Parents we interviewed came from various socio-economic and racial backgrounds. We interviewed moms and dads, and they were of various religious and political dispositions. Still, our interviewees had something in common; they really wanted to do the best for their children. They took on parenting as the hardest but the most rewarding job, as many said.

But we should ask ourselves: why is raising children today financially and emotionally exhausting labor? We should ask this question especially after the pandemic challenges and after the U.S. Surgeon General pronounced the burnout and mental health of parents as a public health crisis in August 2024. In the book I explain that the understanding of parenting as a job is culturally produced and I identify two central social forces that contribute to it.

The first is what I call the rising dominance of the Economic Style, the spread of economic reasoning and influence of financial structures into areas of social life. We have seen this larger phenomenon in the economy and public policy that Elizabeth Popp Berman documented in her recent book, Thinking Like an Economist. What I show is that parenting hasn’t escaped these trends. Through the influence of economists, demographers, developmental psychologists and policy makers, childhood is understood as a development project. Children are treated as investment projects, where every learning activity, enrichment opportunity or school choice becomes a way to optimize investment.

The second equally powerful social change is the rise of the Emotional Style, or a therapeutic culture that urges us to use emotions as moral authority and center how we feel about ourselves and others. An explosion of parenting advice, given by experts but also coaches, popular psychology and social media, constantly disciplines a parent, telling us what we should be doing. And it also channels our focus on children’s emotional well-being, and to how we feel as parents. This means that today’s exhausting parenting reality is as much about parenting—what you do for your child—as it is about parenthood—who you are as a parent.

AMW: One of the most consequential findings in the book is that parental overinvestment—financial, emotional, and time-intensive—ultimately harms children, parents, and society. Based on your data, what specific mechanisms lead overinvestment to produce these negative outcomes?

NB: During the pandemic, there was a lot of discussion about stressed out parents. The New York Times offered a “primal scream” phone line for “a parent who’s tired as hell” to call and scream after the beep. What Overinvested shows is that parental exhaustion, both emotional and financial, didn’t suddenly appear because of the pandemic. The pandemic exposed a system already stretched to its breaking point. And while I mentioned cultural changes as culprits, it is important to emphasize how interconnected they are with the U.S. political system that has not budged on a very family unfriendly policy and, what I call, privatization of childrearing. This means that having to bear the increasing financial pressures—because that’s what’s considered good parenting—has starkly unequal consequences for American families with different income and race backgrounds. The evidence from quantitative analyses based on the data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, Consumer Expenditures Survey and Panel Study of Income Dynamics documented in the book shows that wealthier families accumulate financial assets for children, including in 529 tax-advantaged education savings plans, while lower- and middle-income families increasingly rely on debt, especially mortgage debt to reside in good school neighborhoods and on education debt taken on disproportionately by Black families.

What’s the bottom line? Parenting today doesn’t just reproduce social inequality, as pointed out by an influential study in early 2000s by Annette Laureau on concerted cultivation of the well-to-do who pass on advantages to their children by imparting cultural capital. The new standard of (over)invested parenting seriously deepens economic and racial disparities among American families.

And this is in addition to strong evidence of parental burnout mentioned above, and in addition to now well-documented negative consequences of overinvolved/overmanaged parenting for children’s well being. Indeed, in so many ways the modern emotional economy of parenting is in crisis and, as one book reviewer pointed out, it’s high time to face this “urgent reckoning for American parents.”

Alicia M. Walker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University and the author of two previous books on infidelity, and a forthcoming book, Bound by BDSM: Unexpected Lessons for Building a Happier Life (Bloomsbury Fall 2025) coauthored with Arielle Kuperberg. She is the current Editor in Chief of the Council of Contemporary Families blog, serves as Senior Fellow with CCF, and serves as Co-Chair of CCF alongside Arielle Kuperberg. Learn more about her on her website. Follow her on Twitter or Bluesky at @AliciaMWalker1, Facebook, her Hidden Desires column, and Instagram @aliciamwalkerphd

Fatima Suarez is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She specializes in gender, family dynamics, and Latinas/os/es in the United States. Over the past ten years, her research has focused on examining inequality in family life, particularly from the perspective of fathers. Fatima’s research has been supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship in Latino Studies at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Here, I ask her about her new book, Latino Fathers: What Shapes and Sustains Their Parenting, which is out now from New York University Press. You can find out more about Fatima at her website. 

 AMW: You write about the emotional realities of fatherhood: joy, uncertainty, hope, pain. What did their stories reveal about how Latino men themselves make sense of fatherhood in their everyday lives?

FS: Emotions were fundamental in how Latino men made sense of themselves as fathers and their responsibilities toward their children. For example, men’s perceptions of themselves as fathers were influenced by their collective feelings toward their own fathers. Their feelings were shaped by how their fathers behaved as men (i.e., emotionally expressive or stoic, and absent or involved; egalitarian or traditional), how their fathers treated them when they were boys (i.e., chastising them when they didn’t behave like “boys”) and by their interpretations of paternal sacrificial love (i.e, did their fathers tell them they love them or did they recognize fathers’ sacrifices as an expression of love). Based on these factors, men either resented, empathized with, or shared conflicting emotions toward their fathers. In fact, many of the men I spoke with considered themselves to be involved, modern fathers compared to their own, and they cited the previously discussed factors as reasons why. However, at the same time, they critiqued their fathers’ shortcomings and protected their reputations by offering explanations for why their fathers could not be better fathers. These explanations ranged from their fathers growing up in poverty, in large families with limited resources, to growing up without their own fathers. In this vein, Latino fathers’ stories highlight their deep emotional intelligence as they express the complex nature of their relationships with their own fathers.

Emotions were also central to how fathers used what I call a “childhood frame of reference” to evaluate their parenting in comparison to their own childhood experiences. The men I met shared powerful childhood memories of working to support their families’ economic survival, experiencing severe physical punishment, and feeling unwanted or like a “burden” due to colorism or poverty. These experiences were impactful as they did not conform to what we think of as an ideal or “normal” childhood in which children are protected from adult responsibilities, abuse, and prejudice. These emotionally charged memories affected how they raised their children, pushing them to engage in what I call “intergenerational corrective fatherhood” as they sought to change their parenting to give their children a better childhood than they had. In other words, they infused their painful memories of not living a “normal” or “ideal” childhood into their fatherhood. In this case, Latino fathers’ narratives illuminate how emotions underline their parenting goals and hopes for their children.

AMW: Structural forces can support or undermine men’s parenting, whether through work demands, economic pressures, or broader social inequality. What did Latino fathers teach you about how these forces shape, and sometimes constrain, their ability to parent the way they want to?

FS: Work operates in contradictory ways for Latino fathers. On the one hand, work enabled them to provide their families with a middle-class life — the hallmark of the American dream — and an overall sense of belonging to American culture. This included owning a single-family home, multiple cars, a college education for their children, family vacations, and conspicuous consumption. Work also enabled Latino fathers to fulfill traditional breadwinning roles, which can provide them with honor and dignity. This can be especially important for men whose masculinity has historically been problematized by powerful social, political, and legal actors and institutions. For only a few of them, work allowed them to take parental leave when their children were born, which is a significant privilege, as Latino fathers have the lowest rates of access to paid and unpaid family leave among all fathers. Overall, many fathers took pride in being economic providers for their families, which gave them a sense of purpose.
On the other hand, fathers understood the compromises they had to make in their family lives for work. Work constrained their abilities to parent the way they aspired to. Fathers spoke candidly about the lack of time they had to spend with their families and the effects of bringing work stress home. They were especially forthcoming about how their tedious and dreadful commutes on California’s vast freeways further chipped away at the little time they had to spend with their families after work. In fact, Latino fathers taught me that commuting to work IS work. Fathers who had adult children openly lamented the loss of time, with one father noting that now that his children are older, they don’t want to spend time with him, which he doesn’t blame them for. While they provided their families with upward mobility, it came at a cost.

Some fathers resisted letting work dictate their family lives. They put their families before their careers. These fathers were mainly college-educated professionals who could leverage their social and cultural capital at work. However, these fathers paid a different kind of price—a social one in which their colleagues, supervisors, and even family members constantly questioned their commitment to their careers. 

AMW: Your book shows Latino fathers continually negotiating what “good fatherhood” means. What were the most meaningful ways these men upheld, challenged, or redefined culturally dominant expectations of fathers?

In the book, I examine Latino men’s experiences related to childbirth and child custody, which force them to confront medical and legal institutions that uphold gender essentialism in parenting. Fathers’ efforts to be involved and caring parents are constantly compared to those of mothers, who are regarded as the standard for parenting. In fact, some people have asked me if fathers need to behave more like mothers to be considered good fathers. Fathers’ stories illustrated how motherhood shaped their understanding of fatherhood, driving them to see it as something they needed to achieve and, in some instances, fight for. One father astutely described this dynamic when he said, “Men must engage in the verb of the word ‘father.’ You must live it. You must enjoy it and suffer it. It’s an action.”  

During childbirth, fathers often felt isolated, abandoned, and excluded by hospital staff, particularly when complications arose. The fear of losing the mothers of their children made fathers acutely aware of their own vulnerability as parents. Their experiences during childbirth significantly shaped their feelings about their role as parents moving forward. Some believed they could never overcome the deep emotional connections that mothers have with their children, which undermined their efforts to be caregivers. After the dissolution of their marriage or partnership with the mothers of their children, fathers found themselves having to defend their fatherhood in court. These experiences left them with the realization that they are second-class parents who have to prove their capacity to parent. Some used these experiences as a catalyst to redefine their fatherhood, becoming more intentional about how they engaged with their children. 

Alicia M. Walker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University and the author of two previous books on infidelity, and a forthcoming book, Bound by BDSM: Unexpected Lessons for Building a Happier Life (Bloomsbury Fall 2025) coauthored with Arielle Kuperberg. She is the current Editor in Chief of the Council of Contemporary Families blog, serves as Senior Fellow with CCF, and serves as Co-Chair of CCF alongside Arielle Kuperberg. Learn more about her on her website. Follow her on Twitter or Bluesky at @AliciaMWalker1, Facebook, her Hidden Desires column, and Instagram @aliciamwalkerphd

Reprinted from Gender & Society

In the United States, there are almost two million people held in jails and prisons today, and 113 million people who have a family member who has ever been incarcerated. Research shows that, of those family members, women do the lion’s share of labor related to caring for an incarcerated person. This includes making long and costly visits to facilities that are often remote and far away from incarcerated people’s hometowns, sending money to subsidize the cost of expensive hygiene and food products, and spending hundreds of dollars a month on phone calls and other telecommunication to stay connected. In “‘It’s Heartbreaking. It’s Expensive. It’s Hard’: How the Carceral Care Economy Harms Black and Latine Mothers”, I examine this resource extraction and the caring labor of mothers to highlight the high financial and emotional costs of having an incarcerated adult child.

Using in-depth interviews with mothers with incarcerated adult children, I found that mothers perform care work and engage with what I call the carceral care economy. I define the carceral care economy as a marketplace of overpriced goods and services for incarcerated people, and labor, time, and money from their family members on the outside. In the article, I argue that under the current neoliberal configuration of the criminal legal system, mothers are forced to participate in the carceral care economy to stay connected to their incarcerated children and ensure their survival. The mothers I interviewed discussed the unaffordable and bloated prices of basic necessities like hygiene products, food and clothing items, and the bureaucratic, time-draining hoops they must jump through to visit their imprisoned children. This engagement with the carceral care economy puts their mothering into sharp focus – they make constant decisions about their employment, other children and dependents, and various responsibilities based on their incarcerated children’s needs.

The mothers in my sample were overwhelmingly employed in care work occupations and often saw their labor market participation as a necessary vehicle to providing unpaid care for their incarcerated children, even if that labor took precious time away from themselves. Though the mothers engaged the carceral care economy, they also resisted it in both formal and informal ways. That is, while caring for an incarcerated adult child is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, it also engenders resistance in ingenious ways. For instance, some mothers limited their financial contribution, putting caps on what the state was then able to use for restitution. Other mothers directly engaged the facilities where their children were incarcerated to fight for gender affirming care, appropriate substance use treatment, more nutritious food, and better living conditions. Furthermore, some mothers were actively involved in their state’s legislative efforts to reduce the exorbitant fees associated with telecommunications.

Most federal and state prisons contract with private telecommunication corporations, requiring incarcerated individuals to create accounts to communicate with their loved ones on the outside. Family and friends (typically women) deposit money into these accounts so their loved ones can send and receive phone calls, text messages, emails, video calls, or even pictures. A portion of that revenue then goes back to the corporation. The prison telecommunication industry, led by three major corporations, rakes in 1.4 billion dollars annually, extracting from families and, specifically, working-class women of color to fuel it. Though there are now caps by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on the cost of phone calls, fees associated with telecommunication remain a barrier to connection between those on the outside and their incarcerated loved ones. Instead of facilities providing services and goods at little or no cost, earnings from abhorrently low wages and contributions from family and friends must act as scaffolding to support incarcerated individuals’ basic necessities.

A small but important win in Los Angeles made all calls within county jails free of charge starting December 1, 2023. As more cities look to follow Los Angeles’ lead, future advocacy might encourage states to reduce their criminal legal system budgets rather than relying on families, and more often women, for the millions of dollars in revenue fines and fees create.

One thing is clear: our reliance on carceral solutions to social ills is harming families and communities beyond those who are locked up. As Black and Latine men bear the brunt of mass incarceration, the women connected to them are left to fill in the gaping holes of the United States’ so-called social safety net. As I write in Gender & Society, “The tentacles of the U.S. criminal legal system, emboldened by the neoliberal principles of profit and financialization, engulf poor and minoritized communities disproportionately, facilitating social stratification and inequality. This inequality not only impacts currently or formerly incarcerated individuals but is dependent on family and social network members too—many of whom are mothers.”

Raquel Delerme is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California. Her research examines gendered and racialized labor extraction with a focus on incarceration and the climate crisis. Her work has been published in Gender & Society and The Conversation.

Reprinted from the Texas Population Research Center

Healthy cognitive function allows older adults to better maintain their independence and economic productivity. Due to the rapid increase of the population of older adults in the United States and the lack of effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, it is important to identify factors that promote cognitive health prior to late life.

A sense of neighborhood cohesion – the perceived degree of trust, reciprocity, and sense of belonging among members of a community – may be one of those factors that can promote cognitive health and delay the onset of cognitive decline. Indeed, adults’ more favorable perceptions of their current neighborhoods have been related to positive cognitive health outcomes, and shown to be protective against cognitive decline.

Less is known, however, about the potential enduring effects of neighborhood cohesion from earlier stages in a person’s life course. Cognitive functioning in midlife and older adulthood is partly determined by early-life exposures. These early-life experiences and exposures can accumulate and contribute to well-being and better health outcomes in later life.

Engaging in mentally stimulating activities may protect people against cognitive impairment by building stocks of coping strategies that help stave off or protect against brain diseases. Research has found that structural features of a neighborhood provide important sources of cognitive reserve. These features include public infrastructure, such as sidewalks, and amenities such as parks, libraries and access to cafes and other walkable destinations.

A sense of neighborhood cohesion may be beneficial for cognitive health because it provides greater opportunities for physical activity, positive social interactions, and healthy lifestyle behaviors in both childhood and adulthood. On the other hand, people who perceive their neighborhoods as less cohesive tend to experience greater loneliness, isolation, and increased symptoms of depressive and anxiety symptoms, which are well-documented risk factors for cognitive decline and impairment in midlife and late life.

This study, using data from a large sample of U.S. adults, investigated the impact on cognitive aging of perceived neighborhood cohesion at different life stages—childhood, young adulthood, early midlife, and late midlife/late adulthood.

Key Findings

• Greater perceived neighborhood cohesion in childhood (measured at age 10) and at the time of the baseline interview (measured among people ranging in age from 51 to 89, or among people from late midlife through late adulthood) each predicted higher cognitive function at the time of the baseline interview (see figure).
• Neighborhood cohesion at young adulthood (age at first full-time job) and early midlife (age 40) were not significantly associated with cognitive function at the later ages (age 51-89).
• No associations were found between any of the neighborhood cohesion variables in any life stage and with the rate of change in cognitive function.

Policy Implications

Neighborhood contexts are critical yet understudied social determinants of cognitive health. Greater perceptions of neighborhood cohesion in both early and later life can promote better cognitive function in the period spanning late midlife to late adulthood.

Declines in cognitive function can begin prior to old age. Therefore, policies to enhance people’s sense of belonging and trust in their neighborhoods across the life course can be important strategies through which to promote healthy cognitive aging. These policies could include improving the built environment, for example, adding sidewalks and walking paths; and adding amenities, such as parks and community or recreation centers. These additions to the community would provide more opportunities for physical activity, positive social interactions, and healthy lifestyle choices.

Data and Methods

This study used data from up to 10 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (1998–2016), an ongoing biennial longitudinal panel study of over 23,000 households in the United States, comprised of a nationally representative sample of adults over age 50. The authors used data from participants who were aged 51-89 at the time of their first interview (baseline).

Respondents provided ratings of their perceptions of neighborhood cohesion at childhood (age 10), young adulthood (age at the first full-time job), early midlife (age 40), and concurrently at the time of the interview (ages covering late midlife through late adulthood). To measure neighborhood cohesion at age 40 and below, participants were asked to rate how much they felt a part of the area within a mile of their home on a scale of 1 (I felt I didn’t belong in this area) to 7 (I really felt part of this area). To measure how participants felt about their current neighborhood, they were asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 7, four statements regarding the area within a mile of their home: I really feel part of the area/I feel that I don’t belong in this area; most people in the area can be trusted/most people in this area cannot be trusted; most people in the area are friendly/most people in this area are unfriendly; and if you were in trouble, there are lots of people in this area who would help you/if you were in trouble, there is nobody in this area that would help you. Responses were recoded so that higher numbers corresponded to higher levels of cohesion.

Respondents also completed the modified version of the Telephone Interview for Cognitive Status.

The authors then fit a univariate latent growth curve model of change in cognitive function across waves and tested whether neighborhood cohesion during each recollected life stage predicted the level of cognitive function and change in cognitive function over time. The analyses were based on 25,991 observations collected from 3,599 respondents, equivalent to about 7.22 observations per participant.

Reference

[1] Choi, J., Han, S.H., Ng, Y.T., & Muñoz, E. (2023). Neighborhood cohesion across the life course and effects on cognitive aging. The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 78(10):1765-1774. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbad095 

Suggested Citation

Choi, J., Han, S.H., Ng, Y.T., & Muñoz, E. (2024). Greater neighborhood cohesion in childhood and in older adults’ current neighborhoods each predict higher cognitive function. CAPS Research Brief 3(2). https://doi.org/10.26153/tsw/50159

About the Authors

Jean Choi, jean.choi@austin.utexas.edu, is a PhD candidate in the department of Human Development and Family Sciences (HDFS) and a graduate student trainee in the Population Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin; Sae Hwang Han and Elizabeth Muñoz are assistant professors in HDFS, Center on Aging and Population faculty affiliates, and PRC faculty scholars, UT Austin; and Yee To Ng is a postdoctoral scholar in the department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, University of Michigan.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grant P30AG066614, awarded to the Center on Aging and Population Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin by the National Institute on Aging, grant R01AG054624, awarded to Debra Umberson, principal investigator, by the National Institute on Aging and by grant P2CHD042849, awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. Funding for the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) data collection and RAND HRS data development was supported by the Social Security Administration and the National Institute on Aging.

This Center on Aging and Population Sciences (CAPS) research brief is published in partnership with UT Austin’s Population Research Center, which provides CAPS with high-quality services and resources to facilitate large-scale, population-based aging research.

As parents, we’ve all been there: your child breaks a rule, and you’re faced with a decision about how to respond. Do you come down hard with punishment, hoping to prevent future misbehavior? Or do you take a softer approach, explaining why the rule matters? Research from Brazil suggests that harsh discipline might actually backfire, not just in the moment, but in ways that echo throughout adolescence and beyond.

The Discipline Dilemma

My colleagues and I followed 800 Brazilian students from age 11 to 14, tracking how their parents’ disciplinary styles shaped their attitudes toward authority and their tendency to break rules. What we discovered challenges some common assumptions about parenting.

The study asked adolescents about their parents’ disciplinary practices. We also measured whether these young people saw their parents (and other authority figures like teachers and police) as legitimate—that is, as people who have the right to make rules and deserve to be obeyed. Finally, we tracked whether they engaged in rule-violating behaviors.

The results were striking: harsh discipline didn’t prevent rule-violating behavior. In fact, it undermined parents’ authority in their children’s eyes.

Why Harsh Discipline Falls Short

Here’s what we found: when parents frequently yelled, threatened, or used physical punishment, their adolescent children were less likely to see them as legitimate authorities. And this loss of legitimacy mattered. Adolescents who didn’t view their parents as legitimate were significantly more likely to break rules, even when those parents maintained strict discipline.

In contrast, simply having clear rules was associated with children viewing their parents as more legitimate. And crucially, this sense of parental legitimacy was the strongest predictor of whether adolescents complied with rules.

Think of it this way: harsh discipline might get temporary compliance out of fear, but it doesn’t build the internal sense that “my parents have the right to set these boundaries, and I should respect them.” That internal sense—what we call legitimacy—is what leads to lasting cooperation.

The Missing Link: Procedural Justice

But why does harsh discipline erode legitimacy? The answer is procedural justice, which means making decisions and enforcing rules fairly.

When parents use procedural justice, they:

• Give their children a chance to explain their side of the story
• Explain why they’re being reprimanded
• Listen before making decisions
• Speak politely, even when disciplining

Our research found that adolescents whose parents practiced procedural justice were far more likely to see them as legitimate authorities. In fact, procedural justice was the main pathway through which parenting practices influenced whether kids viewed their parents’ authority as valid.

Harsh discipline, by contrast, violates these principles. When parents yell, threaten, or punish without explanation, children don’t feel heard or respected. They may obey in the moment out of fear, but they don’t internalize the lesson or respect the authority behind it.

A Fully Mediated Relationship

Our statistical analysis revealed that perceived legitimacy fully mediated the relationship between parental discipline and rule-violating behavior.

This means that parental discipline doesn’t directly influence whether adolescents break rules. Instead, discipline affects how kids think their parents are, and that determines whether they’ll follow the rules. It’s not about the strictness of the punishment, it’s about whether children believe their parents have the right to set those boundaries in the first place.

This finding flips conventional wisdom on its head. Many parents assume that stricter, harsher discipline will deter misbehavior. But our research suggests that what really matters is whether your approach to discipline helps your children see you as a fair and legitimate authority.

Beyond the Family: A Ripple Effect

Perhaps most importantly, we found that how adolescents view their parents’ legitimacy doesn’t just affect their behavior at home—it shapes their attitudes toward all authority figures. Young people who saw their parents as legitimate also tended to view teachers and police as more legitimate. Those who experienced harsh, unfair discipline at home were more cynical about authority across the board.

This makes sense when you consider that the parent-child relationship is children’s first experience with authority. It becomes a template for how they understand power and rules throughout their lives. If that first experience teaches them that authority is arbitrary, unfair, and based on force rather than legitimacy, those lessons carry forward into their interactions with teachers, police, and eventually their own children.

A Brazilian Context, A Universal Message

We conducted this research in São Paulo, Brazil—a city marked by significant inequality and frequent police violence. You might wonder whether findings from this context apply elsewhere.

In fact, the Brazilian setting makes our findings even more powerful. If procedural justice and legitimacy matter in a context where harsh treatment by authority figures is relatively common, they likely matter even more in contexts where expectations for fair treatment are higher. The basic principle appears to be universal: people—including children—are more likely to cooperate with authority when they believe that authority is legitimate and treats them fairly.

What Parents Can Do

So what’s the takeaway for parents? Here are some practical implications:

Focus on fairness over harshness. When your child breaks a rule, resist the urge to immediately escalate to yelling or threats. Instead, think about how to handle the situation fairly.

Explain, don’t just punish. Help your child understand why a rule exists and why their behavior was problematic. This builds understanding rather than just compliance.

Listen before deciding. Give your child a chance to explain what happened from their perspective. Even if you ultimately decide they were wrong, the fact that you listened matters.

Be consistent with clear rules. Our research showed that simply having clear parental rules was associated with greater legitimacy. Consistency and clarity help children understand boundaries.

Remember that respect goes both ways. You want your children to respect your authority, but that respect is earned through fair treatment, not demanded through force.

The Long View

Parenting is exhausting, and in the heat of the moment, harsh discipline can feel like the fastest way to restore order. But our research suggests this approach comes with hidden costs that accumulate over time. Each instance of unfair treatment chips away at your legitimacy in your child’s eyes, making future cooperation less likely.

The good news? You don’t need to be perfect. You just need to be consistently fair. When you make decisions thoughtfully, explain your reasoning, and treat your children with respect you build a foundation of legitimacy that makes everything else easier.

That foundation doesn’t just make your life as a parent easier right now. It shapes how your children will understand and interact with authority for the rest of their lives. In that sense, choosing procedural justice over harsh discipline isn’t just about preventing tonight’s argument. It’s about investing in the kind of adults your children will become.

Herbert Rodrigues is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Gerontology at Missouri State University. His research focuses on youth development, legal socialization, and juvenile delinquency, with particular attention to how young people from marginalized communities form attitudes toward authority and law. His work has appeared in the Journal of Research on Adolescence, British Journal of Criminology, International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, and Social Justice Research.

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Vanessa Delgado, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Washington State University

Today, the majority of American parents financially support their adult children. Estimates suggest that only a quarter of young adults are financially independent and rely on their parents for financial support well into their 30s. Parents and their adult children are more financially interconnected than ever before.

However, in immigrant families, financial support is reversed.

Studies suggest that young adults with immigrant parents are more likely to “give back” financially when compared to young adults with native-born parents, that is, parents who are born in the U.S. Adult children of immigrants feel a greater sense of obligation to support their parents and actively contribute to medical bills, rent or mortgage, household expenses, and even work-related costs. Notably, adult children of immigrants even “give back” when they no longer live in the parental home.

Existing research assumes children of immigrants’ financial contributions are uniform. But I find they’re not.

In a study published in Social Problems, I argue that parental immigration status shapes adult children of immigrants’ decisions to “give back” in immigrant families. I find that young adults with undocumented parents are more likely to give back financially than young adults with documented parents. I also find that the adult children of undocumented immigrants are more likely to give direct cash transfers, pay household bills, develop financial plans for homeownership and retirement, open credit cards on behalf of parents, take on debt, and worry about their parents’ financial futures.

There are several reasons why the adult children of undocumented immigrants feel more obligated to “give back.” First, undocumented immigrants are more likely to take on precarious jobs that pay very little and do not provide important benefits like healthcare, overtime, and sick leave. Second, undocumented immigrants are prohibited from accessing federal social services such as the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (i.e., Social Security) Program, Medicaid or Medicare, and Food Supplementary Programs (i.e., food stamps). Third, many banks and retirement insurance policies require a social security number to open an account. Fourth, undocumented immigrants are subject to deportation, which financially devastates families. The adult children of undocumented immigrants feel compelled to take on a greater financial role in the family because their undocumented parents experience significant barriers to economic security.

Overall, this study demonstrates that immigration status is a powerful axis of stratification among immigrant families. An undocumented immigration status transforms the needs of immigrant families, as it blocks pathways to upward mobility and positions adult children of immigrants to take on greater financial responsibilities. The imprint of parental undocumented status is likely to follow young adults throughout the life course as the absence of amnesty relief reaches almost four decades and their undocumented parents grow older without access to public safety nets.

For More Information, Please Contact:

Vanessa Delgado, Ph.D
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Washington State University
Email: vanessa.delgado@wsu.edu
Twitter: @VanessaD015

Discussions of trans youth and their families typically focus on relationships with parents: how parents allow, promote, or discourage particular gender identities and expressions. But a family is often more than parents, and relationships with other family members, such as siblings, can be especially important for young people. Correcting an over-emphasis on parents in existing research, my colleagues and I wanted to hear from trans youth about the role their siblings played in shaping their family experience. We interviewed 52 trans youth and asked them what their siblings did and did not do about their gender identities.

Our new study discovered trans youth often identify their siblings as supportive family members. In our interviews, we found that siblings affirm the identities of trans youth by being “chill” when they come out, using correct names and pronouns, and standing up to people who misgender their trans siblings. In turn, we highlight the roles siblings play in challenging cisnormativity—social norms that ignore or harm trans people.

“Chill” responses to coming out

Disclosing a transgender identity to family members is often distressing for youth, and fears of family rejection contribute to anxieties around coming out. Many of our interviewees particularly expected and experienced rejection or stigmatization from parents when they came out as transgender or nonbinary. But Leaf (18, Asian American, trans man, he/him) recalled that his oldest sister was “completely chill” since he told her he is a man. (All names here are pseudonyms participants chose for themselves.) Unlike when he came out to his parents, when Leaf came out to his sister, it was “like telling her, ‘Oh yeah, I dye my hair this color.’ ‘Okay.’”

Leaf is not the only one we talked with who has a “chill” sibling. As Lorren (18, Chicana, nonbinary, they/he/she) explained, “[my sister] knows who I am and she doesn’t care…As long as I’m me, it’s fine.” Leaf, Lorreen, and others we interviewed agree: they felt safe to be themselves around their siblings, because their siblings thought it was no big deal.

Navigating cisnormativity

For many of our participants, siblings also actively affirmed the gender identity of trans youth. For instance, siblings would call trans youth by their chosen name and pronouns. In doing so, they challenged cisnormativity within their family.

Siblings also stood up to parents when they tried to control how trans youth expressed their gender. When parents would criticize how their trans youth expressed themselves through hair styles, makeup, and clothing, siblings sometimes got involved. They discouraged parents from being too controlling and instead encouraged parents to respect the authority of trans youth themselves.

But in some families, outright challenges to cisnormativity did not feel safe to participants. Clay (16, Hispanic/White, trans man, he/him), who has a transphobic dad, explained that he asked his siblings and mom to deadname (use his name assigned at birth) and misgender him around their dad. And yet Clay’s siblings also use his chosen name and gender-affirming pronouns when their dad is not around, which Clay liked because “they know the truth” about his gender.

Trans youth and their siblings strategically navigate gender recognition to promote the safety of trans youth within their family of origin. Safety was an important concern for our participants, who all had negative or mixed relationships with their parents, because of the high rates of homelessness and housing instability for trans youth. But even when it is not safe to be completely out in a family, trans youth found partners in their siblings to feel less alone.

Standing up to others

The support trans youth reported receiving from their siblings also extended beyond the family. Siblings encouraged other people to resist cisnormativity by correcting individuals who deadname or misgender trans youth. For example, Devon (18, Hispanic, nonbinary, they/them) explained that it can be hard for people to use they/them pronouns, but their sisters “are very adamant about correcting people on my behalf.” Even though Devon doesn’t like correcting people because they are shy, their sisters would tell people “It’s they. They’re nonbinary. It’s they.” By correcting how other people refer to trans youth, siblings challenge the assumption that gender is binary and that everyone is cisgender.

What makes siblings important?

The family has been described by some gender scholars as a “gender factory” because of the important role parents play in how their children perform gender, either by reinforcing traditional forms of masculinity and femininity for children assigned male or female at birth, or by encouraging and embracing children’s nonconforming gender expressions or trans identities. The findings in our study highlight the part siblings might play in this “gender factory.” Because of the research design and sample selection in this study, nearly all participants had parents who were unsupportive or ambivalent (a mix of supportive and unsupportive) toward their transgender, nonbinary, or gender diverse identities. However, about 81% of our participants had at least one supportive sibling.

Our study encourages more attention to children and youth as agents of change in families. Understanding how gender norms shift requires looking beyond parents and recognizing the important role of siblings. Even though children and youth are often seen as disempowered within families, our findings show that siblings challenge cisnormativity and encourage others to resist oppressive gender norms.

Katherine Alexander (she/her) is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Rice University. Her research focuses on gender, health and medicine, and family. In particular, Katherine’s research examines the experiences of LGBTQ+ people in navigating and resisting cisnormativity and heteronormativity in areas like family and medicine using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Her research has been published in the Journal of Homosexuality, Social Science and Medicine, and Gender & Society. Follow her on Substack @ksalexander.