Over at Families as They Really Are, Erin Anderson has posted about men’s lagging uptake of family leave when it is available. Over here, we have prepared a round-up on how men are doing in families by looking back at papers from the Council on Contemporary Families.

An issue related to use (or not) of family leave has to do with the underlying security of jobs: In the CCF June 2013 Symposium on the Equal Pay Act, economist Heidi Shierholz wrote about the erosion of men’s wages in the past few decades. She explains, “In the late 1970s, after a long period of holding fairly steady, the gap in wages between men and women began improving. In 1979, the median hourly wage for women was 62.7 percent of the median hourly wage for men; by 2012, it was 82.8 percent. However, a big chunk of that improvement—more than a quarter of it—happened because of men’s wage losses, rather than women’s wage gains.” Read more here. more...

U.S. fathers are eager to be more involved in the care of their infants and young children—per much research and

many people’s personal accounts. The New York Times recently reported on men who have pursued legal action against their employers as a challenge to discriminatory policies and practices that prevent or limit the time they have available to utilize parental leave. Additionally, a recent survey of American fathers found an overwhelming majority, 89 percent, rated paid parental leave provided by an employer as an important workplace benefit. But consider this: there is also significant evidence that men are not likely to use parental leave, even when it is paid.

Because the leave mandated by the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act is unpaid (and simply unavailable to many Americans), many fathers can’t use it due to financial constraints. If paternity leave was paid, and resulted in no lost income, would men be more likely to take it? In our current economic climate, the answer is not so clear. My recent research on men in academia reveals that many fathers are uninterested, hesitant, or fearful that if they step away from their workplaces for most or all of the 15 weeks their employer offers in parental leave, their careers will suffer.

Some people think that academic institutions are paragons of research, discovery, and innovation that would, of course, be on the leading edge of progressive policies that would allow employees to balance the needs of work and family. This, however, is not the case. Few colleges and universities offer paid leave for mothers that doesn’t require the use of sick or vacation time to cover lost wages, and many schools actually violate federal law with their parental leave policies. Fewer still extend parental leave benefits to fathers. Furthermore, the tenure process puts pressure on young faculty, those who might be looking simultaneously at the tenure clock and their biological clocks. And the vulnerability of some staff positions or the demands on administrators means they are also not likely to take any extended leaves for the birth or adoption of a child.

Originally impressed by the decade long policy of gender neutral parental leave at the institution I recently studied, I ultimately found that policy and practices were seldom in alignment. Through interviews with men, both faculty and staff, employed in higher education within an institution with a generous parental leave policy, I learned that the opinions of colleagues and the needs of co-workers often took precedence over the wishes of a spouse and the needs of a new baby. In general, the men I interviewed still defined a significant part of their family role as that of provider, regardless of their partner’s employment status. Even though a policy of parental leave existed, and even though many of the women with whom they worked had utilized the leave, many fathers worried about the future consequences for their careers if they took any significant time out for parenting. Would co-workers resent them for taking the time off and possibly burdening colleagues with additional responsibilities? Would supervisors question their commitment to their careers or the institution? Would they lose future opportunities or rewards in their workplace if they took parental leave?

Without a doubt, we need more realistic and generous policies that allow workers, men and women, to meet the needs of their families and their workplaces. But people also need to use the policies that are available. The fact that this workplace offered a policy, but few men felt they could use it without suffering consequences, demonstrates the power of the workplace culture and the resistance many employees feel to rocking the boat, especially following a period of economic tumult. Moreover, when it is largely women who utilize parental leave, we reinforce gendered patterns of care work and continue to disadvantage women in the workplace.

These and other issues related to the individual and institutional factors that influence combining paid work and care work in academia are examined more closely in a collection I recently co-edited with Catherine Richards Solomon, Family Friendly Policies and Practices in Academe.

Erin K. Anderson is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Washington College. Her research focuses on the experiences of gender at individual, interactional, and institutional levels. Her most recent work appears in Family Friendly Policies and Practices in Academe.

One of the consistent findings of sociological research in recent decades has been that couples who had a child before getting married had substantially higher odds of divorcing than couples who married first. This held true even when researchers controlled for other factors that tend to distinguish such couples from those who marry directly—education, family background, race and ethnicity. But considering the tremendous increase in premarital cohabitation and childbearing over the past quarter century, and in light of new evidence that many other longstanding “laws” of marriage and divorce have been overturned (e.g., see “It’s Not Just Attitudes: Marriage Is Also Becoming More Egalitarian”; Are Individuals Who Marry at an Older Age Too Set in Their Ways to Make Their Marriages Work?), we set out to investigate whether this particular sociological “rule” still applies. more...

Sixty-seven million women in the U.S. are employed today, which represents nearly half of the entire labor force. According to a new policy brief from the Center for American Progress, 40 percent of American households have mothers who are sole or primary breadwinners and another 25 percent are co-breadwinners. Sixty-four percent of women with children under six are working, but when considering the staggering cost of child care, it is difficult to understand how they are coping.

Rising Cost of Child Care: The Status of Women in the States: 2015, released earlier this year by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, indicates that after correcting for inflation, the weekly out-of-pocket expenditures on child care for families with an employed mother almost doubled between 1985 and 2011, by which time 30 percent of the income of families below the poverty level was being spent on child care. In 2014, the cost of center-based infant care averaged over 40 percent of the state median income for single mothers and rivaled other budgetary items such as housing and transportation, according to a 2014 report by Child Care Aware. In every state, the cost of center-based care for two children exceeds the median cost of rent, and in at least 31 states and the District of Columbia, the price tag for a year of child care exceeds the cost of two semester’s tuition at a public university (Child Care Aware).

To cope, many families devise strategies that include multiple care arrangements and reliance on family members to care for young children. This trend was documented by sociologist Madonna Harrington Meyer (Grandmothers at Work, Juggling Families and Jobs 2014) who argued that in the wake of changing family structures, reduced support from the state, and increasingly limited access to affordable and flexible child care, today’s grandmothers are doing more care work with their grandchildren than their own mothers had done when they were raising families. It is not surprising, then, that a recent Pew Research survey revealed 72 percent of grandparents report they provide child care occasionally, and 22 percent report they do so regularly.

Government Support for Child Care: Reliable and affordable child care is an important factor in enabling mothers in low-wage jobs to maintain stable employment, and for low-income parents to sustain livable conditions for their children. Additionally, inadequate access to child care hampers economic growth because it prohibits the ability of parents to fully participate in the workforce. However, there is little remedy emerging from the government, and according to the CAP proposal:

“Many of the current work-family policies stem from a time period when families had a full-time, stay-at-home caregiver, typically the mother.”

The cost of full-time annual center-based care for infants varies from state to state. This is partially due to considerable variability in state regulatory policies and partially the result of distribution variability of the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG). The grant provides $5.3 billion to subsidize states’ costs in ensuring high-quality standards for child care and offsetting the cost of child care with vouchers to low-income families, which the states must partially match with their own funds. Each state is required to provide this assistance to families with incomes below 85 percent of state median income, yet they have considerable flexibility in determining extended eligibility. In 2013, the grant was extended to the lowest number of families in 15 years and the average subsidy – at $4,900 annually – covered only half the average cost of quality child care, leaving families with limited options. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, only 17 percent of potentially eligible families (under the federal CCDBG parameters) received any assistance, and the recent Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) report, Policy Solutions that Work for Low-Income People, reveals that in 2013, the total combined federal spending on child care fell to the lowest level since 2002.

The other government sponsored child care relief program is the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC), which provides an income adjustable portion (20-35 percent) of up to $3000 in child care expenses for up to two children ($6000 max). According to recently released data from the Department of Treasury, families with incomes over $100,000 benefit the most from the program, which provides benefits retroactively when families file their taxes in the spring – a delay low income families cannot wait for when managing tight month-to-month expenses. In addition, because the credit is non-refundable, the deduction cannot exceed the amount of taxes owed. This means families with incomes slightly above the poverty level or lower, whose other exemptions may zero out their income tax burden, are left unable to take advantage or the credit.

Proposed New Child Care Tax Deduction: Neither the Child Care and Development Block Grant or the Child or Dependent Care Tax Credit is enough to close the gap on assisting families with the unmanageable cost of child care. Therefore, Carmel Martin, CAP’s Vice-President of Policy, argues:

“It’s time for a pathway that will significantly expand access to high-quality child care for those who need it most. When we talk about an inclusive economy, we need to make sure that all parents—men and women—can participate in the workforce.”

The proposed policy (High-Quality Child Care Tax Credit) would make provisions for families earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level and provide up to $14,000 per child under age three. Families would contribute up to 12 percent of their income toward child care fees on a sliding scale. The size of the tax credit reflects the cost of high-quality child care, builds in higher wages for providers, and would be paid directly to high-quality providers selected by parents. Parents with unpredictable work schedules could use providers that met health and safety standards if a high-quality child care provider were not available during a needed time. The proposed policy would make high-quality and affordable child care a reality to millions of American families for the first time and increase economic growth through increased labor force participation. Furthermore, the added benefit of early education available from high-quality child care providers could ensure the long term security of a strong future workforce.

Download the Center for American Progress policy brief here.

Perry Threlfall is a recent graduate of the doctoral program in sociology at George Mason University. She studies gender, race, and structural mobility through the lens of policy and practice, particularly for single mother families. You can read her occasional blog at the Single Mother Sociologist.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s report on income, poverty and health insurance coverage, released today, reflects the continued uncertainty for U.S. families that has persisted since the Great Recession. Year-to-year changes in most trends were modest or not statistically significant—except in the case of health insurance coverage—but the longer-term trends are important.

Specifically:

• Household income has still not recovered to its pre-recession levels. In inflation-adjusted 2014 dollars, household income is now $53,657, which is down 6.5% from the pre-recession peak of $57,357. Although there has been improvement since the lowest level in 2011-2012, this remains a substantial loss—and source of uncertainty—for the typical U.S. household, even with the steady job growth of the last six years.

• Similarly, poverty rates for families remain higher than they were before the recession. In 2014, 21.1% of children lived below the poverty line—up from 17.4% in 2007. For families overall, the poverty rate stands at 12.7%, which is 1.9% higher than it was in 2007.

• The most important good news, continuing recent trends, may be the increase in health insurance coverage. Insurance coverage (from all sources) has increased 1.8% for children, and 5.9% for the total population, since 2010—now standing at 94% for children and 89.6% for the total population. This is generally attributed to the expansion of insurance coverage provided by Obamacare.

Despite strong job growth, the recovery remains a mixed one for U.S. families, with significant uncertainty and hardship a persistent part of family life for many people. However, with household income down and poverty up, the expansion of health insurance coverage may be easing the strain for families, helping to mitigate one important source of uncertainty and potential crisis—the costs associated with a sudden, or ongoing, health condition requiring expensive care.The expansion of health insurance coverage may be easing the strain on families, helping mitigate one source of uncertainty and potential crisis.

Looking for some perspectives on parenting? Here are a few articles to revisit.

In January, Sandra Hofferth presented to CCF a briefing report on Child-Rearing Norms and Practices in Contemporary American Families. Hofferth, Professor, Family Science, at University of Maryland’s School of Public Health, notes that although a recent Census Report had found some differences by family type, most American parents—married, divorced, or single—read to their children, monitor their children’s media youth, and engage their children in extra-curricular activities. Revisit Hofferth’s report here for how parents are doing, by the numbers.

In August, Michelle Janning, a sociologist at Whitman College and CCF Co-Chair, shared a three-part series on parenting: her interest was in overparenting and cross cultural metaphors.

Overprotective Parenting, Back-to-School Edition

American Helicopters, Danish Curling Brooms, and British Lawnmowers

Anxiety, Social Class, and a Gallery of Parenting Advice

The commercialization of everyday life usually gives me a headache, but I guess I can always take a Tylenol. After all, as Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who directed Tylenol’s recent #HowWeFamily advertising spots, put it, the “family brand” is “helping to dispel the fears around difference,” to “get people to understand diversity” by introducing them to a wide range of families in videos that show that “at the end of the day, no matter the gender of the parents, the color of the family’s skin, the religion that they come from, the background that they come from, all of these families have the same concerns. They want what’s best for their kid, they want to care for each other and create a home that’s safe and happy.” And sometimes, of course, they need a decent painkiller.

The Tylenol spots—of immigrant families, of mixed-race families, adoptive families, gay-parent families, military families, step-families, stay-at-home dad/working-mom families, and so on—are charming, well produced, and surprisingly rich and moving. The parents, some of whom are also celebrities, are appealing and articulate, the kids are cute, and the politics are unapologetically liberal. The introductory video takes direct aim at old notions of what and who makes a family, offering the company’s “modern take on the Norman Rockwell family.” It’s an easy target, but still.

“When were you first considered a family? When you fell in love? When you got married? When you had kids?” a kind woman’s voice asks over soft music and images of straight couples holding hands, getting married, holding kids. Then, over similar images of same-sex couples and mixed-race families: “When did you first fight to be considered a family? When you fell in love? When you got married? When you had kids? Family isn’t defined by who you love, but how.” (Pause, then: “Tylenol.”) Many of the participants challenge the idea of a “normal” family, while also asserting that, as one of them puts it, “We are, at heart, all the same.”

That people have families in a wide variety of ways, throughout history and across cultures, is well established if also still widely ignored. These Tylenol images, along with TV shows like Modern Family, are part of an ongoing demotion of the ideology of One True Family (married, heterosexual man and woman with kids), and an emerging celebration of family diversity, in popular culture —even as the legal system lags behind. That’s great, and certainly better than the stigma, discrimination, and sanctimony which nontraditional families still routinely face.

Still, it strikes me as significant that the Tylenol campaign, like the similar family representations that have been popping up, downplays the ways these families move differently through the world, glosses over the origins of the new kinds of families, like my own, that they celebrate, and focuses on only particular forms of non-traditional family. One might wonder, for instance, about the experiences of the white parent of kids of color in the face of racism, immigrant families in the midst of Trump-driven nativism, same-sex parents whose children participate in a fiercely heterosexist culture. One might wonder, too, why we don’t get sunny videos about women who chose to be, or have found themselves as, single mothers, or about multi-parent-by-design families, or #HowWeFamilyWithoutMoney. One might wonder about the birth families, egg and sperm donors, surrogates, and ex-spouses whose lives, labor, and emotions were part of the family creation process but who are invisible in #HowWeFamily. One might wonder about those marginalized members of our broader family—in the communal membership sense of “family” long used by queer people—who can’t, don’t, or don’t want to benefit from the respectability garnered by participation in conventional marriage and family institutions. One might wonder, that is, whether the demolition of the idea that there is a single “normal” family requires the erasure of the ways social inequality shapes family creation and family life.

We really shouldn’t expect advertising to show that to us, of course. That’s not Tylenol’s job. Sometimes corporate actions contribute to progressive social change—in this case, when their branding interests are served by presenting non-traditional families as symbols of liberal tolerance—and oftentimes not. But we should wonder, and we should talk, about the less comfortable, less pretty inequities that are an inherent part of family-making old and new. That family diversity has become a corporate marketing tool can be flattering to some of us. But buyer beware.

Joshua Gamson (@joshgamson) is Professor of Sociology at the University of San Francisco and a Fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. His most recent book is Modern Families: Stories of Extraordinary Journeys to Kinship.

I recently stole time away from a research conference in Chicago to visit the Hull House Museum. After looking through all of the exhibits, I made my way to the tiny museum shop and was mesmerized by a wall of posters containing the lyrics of songs sung by Hull House residents. These were the songs residents sang at rallies and protests while fighting for the many social reformations advocated by Jane Addams and her colleagues. Although we take many of the accomplishments of these brave crusaders for granted today, the lyrics to the song “Eight Hours” seemed especially apposite to contemporary society – so I snapped a picture and posted it to the Facebook pages of friends who are active in the labor justice movement.

“Eight hours for work. Eight hours for rest. Eight hours for what we will.”

The eight hour day movement lasted over 100 years and incited violent clashes between workers and police, finally ending with the passage of the Fair Standards Labor Act of 1938. Like the Hull House residents and union activists of the industrial era, millions of workers today are fighting to improve labor conditions by demanding a raise in the current federal minimum wage threshold of $7.25 per hour. Politicians and the public are at odds in their agreement over the economic and social outcomes a national increase would incur, but the implications for working families should not be ignored. It is impossible for a family to survive on the current minimum wage, even if there are two parents working full time.

The feasibility of financial security with a minimum wage job is even slimmer for single parent families. I used the National Center on Children in Poverty’s Basic Needs Budget Calculator to determine the hourly wage a single mother with a 5 and 9 year old in Sioux City would require to maintain a basic household budget at 215% of the poverty level, and it turns out she would need to make $18 per hour at 40 hours per week (or an eight hour day) to meet the most basic budgetary needs. The same mother in Chicago would need $24 per hour to meet a basic needs budget at 278% of the poverty level.

“The beasts that graze the hillside, and the birds that wander free, in the life that God has meted, have a better life than we.”

Since it is impossible to survive on a full time minimum wage income and employers are unwilling to pay the time and a half overtime rate for work exceeding 40 hours (as required by the Fair Labor Standards Act), many parents report working two, and even three, jobs – putting in 60 and 70 hour weeks at multiple locations. So, what happens when an employer offers a single mother $455 a week as salary (or what amounts to $11.38 per hour for a 40-hour week), an important sounding title, and the time and cost saving benefit of commuting to just one job? It seems like a dream opportunity that will reduce the psychological and physical toll of working multiple jobs, right? Not exactly…

Overtime restrictions. A full time salary of $455 (or more) a week designates a worker as exempt, meaning they are not entitled to the same federally mandated overtime pay as hourly wage workers, as outlined in a recent fact sheet from the Economic Policy Institute. Therefore, the single mother in Sioux City or Chicago working a 60 hours between two minimum wage jobs would become a “supervisor” and bring in only $20 per week more than she did with two minimum wage jobs. She will still not be able to meet her family’s basic needs budget, and she will no longer have the option of taking a second job to help make ends meet. Taking this all too common scenario into account, it’s clear that a raise in the minimum wage will not lift the boat for all low-paid workers.

“Oh hands and hearts are weary, and homes are heavy with
dole; If our life’s to be filled with drudgery, what need of a human soul?”

The Fair Labor Standards Act also regulates the parameters of what defines an overtime exemption, and those standards have not been updated since 2004. In order to remedy this and bring the regulations current, the Department of Labor recently released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that would increase the weekly salary requirement for exempt status to $970, which equals $50,440 annually.

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research released an August report that found 2.7 million of the total 3.2 million estimated workers who would be affected by the approval of this proposal are women. Single mothers in particular will gain greater financial security – with 44 percent of the currently overtime pay-exempt single mothers in line to earn premium pay for long work hours. What this means is that the single mother in Sioux City or Chicago with the $455 a week managerial position will be paid overtime for working more than 40 hours per week – or she will put in an eight hour day and have discretionary time to work another job or spend more time caring for her children.

“Should he, to whom the Maker, his glorious image gave, the meanest of his creatures crouch, a bread and butter slave?”

The press has been covering the slow death of the 40-hour week for over a year, and the eight hour day movement continues. While my attendance the research conference motivated me to get busy with my research, my visit to the Hull House inspired me to dig deeper. I needed to let the voices of the past remind me that the songs of justice never fade; they simply change their tune. I owe it to those who went before me to sing with the same commitment.

“Let the shout ring down the valleys, and echo from every hill.

Eight hours for work. Eight hours for rest. Eight hours for what we will.”

Public comment. Friday, September 4^th is the end of the required 60 day public comment period on the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM). If you would like to contribute to the song, your comments can be submitted here.

//Read a fact sheet about the proposed changes from the Economic Policy Institute here.//

//Learn about the proposed changes to the regulation defining the exemptions for “white collar” employees here.//

Perry Threlfall completed her PhD in Sociology at George Mason University in May 2015. Her research focuses on the institutional and structural forces that influence inequality and mobility in single mother families. You can read her occasional blog at the Single Mother Sociologist found at smsresearch.net.  

August 26 was Women’s Equality Day. Established in 1971, the day commemorates passage of the 19^th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. But political equality did not begin to extend to economic equality or marital equality until the 1970s, despite passage of the Civil Rights and Equal Pay Acts in the mid-1960s. As late as 1975, women earned only 60 cents for every dollar a man earned, and no state had yet repealed the laws that gave a man immunity from raping his wife.

Since then, women’s progress in upward occupational mobility and earnings has been dramatic. Dual-earner marriages are now the norm, women now outpace men in educational achievement, and growing numbers of wives out-earn their husbands.

For many years, however, women’s gains seemed to destabilize marriages and threaten family formation. As women entered the workforce, marriage rates fell and divorce rates soared. Fertility plummeted, and policy-makers worried that career-oriented women were turning their backs on motherhood entirely. Some early studies suggested that when wives got their husbands to do housework, they were more likely to get beaten up (Fuchs 1988), or at the very least, to have less happy sex lives.

Many of these developments, however, were products of a transitional period of adjustment, especially marked in the 1970s and 1980s, when women embraced gender equality more quickly than did men and experienced widespread discontent with the persistence of traditional marriage and family arrangements.

The gender revolution is nowhere complete, but there is now evidence that the further progress of the gender revolution is in many cases resulting in a certain restabilization of family life.

• In the US and many other countries, divorce rates have fallen among couples who express the greatest support for gender equality. Women’s higher education and earnings now seem to help rather than hurt their marriage chances.
• In Sweden, women with a high career orientation are now more likely to enter a union than other women (Thomson and Bernhardt 2010). And in other countries with strong work-family support systems (Finland and Norway as well as Sweden), dual-earner marriages are now less likely to divorce than male breadwinner ones (Cooke et al 2013).
• In US marriages formed in the early 1990s and since, couples who share housework report higher marital quality and better sexual relationships than those with a more traditional division of labor. And even among older men (ages 51-92) those with egalitarian gender role attitudes report much higher levels of marital happiness than otherwise comparable men with traditional attitudes (Kaufman 2006).

Men’s increasing involvement in child care and housework (Sullivan, et al. 2014) seems to be critical here.

• An analysis of 13 industrialized countries (Sevilla-Sanz 2010) found that men with more egalitarian attitudes were more likely to form a romantic union and particularly to cohabit than men with less egalitarian attitudes.
• Among cohabitors, men who were involved in the care of their children (providing care when the mother was absent, taking children to daycare and medical appointments) were more likely to make the transition to marriage than those less involved (Kotila 2014).

In fact, such men’s involvement seems to make women more willing to have children.

• Studies show that when men are more involved with their children after the birth of a first child, a couple is more likely to have a second child. This is the case both in Sweden (Goldscheider, Bernhardt and Brandén 2013) and the US. In the US, the big difference was between the most sharing couples and those who shared inconsistently (81 percent of the former had a 2^nd child compared with only 55 percent of the latter [Torr and Short 2006]).
• This may be why fertility patterns in Europe are changing: In the 1970s, the countries in Europe with the lowest levels of women’s employment (primarily in southern Europe) had the highest fertility; by the 1990s this relationship had reversed, with the countries of northern Europe, which have the highest levels of women’s employment, also having the highest fertility.

References:

Fuchs, Victor R. 1988. Women’s Quest for Economic Equality, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Kotila, Letitia. 2014. “The role of father involvement in the union transitions of cohabiting parents.” Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Population Association of America, Boston, MA.

Kaufman, Gayle. 2006. “Gender and marital happiness in later life,” Journal of Family Issues 27(6):735-757.

Torr, Berna Miller and Susan E. Short. 2004. “Second births and the second shift: A research note on gender equity and fertility,” Population and Development Review 30:109-130.

Goldscheider, Frances, Eva Bernhardt, and Maria Brandén. 2013. “Domestic gender equality and childbearing in Sweden,” Demographic Research 29 (40):1097-1126.

Cooke, Lynn, et al. 2013. “Labor and love: Wives’ employment and divorce risk in its socio-political context,” Social Politics 20(4):482-509.

Sullivan, Oriel, Francesco Billari, and Evrim Altintas. 2014. “Father’s changing contributions to child care and domestic work in very low fertility countries: The effect of education,” Journal of Family Issues 35(8):1048-1065.

Sevilla-Sanz, Almudena. 2010. “Household division of labor and cross-country differences in household formation rates,” Journal of Population Economics 23: 225-249.

Released originally on August 25, 2015.

Part 3 of the Overparenting Series

My previous posts offered an introduction to metaphors used in three different national contexts in order to lay a foundation for my claim that both the concept of overparenting and the words used to describe it are culturally constructed. I also introduced the historical and disciplinary origins of the metaphors. The next paragraphs identify important sociological threads that tie together the obsession with American helicopter parents, Danish curling parents, and British lawnmower parents.

Anxiety, Social Class, and Overprotection. Despite the differences between the metaphors, all of them are about parents who have the means to enact them. In most of the sources referenced here, authors are quick to point out that it is primarily affluent parents who are transforming into helicopters, sweepers, and lawnmowers. The effort put forth for the sake of protecting children and preparing them for the world is recognizable as a form of cultural capital that only the select few have the resources to enact (and the resources to read and talk about), something that sociologist Annette Lareau has discussed in her work on middle class parents’ efforts to intentionally cultivate skills in their children. But even as affluent parents make the efforts to protect their children, the ideals associated with being a “good parent” spread to all parents regardless of class.

In addition to the class-based popularity of overprotective parenting, the metaphors connote anxiety in a sea of saturation of bad, good, and in-between information. As sociologist Margaret Nelson has written in her book Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times, today’s parents, especially ones with means, are overwhelmed with metaphors, messages, and scary clip art about effective parenting. The metaphors lead to a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t world. Parents feel inadequate in their seemingly excessive (class-based) efforts to try to curtail the perceived dangers that lurk around the corner for their children. And feel anxious about whether their impulse to protect is messed up, too.

If we think about the metaphors used, they are meant to convey protection, but they can create unforeseen problems. Indeed, these layers of action that the images suggest is why metaphors are particularly compelling, and why the types of parents they represent can be deemed as both good and bad. The helicopter can rescue, but it can also blow away the prized scarf. The sweeper can smooth a path, but also carve too shallow a spot in the ice that leads the stone to the edge. The lawnmower can clear the blades, but also propel itself into the flowerbed where the spiders live. The metaphors evoke the infinity of “what if” moments that could make anyone have butterflies in the stomach, in terms of both success and failure of the image. Maybe that scarf is ugly. Maybe the stone needs to find the edge before it gets back on track. Maybe spiders are interesting creatures to spend time getting to know. In other words, the collateral damage may be harmless, or it may even simply be not harmful at all to begin with.

Admittedly, creating the best designed fuselage, studying the science of ice brushing, and inventing a stop button on a self-propelled lawnmower are reasonable pursuits to enhance actual helicopter flying, curling, and lawnmowing. But these pursuits done in the name of preventing imaginary things or things inaccurately defined as negative, or done so that parents can have yet more scary imagery in their anxiety arsenal, doesn’t seem to be a good use of time and resources.

MY VIEW: We spend time thinking about the quality of other people’s parenting because other people’s children may affect our child; because thinking about others’ parenting affects how we assess our own parenting; and because it matters beyond our families to locations as large as the nation-state. After all, it’s not hard to find opinion pieces on how a particular country is faring, given the characteristics of the youngest generation. Or on how some parents who are trying to instill the asset of autonomy in their children are reported as UNDERdoing it, thus offering commentary on the role of the state, the neighborhood, and the voyeuristic role of other parents. In other words, the act of assessing the quality of other people’s parenting is contextualized by important sociological factors. What I hope to add is that the words used to describe all of this also need context, too.

Art Gallery of Advice. At the risk of subjecting myself to my own critique about both parenting advice and social class inequality, I offer here another metaphor. But this time, the parent and the child are not metaphors. The parenting advice is. What if each parenting advice column and conversation was an art piece hanging on a wall? What if the world in which parents try to operate is the art gallery? There’s a reason art galleries allow a lot of space between pieces. The space allows the viewer to absorb the art with little distraction and enough time, so that she can uncover the art piece’s story and context, and can decide whether it’s worth looking at longer, ignoring, or obsessing over until she buys a copy for her own home.

Why not take a step back and look into the entire gallery, in order to recognize that we often find ourselves in front of a cluttered wall of parenting advice? Wall clutter that contains different artists competing for the most clever use of metaphorical imagery or best use of genre or media, and different nations competing over who has submitted the best art. Why not take a step back and look at the gallery-goers, recognizing that their artistic preferences are all influenced heavily by their cultural context? Heck, why not recognize that art galleries are classed, and not everyone has time to visit one or care whether it exists?

Imagine a gallery where there was no white space, and the space between crowded pieces was filled with mirrors etched with superimposed scary images. Like viewers in an art gallery who are well-served with calm space between art pieces, parents can benefit from less, not more. Let’s stop making so much clutter, or at least help viewers realize that they can ignore it and just focus on the art that brings them joy and just the right amount of challenge. I encourage people to remember that actual children and parents are not metaphors. What I would like us to realize is that our preoccupation with turning them into metaphors is very real, and could use a careful calm stroll through the gallery of information so that we can best choose what art makes us feel the best about our amazing (and yet, totally mundane) role as parents.

Michelle Janning is Professor of Sociology at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, and serves as Co-Chair of the Council on Contemporary Families. She has taught and served as a pedagogical consultant for the Sociology and Child Development and Diversity programs at the Danish Institute for Study Abroad. She also let her son ride public transportation in Copenhagen by himself when he was eight years old. More about her can be found at www.michellejanning.com.