{"id":2498,"date":"2021-04-27T07:09:40","date_gmt":"2021-04-27T12:09:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/?p=2498"},"modified":"2021-06-02T15:01:44","modified_gmt":"2021-06-02T20:01:44","slug":"its-my-responsibility-nobody-else-doing-motherhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/2021\/04\/27\/its-my-responsibility-nobody-else-doing-motherhood\/","title":{"rendered":"“It\u2019s My Responsibility, Nobody Else”: Doing Motherhood"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Image by marcinjozwiak<\/a> from Pixabay<\/a><\/i><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Women have been far more likely<\/a> to leave the labor force and to juggle working and child care than men have been over the past year. And women\u2019s earnings, career prospects, and mental health are suffering<\/a>. Of course, historically, women have done much more child care<\/a> than men have. Inequality in the time fathers and mothers spend caring for children has persisted<\/a>, though in recent decades, there\u2019s been some movement\u2014men have been doing more child care than they used to, often seen as an improvement for children and for their mothers. But the COVID pandemic has erased many of these gains.<\/p>\n

In our research<\/a> published last year using data from the Time, Love, and Cash in Couples with Children Study<\/a>[1]<\/u><\/a> (TLC3, connected to the Fragile Families & Child Wellbeing Study<\/a>), Laryssa Mykyta and I found that some mothers described themselves as solely responsible for having and caring for their children, even to the exclusion of the children\u2019s fathers. Some mothers spoke about their obligations related to their children in this way even when the fathers were involved in their children\u2019s lives\u2014in some cases, even when those men were sitting right next to them!<\/p>\n

I have written for this blog before<\/a> about people\u2019s reluctance to ask for help from family members. Some participants believed that expenses related to parenthood are the parents\u2019 responsibility\u2014more specifically, the mothers\u2019 responsibility.<\/p>\n

Lanetta[2]<\/a>, a married Chicago mother, said during a couple interview with her husband Jerry, that she got no help for expenses from family, and \u201cI try to take care of that by myself. My motto is, \u2018I don\u2019t take money for nothing\u2019\u2026 Basically, I figure, [my son is] my responsibility . . . So basically I\u2019ve been doing everything for him, by myself.\u201d Lanetta was married to the man sitting beside her, the father of the son she spoke of.<\/p>\n

Melissa also noted during a couple interview that she avoided asking for help from family members \u201cBecause it\u2019s my responsibility, nobody else,\u201d even while the father of her child, Mike, sat beside her.<\/p>\n

Rosa said, \u201cLike my kids are my responsibility, so for me to actually ask for something, for anything, for my kids, it has to be that I really have nowhere else to get it, and it\u2019s my only choice.\u201d Rosa also referred to the responsibility for her children being hers alone.<\/p>\n

These mothers described sole responsibility for their children, even when married to the fathers of those children, and even when the children\u2019s fathers sat next to them in the couple interviews. It may seem surprising that mothers would say this in front of their children\u2019s fathers, but when we think about the context of long-held ideas about responsibility for care and supervision of children, it makes perfect sense.<\/p>\n

U.S. society doesn\u2019t value child care<\/a>, a fact rooted in deeply entrenched sexism and racism. Americans tend to resist the notion of universal child care provided outside of the family unit, and inside the family unit, it\u2019s mothers<\/a> who people expect to provide care for their children. The reasoning centers<\/a> in part on moral arguments and gendered expectations of what mothers should do, and in part on a pervasive individualistic ideology<\/a> that is fundamental to United States society.<\/p>\n

Women have internalized these notions about their obligations as mothers, and have found these ideas validated by economic realities. Center-based child care has long been prohibitively expensive<\/a>, leading some parents\u2014usually mothers<\/a>\u2014to leave the workforce<\/a> as a result. During the pandemic, many school-age children have been learning at home, adding to parents\u2019 need to provide care and supervision during the workday. And when child care is unavailable as it has been for many families over the last year, it\u2019s been women who\u2019ve juggled work responsibilities and parenting to care for their children. And it\u2019s women who too often feel like failures<\/a> when they can\u2019t do it all.<\/p>\n

All parents of young children struggle to balance work and family, and the COVID-19 pandemic has presented an additional challenge for working mothers. Those who cannot work from home have few if any child care options, while those who have been working from home while parenting full-time feel the competing pressures of career and family more intensely than they probably ever have. The situation is not tenable. But maybe these negative consequences can lead us to recognize that child care is an essential piece<\/a> of the economy, and therefore lead to the meaningful structural policy changes<\/a> we have long needed, to finally address enduring systemic inequalities and to help women\u2014as caregivers and as workers.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> TLC3 consists of four waves of interviews with 150 parents in 75 couples (some married, some not married) in three cities, first interviewed shortly after the birth of a child. Both mothers and fathers participated in in-depth interviews individually and as a couple in each of the four waves from 2000-2005.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> All names used are pseudonyms.<\/p>\n

Joan Maya Mazelis is the author of Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties among the Poor<\/a> (NYU Press 2017). She is an associate professor of sociology<\/a> in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice<\/a> at Rutgers University\u2013Camden<\/a>, an affiliated scholar at Rutgers\u2013Camden\u2019s Center for Urban Research and Education<\/a>, a Faculty Affiliate<\/a> at the University of Wisconsin\u2019s Institute for Research on Poverty<\/a>, and co-leader<\/a> of the New Jersey\/Philadelphia chapter<\/a> of the Scholars Strategy Network<\/a>, an organization of scholars that connect their research to legislatures, civic organizations, and the media. Follow her @JoanieMazelis<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Women have been far more likely to leave the labor force and to juggle working and child care than men have been over the past year. And women\u2019s earnings, career prospects, and mental health are suffering. Of course, historically, women have done much more child care than men have. Inequality in the time fathers and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2095,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2095"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2498"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2528,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2498\/revisions\/2528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}