Reprinted from the Council on Contemporary Families Press Release

AUSTIN, TX – April 20, 2023

A briefing paper released today from the Council on Contemporary Families, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic about Health Concerns and US Mothers’ Employment”, summarizes new research on how mothers’ concerns about community COVID-19 transmission affected their labor force participation and suggests that such concerns may exacerbate gender inequality as the threat of new pandemics and infectious diseases rises.

In an article published in Socius, professors Daniel Carlson (University of Utah), Priya Fielding-Singh (University of Utah), Richard Petts (Ball State University), and Kristi Williams (The Ohio State University) used data from 263 partnered US mothers who were employed prior to the pandemic to examine an overlooked reason why mothers’ labor force participation was affected by Covid-19, independent of work layoffs, school closures, and other external factors. They discovered that mothers’ worries about COVID-19 reduced the likelihood of their staying employed, and even when they stayed employed, led them to work fewer hours per week.

Carlson and colleagues also identified two key reasons why worried mothers participated less in the paid work force:

• Children of mothers who worried more about COVID-19 transmission spent less time at school or daycare and more time at home.
• Having children at home increased mothers’ stress, constrained their ability to work, and reduced their work hours.

Since mothers typically take primary emotional and physical responsibility for managing family health, recent and future surges in serious transmittable disease — not limited to COVID-19, but including flu, RSV, and strep throat — may negatively affect mothers’ job prospects and career advancement.

As Carlson and colleagues summarize the takeaway: “If we fail to address mothers’ concerns about COVID and other infectious diseases as they arise, current and future pandemics will continue to dampen mothers’ employment and have substantial consequences for gender equality.”

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION

To contact lead author Daniel Carlson, email him at Daniel.Carlson@fcs.utah.edu.

LINKS

Brief report:  https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2023/04/18/lessons-from-the-covid-19-pandemic-about-health-concerns-and-us-mothers-employment/
Press release: https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2023/04/18/lessons-from-the-covid-19-pandemic-about-health-concerns-and-us-mothers-employment-press-release/

ABOUT CCF

The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the University of Texas-Austin, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions.

The Council helps keep journalists informed of new and forthcoming research on gender and family-related issues via the CCF Network. To locate researchers or request copies of previous research briefs, please contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, at coontzs@msn.com, cell 360-556-9223.

Follow us! @CCF_Families and https://www.facebook.com/contemporaryfamilies

Dr Hannah McCann is a senior lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. Hannah’s academic work sits within the field of Critical Femininity Studies, with research on topics including queer femininities, beauty culture, and queer fandom. She is the author of Queering Femininity: Sexuality, Feminism and the Politics of Presentation (Routledge) and co-author of Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures (Bloomsbury). Her most recent book is Emotions, Bodies, and Identities in the Hair and Beauty Salon: Caring Beyond Skin Deep (Bloomsbury).  You can find her on BlueSky handle: https://bsky.app/profile/binarythis.bsky.social & on her Website: https://www.hannahmccann.com.au/

AMW: One of your central findings is that salon work functions as a form of care work. How does recognizing emotional talk, bodily touch, and aesthetic labor as care challenge dominant ways that both the beauty industry and care work itself are typically understood and valued?

HM: It is anecdotally known that the hair/beauty salon can often feel like a therapeutic space. People can vent about their lives at the same time as being physically pampered and aesthetically transformed. Along these lines, many of the salon workers that I interviewed for this project referred to themselves as “makeshift therapists” or similar. This is not to suggest that going to a salon is the same as seeing an actual therapist. However, to understand the salon as a site of care takes seriously the notion that salons can be profoundly meaningful in people’s lives, and that workers deserve better training and recognition for the work that they do. 

As part of this research, I worked in a hair salon for a period, and I can definitively say that everything that happens in life gets discussed in the salon. From births to deaths and everything in between, workers are privy to the intimate details and textures of life. These disclosures happen while bodies are being touched and managed, often intimate places (like the head) rarely touched by others, and an aesthetic transformation is occurring that impacts how one’s inner sense of self aligns with one’s outer appearance. 

Indeed, if we ignore the care dynamics that occur in this space, we resist the idea that salon workers out to be better trained and supported to deal with client disclosures around issues like domestic violence or mental health. People tend to enter the industry very young, and we essential dump them in the deep end in this intensely social, bodily place, with no support, and no guidance on how to refer people to the right pathways for help. Without better support, workers in this industry are at high risk of burnout. 

Feminists have long highlighted how care work is often feminised work (largely expected to be performed by women), and how it is socially, culturally, and economically undervalued. However, in Western feminism there is a strong tendency to define beauty practices as fundamentally oppressive and patriarchal, such that feminists have largely stayed away from the site of the salon. The few feminist studies on salons that do exist tend to emphasise the emotional aspects and downplay the importance of aesthetics to the care dynamic. I think we can adopt a more ambivalent approach to beauty that at once recognises the oppressive elements of beauty norms, at the same time as understanding how surfaces/aesthetics can be a way to feel affirmed in one’s identity – a point which becomes more obvious in accounts from queer, trans and gender diverse people, about aesthetics – and that workers getting this “right” can feel like a form of care.

AMW: You show that salons are sites where identities are actively curated rather than merely expressed. What did you find about the kinds of identities that are most often supported, stabilized, or constrained through salon interactions, and what does this tell us about broader cultural norms around gender, respectability, and selfhood?

HM: One of the key things to note is that there is a wide diversity of types of salons, what salons offer, who is working there, and what communities they connect to and cater for. So, for example, in recent years queer salons catering the LGBTIQ+ community have become more ubiquitous. Having said that, many of the salon clients that I interviewed talked about times in salons when they experienced feeling misunderstood by salon workers or sometimes directly discriminated against, especially when it came to issues of gender, race, and sexuality. 

The hair and beauty in Australia would do well to better train workers around diversity, for example, when it comes to gendered expectations about hair, different hair types, and diverse identities broadly. This is not to say that you can train away homophobia and racism, etc, but there is space to intervene at a more fundamental level to challenge and change assumptions some workers coming into the industry might have about bodies and identities. Having said all this, despite some negative experiences, the clients that reported such stories to me also each had vivid examples of times they had been affirmed in salons. I gathered many testimonies about how significant these interactions can be, both positive and negative. 

AMW:  The book highlights a tension between clients’ experiences of salons as “self-care” and the labor performed by workers. Based on your findings, what are the consequences of framing salon visits as self-care for how we socially, economically, and emotionally value the workers who provide this care?

HM: This is such an important question — I found time and time again that clients talk about care in the salon as “self-care”, which comes directly from a wellness discourse. This wellness discourse is a distortion of much earlier radical Black organising which argued for self-care as a political act. Self-care has since been transformed into a highly individualistic/neoliberal pursuit. Of course, many salons also use this discourse! 

The problem with this language is that it hides the fact that someone is doing the work. If you get a haircut, or a manicure, or a facial in a salon, this involves a worker or workers working on your body, responding to your emotional disclosures, and translating your aesthetic desires. In a successful salon interaction, a worker is managing a lot. If it feels rejuvenating, if you feel cared for, it is because someone else has laboured to achieve this for you. 

As I analyse in my book, media representations of salon workers frequently represent them pejoratively as unskilled “bimbos”, but being good at salon work involves this unique combination of touch/talk/and aesthetic management that really is highly skilled. I hope that people engage with my work and think differently about what salons do and can mean in people’s lives, and that the industry does better to systematically support workers to do their work safely. 

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 the Texas Population Research Center

Introduction

More than 25% of adults age 65 and over fall every year in the United States. Among older adults who fall, approximately 40% experience two or more falls in the same year. These falls negatively impact older adults’ mobility, function and independent living. Falls are also the leading cause of injury deaths among U.S. older adults. In 2018 alone, falls and related injuries among older adults resulted in an estimated 3 million emergency department visits, more than 950,000 hospitalizations, and approximately 32,000 deaths.

Falls often result from a combination of risk factors. These include physical or functional risk factors, such as impaired balance and gait, pain, overall frailty; medical risk factors, such as multiple chronic health conditions, taking multiple medications, especially psychotropic medications; and psychological risk factors, such as depression, anxiety, and fear of falling. Other factors include sensory and cognitive risk factors and environmental circumstances (for example, trip hazards in the home).

In recurrent falls – that is, two or more falls in a year or over a given timeframe – previous falls are the most significant risk factor, in addition to the combination of risk factors described above. Moreover, recurrent falls generally have greater negative impact on older adults’ health and functioning compared to a single fall. This is because repeated falls increase the risk of injury, fracture, associated pain, fear of falls, disability, and death.

This brief summarizes findings from a recent study [1] that used longitudinal data from a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults age 70 and older. The authors examined whether health characteristics (physical or functional, psychological, and cognitive) and exercise patterns were associated with a single fall and recurrent falls over 3 years. They also calculated the risk of hospitalization based on how many falls an older adult had. Finally, they examined who was more likely to have one or more falls in 2020-2021 among those who had no fall and those who had one or more falls in 2019.

Key Findings

• Rates of falling were high among adults age 70 and older during the 3-year study period (2019-2021).
  • 57% experienced at least 1 fall
  • 34% experienced 2+ falls; showing that 60% of those who fell had recurrent falls
• Older adults who started exercising after a fall in 2019 were less likely to experience a recurrent fall in the following 2 years. Those who exercised in both 2019 and 2020 were the least likely to experience a subsequent fall (see figure).
  • Exercise included walking and other activities such as swimming, running or biking.
• Older adults with recurrent falls had worse physical or functional health and more psychological health problems in 2019 compared to older adults who did not fall.
  • But, there were no significant health differences between older adults with a single fall and those with no falls.
• Both a single fall and recurrent falls over the 3 years were associated with a higher risk of hospitalization in 2021, after taking other risk factors into account.
• Racial and ethnic differences in the risk of single and recurrent falls were found.
  • Black older adults had a lower risk of any fall over 3 years, compared to their White, non-Hispanic peers.
  • However, among those who fell in 2019, Black older adults and White older adults had similar risks of a recurrent fall in the following 2 years.
  • In contrast, Hispanic older adults who fell in 2019 had a higher risk of a recurrent fall in the following 2 years, compared to their White peers.

Policy Implications

This study’s findings underscore the importance of identifying physical and psychological risk factors for falls among at-risk older adults and then quickly connecting them with proven interventions to prevent repeated falls. Older adults with balance or coordination problems and a prior history of falls need access to evidence-based fall prevention programs, with a special emphasis on exercise. Older adults with depression or anxiety would also benefit from fall prevention programs that include an evaluation of medications and the role they could play in falls. Indeed, there is strong empirical evidence that psychotropic medications (antidepressants and benzodiazepines, in particular) combined with pain relievers and other medications for chronic health conditions contribute to falls.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s fall prevention program, STEADI (Stopping Elderly Accidents, Deaths & Injuries), is one such proven fall prevention program. The STEADI algorithm encourages health providers to assess for gait, strength and balance and recommends evidence-based exercise or fall prevention programs (e.g., Tai Chi) and home safety improvement options. The algorithm also encourages health providers to identify medications that increase fall risk and recommends interventions to optimize medications by stopping, switching, or reducing dosage of those medications.

This study’s findings on recurrent falls among Black and Hispanic older adults underscore the importance of making fall prevention programs accessible and available to all older adults. These findings also point to the need to identify cultural or behavioral factors across racial and ethnic groups to create fall prevention programs that respond to the needs of diverse groups.

Implementing fall prevention assessments in primary care settings is an effective way to identify at-risk older adults. Integrating fall prevention programs in agencies that provide services for older adults will expand their reach. Providing community-wide fall prevention education and training for older adults’ informal caregivers will also help to reduce falls among older adults.

Data and Methods

The authors used data from the 2019–2021 U.S. National Health and Aging Trend Study (NHATS). NHATS collects data annually from a nationally representative panel of Medicare beneficiaries. The initial people sampled, who were age 65 and over, were first interviewed in 2011. An additional sample was added in 2015 to replenish those were lost to follow up. This study included 3,063 people who represent approximately 28.3 million Medicare beneficiaries age 70 and over who were living in their own homes or residential care communities (but not in nursing homes) in all three years and reported answers themselves.

Reference

[1] Choi, N.G., Marti, C.N., Choi, B.Y., & Kunik, M.M. (2023). Recurrent falls over three years among older adults age 70+: Associations with physical and mental health status, exercise, and hospital stay. Journal of Applied Gerontology 42(5):1089-1100. https://doi.org/10.1177/07334648221150884

Suggested Citation

Choi, N.G., Marti, C.N., Choi, B.Y., & Kunik, M.M. (2023). Older adults who started exercising after a fall were less likely to experience another fall in the following two years. CAPS Research Brief 3(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/48891

About the Authors

Namkee Choi (nchoi@austin.utexas.edu) is the Louis and Ann Wolens Centennial Chair in Gerontology in the Steve Hicks School of Social Work and faculty affiliated in the Center on Aging and Population Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin; C. Nathan Marti is a statistical consultant in the Steve Hicks School of Social Work, UT Austin; Bryan Y. Choi is a board certified emergency medicine physician affiliated with Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine and BayHealth. Mark M. Kunik is a professor in the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, Baylor College of Medicine; MIRECC director of the South Central Mental Illness Research, Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center; and chief of the Behavioral Health Program, Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness, and Safety, Houston VA.

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.

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.

Reprinted from Council on Contemporary Families Brief Report

A briefing paper prepared by Wen Fan, Boston University, and Richard J. Petts, Ball State University, for the Council on Contemporary Families symposium The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Future of Gender Equality (PDF).

[Acknowledgement: The authors greatly appreciate Jennifer Glass and Jerry Jacobs for their generous feedback on a previous version of the briefing paper.]

The COVID-19 pandemic transformed where paid work is done, leading millions to become remote workers overnight. Large numbers (40% of full-time employees) continue to work remotely three years following the pandemic onset, and workers today highly value flexible work options. Yet, access to, and use of, fully remote or hybrid (i.e., partially remote) work (remote work for short hereafter) remains uneven. Notably, men are more likely to say they can work from home, but of those who can work remotely, women work from home more than men. Gender differences in perceptions and experiences of remote work are also complex, as these forms of flexible work are associated with stigmas for men and discussed as both “a blessing and a curse” for women. These gender differences raise important questions about the consequences of remote work for gender equality; does remote work promote gender equality or in fact widen the long-existing gender gap in paid and unpaid labor?

Two new research projects provide insight into the implications of pandemic-induced remote work for gender equality. One study, the Study on U.S. Parents’ Divisions of Labor During COVID-19 (SPDLC), is a longitudinal survey of partnered U.S. parents residing with a biological child administered from April 2020 to October 2022. Another study, the Remote Work Dynamics Panel Study, is a four-wave, nationally representative survey of U.S. workers who spent at least some time working from home since the onset of the pandemic (October 2020 to April 2022). Collectively, these two projects show that remote work fosters gender equality in some dimensions but perpetuates gender inequalities in other domains.

How Remote Work Enhances Gender Equality

New evidence from these projects highlights two ways in which increased access to remote work might promote gender equality. First, remote work allows women, especially less educated women, to work in a place they prefer. Working from home has been historically popular among women as it enables them to maintain their attachment to the paid labor force while also managing housework and childcare. Greater access to remote work since the pandemic thus disproportionately helps women (more than it does for men) to align where they work with their preferences. When women wanted to work from home but had to go back to the office because of employer mandates, evidence shows that they tended to leave the labor force, at least in the short term. And this is especially the case for women without a college degree, who have fewer options than men or more educated women in locating a new job with remote options.

Second, among heterosexual partnered parents, remote work provides opportunities for fathers to share domestic labor, which also strengthens mothers’ labor force attachment. When partnered fathers worked from home more frequently during the pandemic, partnered mothers performed smaller shares of housework and childcare; mothers were additionally more likely to be employed and worked more hours in paid labor, thereby reducing the well-known gender gap in both paid and unpaid labor. The pattern is even more pronounced when fathers worked exclusively from home. Working from home likely exposes fathers to domestic labor and allows them to have more time to perform these tasks, which, in turn, enables their partners to spend more hours in paid labor.

How Remote Work Hinders Gender Equality

Despite the potential for remote work to promote gender equality, results from these projects also illustrate ways in which remote work widened some gender gaps in both domestic and paid labor during the pandemic. In the initial transition into remote work, results show a deeply gendered process with women more likely than men to experience change—either a major decrease or a major increase—in work hours. Men had more control over the hours they work, making a deliberate decision to work the same hours and being able to maintain high productivity due to fewer interruptions when working from home. In contrast, findings based on partnered parents show that mothers with job flexibility tended to scale back their work hours to accommodate housework and childcare duties, suggesting that enduring gender norms may have led mothers to prioritize the home front during the pandemic. Another strategy some mothers adopted to deal with domestic disruptions in the pandemic was to work longer hours, particularly non-conventional hours such as when children were in bed.

Another way in which remote work exacerbated gender inequality is that remote work helps improve the well-being of minoritized men more than women. Gender equality and racial equality are intricately linked. Given explicit and implicit racial bias, discrimination, and microaggressions in office environments, it has long been argued that remote work may contribute to the well-being of minoritized workers more than for white workers. New evidence shows that remote work promotes well-being generally, but across all gender/racial groups, men of color benefit the most from remote work. The generally lower occupational status of women of color may have limited the extent to which they emotionally and psychologically benefit from remote work.

Lessons from the Pandemic: The Future of Remote Work and Gender Equality

How then do we make sense of the mixed findings about the implications of increased access to remote work for gender equality? We believe that emerging evidence offers important lessons about the ways in which remote work can be used to promote greater gender equality in the U.S. beyond the pandemic. While there may not be a perfect one-size-fits-all remote work policy, we believe policies can be flexible enough to work for a wide range of companies and workers.

1. For jobs that allow working from home, companies should provide workers equal access to remote work regardless of their gender. To avoid remote work being seen as just a policy for women, men should be incentivized to work remotely. Doing so may minimize stigmas associated with remote work while also promoting greater gender equality in domestic labor. This may also allow families to be more flexible, such as by alternating which partner works from home and which works in the office on any given day.
2. There should be clear organizational guidelines and expectations for the day-to-day implementations of remote work. Given that remote work may in fact intensify job demands and further blur work–life boundaries, a consequence disproportionately borne by women, companies and organizations need to provide more job autonomy, set up clear expectations for remote workers, and focus on outcomes instead of office time as the metric for evaluation or promotion.
3. While remote work can potentially help workers better manage work and family responsibilities, it is not a complete solution as these new findings show. Increased access to good, affordable childcare in conjunction with better, more equitable remote work policies, would increase the likelihood that both men and women maximize the benefits of remote work and decrease the likelihood of exacerbating gender gaps in domestic labor by reducing childcare burdens on mothers in particular.
4. Better remote work policies are needed for women of color and less educated women. These workers are less likely to have access to remote work, despite desiring it more than men, and they tend to work in environments with high demands, low control, and low support—factors that mitigate the benefits of remote work. Organizational and public policies that create a more equitable workforce and promote more equitable working-from-home experiences—for example, IT expense reimbursement policies or “work-from-home pledges” that specify company norms around remote work—are essential for improving well-being among disadvantaged women workers.

About the Authors

Wen Fan is Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston College. She can be reached at wen.fan@bc.edu.

Richard J. Petts is a Professor of Sociology at Ball State University. His research focuses on the intersection of family, work, gender, and policy, and he serves on the Board of Directors of the Council on Contemporary Families. You can learn more about his research by visiting his website (www.richardpetts.com), following him on X (@pettsric), or via email (rjpetts@bsu.edu).

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.