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TITLE:
Children, Work, and Family: Some Thoughts on “Mother Blame”

AUTHOR(S):
Anita Ilta Garey
Terry Arendell

DOCUMENT TYPE: Article

*Anita Garey is a senior postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Working Families and is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of New Hampshire.
**Terry Arendell is a senior postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Working Families and Professor of Sociology at Colby College.

Working Paper No. 4

ABSTRACT:
This paper addresses the question of how to study, talk, think, and write about children in studies of work and family in ways that are sensitive to the situations of both children and their parents. We ask, “Is it possible to put children in the center of our research without contributing, even if inadvertently, to the cultural tendency to blame mothers for `child outcomes’?” To address this problem, we argue for research that incorporates a feminist constructionism and the insights of a feminist sociological imagination.