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TITLE:
Scheduling, Worrying, and Stepping Up: Working Parents’ Strategies for Providing Care to Middle-School Children

AUTHOR(S):
Elaine Bell Kaplan
Christopher Davidson

DOCUMENT TYPE: Article

Elaine Kaplan is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. She was a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Working Families. Christopher Davidson was a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Working Families and received his Ph.D. from the Sociology Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Working Paper No. 52

ABSTRACT:
The thirty working parents interviewed for this study offer three unique strategies for raising teenagers ages 12 to 14 years old. This study draws on the literature on care and on parents’ perceptions of their teenagers’ needs, on their own abilities to perform the necessary caring tasks, and on their appraisals of their spouses’ commitments to caring for their teenagers. Rather than produce strategies that are based on negotiations with family members, parents in this study tended to develop their own individual strategies when confronted with a set of problems in caring for young teenagers, principle among these is the contested nature of teenagers’ need for care—contested by the educational institution, by employers, by spouses and teenagers themselves. We conclude by suggesting that these parents’ strategies lead to unequal divisions of physical and emotional care that are shaped by gender, race and institutional intransigence.