Bending Over Backward: Flexible Resources, Parenting, and Child Engagement During Remote Learning

• In Event: Defining and Measuring Advantage and Disadvantage in Education

Abstract

The second author examines how parents configure resources to realize parenting practices. Parenting and class culture studies typically emphasize the relationship between child-rearing practices, resources, and school advantages. This project shifts the analytic lens to understand how parents draw on available resources to support their children’s academic and socioemotional engagement during the 2020-21 remote-only school environment. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 37 parents in two elementary schools, study authors find that although both socioeconomically advantaged and disadvantaged parents dramatically adapted their lives to accommodate their children’s engagement needs, children’s engagement consistency varied based on the flexibility of the resources their parents brought to bear.

The author discusses how the correlation between resources and advantage that researchers traditionally document can be attenuated depending on the flexibility of resources. By overlooking critical resource attributes, like flexibility, researchers may overestimate the role of resource access in the intergenerational reproduction of inequality. This research deepens and contextualizes our understanding of the advantages that forms of capital may (or may not) provide to parents and students, suggesting a role for schools to help families build and enact forms of capital and pointing toward new directions for conceptualizing and empirically researching (dis)advantage in education.

Author

• Alma N. Garza, University of Texas - Arlington
  Presenting Author