Fitting It All In: How Mothers’ Employment Shapes their School Engagement

• In Event: 161 - Section on Organizations, Occupation and Work Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 21. Work and Family

Abstract

Although incompatibilities between work and home life are well studied, less is understood about the implications of employment for another key life role for many, particularly for working mothers: being a “school-engaged parent.” In this paper we examine how mothers’ employment, through a mix of supports and constraints, shapes their involvement in their children’s schools. Using in-depth interviews with 17 employed mothers in a mid-size Midwestern city – recruited from a racially and socioeconomically diverse sample of 95 survey-taking parents – we observed several mechanisms through which mothers’ work influenced their engagement. Some with access to job supports such as time and place flexibility and paid time off were better able to participate in school activities, while others faced a gauntlet of limitations to using available supports, and still others lacked supports and had to make hard calculations about within which domain, work or home, to make sacrifices in order to participate at school. The findings advance a line of inquiry in the “life” side of work-life research and point to the limits of U.S. education reform’s recent emphasis on family school engagement, suggesting that varied bundles of employment conditions stratify parents’ school participation in ways that may be difficult for schools to anticipate or accommodate.

Authors

• Anna Haley-Lock, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Linn Posey-Maddox, University of Wisconsin-Madison