When Mothers Can’t Pay the Cost to be the Boss: Doubled-Up Mothers’ Desires for Residential Independence

• In Event: 325 - Regular Session. Housing Choice, Neighborhood Quality and Doubling Up

Abstract

The transition to adulthood has become increasingly disordered in the United States in recent decades. One manifestation of this change is that doubling up, or sharing a home, has become more common. This study explores how parents navigate the tension between traditional expectations about the pathway to adulthood and structural constraints that prevent them from following this pathway. By following 48 doubled up parents of young children for one year, I sought to understand how such parents experience living doubled up and how they interpret their situation. I find that while doubling up can provide substantial financial and childrearing advantages, the connection of residential independence with conceptions of adulthood and good parenting drives parents’ dissatisfaction with doubling up in someone else’s home. Living in someone else’s home removes the control over their lives and surroundings that parents see as central to adulthood and parenthood. To deal with the stress on their identity, some parents engage in identity work that establishes them as the head of their nuclear family even though they are not the head of the household. However, despite these tactics and even when conflicts are largely absent and parents and their children seem to be benefiting from being doubled up in someone else’s home, parents still profess a desire for to be a householder. In this way, doubled up parents face a tension between what is socially desirable—residential independence—and what is economically beneficial for them and their children.

Author

• Hope Harvey, Harvard University