Kin-care in Contemporary African American Middle-Class Mothers Lives: How Structure and Culture Influence Childcare Choices

• In Event: 174 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Roundtables (one-hour). Table 01. The Black Middle Class

Abstract

Scholars examining kin and community care have often sought to identify the relative importance of structural and cultural factors on the use and availability these networks but research has yielded unclear results in the case of childcare. Cultural theories focus on how values, beliefs, and practices lead to differences in kin- and community care; structural theories focus on how educational attainment, income, inherited power or inequality, and family structure lead to such differences. Using interviews with sixty African American middle- and upper middle-class mothers, this paper examines their preferences for kin and community members’ assistance in caring for their children. Although participants often had the resources to hire childcare providers from the market, they also had access to, and preferred, kin and community networks of care. Through examining participants’ accounts of their childcare choices, I identified three factors that influenced their decision-making. These factors included (1) their experiences growing up with networks of kin- and community care; (2) their present day preferences for kin- and community care and the availability of these networks; and (3) the cost and benefits that came from using these networks. Although using kin and community care is often primarily associated with structural factors, my data reveals a more complicated relationship between structure and culture, whereby it is not possible to easily disentangle one from the other.

Author

• Dawn M. Dow, Syracuse University