I Just Need a Job! Parenting Education and Mothers in Poverty

• In Event: 4385 - Education in a Changing World

Abstract

In response to the well-documented disadvantages facing low-income children, many scholars and policy makers have turned to parenting education to enhance children’s earliest experiences and improve social, emotional, and cognitive outcomes. Research on the impact of parenting education has found mixed results. While useful, such research has less to say about the reasons for these results and, particularly, about the interactions between program content and parents’ lived realities. In addition, this literature takes a fairly decontextualized approach to parenting, assuming that what parents need is a particular set of skills and attitudes, regardless of their social positions or daily challenges. Drawing upon a literature that views parenting standards as socially and historically contingent, this study uses ethnographic methods—data collected in three sites over a three-year period—to explore what parenting classes teach, how low-income mothers experience the classes, and the extent to which class material resonates or conflicts with mothers’ concerns and the norms and beliefs in their communities.

Our analysis of over 100 hours of observation and 32 interviews highlights the difficulties low-income mothers face and the many disconnections between parents’ needs and concerns and the content of the parenting classes. We further show the extent to which parenting classes, even when designed to meet the needs of families in poverty, ultimately aim to change individual behavior rather than address structural concerns. Indeed, when issues related to poverty did emerge (always initiated by the parents themselves) instructors generally avoided any meaningful discussion of these structural or collective problems. Education plays an important role in promoting and legitimating American ideals of meritocracy and self-determination. Here we see this process in action, as an effort to help low-income families ultimately sidelines their concerns and reinforces notions of individual responsibility

Authors

• Maia B. Cucchiara, Temple University

• Erin Cassar, School District of Philadelphia

• Monica Clark, Temple University