Parenting Kids: Child Custody, Parenting, and Gender

• In Event: 2266 - Family Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 5. Fathering, Coparenting, and the Effects of Criminal Justice and State Involvement

Abstract

The American family continues to shift with increases in divorce, separation, cohabitation, and single parenting (Gerson & Torres, 2015). This deinstitutionalization of marriage (Cherlin, 2004) means that most children, at some point in their life, will live in an unmarried family. Parents have to find ways to share child rearing responsibilities outside of the traditional, nuclear, married family configuration. The law does not stipulate the gendered roles parents should take in marriage, but research shows that married women are overwhelmingly doing most of the housework, childcare, emotion work, and invisible labor despite their increased workforce participation. (Hochschild, 1989). However, the state is more active in assigning parenting roles in divorce and child custody cases. Over time, laws have changed to lean more towards joint custody and mandatory mediation between parents, but women still overwhelmingly receive physical custody (Grall, 2016). This project looks at how unmarried families (i.e., divorced, never married, and re-married) with legally imposed child custody arrangements share parenting work compared to the literature on married and cohabiting families. I interview parents in the state of Michigan with a child custody court order to ask, What do parenting roles look like with a child custody court order? Does an imposed legal arrangement lead to more or less gender inequality? This work is timely given that child custody for women increases workforce gender inequality, which, coupled with inconsistent child support, contributes to the poverty of women and their children.

Author

• Adriana Ponce, University of Michigan