Parenting All Over Again: Intensive Grandmothering and Family Inequality

• In Event: 1533 - Care Work/Caring Labor

Abstract

Intensive mothering is a major component of contemporary parenting. However, demographic and cultural changes are producing a new, still understudied, yet related phenomenon – intensive grandmothering. Both the amount of carework grandmothers provide and the high expectations for concerted cultivation as part of grandparental carework are major aspects of how some overwhelmed parents cope with escalating demands at home and at work. Indeed, the intensive support which grandparents increasingly routinely provide for their adult children and grandchildren constitutes an important but undertheorized form of social inequality in American family life. How does this “third shift” of carework centered on extended kin support across households reflect and perpetuate social inequality while also serving as a way in which some families manage inequality? Ideals of intensive grandmothering may shape parenting across class, this paper centers on middle and upper-middle class, mostly white parents and grandparents – those for whom intensive grandmothering is still relatively novel. Trends surrounding longevity, paid work after retirement, exorbitant childcare costs, and increasing levels of insecurity and instability in family life have led to an underexplored reliance on grandparents, especially for regular, if often informal, childcare support, with differing effects by race and class. This analysis draws on in-depth interviews (n=40) with grandparents (n=25) and adult children (n=15) as well as observations at grandparenting classes and seminars. Grandparents try to set some boundaries on the extensive support they are providing to adult children and their families, but they face pressures given that intensive grandmothering is a critical supplement to intensive mothering. Intensive grandmothering may also unwittingly solidify the cumulative advantages of more affluent parents and grandchildren. Grandparents are help adult children and their families not only because of “joy” in spending time with grandkids but because they seek to help adult children and their families succeed in anxious times.

Author

• Jennifer Utrata, University of Puget Sound