A Privileged Adaptation to the Stalled Revolution: Relying on Grandparental Support to Ease Intensive Mothering

• In Event: 3238 - Gender and Family

Abstract

Alongside parenting, grandparenting is becoming more intensive. Intensive grandparenting is an underexplored source of cumulative advantage in families, given that even middle- and upper-middle class parents increasingly rely on significant, regular grandparental support. Using 70 in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations among mostly professional middle and upper-middle class mothers and grandmothers, I argue that an intergenerational perspective is critical for understanding how parents juggle multiple demands. For many mothers juggling multiple career, marital, and childcare demands, relying on a grandparent regularly enables intensive mothering and eases some of the myriad pressures and tensions of career, childcare, domestic work, and marriage. Grandparents who “lean in” to providing more intensive childcare and domestic supports to the families of adult children do so for complex reasons, but mostly to ease the burdens their adult children, especially daughters, face. Some fathers are freed from the expectation of equal sharing in household work and childcare when grandparents “smooth the edges” by providing regular childcare and domestic supports to families. This paper argues that relying on grandparental support eases the demands of intensive mothering and reduces marital tensions – it is a privileged adaptation to the stalled revolution in family life.

Author

• Jennifer Utrata, University of Puget Sound