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3. Where Families and Children’s Activities Meet: Gender, MESHing Work, and Family Myths
- Rutgers University Press
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43 Where Families and Children’s Activities Meet gender, meshing work, and family myths Patricia Berhau, Annette Lareau, and Julie E. Press A recent study suggests that among families of college-educated parents with two children, the children are spending approximately twenty-five hours per month in organized activities. Time diary data from a nationally representative study estimated that a child of a mother with a college degree spends approximately three hours and twenty minutes each week attending organized activities (Lareau and Weininger 2008). As with other aspects of child rearing, significant numbers of hours are likely to be devoted to managing children’s leisure activities—a substantial burden, especially for those in the labor force. Hence, having children participate in such programs generates a variety of parental “activity management” labor. Yet, a systematic analysis of activity management is generally absent from the sociological literature on family labor and work-family conflict. This is unfortunate since the labor is an important feature of family life, particularly for middleclass families. Much of the literature has focused on labor such as preparing family meals or helping children get ready for bed, but parents’ actions related to their children’s organized leisure activities move far beyond the walls of the home.1 Activity management involves the coordination of family life with institutional deadlines that have limited flexibility and substantial variability in demands over short periods of time. These demands are not simply additive; they increase geometrically.2 In this chapter we focus on the parental work involved in maintaining children’s participation in extracurricular activities such as scouts, church activities, music, art, and dance instruction, and various formally organized sporting activities (for example, soccer, football league, and c h a p t e r 3 v basketball programs). In the first part of the chapter, we discuss the contours of the work itself. We describe four main areas of activity management labor: Mental, Emotional, Social networking and pHysical labor (MESH). Although the categories are interwoven and there is some overlap involved, we identify distinct characteristics for each aspect of activity management. In the second part of the chapter, we turn to the question of how MESH labor is divided between parents in our study and how parents make sense of those gendered divisions. Arlie Hochschild’s use of the concept “family myths”3 (1989) helped us to understand how couples were able to ignore the seemingly obvious gendered nature of the division of children’s activity management. Hochschild argues that couples and families often collaborate in the creation of “versions of reality that obscure a core truth in order to manage a family tension” (Hochschild 1989, 19). Among the families in our study, explanations of “who did what” in the management of children’s activities were based on two prevalent family myths: the myth of equal involvement and the myth of a skills-based division of labor. Research Methods This chapter draws on data collected for a larger study of the rhythm of children’s lives outside of school (Lareau 2003), but focuses on an important issue not elaborated there. Data were gathered on the families of eighty-eight children between the ages of eight and ten. Thirty-two of the children and their families lived in a medium-sized midwestern city (“Lawrence”); the remainder (n ⫽ fifty-six) lived in the metropolitan area surrounding a large East Coast city. Observations were conducted in third-grade classrooms, and the participating families were drawn from these schools. Approximately one-half of these families were white and onehalf black; one family was interracial.4 All of the couples were heterosexual. The sample was deliberately constructed to include middle-class (n ⫽ thirty-six), working-class (n ⫽ twenty-four), and poor families (n ⫽ twenty-eight); class was defined using a combined measure of education and occupational position.5 Much of these data were collected during extensive interviews with the children’s mothers and, when present, fathers (or guardians).6 Observations were also conducted during children’s organized activities that required parent labor, such as soccer activities, basketball programs, and baseball games as well as PTA meetings , school fairs, and book sales.7 In addition to the interviews, observational data were gathered between 1994 and 1996 on a subset of twelve children and their families, selected to represent all combinations of class, (child’s) gender, and race included in the larger sample. This highly intensive phase of the study entailed daily visits by a multiracial team...