The Impact of Family and Community on Children’s Understanding of Parental Role Negotiation

Abstract

This study investigates the influence of family context and community context on children's social reasoning about parental negotiation of the gendered roles of breadwinner and caretaker. Participants included 272 seven-and ten-yearold children from traditional and nontraditional parental employment situations, who lived in either a U.S. east coast metropolitan area or in a military-minded community. Children provided judgments and justifications about a parent's desire to switch roles, the other parent's opposition, and the use of stereotypes to defend their opposition. Children's judgments were affected by the gender of parent wanting a new role, age of child, and both personal contexts. The current study provides evidence that children, not just adults, are aware of, and can reason about, parental roles and that it is important to investigate community norms in addition to direct family contexts.

Chinese and South Korean children’s moral reasoning regarding the fairness of a gendered household labor distribution.

“…Furthermore, Korean children and children from traditional families (i.e., where the mother did most of the housework) were more likely to judge their family's division as unfair. This finding contradicts the assumption that children's "traditional" family structure (or community context) makes them more accepting or habituated to inequality directly (Sinno & Killen, 2011;Sinno et al, 2017). Instead, children's observation of inequality at home appears to increase their likelihood of finding their family's division unfair.…”

“…The interview was constructed following methods from previous investigations of children’s moral reasoning (Nucci et al, 2017; Sinno & Killen, 2009, 2011; Sinno et al, 2017; Smetana et al, 2014). It was composed of semistructured questions that allowed for investigation of participants’ fairness evaluations and justifications of the gendered nature of housework as well as their own family’s housework distribution.…”

“…Similarly, Brose et al (2013) found that 16-year-olds thought mothers, rather than fathers, should stay home and care for their infant based on the assumption that mothers take better care of infants. American children's family structure and larger community context has been found to influence children's evaluations and reasoning regarding family roles (Sinno & Killen, 2009, 2011Sinno, Schuette, & Hellriegel, 2017). For example, Sinno and Killen (2009) found that 7-and 10-year-olds who came from traditional homes (i.e., where the mother was mainly a homemaker) were more likely to hold gender stereotypic beliefs and consider it unacceptable for a father to be a homemaker.…”

“…Hypothesis 2: It was hypothesized that in keeping with the literature, boys, younger children, children from a traditional family structure (i.e., a family in which the mother did the majority of the housework), and Korean children who come from a community in which fathers do very little housework (OECD, 2014) would be more likely than their counterparts (i.e., girls, older adolescents, children from nontraditional families, and Chinese children) to find a gendered division fair and to employ conventional reasoning (Park et al, 2012; Sinno et al, 2017; Sinno & Killen, 2009, 2011).…”

Foster fathers performing gender: the negotiation and reproduction of parenting roles in families who foster

“…The formation of families who foster, whatever their composition and arrangements, is important to family social work because they provide support to vulnerable children and their families as well as undergoing a process of reorganization and negotiation to care for children. Jones and Hackett (2011) have reflected on how adoptive parents display family while the ways parental roles are negotiated within families have been shown to impact on children's understanding of family roles and gendered relations (Sinno, Schuette, & Hellriegel, 2017). The negotiation of non-gendered parental roles within families has been shown to occur through the families of choice discourse (Weeks, Heapy, & Donovan, 2001), through homemaking roles taken on by men as stay-at-home dads (Fischer & Anderson, 2012) and the negotiations of domestic labor and childcare can challenge gendered household practices within LGBTQ+ families (Barrett, 2015).…”