Events

Abstract: Leading theories suggest that parenting in the United States varies widely by socioeconomic status, with middle-class parents practicing “concerted cultivation”—marked by parents’ intensive efforts to foster their children’s development—and working-class parents engaging in the “accomplishment of natural growth”—with children given more freedom to manage their own time. First, I show how developmental spending by parents on children has changed over time and across the socioeconomic spectrum in the U.S. However, it is unclear how much these findings reflect differing cultural logics of what makes for good parenting or reflect differences in the resources required to enact the types of parenting that parents believe would be best. Second, I present a novel way to study parenting logics using computational text analysis of parenting advice given by survey respondents to hypothetical parenting situations. Using Biterm Topic Modeling we find that nearly all parenting logics reflect some form of intensive parenting, but within that are multiple nuanced versions varying across two dimensions: (1) assertive vs negotiated parenting, and (2) pedagogic vs pragmatic parenting. Third, using fractional multinomial logistic regression, I show there is little difference in how parenting logics vary by race/ethnicity, education, and income, suggesting more similarity across groups and more variability within groups than commonly understood. This work is part of a broader project to understand the socioeconomic correlates of parenting and their implications for children’s outcomes.

The Sociology Seminar Series for Trinity Term is convened by Nan Dirk de Graaf and Christiaan Monden.  For more information about this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.