After a year cooped up with their kids, parents - or at least many parents - are struggling. In my interviews with parents of young children, they talk about being exhausted, about feeling like failures as parents and in their paid work roles. They talk about depression and anxiety and about being so on edge all the time that they’re frequently yelling at their partners or their kids.
And those stresses don’t just show up in the qualitative data. They can be seen in the quantitative, as well. Here, I’ll share some basic descriptive data from an online survey I ran in December 2020 with a sample of about 2,000 U.S. parents. Participants were recruited through the Ipsos iSay panel and received points for their participation. The data are weighted to be representative of parents with children under 18.
As the COVID-19 pandemic has dragged on, schools across the U.S. have responded in varied ways. Some are offering only remote instruction, while others are giving students the choice between remote and in-person instruction, either through a traditional in-person model or through a hybrid model involving a mix of in-person and remote instruction.
The US Department of Education recently announced plans to gather data on school instruction in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a much-needed effort, given the previous administration’s failure to support research on pandemic schooling. And yet, these efforts are likely to take time.
In the short-term, then, and particularly in context of heated debates about pandemic schooling, scholars, policymakers, and educators need data to understand which families have access to in-person instruction and what decisions families make when they have the choice between in-person and remote instruction.
Wednesday was my daughter’s first day of Kindergarten. And I managed to get through the whole day without any tears. I got through Thursday’s drop-off, too, even when my daughter stopped me outside the school and said: “You don’t need to come in, Mom. I know where to go.”
As I walked back home, I scrolled through Twitter on my phone. And that’s when I first saw the articles. On Wednesday, hundreds of immigrant workers in Forest, Mississippi had been detained, taken away without warning when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers raided the food processing plants where they worked.
The children of those workers came home from school to empty, locked houses. They were crying and looking desperately for their parents. It was their first day of school, too.
If you spend time with kids, you probably hear those words a lot. And for adults, it's easy to respond with "Life isn't fair." But if your kid is growing up with privilege, that response is problematic. Here’s why…
Travel with kids is rarely a vacation. But the trip we took last week left me utterly exhausted. And that exhaustion left me angry and on-edge. Which in turn sent me down a late-night rabbit hole into the research on parenting and sleep.
Last week, I took my son to the doctor for his 15-month check-up. I tried to keep my son entertained while the nurse went through the standard battery of questions, marking my answers on her laptop…
When we think of gendered aggression, it’s easy to think of beer-fueled moments at high school and college parties. But young girls’ first encounters with gendered aggression often happen much earlier and in seemingly more “innocent” settings. Like preschool playgrounds.
I study privileged parents. And I’m more than a little critical of privileged parents. Especially for hoarding opportunities for their children and teaching their children to hoard opportunities for themselves. But, I am a privileged parent. So I also get why they do what they do. To give you an example…
It’s that time of year again. Parents are frantically checking supply lists and packing their children’s backpacks for school. But pencils and notebooks and glue sticks aren’t the only things parents send from home. Rather, parents—or at least affluent, white parents—also send their children with strategies for securing unfair advantages in school….
It's my first day back in the office after maternity leave, and I sit down at my desk to pump. But then I realize: "the last thing I need is undergrads wondering about wet spots on my dress." So I take off my dress and zip on my coat, because it's January and it's a little cold.
I start up the pump, but then my phone buzzes. It's daycare - they ran out of milk for my son, and they want me to bring more. I glance at the clock - this is my longest break all day, and I can probably make it. So I switch into go mode….
