Millennial Parenting: Still Stressful for Women?

Canadian Journal of Sociology, 2011

2000

Social Sciences

The nature of parenting and parent–child relationships is often dramatically affected by the historical period in which one raises children [...]

International Journal of Social Science and Humanity

2018

The United States is one of the few countries in the world not to offer national paid parental leave benefits. The lack of a national, universally-available parental leave policy drives women out of the paid labor force, with a disproportionate impact on low-income women. Yet, because benefits are expanding for some elite professional women, the continued lack of supports for some middle class and working class women may be easy to overlook. In this article, I illuminate the mechanisms by which structural inequality reproduces class inequality across the transition to motherhood. Between 2012 and 2015, I interviewed 44 first-time mothers from diverse class backgrounds. From their narratives, I identify three typologies of working women—professional, pink-professional, and low-wage workers—and show how formal workplace policies and informal practices, coupled with women’s cultural knowledge, shape new mothers’ employment trajectories when they have their first child. I find that whil...

2012

The biggest challenge for sex equality in the 21st Century is to dismantle inequality between women and men’s family care responsibilities. American law has largely accomplished formal equality in parenting by doing away with explicit gender classifications, along with many of the assumptions that fostered them. In a dramatic change from the mid-20th Century, law relating to family, work, civic

Sex Roles, 1995

Futures, 2008

Journal of Marriage and Family, 2020