A study of the negotation of parental responsibility on a two-parent family

Updated Mar 12. Better late than never. My post won an award! It's my first award. Thanks Mayberry Mom.



Post begins:
This is a mock journal abstract. It was Andrea's idea. It was really, really fun.

In the middle decades of the 20th century in American society, childrearing roles were clear: in a two-parent household, the woman was the primary caregiver. The man may have been involved in caregiving, but he was not primarily responsible for fulfilling the day-to-day, minute-to-minute demands of small children. Now, however, these roles are in flux. In some households, women are still the primary caregivers, and in some, men are the primary caregivers. In yet others the role can vary by month, by day or by hour, depending on various factors.

We are interested in households in which the role of primary caregiver switches between the two parents over the course of a single day. How do they manage the hand-off? Are the children aware of which parent is on-duty, so to speak?

To address these questions we studied a single household in a small Oregon town on one day. The family includes a father who works outside the home, a mother who works part-time, and two children ages 5 and 2. On the day we visited this family, the children were not in daycare and the mother did no office work. The father left before anyone had woken, returning home at approximately 6:30pm. Both children were in bed at 9pm. Over a period of 2 1/2 hours, then, the parents were both in the house, constantly negotiating who was primarily caregiver.

For most of the evening the atmosphere in the house was not tense. The child* was always within arm's reach of one parent or the other and it did appear clear to both him and the parents that the adult nearby was the one in charge of him. (He did not, for example, misdirect requests for food or water.) For most of this time the hand-off occurred with no visible negotiation. We did not witness any gestures nor hear any statements regarding the swapping of responsibility.

However, there were two notable exceptions:

* At approximately 8:30 pm, the mother said, "You got to take 1/2 an hour in the bathroom. Now it's my turn!" She then retired to the master bedroom, leaving the child with his father.

* At approximately 9pm the father was heard to say, "It's time for bed now, Blake. Mom will help you brush your teeth." As the mother was still in the master bedroom at that time (but clearly was able to hear the statement), we infer that the father was stating his desire to reliquish his role as primary caregiver. This inference was later corroborated in a follow-up interview.

In conclusion, it appears that parents use a sophisticated form of ESP to communicate which of them is primarily responsible for the children. The children are included in this "invisible" communication. That system breaks down as bedtime nears, when parents and children must rely on the spoken word -- usually uttered in a raised voice -- to communicate their roles.

*Design notes: Because the mother was the only adult at home with the children from the moment she woke until the father returned, she assumed the role of primary caregiver for those eleven hours. At the time he returned, the youngest child had fallen asleep on the kitchen floor (a situation we were led to believe is unusual) and was put to bed by the mother. It is therefore possible that our sample size was too small and duration too limited. More study is needed.