Who Cares About Parents?

Temporary Alliances, Exclusionary Practices, and the Strategic Possibilities of Parenting Groups

By Kim Price-Glynn

SERIES: Carework in a Changing World

Rutgers University Press

Who cares for parental caregivers? The short answer is, parenting groups do. Who Cares for Parents examines how parenting groups collectively build and contribute significant resources to form a broader care infrastructure for adult family caregivers with children. This book looks at the content of care parenting groups provide care for parents, through comparative research including mothers, fathers, and nonbinary parents. Cases include some of the most recognizable parenting groups in the United States, some with vast networks of parent members numbering in the thousands or even millions, like the Parent Teacher Association, La Leche League, and MOMS Club International. The book also examine newer and, perhaps, less well known groups like the City Dads Group, the Upper East Side (UES) Mommas, as well as smaller sets of local dads’ groups and a babysitting co-op.

Can parents in the contemporary United States secure some of the necessary resources to provide care, not only for their children but also for themselves, through parenting groups? The evidence from this research suggests they can. Parenting groups have a long history of organizing membership, meetings, education, material resources, and advocacy to provide for parents’ needs. Parenting groups’ ideologies and practices often seek broad goals, and sometimes include far reaching advocacy, innovative solutions, and possibilities for what Price-Glynn calls strategic parenting and social change. Alongside their successes, however, parenting groups also face challenges of producing narrow and temporary alliances, exclusion, and exacerbate inequalities. Despite their many challenges, Price-Glynn remains hopeful about the possibilities for non-familial and collective care infrastructure like that performed by parent groups.

Reviews

Communities of Care updates and extends sociological work on parenting and the gendered division of labor in families. Unlike previous authors in this field, Price-Glynn focuses greater attention on a comparison of mothers’ and fathers’ attempts to actively manage their identities as parents by forming bonds with others who are similarly situated. Markella B. Rutherford, author of Adult Supervision Required: Freedom and Boundaries in Popular Parenting Advice

Author

Kim Price-Glynn is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut. She received the inaugural University of Connecticut College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Faculty Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching. She is co-editor of From Crisis to Catastrophe: Care, COVID-19, and Pathways to Change. She is an active member and past co-chair of the Carework Network, an international organization of researchers, policymakers, and advocates involved in various domains of care work.

Chapter 1: Two Care Communities
Chapter 2: Caring About Caring: A History of Parenting Communities
Chapter 3: Studying the Social Organization of Care in Parenting Communities
Chapter 4: Collective-Intensive Mothering and Co-operative Care
Chapter 5: Dad’s Groups: Men’s Caregiving Communities
Chapter 6: Parenting Community Lessons: Fostering New Understandings of Care

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