Ep. 41: Parenting in Privilege or Peril w/ Dr. Pamela Bennett

10:34PM May 23, 2023

Speakers:

Dr. Ian Anson

Dr. Pamela Bennett

Keywords:

parents

question

working class families

children

bennett

study

parenting

working

neighborhoods

families

social

resources

insights

financial resources

context

book

umbc

eighth grade

kinds

survey

Hello and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting speakers, and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times. Qualitative, quantitative, applied, empirical, normative. On Retrieving the Social Sciences we bring the best of UMBC's social science community to you.

As a social scientist, I'm a natural expert at hedging my claims. I'm well-practiced and using phrases like "There's partial evidence to support" or "The literature remains in disagreement" or even "Future studies are poised to clarify." But you know, if there's one claim that I will boldly and unequivocally state to anyone willing to listen, it's this: parenting is really hard. If any of you listeners out there happen to be blessed with the responsibility and joy of parenting, I offer you my weary salute. Our society has created some rather challenging conditions for child rearing. And perhaps it's no surprise then that birth rates are declining precipitously in the United States. Now, don't get me wrong. Becoming a parent is the most joyful thing that I've ever done. But I'm sure I speak for all parents out there in saying I also really need a nap.

On today's episode, I'm eager to bring you my recent interview with Dr. Pamela Bennett, Professor in the School of Public Policy here at UMBC. Dr. Bennett's fascinating and highly acclaimed research examines social stratification centered on race, ethnicity, and social class. Her work in these areas has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the American Sociological Association among other high profile funders. And these projects have resulted in a wide variety of publications and important scholarly outlets. In our conversation, I asked Dr. Bennett to tell me about her recent book, entitled, "Parenting in Privilege and Peril: How Social Inequality Enables or Derails the American Dream," published in 2022, by Teachers College Press. Dr. Bennett's engaging book explains how parents from different socioeconomic backgrounds engage in the hard work of parenting and how their strategies and their children's outcomes are driven by deeply rooted social forces. This is an important and engaging topic, and I'm eager to jump into our conversation right now.

So I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast, Dr. Pamela Bennett, here to tell us a bit about her co authored book that has recently come out that is titled: "Parenting in Privilege and Peril" and I think this is a really attention grabbing title. It's something that immediately caught my eye when I saw the announcement of its publication. And first of all, Dr. Bennett, thank you, again, so much for being here. I want to jump right in and ask you about this title. What's going on here? How is it that parents are exposing themselves to both privilege and peril?

Well, thank you for the invitation. I'm so happy to join you to talk about this work. So the title references the social contexts in which parenting is taking place. And the reference to privilege is to the social context that we document that middle class and upper middle class families are able to live in and to provide for their children by way of their financial and other resources. And peril refers to the context in which working class and working poor families, too often find themselves raising their children. So I'm glad to hear that the title caught your attention. We're, we don't want to be hyperbolic about it. But these are really important issues. And parents are working very hard and raising their children, but they do raise them in very different social contexts.

Absolutely. And I think it's also doubly relevant for me as, as the parent of now a one and a half year old. Certainly thinking about some of these really difficult questions of how to navigate, you know, raising a child and in a fraught social context, trying to make the right decisions. Obviously, every parent wants what's best for their children, right. But obviously, this is a very difficult question to answer. And it depends so much on people's social and economic contexts. And so if you wouldn't mind telling me a little bit more, you know, you just mentioned This question of resources, right? What resources are we talking about in terms of the sort of determinants of this privilege or perilous state?

Sure. So we're talking about several different kinds of resources, most obviously, financial resources, the the money that families have to spend, on where they live, where their children go to school, where their children play, the kinds of things that they can do with their lives. But the other kinds of resources, non financial, although financial resources has implications for them. And these are social resources, in particular, your social connections to other people, who are members of your social network, with whom do you give and receive information? Who do you talk to about the challenges that you may be experiencing, say, with your child's schooling, or other kinds of problems that come up as you're raising a child into adulthood? The financial and the social resources are the ones that we focus on in the book. So social networks, and financial resources.

Interesting. And so obviously, there's these two dimensions do you feel from your research that they track together generally that these social resources and economic resources are in some way correlated? Are they sort of distinct and wholly separate sort of spheres?

Oh, thank you for that question. That's an interesting question. Unfortunately, they are highly correlated with one another, at least in America. So research has shown that folks and families who have lots of financial resources tend to have in their social networks, members who are more like themselves, and who also have lots of financial resources. So there's kind of, there's a phrase that refers to this social homophily. And the phrase is birds of a feather flock together, sure that there are these relationships that develop among people who are similar to one another. And while that sounds sort of natural, it has a lot of inequality implications in the sense that the kinds of resources that I have, personally, are going to be found in my social network. And there's a reinforcing dimension to that. So if I am someone who has few financial resources, or or a few informational resources around certain kinds of issues and topics, that generally means that those in my social networks also have few resources, and perhaps a little information around that same topic or issue. And the question is, how can we break that association so that there's more of a sharing of resources? Beyond one social networks defined by this social homophily?

Absolutely. That seems like the million dollar question here of how we sort of undo this, this strong correlation. I want to know a little more about information here that you're mentioning information or resources. So obviously, as a parent, maybe this is actually a question that's spoken out of my own genuine desire to get some information about how to be a good parent, maybe that's outside the scope of this book. But what are some of these informational resources that the parents are in need of to be able to raise their children effectively?

Well, in this book, we are focused on parents who are raising kids who are in the eighth grade, and they're in the middle of transitioning from the eighth grade into high school. So that's a new domain for all of them. And so there's lots of questions around how that's done. Where should their kids go to school? What you know what resource sources will be available to them at the various schools that they have before them in terms of the school choice, landscape, and in that particular city. So in the city in which our parents are located, they don't naturally flow from a particular middle school into a particular high school. That city has a school choice regime. And so parents have to be very involved in the decision in that transition for their kids into high school. And so the question that they're immediately faced with is what's a good high school in the city? There's a hidden go to school, where should they apply? And so getting information about schools that goes beyond what's on the website, is vitally important and was vitally important to the parents that we were studying.

I'm getting stressed out already, to be honest thinking about some of these choices that parents are having to make. I mean, what a difficult thing because, I mean, I think every parent to some extent has this, this understanding that that school context that trajectory is going to be so important for outcomes, you know, starting from the ninth grade all the way up to graduation. potentially those students tracks after they finish, maybe college readiness, maybe other kinds of vocational programs. That's a really, really, really challenging and I think momentous decision to make right at that critical juncture when I mean, I don't remember, I don't know if you recall too much what eighth grade felt like to you. But to me, it was a very tumultuous time as well. And one where there was a lot of conflict, you know, back and forth between myself and my parents. At the time, then when I was trying to sort of stake out my own identity and understand who I was as a person. What a fraught moment, what an interesting moment for you to study in the research. So yeah, I was wondering on that note, if you wouldn't mind telling us a little bit about the methodology that you use for this study. So obviously, you mentioned you're studying eighth graders, which is, I think, a fantastic and interesting choice in terms of data data, sort of sample selection, but how was it that you actually went about studying these students?

Short, so we, we didn't have much access to the students, but we were studying their parents. And we approach to schools in the city in which the study takes place to ask for their helping crafting a sample are getting access to parents. And thankfully, the two schools were interested in willing to do that. And so they allowed us to distribute to the eighth grade classes in the school, a letter that the kids could take home to their parents, and that letter, describe the study, and invited their parents participation. If their parents indicated they wanted to participate, we sent them a survey where we collected all kinds of information on the family. And we use that information from the survey to then make decisions about who to interview if the parents were willing to sit down with us for an interview that lasted anywhere from one hour into four hours in the most, in our longest example.

Wow. So parents had a lot to say it seems from from these interviews,

Some of them did. Yes.

That's really interesting. So you're using this survey tool to identify a sub sample, I guess, of more, you know, more qualitative, interview based sort of evidence. And so tell me a little bit about this, this survey, and also the results of these interviews. Right. So what did the survey generally reveal about parents and their sort of overall patterns?

Sure. The the survey revealed for us what we see in other social research on inequality. So in the survey, we collected data on parents education, their income, their occupation, their household structure, and vitally importantly, their residential location. And what we can see in the survey data is that middle class parents, at least the ones in this study, lived in a host of neighborhoods all around the city. So their residences bark out from the center in almost every direction in this particular city. But the working class families in the study tended to live in only a handful of neighborhoods, matched census data to their addresses in order to understand the neighborhood context in which they were living. And then we live those up against one another. And we can see that the neighborhoods of middle class families tended to be more wealthy. They had higher median family incomes, they had more professionals who lived in them, they had people living there who had higher levels of education. Interestingly, they differed only a little bit in terms of homeownership. So in the working class neighborhoods, although they were more disadvantaged in terms of their socio demographic characteristics, there was a relatively high level of homeownership. And we don't know if that's something particular about the city, or not that it's has such high levels of home ownership among working class families, again, at least the ones in this study, but of course, they didn't translate into the same levels of wealth for families, because the homes of the working class families were more modest in terms of their value than those of middle class families. But the other very striking issue was that the neighborhoods of working class families tended to be more racially and ethnically diverse, so they tended to reflect more of the national population than the neighborhoods of middle class families that were diverse but just not as diverse as the neighborhoods of working class families. The other thing we were able to do was to add crime data to the neighborhoods in which our families lived. And that revealed that middle class families lived in neighborhoods that were much more safe than the neighborhoods in which working class and poor families lived. It isn't that their neighborhoods had no crime. And our families, the families in the study told us about experiences with crime. But the neighborhoods in which working class and poor families lived, had levels of crime that were substantially higher, whereby they were dealing with crime and the consequences of crime much more frequently than working then middle class families. And that came through also in the stories that they told us and the ways in which they have to put in a lot of energy around protecting their children as they are trying to help them transition into high school and to be successful and to experience hopefully, and ultimately, social mobility.

Yeah, this this notion of protection, I think, is something that's really important and interesting that comes out really strongly in the book. And I wanted to ask a little bit about this term that I think is used fairly frequently in the book, this idea of sort of defensive parents saying, Is that related at all to these kinds of insights? And how does one actually engage in this method, I guess, of defensive parenting?

Yes, indeed, it is related. Defensive parenting is the term that we use to describe the parenting strategy that working class and poor families were using in their efforts to get their kids into high school and through high school.

So tell me a bit about the nature of these defensive strategies. What is it that the parents are having to do necessarily, that differs perhaps from middle and upper middle class parents.

Because of the high crime rate in the neighborhoods of working class families, they often dealt with threats to their children, whether those threats were to their, to them physically, or to them socially and emotionally and psychologically, families told us about harms that either their children had already experienced or harms that their children's friends had experienced or harms that other children in the neighborhood that they knew of had experienced. And so defensive parenting is our way of describing how working class families were constantly on the lookout to defend their children against these harms. So then, these harms can also be their threats to their children's social mobility as well. For example, one working class mother told us about a break into her home, while her daughter, her eighth grade daughter was at home asleep, oh my gosh, and the intruder, woke her daughter up, threatened her and demanded money from her, which she did not have. Her daughter withdrew from all of her structured activities that year, because she just wasn't up for participating in them. And we know that participation in structured activities is very beneficial for middle schoolers and for high schoolers. And so that's a way in which defensive parenting encompasses more than just keeping their children safe, because it has social mobility consequences. So defensive parenting is is a term that, you know, reflects both their parents efforts to keep their children safe, but also to try to accomplish the goal of social mobility, which they were always focused on.

So it seems from from what you've written, that this strategy of defensive parenting may actually result in certain trade offs are in certain, a certain inability, perhaps, to pursue some of the other strategies that more well off parents are able to pursue, while they're not busy, essentially, occupying both sort of the mental and physical realms with with this set of tasks, right. I mean, what what is it the parents in other contexts are doing that they're freed up to do in this sense?

Right. Thank you for that question. That's a really great question. So middle class parents didn't describe to us any sort of strategy that they engaged in that sounded at all similar to what we heard from their working class counterparts with respect to having to defend their children against anything. And so they were telling us about all of the time they spend working with their children with respect to structured activities. Not only the ones in which they had easy and ready access to at school, which working class families also had, but activities that took their kids into other parts of the city, which which required you know, commuting, and other kinds of organizations. So middle class parents, were free to engage in that behavior to that kind of supports of their adolescence development, and educational achievement in ways in which working class families were more constrained to do. But other things that middle class parents were engaged in, was spending lots of time with their adolescents, just talking with them, helping to helping them to explore their interests, you're working on that parent child relationship, developing trust, and one of the things that was most interesting was helping their kids become independent in terms of navigating their way around the city. Yeah, several middle class parents told us about this as a skill they wanted their kids to learn. And so they would take them to places and have the kid then navigate, navigate themselves with parent home, or to another destination. So these kinds of things, they take effort, but they also take time, not having to spend so much time defending kids against harms, freed parents, both in terms of their time and their energy, to explore other ways of supporting and developing their adolescence,

As a new parent myself, I can definitely come to appreciate how, you know, parents are all trying their best, and they're expending a huge amount of energy. Right. But that energy is finite to some extent. And, you know, we we find ourselves despite our best efforts sometimes, you know, in a really difficult spot, you know, sort of down down on the floor thinking I can't possibly do more. And it's fascinating to think that those differences in context are resulting in parents sort of expanding their energies in such different ways. And we, we foreshadowed this question a few minutes ago, but I wanted to maybe see if we could crack into that million dollar question, as we, as we wrap up here a little bit. How might we overcome some of these inequalities? Is there a way forward? Are there lessons here for parents or for communities or for governments? What's the what's the solution? If there is one?

It's a complex question. Yeah, for sure. And we don't offer all the answers. But we try to encourage our readers to think about where change can be made, that they haven't perhaps thought about before. And in particular, we would like them to think about changes that can be made to parents social contexts, rather than changes that parents can make with respect to their own behavior. So often, policy is written around motivating certain kinds of behaviors, how can we motivate people to work? How can we motivate students to study harder. But sometimes, we also need to make change in the social context in which we're asking people to accomplish the things that we want them to accomplish. So making neighborhoods safer, making schools safer, freeing parents from all the frantic activity around defensive parenting so that they can focus more on their children's education so that they can invest more in that parent child relationship. So I think for us, we would be thrilled if people would invest more time thinking about that social context piece and seeing what we can do to improve the lives of families. And that way,

absolutely. And what valuable insights in this research, I think this is such an incredibly important topic. And the insights that you've been able to draw out of this mixed methods study, I think, are really, really valuable and have such important policy implications. I really hope that a lot of folks are able to lay eyes on this book, and that you're able to talk about it to important people in the future. Hopefully policymakers, educators, other other people who are involved in this process, everything from the educational sphere to to government, I hope that this book has wide impact. And so thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today. I really, really appreciate it. I have one more question. Dr. Bennett, before we let you go. It's a question I ask of all the folks that come on the podcast, who have some sort of educational role, and that is to give us a little bit of advice, maybe some some words of advice for students who might be listening to this podcast and are thinking about potentially going pro like you in the social sciences?

That's a great question. My advice would be to read widely and to draw from different bodies of, of knowledge. And that's one thing that I think this book will benefits from with my co authors and their expertise, we were able to draw from different bodies of knowledge and to try to bring them together in order to hopefully generate some some new insights. So, yes, learn the literature and the lessons from your field, but also to take some time to read beyond your field to try to understand what other scholars are working on and what other insights that they can bring to the thing that you're interested in. And to see what then your creativity and add to that mix.

Absolutely. I think that creativity is the name of the game today in scholarship. And in terms of this eclectic, thinking, I really think that the the podcast itself, right is perhaps one small way that we can begin that journey. I certainly have learned so much from doing this podcast over the last couple of years. And I've really learned so much from your discussion of this fantastic book. Dr. Pam Bennett, thank you again, so much for being with us today. And best wishes going forward with your next research.

Thank you so much.

I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Dr. Bennett as much as I did. It's finals week here at UMBC and our intrepid production assistant Alex is currently busy excelling in his coursework, which always comes first, even if we will miss him on today's Campus Connection. Tune in next time for more Alex, more great social science research, and as always, more opportunities to keep questioning.

Retrieving the Social Sciences is a production of the UMBC's Center for Social Science Scholarship. Our director is Dr. Christine Mallinson, our Associate Director is Dr. Felipe Filomeno, and our production intern is Alex Andrews. Our theme music was composed and recorded by D'Juan Moreland. Find out more about CS3 at socialscience.umbc.edu. And make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, where you can find full video recordings of recent CS3events. Until next time, keep questioning.