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Mandy D. Goodnight
PARENTING
Parenting is the process by which adults socialize the
infants, children, and adolescents in their care. Meth-
ods such as monitoring, emotional closeness, disci-
pline, control, and demands are used to shape
society’s younger members so that they behave appro-
priately for their future role in society. Parenting is at
once both a careful dance between child and parent
and a process that is heavily influenced by the larger
social context. Urie Bronfenbrenner is well known for
developing his ecological model, which describes the
role of contexts such as family, peers, schools, and po-
litical climate in human development. Thus, social
scientists no longer study parent-child interaction in
a vacuum. Rather, the family is best understood as a
social system with subsystems, including parent-child,
marital, and sibling systems, that is enmeshed in the
larger social context.
From time to time researchers have questioned
how important parenting is to long-term outcomes
for children. The answer over and over has been a re-
sounding ‘‘very important.’’ With such a broad con-
stellation of influences on the developing child, how
can one be so sure that differences in what average
parents do really matters? The answer lies in the fact
that parents affect their children directly and indi-
rectly. Parents shape children by interacting with
them directly. In addition, parents act in concert with
institutions such as peers, schools, and media. Parents
determine the neighborhood children are raised in,
for example, which sets in motion a chain of events
that heavily influences a child’s future identity.
Quantitative Aspects of Parenting
A wealth of research findings indicate there is
great variation within each type of family structure—
such as two-parent, divorced, remarried, cohabitat-
ing, and single-parent—such that family structure
alone is a very poor indicator of quality of home envi-
ronment or child outcomes. Children can have their
emotional, social, cognitive, and physical needs met
in the context of diverse family structures when par-
ents have the personal and economic resources and
the desire to provide a healthy environment for chil-
dren in their charge. According to the U.S. Bureau of
the Census, in 1999, 68 percent of children in Ameri-
ca lived with two parents. This represented a drop
from 77 percent in 1980. Among children living in
two-parent households, 91 percent lived with both bi-
ological parents while 9 percent lived with a steppar-
ent—more commonly a stepfather.Who Is Socializing U.S. Children?
Despite progressive shifts in cultural attitudes re-
garding the appropriateness of mothers and fathers
sharing caregiving activities and involvement with
children, only small changes in actual parenting pat-
terns are recorded by existing research completed
after 1980. Fathers continue to spend less time than
mothers with infants and children in the United
States and other industrialized countries. When they
are with their children, fathers are more likely than
mothers to be involved in play rather than the chil-
dren’s routine maintenance such as feeding and
grooming. Fathers also spend a greater amount of
time on personal activities, such as watching televi-
sion and reading, in comparison to mothers. Parent-
ing infants, as opposed to children or teenagers,
differs greatly with respect to the common activities
and skill utilization parents have the opportunity to
employ. Although qualitative changes in parenting
are dramatic as children mature, the traditional divi-
sion of labor between mothers and fathers persists
through developmental changes.
Division of labor is not an issue for the growing
number of parents who manage all the varied respon-
sibilities for their children on their own. The substan-
tial majority of single parents are mothers. In 1999
the Census Bureau reported that 23 percent of chil-
dren lived with only their mothers while 4 percent
lived with only their fathers. Other data indicated that
growth of one-parent families was slowing. In particu-
lar, the number of single-father households was ris-
ing, while the number of single-mother households
remained nearly constant between 1995 and 1998,
after almost tripling from 1970 to 1995. Time and
money continue to be the biggest challenges for
mothers parenting alone. In America, the richest
country in the world, 19 percent of children lived in
poverty in 1998. This statistic reveals that many di-
vorced or never-married mothers struggle to make
ends meet. The median household income for single
fathers is significantly higher than that of their female
counterparts. Some of the financial difficulties faced
by single parents may be assuaged by contributions
made by cohabitating partners. Sixteen percent of
children living with fathers and 9 percent of children
living with mothers also lived with a parent’s coha-
bitating partner.PARENTING 295