The Role of Social Inequality in Parent Engagement: From Inequality to Social Justice in Education
Abstract:
By summer 2020, some US parents—disproportionately affluent, highly educated, White parents—were calling for schools to reopen, despite the continued threat of Covid-19. We examine the role that parenting logics—and particularly concerted cultivation—may have played in driving these patterns. We investigate this possibility using data from 66 mothers of school-aged children who completed in-depth interviews and/or wrote diary entries about their experiences with pandemic parenting between April 2020 and April 2021. We found that mothers who applied intensive parenting logics to remote instruction in spring 2020 disproportionately preferred in-person schooling for fall 2020 and did so because their logics influenced: (1) the extent to which mothers trusted schools to provide high-quality remote instruction, (2) the role conflict mothers experienced in their proxy educator roles, and (3) the coping strategies mothers could use to avoid burnout in those roles. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on parenting, role conflict, burnout, and inequalities in health and education in the context of Covid-19.