Invisible Work, Power, and Money: Gender Inequality in Shared Parenting within Child Custody Arrangements

Abstract

Most parents in the U.S. are raising children outside the romanticized heteropatriarchal, nuclear family–56% of children are growing up outside of two parent households in their first marriage (Livingston 2014). Yet I argue that the legacies of foundational feminist theories and extant sociological research on families have largely neglected the division of caregiving work in diverse contemporary family forms. One growing branch of contemporary family forms is shared parenting in child custody arrangements. The Office of Child Support Enforcement served 14.7 million children in 2018. Drawing on qualitative data of in-depth interviews with 50 parents, this dissertation explores how child custody agreements translate into daily life and what happens to the gendered division of parenting work in these separated family forms. The first study of this dissertation presents the theoretically expansive concept of the “custody load.” In the context of family separation, the custody load is the invisible, distinct mechanisms necessary to manage practical logistics of state-sanctioned shared parenting rooted in the legal compulsory involvement of biological fathers. I find that mothers coordinate care between households, ensure court-promoted paternal participation, and compensate for fathers’ (lack of) caregiving labor. Further, Black mothers’ custody load is made heavier by state racism fathers face. This study underscores how macro-level shifts in culture and law toward gender neutrality can obfuscate that gender inequality is exacerbated in micro-level experiences within the family—in short, increased father involvement does not equate to fair care. The second study of this dissertation offers the term “power moves” to analyze the interactional mechanisms parents deploy to exert (or deflect) influence over each other. I find that fathers primarily exercise power moves over mothers utilizing physical and legal custody as mechanisms to prioritize their own paid or leisure time and avoid invisible work associated with decision-making. Further, Black parents’ interactions are more challenging due to experiences of racial bias in the family court system. This study illuminates the interactional process of power in the family by situating micro-level experiences of inequality within macro-level changes that purport gender equality while reconstituting patriarchy. The third study of this dissertation conceptualizes “invested mothering” to explain how state structures uphold the breadwinner-caregiver dichotomy by obscuring that financially providing has been integrated into caregiving under state-mandated child support. I find that the onus is on mothers to secure financial resources for children’s basic and enrichment needs through invisible, paid, and relational work strategies. Low-income Black mothers deploy adaptive strategies of self-reliance and are on the receiving end of fathers’ misdirected frustrations. This study highlights that legal and cultural expectations of women’s caregiving have been reconstituted to incorporate financial provision, collapsing the public and private sphere into each other–which are often in conflict–within an androcentric social landscape. Collectively, these dissertation studies lean on an intersectional lens to mirror the experiences of contemporary U.S. parents vis-à-vis interlocking systems of gender, social class, and race. More specifically, the findings underscore that child custody arrangements adjudicated utilizing gender-neutral family laws ignore and obfuscate entrenched social gender expectations resulting in an unequal playing field day in and day out for mothers contending with interactions of invisible work, power, and money. Low-income Black mothers are the most disadvantaged in these shared parenting arrangements due to sexism, historical economic inequality, and systemic racism. Child custody arrangements buttress patriarchy.