April 3

• Between weeks 8 and 12, each student should provide a weekly reflection (500 words) on the data you have collected to date.
  • What data did you collect?
  • What is your initial impression of the data?
  • How have the data you have collected this week changed/progressed your thinking about your research project?
  • What challenges did you encounter while collecting the data?
  • What are your next steps?
  • 2-3 annotations.

Judy:

This week I found two sources that I think is shaping my topic. At first I was only looking at the cultural values that differ from neoliberal parenting values, but I found some sources that show an economic component in the ways in which some parents upbringing does not match the expected “neoliberal parenting. For example, Annette Lareau’s book Unequal childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. From the first few pages it showed how middle class family have access to certain activities that help foster a child such a sports and piano lessons. But, families in the low-economic bracket do not necessarily have that option due to how expensive it can be, which limits them. Lareau gives this description in the first few pages of her book and it reminded me of how over the summer we would ask families what they had plan for the children (in the context of activities). I notice that CPS workers associated “good parenting” with activities parents should plan for their children. This was emphasized when I was there because it was the summer and some children were not in summer school. My supervisor also gave me a packet that is given to parents involved in CPS on summer programs around San Antonio for their kids. This made me think about whether “bad parenting” is associated with having the kids watching tv all day. I just thought about that because many parents do not have the financial ability to send their children to summer programs. So I guess now I am thinking it is not just a culture component, but also an economic one. The other source is P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale & Laura D. Pittman article “Welfare Reform and Parenting: Reasonable Expectations.” This article was helpful thinking about what is the expectation for parenting and the types of desired parents. In other words, two-parent households are much more desired than a single parent because single parents have more stress which can effect how they treat their children. But on the aspect of expectations, parents not having “too many” children, in other words if you can’t afford them you shouldn’t be having them. In the article there is a section on family size and structure and it gives a description that the more children a parent has the less attention and fewer resources. Since I have decided to write the 20-page paper I am a little nervous that I will not have enough to say about this topic in 20 pages. I thought these were really good sources, but I could be wrong haha.