- 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:
I decided to do a podcast rather than a 20 page paper, and my theme is around neoliberal parenting. I want to show how working-class parents/families struggle to meet to criteria of ideal parenting compared to middle class families who have the resources to achieve the ideal parenting concept, which is why working-class families are much more likely to be surveilled than middle-class families.
In “Factors related to the disproportionate involvement of children of color in the child welfare system: a review and emerging themes,” Alice Hines explores how families and children of color become and stay involved in child welfare services (CWS). One of the areas she focuses on is the social factors related to poverty, neighborhood effects and other community-related predictors of children of color entering and staying in (CWS). She argues families in poverty have limited resources and generally live in impoverished communities associated with negative stigma (e.g., high crime rates, neighborhood violence, and poor public schools), suggesting higher rates of child maltreatment. This demonstrates how working-class families struggle to provide the necessary resources for their children, but to the eyes of CPS workers they appear neglectful compared to middle-class families who are able to provide a safer neighborhood, and other luxuries such as healthier and more expensive food.
Dorothy Roberts argues in “The Racial Geography of Child Welfare: Toward a New Research Paradigm,”that families in poor neighborhood are negatively impacted by CPS surveilling them. One major consequences was children’s loss of respect for their parents when they are placed in foster care. The other major consequence was the impact on parents’ ability to discipline their children. These two consequences suggests that CPS involvement in poor neighborhood causes parents lose agency. This article shows how CPS involvement negatively affects working-class families due to the lack of resources available to them. I was thinking this could be a concluding factor towards the end of my podcast on the consequences of working-class parents inability to have better access to resources for their children which ultimately causes tensions once CPS is involved. I don’t know if that makes sense.
Hines, Alice M., et al. “Factors related to the disproportionate involvement of children of color in the child welfare system: A review and emerging themes.” Children and youth services review 26.6 (2004): 507-527.
Roberts, Dorothy E. “The racial geography of child welfare: Toward a new research paradigm.” Child Welfare 87.2 (2008): 125-150.
Lopez’s Comments:
Judy, this is wonderful progress on your project. I’m happy to see that your conversation with Riley went well and allows you to venture out into this new direction. Building on my comments from last week, I think it is a good decision to think about how working-class parents are held to standards created by middle-class parenting. The sentence, working-class parents are expected to meet certain moral and societal standards even though structural inequalities make this a difficult objective to accomplish.