Girls’ Family Labor in Low-Income Households: A Decade of Qualitative Research

This article analyzes a decade of qualitative research to identify and explore an overlooked survival strategy used in low-income families: children's family labor. Defined as physical duties, caregiving, and household management responsibilities, children's-most often girls'-family labor is posited as a critical source of support where low wages and absent adult caregivers leave children to take over essential, complex, and time-consuming family demands. We argue that there are lost opportunities when children are detoured from childhood to do family labor and that an intergenerational transfer of poverty is associated with those losses. Key Words: caregiving, child care, children, girls, low-income, work-family. Low-income working families have long devised nonmonetary strategies to manage daily life (Edin & Lein, 1997; Furstenberg, Cook, Eccles, Elder, & Sameroff, 1999; Stack, 1974) in large part because they cannot afford market alternatives. One of these strategies is shared caregiving, or reciprocity and kin care, but recent research suggests that relative care may be less available than has been presumed (Gerstel & Gallagher, 1994; Roschelle, 1997a). Work and family scholarship in general has focused on the strategies used by middle-class and dual-career families, with less research on low-income and single-mother families (Dodson & Bravo, 2003; Heymann, 2000). Although researchers have examined children's household work, largely in the context of whether doing chores benefits children (Goodnow, 1988), the use of children to provide family labor-physical duties, caregiving, and domestic management responsibilities critical to family survival-is absent from most work and family scholarship. A review of recent scholarship about low-income working families reveals that parents face formidable challenges taking care of children and households while meeting the demands of low-wage jobs (Munger, 2002). Moreover, the wages of many underskilled workers are insufficient to support a family (Bernstein, Brocht, & Spade-Aguilar, 2000). Although an increase in publicly funded child care has accompanied the loss of welfare, government-subsidized child care serves a small percentage of all eligible families (Mezey, Schumacher, Greenberg, Lombardi, & Hutchins, 2002). This article examines children's family labor, arguing that low earnings and parental absence due to employment push significant care and household work onto children-particularly girls-as a family coping or survival strategy. Moreover, our data show that in low-income America, when children focus on family labor, there is an opportunity cost-a loss of attention to their own development-contributing to an intergenerational cycle of poverty and near poverty, largely from mother to daughter. Using a grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), the first author identified the theme of low-income children's family work while conducting several studies in the 1990s in which children's family labor was noteworthy in its complexity, importance to respondents, and prevalence. Subsequently, between 1998 and 2002, researchers conducted additional research about children's nonmonetary contributions to family life. This article describes types of children's family labor that emerged repeatedly during these studies. We use rich, triangulated qualitative data to examine respondents' understanding of children's work for family as economic necessity but also in the context of gender and race or ethnic cultural obligations. We conclude that low-income children commonly perform family labor and thus spend less time on school and extracurricular activities, resulting in profound opportunity costs and foregone and forgotten dreams. Our methodological experience cautions us that low-income parents are often reluctant to divulge details about their family patterns, maintaining oblique habits of survival in low-wage America. …