Parents living in poverty are sometimes denigrated for doing less to promote their children’s success than middle-class parents who engage in highly visible forms of intensive parenting and investing in their children’s academic and extracurricular success. But research has found that ensuring children’s safety and basic physical needs while living in poverty is itself an intensive process. That extends to something as apparently simple as providing diapers for babies and toddlers, sociologist Jennifer Randles demonstrates.
Randles coins the term “inventive mothering” to illuminate how, for poor parents, aspects of parenting that are routine for middle-class parents often require effort and creativity.
Diapers demonstrate this because they’re simultaneously a basic necessity and a significant expense: In Randles’s sample, diapers took up an average of 8 percent of total monthly income, making this a serious financial challenge, especially since government food programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program don’t cover diapers.
It’s an essential expenditure, though. For mothers whose poverty leaves them vulnerable to oversight from welfare case workers, social workers, and health care providers, an adequate supply of diapers isn’t just necessary to protect their children from rashes and urinary tract infections. Mothers fear that a lack of diapers could be taken as a sign of negligence and lead to children being removed from their custody. To the outside world and to themselves, having a child in clean diapers validates their parenting.
“Providing those diapers means I’m a good mom who keeps them away from my trauma and our money problems,” one woman told Randles. “For diapers, I’m willing to do anything for my kids.”
“Willing to do anything” wasn’t just talk. The women Randles interviewed went to great lengths to ensure that they had enough diapers for their children. They collected cans and bottles, sold plasma, went without food and toilet paper, and panhandled. They asked friends and family for help. When their children were at home, they made makeshift diapers out of paper towels or dish towels to save diapers for use outside the home and particularly when engaging with the child welfare system. They pursued sources of free diapers including diaper banks, asking doctor’s offices for diapers, and writing to companies seeking free samples. In particularly desperate moments, some stole them.
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In addition to the work they did obtaining diapers, these mothers developed intense knowledge of their children’s diaper needs. They tracked fluid intake and diaper usage to predict how many diapers they would need, and they “invested significant cognitive labor into learning which diaper brands and sizes could hold the most without causing discomfort or pain for children.” That often meant avoiding the cheapest diapers that would be both less absorbent and more likely to cause rashes.
Obtaining diapers is less visible as a form of intensive parenting than taking toddlers to music or gymnastics classes, but Randles shows how this inventive parenting involves “rigorous, innovative, and productive practices ingeniously cultivated to address stratification” through great effort.
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