IBS Speaker Series: Pat Hastings

Join in person at IBS 155 or via Zoom, email ibs-contact@colorado.edu for the password.
*Light lunch served at 11:45 a.m.

Title: What’s a Parent to Do? Socioeconomic Variation in Parenting Logics Measured with Computational Text Analysis

Bio: Orestes “Pat” Hastings is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Colorado State University, where he has been since receiving his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2017. Pat’s research interests mostly center around stratification, inequality, and family demography, and his work includes publications in the American Sociological Review, Demography, the Journal of Marriage and Family, and Social Forces.

Abstract: Leading theories suggest U.S. parenting varies widely by socioeconomic status, with middle-class parents practicing “concerted cultivation”—marked by parents’ intensive efforts to foster their children’s development—and working-class parents engaging in the “accomplishment of natural growth”—with children given more freedom to manage their own time. However, it is unclear how much these findings reflect differing cultural logics of what makes for good parenting or reflect differences in the resources required to enact the types of parenting that parents believe would be best. In this talk, I will present a novel way to measure parenting logics using computational text analysis of parenting advice given by survey respondents to hypothetical parenting situations. Nearly all parenting logics reflect some form of intensive parenting, but they vary across two other dimensions: assertive vs negotiated parenting and pedagogic vs pragmatic parenting. There is also little difference in how parenting logics vary by race/ethnicity, education, and income, suggesting more similarity across groups and more variability within groups than commonly understood. This work is part of a broader ongoing project to understand the socioeconomic correlates of parenting and their implications for children’s outcomes.