What’s a Parent to Do? Measuring Cultural Logics of Parenting with Text Analysis

Abstract

Leading theories on parenting in the United States suggest that parenting styles vary 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. While it is frequently inferred that these parenting practices reflect different cultural logics of parenting, such logics are inherently hard to measure. Our paper proposes a new way to study parenting logics using computational social science (CSS) techniques applied to a nationally representative survey where respondents provided parenting advice across three hypo- thetical parenting situations. We analyze this advice using Biterm Topic Modeling and explore whether the resulting topics vary by respondents’ race/ethnicity, education, and income. We find that nearly all parenting logics reflect some form of intensive parenting but, within that, multiple nuanced versions of parenting emerge, varying across two dimensions: (1) assertive vs negotiated parenting, and (2) pedagogic vs pragmatic parenting. Using fractional multinomial logistic regression, we find little difference in how parenting logics vary by race/ethnicity, education, and income, revealing much more similarity across socioeconomic and sociodemographic groups than commonly understood. These findings demonstrate how CSS provides new tools to enrich the study of long-standing questions in social science research and complement the use of more "traditional" research methods in a synergistic manner.