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Parenting, Motherhood, and Fatherhood

Johanna Lilius, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
This article is a revision of the previous edition article by S. C. Aitken, volume 8, pp 72–76, © 2009 Elsevier Ltd.

Glossary
Emancipatory city thesis A spatial metaphor for the inner city as a liberating space, enhancing liberal agency and especially
reproducing more gender-neutral caring practices.
Gender contracts Constitutes of a set of implicit and explicit rules governing gender relations, which allocate different work,
value, responsibilities, and obligations to women and men.
Nuclear family The family form that Western societies have relied on throughout the early 20th Century, in which the mother
takes care of the home and the family and the father is the breadwinner of the family.
Social reproduction Refers to practices outside the home–work relationship through which people reproduce themselves.
YUPPS Young urban professional parents, a term coined by Lia Karsten to illustrate a new generation consisting of two
professional parents staying in the city after the transition to parenthood.

The transition to parenthood Becoming a parent challenges self-identity, labor market position, and gender relations. Parenthood
brings about an emotional register and a new set of expectations and responsibilities, while also transforming everyday life and the
spaces and places of daily life. Geographers have shown that place and space play a substantial role in defining parenthood and
parenting at a global, national, and local scale. Simultaneously national policies, social welfare systems, and global as well as local
parenting cultures shape everyday family life and the practices of care. Over the last century, a diversity of ways of caring Becoming
a parent have evolved and been reproduced around the globe.
In order to understand parenthood and mothering/fathering in different places and across time, it is crucial to apprehend the
gender contracts on which family life in the specific context is grounded. A gender contract, according to the European commission
(1998), is a set of implicit and explicit rules governing gender relations, which allocate different work, value, responsibilities, and
obligations to women and men. The nuclear family emerged with the development of the industrial city. The nuclear family is based
on a gender contract in which the father is the family breadwinner. The mother is the homemaker; she is responsible for the well-
being of her family members. This includes a responsibility to make the home a safe haven. The nuclear family model thus was built
on a gender contract in which production and reproduction were divided. On the one hand became work in the public sphere,
outside the home; on the other hand, reproduction, care work, and work connected to the household and the private sphere. Early
geographic work captured these different spheres of life and showed that lifeworlds of men and women and family life to be inher-
ently spatial. An example of this is Mona Domosh and Susan Saegert’s book Putting Women in Place, in which they demonstrated the
connection between maleness and femaleness on urban form and the built environment. The book shows how modernist urban
planning and the ideal of spatially dividing different functions impacted on the lives of men and women living in nuclear families.
Housing was placed in suburbs and work often in inner cities. Women were at home, in the suburbs, while men by commuting daily
to their work sustained their relationship to the city. In this notion lie the strong and enduring dichotomies: private–public; men–
women; suburb–city.
While the after-war period, and especially the 1950s, emphasized the role of mothers as housewives, a number of studies have
shown that by the 1970s nuclear families often included a mother who worked part-time and a short way from home. The same
studies have remarked on the father’s further commute to a full-time job. The feminist critique in the 1970s argued that the
suburban city reinforced White lower- and middle-class women’s roles as household workers. Even though they were now contrib-
uting to the household economy, they were nevertheless still “spatially trapped” in the suburbs. The working mother’s workplace
was, as stated above, relatively close to home. This facilitated her capacity to also meet the criteria of her main responsibilities:
managing the home and the children. By contrast, the men who commuted further to work continued to actively engage in the
public sphere.
With the emergence of the dual workload for women the feminist critics began turning their attention to, for example, the avail-
ability of childcare and the importance of well-functioning public transportation and a more inclusive urban planning practice (e.g.,

International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2nd edition, Volume 10 https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102295-5.10847-9 33

34 Parenting, Motherhood, and Fatherhood

Hayden, 1980; England, 1991). In order to emphasize a variety of lived experiences across space and not only the traditional roles of
men and women in the nuclear family, the concept of “gender lenses” was introduced in urban planning emphasizing that planners
should address a more diverse view of the spatial needs of different people. A common interpretation emphasized a denser urban
form, with good public transportation as a key issue for helping women, and especially mothers, cope with work–life balance.
Many of the first studies connected to family life and urban form were situated in cities in North America. Helen Jarvis, Jonathan
Cloke, and Paula Kantor in Gender in the City (1999) emphasized expanding the examination also to other context. In the book, they
revealed how different, but simultaneously interdependent, gendered life-chances are in European, North American, as well as cities
in the Global South. These critics undertook an in-depth exploration of what they called the “hidden” infrastructure of everyday life,
as well as of the role of the household on issues such as transport, housing, and urban regeneration. In their analysis they also
revealed inequalities in the everyday lives of mothers and fathers. They concluded, however, that the prevailing dichotomy between
city and suburb and the spatial separation of production and reproduction is a simplification. Paid work and household work
(including care work) on the contrary are often performed in tandem in a multitude of places. Therefore they claimed that it is
unclear whether there could be an ideal city form (such as a dense city) that would resolve issues related to parenthood and
work–life balance.
It is important to remember that mothering and fathering is also affected by social welfare. The prevailing assumption among
Westerners is often that Nordic countries are forerunners in gender equality. The Nordic welfare model in many ways has promoting
the modernization of motherhood and thus updated gender contracts. For example, the Nordic countries have seen many women
engaged in paid care work, as nursery school teachers and public health nurses, and the availability of affordable childcare has also
made it possible for mothers to work outside of the home even when their children are very small. Today, the fertility rates in the
Nordic countries are higher than elsewhere in Europe. This is often explained by the many family-friendly arrangements that are
offered in the Nordic countries. After becoming parents both mothers and fathers are offered generous family leaves, which arguably
enhance a more child-friendly working environment for them. In addition, families are offered free or affordable childcare until the
children start school.
Nordic geographers actively took part in research on family life, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. Much of their research built
on Torsten Hägerstrand’s time-geography or time–space geography. In time-geography, time and space are seen as preconditions to
everyday life. Time-geography then can be used to study how different actions occur in an individual’s time–space framework and
what restricts realizing those actions. These geographers were particularly interested in varieties in the everyday practices of mothers.
Time-geography revealed the spatial division between public and private activities, and the consequences that this division had on
the lives of women in managing their everyday lives. Tora Friberg (1990) combined time–space geography with the concept of life
form. Life form is a concept developed by ethnographers and sociologist and can be described as the totality of daily activities and
the relationship between these activities. Combining mother’s time–space diaries with their occupation and their social situation,
she found that while those mothers who lead the carrier life form found their working lives to be their most meaningful everyday
practice, mothers who lead the wage earner life form derived more meaning from their leisure activities. Despite the differences in
the life forms of the mothers, childcare work was equally important to the mothers. Balancing between paid and unpaid work was
difficult for the mothers despite life form.
As the article has so far concluded, family life and form and the act of caring are constructed and reproduced through time and
within different national and legal frameworks. Moral geographies of local childcare cultures add further to the ways in which
parenthood is enacted. In particular qualitative studies have been powerful in showing local moral geographies. One example is
Sarah Holloway’s work in 1998. Basing her argument on an interview study on childcare cultures in two socioculturally different
neighborhoods in Sheffield in the United Kingdom, Holloway maintained that parents use childcare for reasons not only related to
the working life of the mother. For example, mothers may put their child in childcare because they believe doing so is important for
the child’s development. This kind of perception, a local moral geography, was important especially for many middle- and upper-
class women in validating their decision to use day care. Although the mothers might not have chosen day care in the first place, they
felt pressure from other mothers to do so. In other words, the mothers were influenced by the localized moral geography reproduced
in the mothering networks in their neighborhood.

Caring Takes Place

While the traditional nuclear family emphasized strict gender roles, gender roles in many context today can be considered much less
fixed. Many qualitative studies have been inspired by the geographer’s own transition into parenthood. These qualitative studies
have been undertaken to understand how mothering and fathering in everyday life and across everyday spaces are contested and
negotiated. A number of them have shown that care work is still connected primarily to mothering, and that fathering is still defined
in relation to mothering. However, in many Western contexts today, geographers have eschewed the separation of mothering and
fathering in their consideration of parental responsibilities, instead emphasizing the importance, in a culture that promotes equity,
of discussing parenting as a shared task. At the same time, the discussion has emphasized the connection between equal parenting
and class. For example, a number of reports from the Nordic countries have shown that well-educated fathers spend more time with
their children and take longer family leaves. By contrast, immigrant fathers in the Nordic countries hardly stay on family leave at all,
which may relate to their work–life positions as well as gender contracts. However, while modern Nordic fathering includes actively
caring for the child, a common finding in questioners on that show that other household work still remains the main responsibility
 Parenting, Motherhood, and Fatherhood 35

for the mother. In other words, women continue to shoulder the main responsibility for unpaid domestic work even though parents
are taking equal part in work–life and childcare.
Inherently, caring practices also take place somewhere, and geography has been a particularly progressive discipline for demon-
strating the spatial dimension of mothering and fathering and how it varies across contexts. A number of studies have shown that
local gender contracts still influence how the neighborhood is used and perceived by the parents as part of the parenting practices.
For example, Willem Boterman and Gary Bridge (2015), in their comparative study of Amsterdam and London, have concluded that
while mothers dominate in the childcare realm in certain neighborhoods in London, fathers are almost as dominant as mothers in
their childcare work in some Amsterdam neighborhoods. Likewise, in Sweden, parental responsibilities are not drawn along gender
lines. The phrase “latte parents” underscores this sense of shared responsibility, as it refers to both mothers and fathers who frequent
cafés while spending time with their babies. And, this image of equality is not only found in the Netherlands and Sweden. In fact,
the media actively reproduces the image of contemporary urban fathering through stories about “hipster dads” and “Scandi-dads” in
cities such as Berlin and Copenhagen. The image of the new equal father, however, often builds on conformed ideal in a situational
context. Studies in Helsinki, for example, show that particular places play a crucial role in shaping the identities of mothers and
fathers. For fathers in the inner city of Helsinki, the available services and the close proximity to a social environment that had
been of importance prior to parenthood played a substantial role in their lives while they were on parental leave. In fact, both
mothers and fathers emphasized the importance of a lively neighborhood to their own well-being while they were on family leave.
They explained parental leave, if it had isolated them from their social lives, would have been much less enjoyable.
Although geographers have shown that parenting is inherently spatial, Stuart Aitken has argued that research has sorely neglected
to consider the daily emotional practices by which fathering is negotiated and contested. In his book The Awkward Spaces of Fathering
he has shown that although the normative ideal emphasizes equal parenting, irrationality and emotional labor is (still and also)
involved in the day-to-day practice of fathering. Furthermore, nuclear family roles still influence the work and spaces of fathering.
Thus, fathering can be seen as emotional work opposed to seeing fathering as something biologically determined. This is an impor-
tant thrust, which is unified across class and in different social and global contexts.
We need to consider that the analyses of parenting and parenthood often still operate within a heteronormative social construc-
tion, and only a few geographers have analyzed mothering and fathering outside heteronormative relationships. Karina Luzia has
emphasized that this narrow breadth of research limits the ways in which we understand contemporary geographies of family. For
example, Luzia has argued that we have not dedicated enough research to same-sex parented families who are increasingly chal-
lenging traditional roles and practices. Same-sex parents find they need to negotiate their place in those material and symbolic
spaces of parenthood that have been shaped by and for families with heterosexual parents. At the same time, “queer friendly” spaces
are also renegotiated as parental identity emphasizes different needs and practices.

Parenting Alone

Single parents comprise another group that falls outside the nuclear family, but whose everyday lives nevertheless include the same
time–space constraints as families with two parents. Single parenting come in various forms: as the starting point for starting
a family; as a consequence of divorce or loss; and as Marjolijn van der Klis has argued, as a means to avoid family migration.
van der Klis calls families who opt for relationships in which one of the parents is offered a job in another location “commuter
families.” In the Dutch context, she has argued, commuter parents may have an egalitarian notion of combining work and family
roles, and a relationship in which both the mothers and fathers take their mothering/fathering roles seriously. However, due to
being spatially divided between homes, one of the parentsdmost likely the motherdhas to bear the main responsibility for family
life. While the absent parent lives in two different activity spaces, the parent who lives with the children has to work her/his daily
work and family routines around one activity space and within a single-parent framework. Both parents may actively care, as is
demonstrated by the commuter parent’s phone calls or visits; however, the parent living full time with the children still bears
most responsibility for the everyday life. This means in particular bearing the often invisible coordinating role of the homework.
The parent who lives with the children has to manage the organization of the children’s school and leisure time and hobbies, while
also planning that there is food on the table, that clothes are washed, and so on. van der Klies study is important also in showing
how care work is negotiated and divided and how the different dimensions of care work often remain gendered.
Single parenting within geography has been mainly studied from the perspective of post-separation families. Separation adds,
inevitably, a complex layer of negotiation to parenting practices. In some countries, joint custody is becoming increasingly
common. Children then live with alternate parents on different weeks. Nevertheless, the spatial implications of this sort of residen-
tial arrangement have so far been poorly researched. On the other hand, in many places it is still most common that women are the
head of single-parent families. Thus, Michael Thomas, Clara Mulder, and Thomas Cooke have argued that the residential location of
separated mothers has a much greater implication on the future caregiving activities of the family than does the residential location
of the fathers. For single mothers’ density and housing process are also relevant to the parenting practices, as women often tend to
earn less than men. Mothers need more space because children spend time primarily in their homes, but they often have much fewer
means than the fathers do to provide adequate housing for their children. Fathers, because they need less space as the children spend
more time with the mothers, and because they often earn more, have more options relating to where they will live. And, adequate
housing is not the only difficulty. Single-parent families often have lower incomes than dual-earner families, which may mean the
primary caregiver cannot provide an adequate level of basic needs.
36 Parenting, Motherhood, and Fatherhood

In the 1980s, single motherhood was connected to gentrification processes in cities. The inner city was considered to be partic-
ularly suitable for single mothers, who could more easily negotiate their daily lives in environments that did not generally adhere to
nuclear family ideals. Single parents in other words were recognized as pioneering gentrifiers. Today, being able to live in the inner
city very often demands two high salaries and the research on parents living in inner city mostly addresses dual-earner families.
Single motherhood has remained connected to gentrification research, though on very different terms, namely within the discussion
of austerity urbanism. Paul Watt recently drew attention to displaced lone parent mothers in East London. He concluded that
women’s rights in particular, as they regarded city living, have eroded because of neoliberalist welfare cutbacks and housing restruc-
turing after the Olympic Games in 2012. The limited availability of affordable housing in East London had pushed the lone mothers
that he studied into living into temporary supported housing. He found that while many of the mothers grew up, and were close to,
their extended families in the supported housing in East London neighborhoods they had either been or were under the threat of
being displaced in suburban outer London. According to Watt, lone parents are particularly vulnerable to being relocated far away
from their social networks and services because they lack the resources to lead a working-middle-class suburban lifestyle. In this
view, the city still fosters a more advantageous environment for lone parents.

The Domesticfication of Inner-City Neighborhoods

A number of studies emphasize that families are influenced by local parenting and family ideals. For instance, Lia Karsten in her
article “Family Gentrifiers: Challenging the City as a Place Simultaneously to Build a Career and to Raise Children” in Urban Studies
specifically addressed why (nuclear) families stay in the inner city. She brought evidence from a newly built neighborhood in the
inner-city Amsterdam, documenting that some families opted to stay in the city instead of buying in the suburbs. Since the early
2000s the number of children has grown in many inner cities including New York, Berlin, Helsinki, and Amsterdam. Karsten
put a name to these families who stayed in the city: YUPPS (young urban professional parents). She concluded these gentrifiers
were unwilling to give up their careers and urban lifestyles for a life in the suburbs. Karsten also recognized changing gender rela-
tions as crucial for the families to stay in the city. Mothers found the social environment of the city to better accept their decision to
take part in full-time work. In other parts of the Netherlands the “moral geography of family life” still emphasizes a working father
and a mother who stay at home with her children. Secondly, the city made it more possible for the parents to manage their daily life
with children better, than commuting across the city would have. Other studies addressing parents who stay in the city have further
highlighted the importance of being able to blend different life-stages, emphasizing that by staying in the inner city, the transition to
parenthood becomes less strict and fixed. The growing number of children in many cities has made parenting practices an integral
part of the city streetscape. Through everyday parenting practices, mothers and fathers make the domestic sphere all the more visible
in public and semi-public spaces in the city. The term “domesticfiation” explains the ongoing change of urban space, in which
middle-class parenting, as caring activities by both mothers and fathers are reforming inner cities.
Following Lia Karsten’s study, geographers have increasingly paid attention to the growing number of families living in apart-
ments, particularly in contexts in which suburban single-family housing has been understood to be the norm. In Australia, for
example, the number of families staying in apartments is growing rapidly because the planning ideology has shifted from providing
detached housing to urban consolidation, and consequently more apartment building housing. However, the norm is still that
families belong in detached suburban housing. According to Sophie-May Kerr, together with Chris Gibson and Natascha Klocker,
this norm causes extra emotional drain for those parents who live in apartments. In their daily domestic spatial practices they
include a number of adjustments such as paying extra attention to sounds in order not to disturb neighbors, something they would
not do if they lived in single-family housing. The noises of families are not considered adequate in apartment building houses.
Although early research on urban parenting found planning and policymaking was lagging in facilitating a working everyday life
for families in inner-city environments, other studies have shown that the bond between the nuclear family and urban planning and
policymaking is still strong. Research recognizes nuclear families as important players in government-led regeneration policies.
Todd Goodsell has proposed the term “familification” to explain ‘a process of neighborhood change where planners encourage
traditional families to move into disadvantaged neighborhoods, with cultural, social and economic consequences for those
neighborhoods.” The study, conducted in the inner city of a medium-sized city in Utah revealed that politicians and policymakers
considered families important in transforming neighborhoods to safer places, which in turn local government would cost on, for
example, security issues. In the European context, Marguerite Van den Berg has introduced the term “genderfication” to explain the
production of space for specific gender ideals though planning. According to her analysis of planning documents in Rotterdam,
space in the inner city is produced for well-educated, middle-class, dual-earner families, in other words YUPPS, which are
considered as the medicine to cure the ills of the urban problems that poorer families are said to cause.

The Emancipatory City Thesis Revisited

Class is becoming an inevitable part of studies on parenting. Across race and nationality, part of being middle class means being
concerned about children’s social and academic development, including schooling. A number of geographers are engaged with
school choice. Gentrifiers who initially have been attracted to the mix of people in inner-city neighborhood in both American
and European cities often do not want their children to attend low-scoring, socially mixed local schools. So, while parents
 Parenting, Motherhood, and Fatherhood 37

emphasize diversity in their housing choice, it is not something they want included in the daily lives of their children’s education.
Rachel Sherman (2016) brings an interesting insight to elite child-rearing: some wealthy and affluent parents find it difficult to
parent according to their ideals in segregated housing environments. The elites want to cultivate “children’s moral selves” and raise
their children to become “good people” who are “entitled.” In practice this means, for example, that these elite parents limit their
children’s possibilities to consume limitlessly, although they would have the financial means to do so. However, they also wish to
expose their children to “others” in imaginary and concrete ways so that the children understand their own social position, and see
what “normal” life is. Part of the concerns of the elite parents in New York is to find residential areas with mixed income people so
that the children could understand their entitlement.
Different kinds of leisure activities for children are also changing the daily activity patterns of parenting. Although the research
on parenthood traditionally has concentrated on spaces directly related to child-rearing such as the home, school, and playground,
much of the time middle-class parents, both mothers and fathers, spend with their children today take place outside these arenas.
Many authors have concluded that social reproduction is becoming an inevitable part of raising children because of more free time
and higher incomes. Social reproduction refers to practices outside the home–work relationship through which people reproduce
themselves. For example, organizing children’s free time around hobbies is understood to be crucial for the development of chil-
dren. “Generation backseat” refers to children, who are spending their free time in the car, while their parents drive them around the
city to different activities. In cities, spaces such as leisure and retail centers outside the city as well as cafés and restaurants in the inner
city have also become important sights for social reproduction. Taking children to these facilities is a way to reproduce class status.
By making going to restaurants and cafés an inevitable part of the everyday, parenting simultaneously reproduce children to become
class-informed city dwellers.
While the emancipatory thesis has been a spatial metaphor for the inner city as a liberating space, enhancing liberal agency and
especially reproducing more gender-neutral caring practices, Winifred Curran in her book Gender and Gentrification brings up social
reproduction as an obstacle that makes parenting in class-conscious inner cities demanding. In an otherwise functioning city struc-
ture, the high demand of activities for children makes it difficult especially for single parents to keep up the pace of developing their
children. To her, gentrified inner cities together with intensified motherhood, the privatization of education and urban governance
in the US context makes social reproduction more masculinist and less democratic. This highlights how parenting is constantly
being contested and revised in space, and how individual experiences and emotions intrinsically build family geographies in
different social, cultural, and institutional context. Simultaneously it also shows that parenting has an inevitable role in producing
neighborhood spaces and places. Parenting geographies change cities, both socioeconomically and culturally.

See Also: Festival and Spectacle; Gender, Historical Geographies of; Knowing, Emotional; Masculinities; Pregnancy and Childbirth; Time-Space
Diaries.

Further Reading

Aitken, S.W., 2009. The Awkward Spaces of Fathering. Ashgate, UK & USA.
Boterman, W., Bridge, G., 2015. Gender, class and space in the field of parenthood: comparing middle-class fractions in Amsterdam and London. Trans. Inst. Br. Geogr. 40,
249–261.
Curran, W., 2017. Gender and Gentrification. Routledge, London and New York.
Domosh, M., Saegert, J., 2001. Putting Woman in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World. Guilford Press, New York.
England, K.V.L., 1991. Gender relations and the spatial structure of the city. Geoforum 22 (2), 135–147.
Friberg, T., 1993, English. Everyday life : women’s adaptive strategies in time and space. Linköping University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Linköping University, Department for
Studies of Social Change and Culture, Department of Culture Studies.
Goodsell, T.L., 2013. Familification: family, neighborhood change, and housing policy. Hous. Stud. 28 (6), 845–868.
Hayden, D., 1980. What would a non-sexist city Be like? Speculations on housing, urban design, and human work. Signs 5 (3), 170–187 (Supplement. Women and the
American City).
Holloway, S.I., 1998. Local childcare culture: moral geographies of mothering and the social organization of pre-school education. Gend. Place Cult. 5 (1), 29–53.
Jarvis, H., Cloke, J., Kantor, P., 1999. Gender in the City. Routledge, London & New York.
Karsten, L., 2003. Family gentrifiers: challenging the city as a place simultaneously to build a career and to raise children. Urban Stud. 40 (12), 2573–2584.
Kerr, S.-M., Gibson, C., Klocker, N., 2018. Parenting and neighboring in the consolidating city: the emotional geographies of sound in apartments. Emotion, Space and Society 26
(2018), 1–8.
Lilius, J., 2016. Domesticfication of urban space? Mothering and fathering while on family leave in the inner city. Gend. Place Cult. 23 (12), 1763–1773.
Luzia, K., 2010. Travelling in your back-yard: the unfamiliar places of parenting. Soc. Cult. Geogr. 11 (4), 359–375.
Pohl, N., 2006. Women, Space and Utopia, 1600–1800. Ashgate, Aldershot.
Saegert, S., 1980. Masculine cities and feminine suburbs: polarized ideas, contradictory realities. Signs 80 (5), S96–S111.
Sherman, R., 2017. Conflicted cultivation: parenting, privilege, and moral worth in wealthy New York families. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 5 (1–2), 1–33.
Thomas, M.J., Mulder, C.H., Cooke, T.J., 2017. Linked lives and constrained spatial mobility: the case of moves related to separation among families with children. Trans. Inst. Br.
Geogr. 42, 597–611.
Van den Berg, M., 2013. City children and gentrified neighborhoods: the new generation as urban regeneration strategy. Int. J. Urban Reg. Res. 37 (2), 523–536.
van der Klis, M., 2009. Commuter Relationships. Balancing Home, Family, and Distant Work. Doctoral dissertation, University of Amsterdam.
Watt, P., 2017. Gendering the right to housing in the city: homeless female lone parents in post-Olympics, austerity East London. Cities 76, 43–51.