Managing Wage Work and Care Work for Children with Disabilities: how single- and two-parent
white and Latino families juggle competing demands
Ellen Scott, University of Oregon (## email not listed ##)
The Problem
Low-income and racial-ethnic minority families of children with disabilities face substantial
obstacles to adequate care provision resulting in potential compromises to their children’s well-being.
Low-income job conditions in a service sector economy, diminished public resources, and increased
privatization of care force parents to make anguishing decisions as they negotiate the often conflicting
obligations of wage work and care work. These decisions have consequences for the financial well-being
of the family and the health and general well-being of the children. Minority and immigrant families face
particular obstacles to services due to language and cultural barriers.
Currently, the social science and policy literature provides little data on how decisions about
work and care, and access to services, vary cross-culturally. Some surveys with national data on families
of children with disabilities allow for limited analysis by income and race, but these data do not allow for
analysis of the complex factors that shape nuanced decisions regarding work-care tradeoffs, access to, and
utilization of, services, and the consequences for the family. Qualitative analyses of work, care, and
services in families caring for children with disabilities tend not to be cross-cultural, and indeed most of
the samples include exclusively white respondents. Therefore, we know little about how the society’s
most vulnerable populations manage the enormous complexity of caring for children with special needs,
with few financial and social resources, poor access to the limited social services available, and jobs that
are often unstable, part-time, inflexible, low-wage and lacking health insurance.
In this project, I have sought to fill some of this gap by collecting data through in-depth
interviews with single- and two-parent white and Latino families. Thus far, I have interviewed 35
families, most of whom are white, many of them single-parent. I am currently working with the local
school system to conduct interviews with Latino families of children with disabilities and anticipate by
this summer that I will have completed 20 interviews. These open-ended qualitative interviews examine
how families assess and understand their child’s illness or disability, and how factors such as social
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Convention