“She Took Care of Us and She Went Through a Lot”: Emotional Availability,Emotional Support,and Millennials’ Gendered Understandings of Parenting

Abstract

In the United States, parenting pressures are growing for both mothers and fathers. Thus, it is important to investigate how younger generations may make sense of parenting in ways that could either reduce, or exacerbate, gender inequalities. In this article, interviews with 60 millennials discussing their experiences with their parents reveal that emotional support and emotional availability are key normative parenting expectations. However, disparate gender norms also factor into millennials’ stories about their parents’ efforts. These millennials often criticize fathers for sometimes being too absent, authoritarian, or ego-driven while they understand mothers as constrained by fathers’ bad behaviors yet still bound by expectations to be emotionally available and supportive in appropriately gendered ways. In millennials’ stories, emotional support and availability are seemingly gender neutral and millennials expect both fathers and mothers to live up to these expectations. However, broader structural gender norms challenge the apparent neutrality of parenting expectations.