The care of children when Pacific parents live apart: A case of mothers and othermothers caring together

ABSTRACT

Shared post-separation parenting has become legally and culturally idealised across many Western jurisdictions. Shared parental responsibility is often accompanied by a presumption that parents will share care time as well as a cultural imaginary of involved shared parental care for children. However, little is known about how care work is organised and enacted following separation. Drawing on interviews with 15 separated Pacific parents, 10 mothers and five fathers, in New Zealand, this paper explores whether shared care time translates into mothers and fathers sharing post-separation care work for children. Our examination pays especial attention to how collectivised approaches to caring interacts with gender to shape how care for children is organised and performed following separation. In pursuing this, we examine gendered differences in how and with whom Pacific mothers and fathers care for their children post-separation. We conclude by arguing that the Pacific mothers’ and fathers’ everyday care practices were embedded in collectivist approaches to parenting, with mothers and fathers sharing care work in gendered ways with othermothers. What emerges from the Pacific mothers’ and fathers’ talk is that care work relies on gendered practices of care that are underpinned by gendered divisions of care labour in the family.

KEYWORDS:

• Pacific mothers
• Pacific fathers
• separated parents
• othermothers
• shared care
• extended families
• post-separation families

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Large scale time-use studies of parents who live together continue to show that mothers do about twice as much childcare as fathers, are more likely than fathers to undertake solo childcare and perform a disproportionate share of routine physical childcare tasks, for example, feeding, bathing, dressing, putting children to bed, as well as transporting children (or accompanying care) (Craig and Mullan 2011; Bianchi et al. 2012; Raley et al. 2012; Craig et al. 2014; Sayer 2016).

² Palagi is the Samoan word for white people who usually have European ancestry.