“I Don’t Need to Be Here:” How Parents Negotiate Identity After Mandated Parenting Classes

Abstract

When parents become involved with Child Protective Services, one of the first interventions in case plans for reunification with their children is a parenting class. These classes are praised by child development specialists and funders for their content and potential impact on parents, yet parents drop out at high rates and are routinely dissatisfied. In this thesis, I explore how parents make sense of their involvement and how they navigate the associated stigma. Through in-depth interviews with fifteen parents, I found that their frustrations and successes are fundamentally tied to the ways in which they see themselves. Parents utilize the class itself to reject negative labels. These interviews revealed how parents are able or limited in their ability to learn from class content. This offers important implications for policy concerning parenting classes and policies generally that prioritize educational interventions over other forms of assistance to low-income families.