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Project title: "Welfare Queens, Soccer Moms, and the Working Poor:
The Socio-Political Construction of State Child Care Policy"

My research asks how myths of American motherhood affect state-level policy outcomes in the increasingly critical area of child care policy. The socio-political construction of mothers by influential media sources and policy elites will be explored in depth to answer this important question. For instance, will states that construct policy targeting populations as "soccer moms" provide greater child care benefits than states focusing on negative images of "welfare queens?" Where do working poor mothers fit within this debate and does their apparent absence in popular media and state policy reflect their construction as "invisible?" While the existence and pervasiveness of such stereotypes of mothers has been explored by scholars from a variety of different disciplines, this project breaks new ground by asking how these societal myths shape concrete policy outcomes.

To answer theoretical and applied questions about the role of myth in redistributive politics and child care policy outcomes, an interdisciplinary social science approach will be used. Drawing on the social-problems and issue-framing theories of sociology and psychology and the problem definition literature of political science and public policy, I will conduct this research using a constructivist lens. I will examine state-level conceptions of mothers as targets for child care policy by focusing on how social, political, and cultural forces all construct or shape images of social problems and groups. More specifically, I will examine how images of three groups of mothers&emdash;middle class, working poor, and welfare recipients&emdash;are constructed in each state and how or if these images translate into policy outcomes.

To comprehensively explore the effects of myth construction on state child care policymaking, a variety of empirical methodologies will be used in a two-stage analysis. First, a statistical analysis of the fifty states will be carried out, followed by a comparative case study of two southern states. While the quantitative test will provide a broad, impressionistic look at how problem definition affects policy design, enactment, and implementation, the in-depth case studies will magnify and thus, better explain the relationships found in the quantitative assessment. The quantitative tests will rely on data from original surveys of state legislators, interest group leaders, and agency officials, as well as on existing state-level data and content analysis of state newspapers. The qualitative stage of the analysis will rely on in-depth elite interviews to make effective comparisons between the two case states. This use of multiple methods will allow for a more accurate study of the interaction between socio-political constructions of motherhood and child care policy-making.

By exploring how the myths of American motherhood shape public policy outcomes, this research will make significant contributions to the mission of Emory's MARIAL Center. The project's focus on child care as the key policy area, as well as on the role of the media in constructing myths of motherhood, also demonstrate how this dissertation research will contribute to the MARIAL Center's base of knowledge concerning America's working families.

"Soccer Moms, Welfare Queens, Waitress Moms, and Super Moms: Myths of Motherhood in State Media Coverage of Child Care"
(Working Paper 016-02) April 2 2002
Laurel Parker West