Kim Price-Glynn
My research interests center on gender, labor, and carework. My recent book, Who Cares About Parents?: Temporary Alliances, Exclusionary Practices, and the Strategic Possibilities of Parenting Groups published in 2025, with the series Carework in a Changing World (Rutgers University Press) explores the dimensions of parenting groups’ carework practices and examines how parenting groups both foster and thwart access to care infrastructure. Despite their challenges, I found that parenting groups provide the possibility for strategic parenting – or parents’ provision of community based, nimble, and often scalable solutions to address parents’ care needs.
Who cares for parental caregivers? The short answer is, parenting groups do. Who Cares for Parents examines how parenting groups collectively build and contribute significant resources to form a broader care infrastructure for adult family caregivers with children. This book looks at the content of care parenting groups provide for parents, through comparative research including mothers, fathers, and nonbinary parents. Cases include some of the most recognizable parenting groups in the United States, some with vast networks of parent members numbering in the thousands or even millions, like the Parent Teacher Association, La Leche League, and MOMS Club International. The book also examines newer and, perhaps, less well known groups like the City Dads Group, the Upper East Side (UES) Mommas, as well as smaller sets of local dads’ groups and a babysitting co-op.
Can parents in the contemporary United States secure some of the necessary resources to provide care, not only for their children but also for themselves, through parenting groups? The evidence from this research suggests they can. Parenting groups have a long history of organizing membership, meetings, education, material resources, and advocacy to provide for parents’ needs. Parenting groups’ ideologies and practices often seek broad goals, and sometimes include far reaching advocacy, innovative solutions, and possibilities for what Price-Glynn calls strategic parenting and social change. Alongside their successes, however, parenting groups also face challenges of producing narrow and temporary alliances, exclusion, and exacerbating inequalities. Despite their many challenges, Price-Glynn remains hopeful about the possibilities for non-familial and collective care infrastructure like that performed by parent groups.
I am co-book series editor of Carework in a Changing World, with Mignon Duffy and Amy Armenia (also with Rutgers University Press). Within our book series we have published several books including: From Crisis To Catastrophe (2023); Migrants Who Care (2023); Decentering Epistemologies and Challenging Privilege (2024); Becoming an Expert Caregiver (2024), Who Cares About Parents? (2025), Called to Care (2026).
I am co-editor of the volume, From Crisis to Catastrophe: Care, COVID, and Pathways to Change (Rutgers University Press 2023), with Mignon Duffy (University of Massachusetts Lowell) and Amy Armenia (Rollins College). The book examines the pandemic’s impact on the social organization of care in different countries around the world.
My past research addresses diverse organizational settings including strip clubs, nursing homes, and home health care. My 2010 book, Strip Club: Gender, Power, and Sex Work (NYU Press), examined the processes through which men and women wield, negotiate, and contest power in a gendered organization. I have published with Gender & Society, Sociology of Health & Illness; Research in the Sociology of Health Care; and Work, Employment & Society as well as other journals and in the edited volume, Caring on the Clock (Rutgers University Press 2015).
