The ongoing gendered parenting in North Cyprus / Kuzey Kıbrıs’ta Süregelen Cinsiyetlendirilmiş Ebeveynlik

Abstract

This study examines the role of extended family support for parents with children in early and pre-school age, father’s unpaid care work, mother’s employment status, social ties, cultural values, socioeconomic status, and kinship relations from a feminist perspective. A questionnaire composed of a Demographic Information Form, Father Involvement Scale, Extended Family Support Scale, Child’s Day Test, and Trait Anxiety Inventory was used for data collection. The research sample consisted of mothers of 397 children who were aged between 12 and 60 months. A total of 318 mothers were employed in a paid job while 79 were not employed in a paid job. The average age of the children was 36.0 months. It was observed that while all the families live as nuclear families, 17.9% of them lived in a building where their mothers and fathers live as an amalgam family structure (nuclear family living very close to the extended family, for example in the same building but in separate flats), and 3.8% lived in the same house as an extended family structure. The overall percentage of mothers who stated that they receive extended family support was 71.9%. The study also showed that half of the children (51.6%) of the employed mothers were cared for by their grandmothers during the day at least until the children reached two years of age. Furthermore, it was found that fathers’ involvement was limited both in housework and childcare responsibilities. Research findings showed that the social environment in North Cyprus supports familial care as a childcare method. In conclusion, in the North Cyprus sample, the gendered child-rearing role attributed to women continues in the status of grandmothers.

Keywords

• gendered parenting
• unpaid care work
• extended family support
• father involvement
• child development