Abstract:
Much of the sociological literature on how child support is allocated and used engages with normative white Western understandings of family structure, the organization of gender relations, and the distribution and management of financial resources within that structure. There has been an absence of an examination of how mothers and fathers from ethnic minority communities navigate and negotiate uses of child support money. Drawing on interviews with nine Pacific mothers in receipt of or eligible to receive child support, this paper considers the differences between white Western and Pacific practices of money transfer within families, as well as discursive constructions of child support, to explore how Pacific mothers reconcile Pacific understandings of money with how they construct, allocate and use child support, and the extent to which this money is understood and treated as ‘special money’ (Zelizer, V. A. (1989). The social meaning of money: “Special monies”. American Journal of Sociology, 95(2), 342–377.). The mothers’ discussions of child support money emphasize child-centred spending priorities in ways that challenge practices associated the flow of money in Pacific families, but reaffirm their identities as ‘good’ mothers. This paper concludes by arguing that discursive constructions of child support operate in ways that constrain how the mothers in this study allocated and used child support money.
