179 Motherhood and Work Issues in Race & Society | Spring 2023 Motherhood and Work: Women Combining Work and Childcare as a Patriarchal Response Nicole Dezrea Jenkins ABSTRACT Employers have begun to strategize ways to accommodate families as they navigate work-family balance, and scholars have found that various policies contribute to how employees perceive and manage work-fam- ily balance. However, research in this area largely centers on White workspaces and experiences for policy recommendations, leaving out those experiences specific to people of color and their workspaces. The practices and experiences of people of color in managing work-family balance are mostly absent from policy development for the institutions of work. I argue that Black women, who are the largest group of grow- ing entrepreneurs in the US, have valuable experiences that contribute to a better understanding of how families of color navigate and under- stand their parenting and work responsibilities. In this paper, I describe racialized child-rearing techniques used by Black mothers to maintain work-family balance. Drawing on two years of participant observation, ethnography, and unstructured interviews in a Black, women-owned and operated business, I find that Black women adopt collective racial- ized conceptualizations of motherhood and responsibilities, that cen- ter competing ideological frames of motherhood. Mothers value their Black children’s success in education, yet understand institutions of education as hostile sites for their children. Women aspire to work out- side of the home to secure self-actualization, yet understand their roles as mothers through a patriarchal lens that places more responsibilities of parenting and childcare on mothers than fathers. This patriarchal