Parenting behavior has long been the object of social scientific research. Though varied, most theories translate into social imperatives for parents to be increasingly involved with complex institutions on behalf of their children (Hays 1996; Lareau 2003; Blum 2007; Landsman 2009; Sousa 2011). As children's educational needs intensify with the presence of developmental disabilities, the expectations placed upon parents, particularly mothers, are intensified as well. Mothers of children with disabilities are deemed vigilantes (Blum 2007) and warrior-heroes (Sousa 2011), battling social systems to gain services and support for their children. However, these heightened expectations often serve as reproaches to low income mothers who are viewed as having less involvement with educational processes than their middle class counterparts (Lareau 1987; Fruchter et al. 1993; Simoni and Adelman 1993; Epstein 1995).

Whether ascribed to unfavorable personal attributes or a lack of cultural capital, discussions of low income mothers' perceived lack of involvement with educational decision-making has emerged as a literature of its own; yet, few researchers and practitioners have questioned the universality of these assumptions. Even when viewed through the lens of structural inequality, researchers have described low income mothers as favoring "natural development" processes (Lareau 1987) or as placing demands on children (Maccoby and Martin 1983) rather than engaging in strategic or systematic parenting practices that advance child development.

This article presents extensive, ethnographic interview data with three low income mothers of children who experience severe developmental disabilities. These women articulate many of the challenges noted in previous research in which race, class, education, and culture present barriers to advocacy within legalistic institutions. However, each of these mothers also conveys a thoughtful process of engagement with and strategic disengagement from educational bureaucracies and alternative resources to advance child development. Decisions about engagement are informed primarily by mothers' self-perceptions of their abilities to balance knowledge and emotion in public spaces in exchange for services.

Specifically, three ideal types of low income maternal advocacy are explored: (1) the warrior-hero battling against bureaucrats to obtain resources, (2) the surrogate advocate serving as an educational decision-maker in place of parental presence at school, and (3) the disengaged parent removing herself from the adversarial educational system and positioning herself as a home-based support for her children. These ideal types are a significant departure from previous theorization about low income mothers' cultural predisposition to avoid child development expertise entirely. Instead, the parenting practices of these women offer poignant examples of underexplored advocacy efforts of working class women on behalf of children with developmental disabilities. Likewise, these case studies serve as critical counter-examples to current parental involvement theories.

INTENSITY AND ABSENCE: EXPECTATIONS OF MIDDLE CLASS AND LOW INCOME MOTHERS

Scholars and policy makers agree that parental involvement in education is the fundamental attribute of an academically successful child (i.e. Fan and Chen 2001; Hill and Taylor 2004; Jeynes, 2003, 2005). Yet, the phrase "parental involvement" is often used ambiguously to describe myriad and sometimes divergent activities, including helping children with homework, attending parent-teacher meetings, and taking part in institutional policy making and governance (Cotton and Wikelund 1989). Despite conceptual vagueness, programmatic emphasis continues to promote school-based parental involvement in academic skill building as the paragon of child development. As a corollary, there is a relative disregard for parental dedication to emotional and motivational home-based activities (Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler 1997). Ironically then, good parenting behavior is measured largely by bureaucratic activities performed outside of the home and in the absence of the child.

Despite previous cultural dictums relegating parenting to the private sphere, contemporary expectations of parents, particularly mothers, 2 reinforce an external focus of parental involvement in child development and add an aggressive dimension to the endeavor. "Good" mothers are obligated to parent with "intensity" (Hays 1996), accessing professional advice and services to advance children's development and engaging in concerted efforts to cultivate desirable outcomes (Lareau 2003). Educators, physicians, and psychologists guide the child-rearing process, steering parents through a maze of seemingly arbitrary child development milestones with handbooks, manuals, and professional checkpoints designed for parenting "perfect" children (Landsman 2009). Failure to adhere to these normative standards brings adverse consequences, including maternal stigma and professional predictions of undesirable child outcomes (Hays 1996; Caplan 1998; Rapp 1999; Blum 2007; Landsman 2009; Sousa 2011).

For middle-class mothers of children with disabilities, the intensive mothering paradigm is exacerbated. These mothers are not only encouraged to seek out professional resources, but to fight for cutting edge therapies to mitigate the impact of disability on their children no matter the cost (Blum 2007; Sousa 2011). But for low income mothers, cultural and political expectations are presented differently. Low income mothers are portrayed as being less involved in and more resistant to formal child development activities than their middle- and upper-class counterparts (Lareau 1987; Fruchter, et al. 1993; Simoni and Adelman 1993; Epsteian 1995; de Carvalho 2001) even as they are cited frequently in social research as being more likely to parent children with impaired cognitive and language development, behavioral challenges, and poor health (Fujiura and Yamaki 2000; Emerson 2004; Fujiura and Parish 2007; Shannon, 2009). The literature also cites a dearth of school involvement among parents of ethnic and racial minority groups (Finder and Lewis 2006).

Some researchers attribute the absence of low income parental involvement in educational institutions to individual parenting styles or to ill-suited behavioral control mechanisms, perhaps, derived from neighborhood and cultural influences (Darling and Steinberg 1993; Payne 2003). Other scholars, such as Annette Lareau (2003), argue that structural factors are at play: systemic class bias impedes low income parents' involvement in homework, participation in school-based events, and compliance with school standards by assuming extensive leisure time and a priori knowledge in the structure of such activities. Under either rationale, the implication is that low income and working class mothers are ill equipped to sustain meaningful participation in an educational environment and, by extension, to serve as educational advocates on behalf of children with developmental disabilities.

Instead, low income parents are said to rely on children's "natural development" in which youngsters have limited access to structured activities beyond the walls of mandatory public schooling (Lareau 2003). Low income children are left to invent pastimes, which enhances their creativity, but provides less experience in contending with formal social systems, negotiating with authority figures, and advancing strengths in academia. These differential experiences ultimately place low income children at a competitive disadvantage when vying for academic and workplace success.

Despite the ample research on the minimal parental involvement of low income mothers, the working class mothers interviewed in this study were engaged substantially and strategically in cultivating their children's cognitive, social, and emotional development even when absent from school-based interventions. This suggests that some low income mothers may, in fact, apply concerted cultivation strategies, but may not be recognized and viewed as engaged parents. Instead, mothers' advocacy efforts are often dismissed and, as a result, these low income mothers are further alienated from systems designed to support their children with developmental disabilities.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHOD

Used as framework for ethnographic fieldwork, case studies introduce the potential for deep, qualitative refinement of existing theoretical propositions or outright challenges to prior theorization (i.e., Liebow 1967; Duneier 1994). The case study data analyzed in this article comprise one aspect of a multi-method study on mothering within modern disability bureaucracies. Low income mothers of children with developmental disabilities volunteered to participate in ethnographic interviews regarding their interactions with social systems. Advertisements were posted in community-based, disability service agencies; parent information trainings; and statewide disability advocacy email lists of parents in New Hampshire. The participating mothers engaged in multiple intensive interviews ranging from forty-five minutes to three hours per session. In addition, they offered pictures, blogs, email communications, home visits, and interactions with family members to describe their experiences of raising children with developmental disabilities. Prior to the interviews, mothers filled out a short questionnaire detailing biographical information, including, but not limited to, data such as household income, number of children, and children's diagnoses.

Interview questions were open-ended and designed to uncover the nature and context of low income mothers' interactions with disability bureaucracies, specifically schools, healthcare providers, and social service networks. Interviews elicited information about mothers' relationships with their children as well as examining their perceptions of cultural parenting expectations, interactions with professionals, and experiences with accessing disability service systems. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed by the author. Using a grounded theory approach to discourse analysis, the transcripts were coded and categorized (Glaser and Strauss 1990 and 1998; Charmaz 1995; Wilson-Scott 2004). Emergent themes developed throughout the data collection and analysis with the role of emotion management in educational decision-making being one of the most prominent trends across the interviews. Over the course of the interviews, mothers spent minimal time describing what services were provided to their children and which of those services was most helpful. More often, the narratives focused how mothers felt about the experience of interacting with educators and how those feelings translated into advocacy, social interaction, and personal behaviors within bureaucratic contexts.

Three participants were selected as sources of case study data. Joy, Jackie, and Maya are unique among the women interviewed in their adherence to a primary strategy of interaction with disability bureaucracies rather than varying approaches. However, these women describe behaviors and emotional explanations of those behaviors, which are found in various aspects of all of the participants' interviews. Like all people, Joy, Jackie, and Maya exhibit variations and contradictions in behaviors that create ambiguity in analysis; nevertheless, their narrative emphasis on one of these postures indicates a clear presentation of ideal types. By closely examining the interactions of these three women as ideal types, nuances of their struggles and strategies become more evident, particularly when juxtaposed with systemic expectations of low income mothers' parental involvement.

Despite the benefits, case studies raise important methodological questions, notably in regard to replicability and generalization (Chen 1999). Clearly, this small sample study is not designed to be representative; these cases may, however, help to refine concepts surrounding parental involvement, contributing to formulation of testable hypotheses in future work. In addition, these three distinct cases of low income women, who are heavily involved in child development activities, indicate something greater than the unique situation of an outlier. Instead, the cases contest conventional theories on low income mothers' parental involvement and yield subjugated knowledge of working class women who are intensely and strategically involved in the development of their children with disabilities.

STRATEGIC INTERACTION WITH EDUCATIONAL BUREAUCRACIES

The mothers interviewed for this study demonstrated three postures of parental interaction with educational systems, which defied class expectations: (1) the warrior-hero battling against bureaucrats to obtain resources, (2) the surrogate advocate serving as an educational decision-maker in place of parental presence at school, and (3) the disengaged parent removing herself from the adversarial educational system and positioning herself as a home-based support for her children. Most of the mothers interviewed for the larger study described behaviors from two or even all of the categories. For example, a mother could fiercely advocate for evaluative services, seek out an educational advocate to support the development of an individual education plan (IEP) in place of maternal advocacy, and then disengage from her child's progress meetings and clinical observations throughout the school year. Three of the mothers, however, tended toward sustained behavior within one of the typologies and serve as subjects for the following case studies.

FEELING OUT THE SYSTEM: SPECIAL EDUCATION BUREAUCRACIES AND EMOTION MANAGEMENT

The conflict between mothers' views of their children's needs and professional assessments of student weakness elicits powerful emotions in mothers. These intense "expressions of positive and negative affect" evolve from momentary expressions of feeling, to "long-lasting sentiments" for other actors, and ultimately, become the foundation for social structures "and associated performance expectations" (Shelly 2004:141-2). In this manner, emotions may be elicited through an interaction; but, only certain emotions may be displayed according to the role expectations of the educational system. In such circumstances, emotion norms or "feeling rules" must be respected, necessitating individuals to craft means of emotion management to conceal internal discrepancies between personal feelings and the rules of expression (Hochschild 1979, 1983). Those who fail to negotiate this process adeptly or who demonstrate extreme emotions will endure social reprisals (Denzin 1985; Koole 2009).

Even with substantially different cultural backgrounds, Joy, Jackie, and Maya interpret the feeling rules of special education interactions similarly as social exchanges: mothers must exhibit appropriate parental demeanor in exchange for special education services. In their estimation, parents are expected to be "good" participants in the educational process by attending meetings, carrying out the recommendations of professionals, and "playing nice." Parent-initiated goals for children should be prioritized only if the educational "team" agrees to the importance of such activities. Disagreement with a method or discomfort with a staff member may be indicative of a parent's ignorance rather than concern:

Like, my son is still nonverbal. And, I think he desperately lacks speech [services]. He only had like two thirty minute sessions per week. And the way…the day I went to observe and he was just not happy. The way they were doing it wasn't right. And I tried to suggest and they said I had no background, no knowledge to suggest.

Furthermore, disagreement is perceived as inappropriate parental behavior subject to punitive action, such as refusal to abide by previous agreements for service. When Maya kept "pushing" for more speech services, she found her son isolated from Frank's educational team. He was bounced around to new speech pathologists whose tolerance for Maya's questions quickly waned. Maya became distraught and pulled back her involvement from school. She worried that if she applied too much force, Frank would "get worse." Now she cries over her "failure" to get what Frank needs.

Joy, on the other hand, moved full steam ahead against opposition knowing well that she was perceived as being "too aggressive" by professionals:

They would say to me, "Joy, we don't know what you want." And I'd say, "This is what I want: I want somebody at this table to tell me something I don't already know. That's what I want." And then there was silence. I already know he had difficulty communicating because he didn't have a voice box. And I already knew he couldn't walk because he was in a wheelchair. So they would go through all of this and, um, the goals had been on there for two years. I would say, "I need someone in this room to come up with something else, to try something different. Not to just say what we already know." And that would be aggravating for them.

Joy is often credited with being a "pit bull" as parents laud and professionals fear her tenacity. Her advocacy efforts are praised by fellow mothers and highlighted by parental advocacy groups. She was even nominated to sit on the state's parent advisory board. But Joy paid a price within the school system for her refusal to comply with unofficial standards of parental behavior. Joy describes intense retaliation after winning a due process legal claim against her son's school:

…at the mediation table the school started going after me. The mediator separated the parties. He said for the record that the school is extremely offensive and completely out of line by making this about the mother with the son sitting right there. It's not going to happen… Their lawyer was just as obnoxious. We won everything…I remember bringing [Conner] to school after that and his teacher said to me, "Try and make us do it." [She said] to my face: "There's no court around here."

Joy was perceived as "greedy" by some educators who believed the services she won for her son were "luxuries" to which she and her son were not entitled. Like Maya, Joy made a calculated decision to retreat, albeit temporarily, from her involvement with the school. Her disengagement was brought on by "anger" over the audacity of Conner's teachers:

I pulled him out of school. He had nurses and started a home school program. I said, "They're never going to do it [abide by the court ruling] or they're going to take so long that he'll be 19 by the time they start." I made them perform all his secondary services at home…because I wanted to know if they were showing up. I have never been so angry.

Conner's doctor agreed to the homeschooling plan and drafted a letter of medical necessity for home-based, educational services. At that moment, Joy needed a break from the "anxiety" and Conner's doctor was willing to give her one. "I couldn't even look at them," she says. Eventually, Conner went back to school and Joy regained her momentum. She was at school advocating for a new assistive communication device the night before Conner died.

These mothers have found that they cannot always abide by the rules, nor is complete compliance desirable. Yet educational bureaucracies hold considerable power over them as services for children with disabilities are within the control of bureaucrats not mothers. For Jackie, this power means that the rules must be followed by someone who can "handle the situation" rather than someone "like me" who gets "wound up." Even as she talks about the special education process, her breath quickens and her voice is raised to the point of yelling: "I need my mother to do this. It's just not an option. [Sam] depends on these services…he depends on me to be cool. [sighing] I just can't…" There is a clear logic to Jackie's approach to interaction with educational bureaucracies; yet, she is aware that her distance comes at a price. To bureaucrats, Jackie is an uninvolved mother rather than a concerned parent abiding by the feeling rules of the institution as she understands them.

DISCUSSION: CONFLICTING EMOTIONS AND EDUCATIONAL BUREAUCRACIES

Special education is governed extensively by law and regulation; however, any consideration of these edicts must take seriously the subjective experiences of the system's consumers. Every aspect of families' lives is subject to formal and informal surveillance of special education systems and judgments are made to support requests for increased services at great costs to the bureaucracy (Lipsky 1980; Cassiman 2011). A mother's inability to maintain performance expectations, coupled with inequalities in income, race, language, and education, can yield passive determinations about the worthiness of both mother and child for enhanced services. It is not surprising, then, that low income mothers conceal both ideas and emotions from educational bureaucrats (Ridgeway and Johnson 1990; Cassiman 2011) and sometimes disengage from interaction entirely.

At the same time, public rhetoric about parents being their children's best advocates has permeated cultural notions of parenting children with special needs, inspiring legions of books, blogs, and advertisements heralding the virtues of strident and confrontational advocacy (Sousa 2011). According to the precept, mothers must act with intensity and seek out every resource aggressively to mitigate the impact of disability on children. These concentrated advocacy efforts not only contrast with bureaucratic expectations of low income mothers' compliance with institutional mandates, they also conflict with traditional expectations of mothers to be inwardly focused and perform household "emotion work," giving comfort, care, and support to children (Hochschild 1979, DeVault 1999). The result is role confusion for mothers attempting to adhere to competing ideologies of mothering, in which the emotionally expressive caregiver, the vigilant advocate, and the compliant service recipient are intended to be integrated seamlessly by a single individual. The strain of discrepant roles is exacerbated further by a lack of material resources and a sense of personal urgency to obtain services for a child with disabilities resulting in an emotionally charged environment.

Despite the mounting odds against low income women advocating for children with disabilities in the educational system, these case studies highlight how conflicting and, sometimes, negative emotions may compel some low income women to create alternative means of interacting with systems that may yield some positive results. During instances in which emotions come bubbling to the surface, creating distance is not a function of "natural development processes;" instead, parental distance from educators is a carefully considered, strategic investment in obtaining better services for children with disabilities, without institutional reprisals for expressing unwanted emotions. Educational surrogacy offered Jackie with an opportunity to access speech services for her son and concomitantly enabled her to focus on physical aspects of her son's development on the soccer field and skills of daily living at home. Maya, on the other hand, separated herself entirely from the school environment and committed herself to home-based efforts supporting her son's emotional development, which was excluded almost entirely from his school programming. Joy, too, practiced situation selection when her frustration and anger emerged, homeschooling her son for nearly a year.

Each of these mothers describes carefully crafted efforts to modify or avoid situations in which scrutiny of maternal affect would impact children's development negatively. Yet, all concede that even after thoughtful and extensive efforts to nurture their children's talents outside of formal educational settings, they remain unhappy with the outcomes of service. They continue to want more from educational institutions to support their children with disabilities, which, again amplifies the emotional impact of interacting with special education bureaucracies. The result is continued antipathy for educational systems that undermine these low income mothers' efforts to cultivate their children's development.

CONCLUSION

The sociology of emotion and the psychology of affect management examine the reciprocal relationship between emotion and self-identity with particular emphasis on how individuals' affective responses differ from emotion norms and the resultant labeling processes (Stryker 2004; Koole 2009). Likewise, at the heart of the parental involvement debate is the assignment of "good parent" label on those who participate fully in sanctioned child-development activities within educational bureaucracies and who are rewarded with praise and the promise of positive child outcomes. These intersecting fields of study elucidate varying forms of labeling theory; yet often, theorists assume that role negotiation begins and ends with emotion regulation rather than extending to creative non-compliance with emotion rules to satisfy children's needs.

For Jackie, Joy, and Maya, challenges to emotion regulation and affect management within the context of special education inspire alternative behavior that technically complies with cultural mandates of maternal intensity in many ways but, to some extent, sidesteps engagement with institutions and insulates mothers from emotional reprisals from those institutions. In each case, mothers defy traditional expectations of low income parenting in favor of a high level of engagement in structuring and following through with child development activities. As such, the three women in this case study not only initiate examination of affect management, but, contribute to a more robust picture of strategic parental involvement activities in low income women raising children with developmental disabilities, which has been substantially neglected in the literature.

These case studies also suggest the need to refocus scholarly attention on low income mothers' involvement with educational institutions to include the compensatory strategies working class women use to meet the needs of their children. Critical examination of these strategies may shed light on the role emotional coercion plays in structuring parental participation and limiting viable options for educational goal setting. Finally, this redirection may present opportunities for minimizing structural barriers to accessing mainstream educational services for a broader range of children and families.