Balancing Parenthood and Academia: Exploring the Institutional Challenges Faced By International Graduate Parents

As a single international graduate parent, I have faced numerous challenges during my academic journey, including difficulties with securing childcare support, managing healthcare costs, covering the rising cost of living, navigating transportation, and experiencing isolation and loneliness that often accompanies my dual roles as student and parent. My positionality has driven me to seek a deeper understanding of my own experiences and how they intersect with institutional structures, policies, practices, and procedures that shape the experiences of others in similar situations. This approach guides a future study in which I aim to use Institutional Ethnography (IE) (Smith, 2005) to explore the lived experiences of international graduate parents in higher education, drawing on feminist standpoint theory (Smith, 1987) to understand how institutional structures, policies, and discourses influence the dual roles of student and parent while deepening my comprehension of these experiences as both a caregiver and scholar. IE is uniquely suited to this study because it provides a way for me to examine the disjuncture between institutional texts and the lived realities of individuals. Building on previous IE studies, I will explore how institutional systems and practices shape the daily lives of international graduate parents. This will help me show how these systems can be improved to support this marginalized group better.

In this literature review, I discuss the challenges researchers have found that international graduate parents encounter, including balancing academic and parenting responsibilities, navigating complex immigration regulations, and coping with limited institutional support. By analyzing how these barriers shape the day-to-day lives of international graduate parents, I aim to uncover significant gaps in current policies, such as restrictive visa regulations (Kim, 2021), financial pressures (Myers-Walls et al., 2011; Yoo & Marshall, 2024), and inadequate resources (Charles et al., 2021) that exacerbate the stress of balancing academic and caregiving duties.