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Family influence is inescapable because, even as consumers make decisions, they are always immersed in family relationships. As a dominant cultural institution, family is a main organizing force that shapes consumers' choices and experiences in the marketplace. More so than other types of decisions, families' choices often are scrutinized in the public eye and lead to feelings of guilt and stress about whether they are making the "right" decisions. Parents might ask, are we eating healthy meals? What rules should we have about technology use? Do we spend enough family time together? Constant sharing on social media makes parenting (or certain images of parenting) more visible and transparent, increasing expectations and raising the pressure on parents to make good choices. Nowhere is this reality more evident than in current debates surrounding child care.

Increasingly, parents are outsourcing an expanding array of caregiving activities. Services now exist for everything a parent could imagine including nannies, potty training, planning birthday parties, etiquette classes, teaching children how to ride a bike, helping with school projects, and accompanying kids on college tours. These services blur the boundaries between family and the market, and prompt new questions about what is acceptable to outsource and how parents make sense of these sometimes contentious decisions.

In a recent study, my co-author and I conducted in-depth interviews with 23 sets of parents across five major cities to address three research questions: (1) how do parents make choices about which care activities to outsource? (2) what tensions emerge when parents outsource, and how are these tensions managed? and (3) how do parents justify and revise the mix of resources they use in care provision?

We found that when parents outsource care they experience tensions of control, intimacy, and substitutability. For instance, when contemplating whether or not to enlist others for help in planning a child's birthday party, parents might ask, isn't it my job as a parent to do this (substitutability)? What if the party planner doesn't do things the way I want them to be done (control)? Shouldn't I be the person who created the excitement and joy on my child's face (intimacy)? Despite struggling with these questions and resulting tensions, parents still outsourced. However, parents generated specific strategies to manage tensions such as customizing services, using them infrequently, or deconstructing care (e.g., baking the birthday cake themselves, but hiring someone else to plan and coordinate).

Our data also suggest that who parents outsource to (e.g., family, village, public, or market) matters immensely, as each has the potential to spark or relieve different tensions. For example, although family and village resources frequently heighten control tensions, the market often resolves control tensions more effectively because of its for-hire, contractual nature. Modern-day parental support comes in many forms, but the optimal mix of resources varies across families and depends on the tensions parents face.ii Amber M. Epp and Sunaina Velagaleti, "Outsourcing Parenthood: How Families Manage Care Assemblages Using Paid Commercial Services," Journal of Consumer

Research, 41 (December 2014): 911935.

The parents in Dr. Epps and her colleague's study carefully consider the pros and cons of various caregiving options. Which decision rule do these actions describe: compensatory or non-compensatory? What is the difference between the two?