Care and work or caring work

Care & Work or Caring Work?
Nathan
Loynes

Churchill explores ‘Layers
of Meaning’ within the
parenting experience:
• 'family' and parent child relations
• children and children's needs
• maternal and paternal
responsibilities for children
• desirable and normative parenting
and childcare practices.
Source: Harriet Churchill, 2011, Parental Rights and Responsibilities, Bristol, The Policy Press.
Layer One:

Parent-child and family relations
Key themes
1.an ethic of care
2.intimacy
3.power relations.
Layer Two:

1. An ethic of care towards children
• A distinction can be made between 'care as
work, labour and activity versus caring about'
children and ' care as an ethical orientation'
(Williams, 2004a; Doucet, 2006).
• Sevenhuijsen's (1998) notion of an ethic of
care: 'motivation towards and
sensitivities to the welfare needs of
others'.
• In ‘lay terms’: ‘children's needs come first'
(Ribbens McCarthy et al, 2000)

children's needs come first'
Measuring up to these ideals, however, is
another matter. Much research finds that the
majority of parents fear they are not 'doing
a good enough job'(Edwards, 2004; NFPI, 2001).

Gender Differences on ‘Caring For
Children’
Mothers' accounts were 'more
organised around accepting
care responsibilities for
children', 'the creation of a
stable family unit was a
strong moral theme in several
women's accounts, requiring
considerable emotional
work, mediation of
relationships and
organisation skills'
(Ribbens McCarthy et al, 2000).
The male respondents did not
perceive 'putting children first'
in such demanding `caring for'
terms, but rather referred to
constraining their leisure,
social or paid work
aspirations in order to 'be
there' for step and birth
children, often in the evenings
or at weekends. (Ribbens McCarthy et al,
2000).

Related: ‘putting family first’
• Women were influenced numerous aspects of their lives
such as
• Their 'choice' of employment: with a preference for
employment that 'fits round family commitments‘
• The informal use of `trusted and known' family members
for childcare)
• Their residential location (to be near family);
• Daily domestic and caring responsibilities, and availability
to provide support.
'Putting family first' placed considerable demands on the
women's daily lives and was not always compatible with the
demands of being 'good reliable employees' and their
breadwinning responsibilities: (Backett Milburn et al, 2008)

2. Intimacy in parent-child relations
• The Good childhood inquiry (Layard and Dunn, 2009, p
15) stated that 'above all children need to be
loved'.
• The Counterpoint Research (2007) study discussed
found that parents valued close parent-child
relationships in terms of children's emotional well-
being (and the personal emotional rewards of
parenthood) and emphasised how 'knowing your
child' and 'good parent-child relationships' were at
the heart of 'good parenting'.

Parenting: Emotional Work
• Doucet (2006) used the term `emotional responsibility'
to refer to parental commitments to children's
emotional well-being.
• Erikson (2005) conceptualises 'emotional work' within
parent-child and family relationships as a two-way
process involving all family members.
• Erikson (2005) in highlights how mothers undertake
`activities that are concerned with the
enhancement of others' emotional well-
being and with the provision of emotional support'
(Erikson, 2005, p 338),

Father’s Breadwinning
• Non-resident fathers living on low incomes can
face burdensome financial costs associated with
sustaining contact with children.
• Speak et al (1997) interviewed young non-
resident fathers who detailed the way poverty,
material deprivation and unpredictable
employment impinged on their capabilities to
provide for their children, sustain contact and
participate in recreational activities with their
children.

Parenting: There’s no manual!
• Sevon (2007) found that mothers often, over
time, gained expertise in caring for their
babies, especially when they were well
supported and in good health.
• Sevon (2007) also found 'tiredness, guilt,
shame, anxiety, anger and aggression'
were often part of the experience of meeting
the demands of childcare and adapting to
parenthood.

3.Power and authority in parent-child
and generational relations
• 31 per cent reported that their family had lots of rules
• 42 per cent did not have many rules
• 27 per cent said that their policy varied.
• Almost half (49 per cent) added that the rules they did
have were strictlyenforced.
• Black Caribbean mothers were most likely to report
that they had lots of rules (39 per cent)
• While Bangladeshi mothers were the least likely
(17 per cent). (Smith, 2007)

Spare the rod, spoil the child (again)
• The Counterpoint Research (2007) study
found a keen rejection of both authoritarian
and lax parenting (the latter associated with
'allowing children to get what they want'): too
much parental control over children was
detrimental.
• But so too was lax or permissive parenting
parenting which 'indulged children' led to
'selfish and self-centred' children

‘Power’ and Parenting Teenagers
• Lewis's (2007) study of parenting teenagers found
that many parents rejected notions of traditional
authoritarian parenting as 'impossible to achieve
in practice.
• Traditional, authoritarian parenting was
damaging to parent-child relationships and likely
to encourage children to rely more on their
friends‘.
• Instead, parents supported ideas about 'respect
for teenagers' opinions and freedoms‘.

Social Class Differences in Parenting
• Evidence suggests that parenting remains
highly gendered and demanding in better-off
families but that having a higher income
enhances access to assets, social and cultural
capital, and opportunities.
• Parents in this context can negotiate and seek
to sustain a more privileged social status for
their children, albeit not one without its own
struggles and anxieties (Devine, 2004; Ribbens, 1994).

Caring for children – What is
childcare?
Folbre and Yoon (2007, p 232) definitions of childcare
need to incorporate a range of activities such as:
• Physical care (ie feeding, bathing, dressing or attending to the
physical medical needs of a child);
• Domestic labour arising from having children in the house (such
as preparing a meal, doing the laundry, tidying up toys or cleaning the house);
• Developmental care activities (ie activities that stimulate
cognitive, emotional or social development, such as talking to your child, parental
language use, reading to a child or playing with a child);
• Logistical and managerial activities (where a parent
carries out an activity on their child's behalf, such as arranging social activities,
transporting children to activities or communicating with teachers).

Domestic Imbalance
• Women continue to carry out the bulk of informal
childcare and domestic labour.
• However, less research has examined fathers'
experiences of childcare. Lewis and Lamb (2007)
reviewed studies of fatherhood. They found that
conventional measures of childcare which focus on the
primary carer and physical day-to-day care of children
neglect fathers' contribution to childcare. Fathers have
been found to take on more responsibility for domestic
labour if they hold more egalitarian views about
gender (Lewis and Lamb, 2007)

Male/Female Patterns of Caring
Doucet (2006)
proposed that
men may care
differently to
women, with an
emphasis on
play.
Dermott (2008),
felt that fathers
are able to `select
more rewarding
activities with
children', due to
childcare or
domestic labour
being positioned
as primarily
mothers' work
Lewis and Lamb
(2007) found
evidence that
some studies
reported fathers
could feel
mothers had a
`gatekeeping' role
when it comes to
children's lives
and childcare
issues.

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