Abstract for the 23rd
Nordic Sociological Conference 18-20 August 2006, Turku, Finland.
Katja Repo
LSocSc, Research
Fellow
Department of Social
Policy and Social Work
33014 The University
of Tampere, Finland
phone: +358 50 3625633
Fax: +358
3 2157484
Working mothers talking about the care of their
children
Working parents
participate in constructing the social world they live in. In so doing, they
also formulate meanings for the care of their children. My paper concentrates
on those meanings. It will discuss what
kinds of meanings Finnish mothers give to childcare in a situation where
parents’ work creates challenges to organising the care of their children. In
the paper I will discuss, how mothers see and talk about childcare in the
context of family and work interplay and how these constructions of childcare
relate to the broader issue of childhood, parenthood and work life.
The analysis is based
on the interviews of the mothers of under school age children conducted in
Finland in 2001by the EU-funded SOCCARE-project. The interviewees (N=14) come
from families where both parents are either highly educated, career-oriented knowledge
workers or persons who work anti-social or anti-typical hours.
The paper describes
five main ways to construct the meaning of childcare that the interviewed
mothers produced when talking about the work and family interplay. These are:
flexibility, trust, risk, parental sharing, and emotional attendance. It argues
that the emphasis on flexibility, trust and risks in the mothers’ talk can be
understood in relation to the work culture that expects flexibility and strong
commitment to work. At the same time, the importance of emotional attendance
and parental sharing in the talk of mothers can be related to the increasing
demands on parenthood, to the increasing significance placed on childhood and
to the worries about the decline of family time.