Why more ‘quality time’ is not on the top of children's lists: the ‘qualities of time’ for children1

For many years the everyday reality of working parents and their children has been captured in notions of ‘quality time’ versus ‘quantity time’. On the one hand it is suggested that what families need is ‘more time’ for parents to spend together with their children and less time working. On the other hand this has been countered with arguments saying that attention has to be paid to how parents spend their time together with their children. As a result quality time is often presented through idealised images of ‘happy families’. Quality time is seen as parents engaging with their children in particular activities or outdoor excursions that create and maintain family enjoyment, care and togetherness. However, such debates are based on assumptions of what would be ‘good’ for today's children and neglect the perspective of children themselves. This paper draws on field research carried out with 10–11‐year‐old children on their understandings and use of time in an urban and a rural setting in the north of England. The paper points to five ‘qualities of time’ identified by children. These qualities suggest that children's views of time spent with their families cannot be seen as separate from the time they spend with friends, at school and on their own. The paper argues that the quality/quantity time conundrum needs replacing by fuller and more representative accounts of the varied aspects of time that matter for children. These need to be situated in the processes through which family, school and work life take place on a daily basis and in relation to children's life course. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Constructions,reconstructions and deconstructions of ‘family’ amongst people who live apart together (LATs)

This article explores how people who live apart from their partners in Britain describe and understand ‘family’. It investigates whether, and how far, non‐cohabiting partners, friends, ‘blood’ and legal ties are seen as ‘family’, and how practices of care and support, and feelings of closeness are related to these constructions. It suggests that people in LAT relationships creatively draw and re‐draw the boundaries of family belonging in ways that involve emotionally subjective understandings of family life, and that also refer to normative constructions of what ‘family’ ought to be, as well as to practical recognitions of lived family ‘realities’. This often involves handling uncertainties about what constitutes ‘family’.     

Women's Work,Dirty Work: The Gynaecology Nurse as ‘Other’

This article seeks to explore the world of the gynaecology nurse. This world defines the gendered experience of nursing; that is, women in a women's job carrying out ‘women's work’. It is also a world that receives scant public recognition due to its association with the private domain of women's reproductive health. Many issues dealt with on a daily basis by gynaecology nurses are socially ‘difficult’: cancer, infertility, miscarriage and foetal abnormalities; or socially ‘distasteful’: termination of pregnancy, urinary incontinence, menstruation and sexually transmitted disease. The ‘tainted’ nature of gynaecology nursing gives it the social distinction of ‘dirty work’ but does not deter the gynaecology nurse from declaring her work as ‘special’, requiring distinctive knowledge and skills. Qualitative data collected from a group of gynaecology nurses in a North West National Health Service hospital displays how they actively celebrate their status as women carrying out ‘dirty work’. Through the use of ceremonial work that continually re‐affirms their ‘womanly’ qualities the gynaecology nurses establish themselves as ‘different’, as ‘special’, as the ‘other’.     

Which is the ‘self’ in ‘self‐interest’?

This article contends that homogenisation of the term ‘self‐interest’– in sociological and economic discourse – has resulted in many misconceptions about what particular doctrines of ‘self‐interest’ were instituted to achieve at certain historical periods and in specific cultural milieux. At its worst, the article argues, this has led to a misunderstanding of the import of particular doctrines of self interest,which are read in terms of general tradition – such as that which views self‐interested conduct as a natural faculty – rather than in terms of the context specific aims of those advocating them. The article attempts to show how, historically, there have been quite significant changes in the characterisation of the ‘self’ deemed to be ‘self‐interested’. In particular, it focuses on the ‘self’ of certain early modern conceptions of self interest, and suggests this creation is best viewed not as a subjectivity transcendentally presupposed by experience, but as one historically cultivated to counter the exigencies of particular circumstances – the disaster of perpetual ‘warre’ in 17th century Europe – and to meet the purposes of a certain way of life – existence in the civitas.     

Transnational families and their children's education: China's ‘study mothers’ in Singapore

Abstract For many middle‐income Asian families from the region's less developed countries, the education of children in a more developed country has become a major ‘project’ requiring the transnational relocation of one or more members of the family. As an aspiring global education hub, Singapore has been a recipient of many international students. In our article we examine the case of ‘study mothers’ from the People's Republic of China who accompany their children to Singapore during the course of the latter's study, while leaving their spouses at home. In the analysis we demonstrate that the transnational ‘project of education’ for these young Asian children hinges crucially on the notion and realization of the ‘sacrificial mother’. Unlike the women in elite Chinese transnational families who enter western countries as potential citizens and are able to regain their relatively privileged lifestyles after a period of transition, the study mothers are admitted to, and remain in, Singapore as transient sojourners whose lives are characterized by continuing challenges and fluidity.     

‘Blair's children’: young women as ‘aspirational subjects’ in the psychic landscape of class

This paper engages with the subjective experience of ‘doing’ aspiration, teasing out the psychic and social costs that accompany this as a classed process. It draws on a qualitative study of young women located in further education and contemplating their futures under New Labour, locating how the political rhetoric of aspiration gets institutionalized within school practices; how it intersects with maternal expectations and practices of involvement; and how these are lived and managed by subjects located in different positions in class‐inflected social space. In attending to the tangled web of institutional, intergenerational and affective practices which shape young women's aspirations, the paper seeks to interrupt the celebratory and simplistic rhetoric of aspiration that characterizes the contemporary socio‐political register of neoliberalism. As these ideals become further entrenched by the current Coalition government, there is an even greater urgency for such sociological enquiries.     

‘Cleaning Your Glasses’: A Prerequisite for ‘Catching Your Child Being Good’

Used widely throughout the parenting literature, the phrase ‘Catch them being good’ encapsulates much of current practice that has been shown to be effective in reducing instances of non‐compliance in children with complex and challenging behaviours. ‘Catching your child being good’ is obviously in line with the strategies of praise, encouragement and positive reinforcement. But for some parents, ‘Catching their child being good’ after long periods of defiance becomes almost an impossible task. Metaphorically speaking, ‘Cleaning your glasses' is a necessary prerequisite for effectively ‘catching your child being good’. This metaphor and an associated six‐phase therapeutic intervention seek to enhance a parent's ability to ‘Catch their child being good’, by working through parental distortions, restraints and negativity. This paper introduces the metaphor's origin and use; describes keys concepts; and gives a detailed case example to highlight the advantages and limitations of the intervention.     

‘Live to Work’ or ‘Work to Live’? A Qualitative Study of Gender and Work–life Balance among Men and Women in Mid‐life

Many contemporary studies of ‘work–life balance’ either ignore gender or take it for granted. We conducted semi‐structured interviews with men and women in mid‐life (aged 50 to 52 years) in order to compare their experiences of work–life balance. Our data suggest that gender remains embedded in the ways that respondents negotiate home and work life. The women discussed their current problems juggling a variety of roles (despite having no young children at home), while men confined their discussion of such conflicts to the past, when their children were young. However, diversity among men (some of whom ‘worked to live’ while others ‘lived to work’) and women (some of whom constructed themselves in relation to their families, while others positioned themselves as ‘independent women’) was apparent, as were some commonalities between men and women (both men and women constructed themselves as ‘pragmatic workers’). We suggest ways in which gender‐neutral theories of work–life balance may be extended.     

Agency and clientship in public encounters: co‐constructing ‘neediness’ and ‘worthiness’ in shelter placement meetings

This article seeks to develop our understanding of the agency of vulnerable groups who at first sight may not seem to have much agency in their lives. It explores the co‐constructed nature of agency in three Danish homeless shelters. Unlike earlier interview‐based studies, our research is based on naturalistic data drawn from 23 video‐recorded placement meetings. Using concepts from Goffman, we examine how versions of the neediness and worthiness of homeless people are negotiated verbally and bodily between staff and clients. We find that homeless people have to juggle two partly contradictory roles when they are given or take the roles of either a (active) citizen or a (passive) client. Clientship is actively negotiated by both parties and demonstrates the agency of homeless people: they can collaborate with (as clients) or challenge (as citizens) the staff’s attempts to formulate solutions to their troubles. We further examine how the professional ideology of client centredness affects the meeting between the two parties. However, we show that, like any discourse, client centredness has no intrinsic meaning and is played out by actors in very different ways. In work with the homeless, the discourse of client centredness is related to discourses of ‘neediness’, ‘worthiness’ and ‘value for money’ that define agency in different ways and make three different client positions available: the resolute client, the acquiescent client and the passive client.     

Poverty talk: how people experiencing poverty deny their poverty and why they blame ‘the poor’

Drawing on life history interviews with sixty men and women in north‐east England who were caught up in ‘the low‐pay, no‐pay cycle’, this article describes how people living in poverty talk about poverty – in respect of themselves and others. Paradoxically, interviewees subscribed to a powerful set of ideas that denied poverty and morally condemned ‘the poor’. These findings are theorized in four ways: first, informants deployed close points of comparison that diminished a sense of relative poverty and deprivation; second, dissociation from ‘the poor’ reflects long‐running stigma and shame but is given extra force by current forms of ‘scroungerphobia’; third, discourses of the ‘undeserving poor’ articulate with a more general contemporary prejudice against the working class, which fuels the impetus to dissociate from ‘the poor’ (and to disidentify with the working class); and fourth, the hegemonic orthodoxy that blames ‘the poor’ for their poverty can more easily dominate in contexts where more solidaristic forms of working‐class life are in decline.     

Being Confined within? Constructions of the Good Childhood and Outdoor Play in Early Childhood Education and Care Settings in Ireland

This study is based on a study of the experience of the outdoors in early childhood education and care settings in Ireland. Central to the analyses are the inter‐linkages drawn between constructions of a ‘good’ childhood, and children’s ‘need’ for outdoor play, as well as the contradictions which arise around competing discourses of safety and protection versus play and autonomy in the structuring of children’s everyday lives. The findings indicate that the outdoors is increasingly marginalised in young children’s everyday experiences. Conclusions are drawn with reference to the implications for the development of real and meaningful outdoor play experiences for children in early childhood education and care settings.     

Evaluating Area‐based Interventions: The Case of ‘Communities for Children’

Increasingly, governments in wealthy countries are designing early intervention initiatives around principles of ‘community regeneration’ or ‘place management’. Because these initiatives are multi‐site, aimed at long‐term systemic change, and implemented amidst a range of other initiatives, assessing their quality and outcomes demands departure from conventional programme evaluation approaches. This article analyses the challenges of evaluating area‐based interventions in the child welfare field, and shows how the National Evaluation of Australia's ‘Communities for Children’ initiative seeks to overcome these through its mixed method design and the longitudinal Stronger Families in Australia study.     

Ideologies & Narratives in Relation to ‘Fat’ Children as Bullies, ‘Easy Targets’ and Victims

In this study, we explore narratives in relation to ‘fatness’, drawing on focus group interviews with parents, early years practitioners, teachers and young people. The study is located in a larger study on bullying and resilience, with no specific focus on obesity or ‘fatness’. Analysis of the interview data highlighted a recurrent focus on ‘fatness’ within the participants’ narratives, by labelling and stigmatising the ‘fat kid’ and ‘bigger children’. We conclude that obesity and fatness, as abnormalities, are now included in commonsense talk in relation to ‘easy targets’, victims and bullies.     

Children and the ‘Social Cohesion’ Agenda in Sport: Children's Participation in ‘Ethnically Mixed’ Sports Teams in the North of England

This study is set in the North of England in the context of debates around the integration of communities, after a series of street disturbances in the early 2000s. The debates centred upon ‘social cohesion’ and the social mixing of Pakistani British and White British communities. The current study explores this from the context of 10‐ to 11‐year‐old Asian, Black and White British boys participating in cricket and football clubs. It draws on the sociology of childhood approach that sees children as active participants and co‐creators of their own lives. This more nuanced approach sheds important light on children's own negotiations of home, peers, sports clubs and identities that are key to how cohesion is achieved.     

Becoming ‘Real’ Entrepreneurs: Women and the Gendered Normalization of ‘Work’

This article focuses on the way in which women entrepreneurs legitimate their place in a gendered economy by reifying a divide between ‘real work’ and ‘not‐real work’. Using ethnographic approaches to follow the everyday lives of several women who own and operate small businesses in the USA, our article documents three gendering practices the women use for ‘becoming real workers:’ embodied, spatial and temporal. The study shows that women entrepreneurs become ‘productive workers’ by recasting reproductive work as non‐productive or not‐real work. At the end, we explore two possible alternative conceptualizations of ‘work’ that could contribute to dissolving this gendered divide.     

‘Access and achievement or social exclusion?’ are the government's policies working for disabled children and their families?

The past decade has seen significant developments in policy and practice for disabled children and their families. In particular there is a new focus upon access and inclusion, with increasing awareness of the need to see disabled children and families as active partners within policy development and implementation. There is growing awareness of the implications of disability discrimination legislation across children's services and of the importance of improving arrangements for early identification and intervention to maximise disabled children's participation within mainstream services. The National Service Framework, the advent of Children's Trusts and a new Special Education Needs (SEN) Action Programme, together with the introduction of direct payments, give encouraging messages about multi‐agency working and a strategic and ‘joined up’ approach to childhood disability. However, many disabled children and their families continue to experience discrimination, poverty and social exclusion. The challenge for the Government is to ensure that disabled children are ‘mainstreamed’ across all policy initiatives and to recognise the talents and ambitions of disabled children and their families in service design and implementation. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘Off school sick’: mothers' accounts of school sickness absence

Interview material, collected as part of a wider ethnographic study of sickness absence in an English primary school, is used to examine how mothers accounted for their decisions to keep children ‘off school sick’. Mothers' accounts suggested a process by which they tested their children's claims on sickness against suspicions of feigning illness. The paper describes, from the mothers' point of view, the process of negotiating sickness with children and how children are categorised as ‘pretending’, ‘upset’ or ‘really ill’. These decisions are set within a wider context comprising: a normative discourse of maternal child health care; contradictory demands placed on mothers by the image of children as simultaneously robust and vulnerable; the surveillance and contradictory demands of schooling; and the use by children of sickness as a means of exercising influence on their social situation. It is suggested that locating child health care in relation to childrens' point in their childhood career (for these children the transition to secondary school) and acknowledging the active role that children play in the construction of illness will facilitate a fuller picture of mothers' unpaid health work within the family.     

Geometries of ‘global’ evangelicalism

In this article, I explore the power dynamics at play in religious place‐making. I critically discuss the uneven co‐configurations of imaginaries of the ‘local’ and ‘global’ within global evangelicalism. Specifically, I analyse the recent recording of a live album by the famous charismatic Australian band Hillsong United (of Hillsong Church) at various locations in Israel‐Palestine, which was followed by a concert tour in Israel. Palestinian evangelical Christians were critical of this endeavour, for they felt that it marginalized and excluded them from their global evangelical faith family. The frictions between the Palestinian evangelical community and Hillsong United illustrate how dominant evangelical actors create an imagination of the ‘local’, which enters the imaginary of global evangelicalism (and bears material consequences). In the article, I thus argue that privileged financial and cultural resources and travel regimes lead to specific notions of geometries of power in global evangelicalism.     

‘Here and There’: Children and Youth’s Perspectives of Borders in Mexico–United States Migration

This article explores children’s perspectives regarding migration and family separation on both sides of the Mexico‐U.S. border. ‘Transnational care constellations’¹ that connect separated siblings allow children to imagine the other side of the border and to explore their thoughts and perspectives through the lenses of inequality, as well as through a sense of belonging and family. This article presents ethnographic data of families that capture the dynamism of families that are both ‘here and there’ as children assemble their ideas and narratives of how transnational lives exist.