Grandparental childcare in Australia: gender differences in the correlates of providing regular grandparental care while parents work

Grandparents’ regular care for children while parents work has been mostly studied from the parental perspective. This paper focuses on the grandparents. Using the Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use Survey 2006 (N = 7672) we investigate regular-caring grandparents’ demographic characteristics, which childcare activities they undertake, and how regular childcare provision relates to their time in other activities, subjective time pressure and satisfaction. Results indicate the correlates and nature of regular care differ by gender. Regular and non-regular-caring grandmothers’ relative time allocation to different childcare tasks barely differs, while regular-caring grandfathers’ care includes a much higher proportion of active care and travel than non-regular-caring grandfathers’. Regular care provision is associated with less leisure than non-regular-caring counterparts for both genders, but with only grandmothers’ housework, personal care and sleep time. Providing regular care doubles the likelihood of grandmothers reporting high subjective time pressure compared to non-regular-caring grandmothers; there is no association between regular care and time pressure for grandfathers. We conclude that in taking on regular care, grandparents echo the gender patterns found among parents, namely that it is women who are disproportionately impacted by meeting family care needs.     

‘Dirty Work?’ Gender,Race and the Union in Industrial Cleaning

The study uses an eclectic framework and through an intersectional analysis and use of narratives explores the meaning of janitorial work, the gender division of labour (GDL), the unions and organizing for janitors engaged in industrial cleaning for a big cleaning company, Pluto, in Toronto. Pluto was organized by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in 2006. The study is based on the organizing drive for Pluto and uses participant observation and interview methods. Intersectional analysis is useful in understanding the worker's perceptions of the racialized, gendered and classed constitution of cleaning work as ‘dirty’ and their resistance to these constructs. We explore GDL in industrial cleaning and the construction of women's work as ‘light duty’ and men's work as ‘heavy duty’. We conclude that union membership is important not only for material benefits of the janitors but also for their alternative identity construction. However, there is a persistence of GDL and gender pay equity is not addressed seriously in the organizing drive or upon organizing.     

How Employed Mothers in Australia Find Time for Both Market Work and Childcare

Time use studies find that employed mothers reduce their parental childcare time by much less than an hour for every hour they spend in market work. This paper uses data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use Survey 1997 (4,059 randomly selected households) to investigate how employed mothers manage to avoid a one-for-one trade-off between work and childcare. It compares the time allocation of employed fathers, employed mothers and non-employed mothers and finds that parents use non-parental childcare to reschedule as well as to replace their own childcare, that employed mothers reschedule activities from weekdays to weekends or to earlier or later in the day, and spend less time than other mothers in housework, childfree leisure and personal care.

Emancipated foster youth’s experiences and perceptions of the transition to adulthood

Using a grounded theory approach, this study evaluated narratives from a sample of 170 emancipated foster youth (66.5% female; 84.6% non-white) as they reflected on their experiences between the ages of 18 and 25 across three data waves. Corbin and Strauss’ (1990) three-phase coding process revealed five overarching themes: adult values and characteristics, nature of the transition process, material needs and resources, relationship concerns, and affective experiences. Although some elements of Arnett’s (2000) model of emerging adulthood were evident in this sample of emancipated foster youth, such as individualistic qualities and instability, other core features were rarely discussed, such as self-focus and optimism, or were expressed in unique ways, such as exploration and feeling in-between. There were significant age-related changes, but not gender differences, in youth’s discussion of varied themes. These findings suggest promising avenues for intervention during the sensitive period of developmental reorganization that characterizes the transition from adolescence to young adulthood.     

Towards intensive parenting? Changes in the composition and determinants of mothers' and fathers' time with children 1992–2006

Contemporary expectations of good parenting hold that focused, intensive parental attention is essential to children's development. Parental input is viewed as a key determinant in children's social, psychological and educational outcomes, with the early years particularly crucial. However, increased rates of maternal employment mean that more parents are juggling work and family commitments and have less non‐work time available to devote to children. Yet studies find that parental childcare time has increased over recent decades. In this paper, we explore the detail of this trend using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Time Use Survey (TUS), 1992 and 2006. To investigate whether discourses on intensive parenting are reflected in behaviour, we examine a greater range of parent–child activities than has been undertaken to date, looking at trends in active childcare time (disaggregated into talk‐based, physical and accompanying care activities); time in childcare as a secondary activity; time spent in the company of children in leisure activities; and time spent in the company of children in total. We also investigate whether the influence of factors known to predict parental time with children (gender, education, employment status and the age of children) have changed over time. We contextualize our analyses within social and economic trends in Australia and find a compositional change in parental time, with more active childcare occurring within less overall time, which suggests more intensive, child‐centred parenting. Fathers' parent–child time, particularly in physical care, increased more than mothers' (from a much lower base), and tertiary education no longer predicts significantly higher childcare time.     

Can't do it alone: housing collaborations to improve foster youth outcomes

Research documents that youth transitioning out of the foster care system experience a variety of negative outcomes, including homelessness. Housing collaborations, which aim to comprehensively address resource and service needs for transitioning youth, including permanent connections, education, and employment, have resulted in innovative programming and forged new relationships among child welfare, social service and housing developers, and providers. This article describes the partners, models, and resources several collaborations used and their progress and outcomes; shares insights gained; and explores productive directions for future work.     

The Social Shaping of Emotion: The Case of Grief*

This article addresses the issue of how deeply social arrangements may penetrate into private emotion, in this instance, grief. It argues that the data necessary to address the issue satisfactorily are not available and thus current assumptions in the literature about the universality of the grief experience are at least suspect. However, there are theoretical reasons, derived from interactionist thought, to suspect that if certain components of the grief experience vary, so will the experience. Four of these components are examined (level of significance of the other who dies; definition of the situation surrounding the death; character of the self experiencing a loss through death; and the interactional situation/setting in which the prior three components occur). Evidence is also presented which is suggestive of space-time variation in these components. It is concluded that an assumption of the deep social shaping and thus the variability of grief is fruitful for further empirical inquiries.     

Speed Mentoring in Teaching and Learning: Young people with experience of the care system mentor social work students

The value of listening and talking to young people with experience of the care system has been recognised as a vital and positive contribution to social work students' learning. A model of co-production was used to develop a series of speed mentoring events whereby social work students placed in local authority children and family settings were mentored by young people with experience of the care system. This tentative review of this small-scale project shares the authors' critical reflections on the value and reliability of this model, for evaluating the outcomes of co-productive mentoring relationships between young people and social work students. The reversal of the power dynamic between student and service user contributed to the unsettling of assumptions about each other and empathy for each other's role. The student authors reflect on learning about the child's experience that has influenced their practice. The mentor authors welcomed the opportunity to participate in the development of ‘young people friendly’ social workers. Suggestions are made as to how this model could be developed to contribute to a more systematic approach to the role of service users in mentoring, advising and contributing to the supervision process of students and social workers.     

Beyond normalization and impairment: theorizing subjectivity in learning difficulties – theory and practice

Normalization and social role valorization continue to play a central role in shaping debates and practice relating to learning difficulties. In the context of recent arguments this paper draws on the work of Foucault to deconstruct these theories. Foucault’s work alerts us to a conceptual confusion at their heart which reproduces a common but problematic individual–society dualism. There is an implicit, and problematic, presence in the theories of a pre‐social individual conceived as having essential impairments and who is passive in the face of negative socialization. We propose that Foucault’s ‘ethical’ domain of inquiry, with its concern for how people actively understand themselves and govern their conduct in relation to specific values and a ‘truth’ that they are obliged to recognize in themselves, provides the basis for returning the individual‐as‐subject to theories in an active, critical manner.