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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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'Grandparents are the next best thing'
— informal childcare for working parents in urban Britain | | Author(s) | Jane Wheelock, Katharine Jones |
| Journal title | Journal of Social Policy, vol 31, no 3, July 2002 |
| Pages | pp 441-464 |
| Keywords | Grandparents as carers ; Family care ; Grandchildren ; Parents ; Social roles ; Employment ; Social surveys. |
| Annotation | This article is based on a unique empirical investigation of the contribution that informal childcare - relatives, friends or neighbours looking after children, usually on an unpaid basis - makes in allowing parents to go out to work. A clear understanding of why working parents use complementary childcare (particularly from grandparents) is essential for any childcare policy that hopes to be attuned to what families actually want. The article argues that policy makers, lured by a simplistic vision of economic vitality into adopting a behavioural paradigm from economics - in which parents are assumed to respond to purely financial incentives - are likely to find themselves distracted from important issues of the social well-being of working families with children. Childcare needs are related to dramatic changes in women's labour market participation over recent years, where the largest increase in female employment has been among mothers of children under the age of five. Neither mothers nor fathers may be in a position to provide the desired amount of childcare inside the nuclear household. This situation gives rise to the possibility of a 'childcare deficit'. In failing to acknowledge and underpin the value which parents place upon complementary forms of childcare, policy makers are in danger of committing themselves to institutional arrangements which may make that deficit worse in the longer term. (KJ/RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-020814213 A |
| Classmark | P6:SW: P6:SJ: SW5: SR: TM5: WJ: 3F |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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