Contribution of SOCCARE Work Package 2 to the understanding of structural

1.

Each individual care arrangement has been applied to specific conditions within the constraints of existing labour market and child care service structures. Lone parents have to be innovative in using all the existing opportunities to overcome the gaps in service provision and the inflexibilities of their work conditions. Innovations at the everyday level of the lone parents of the sample include, for example, moving to a place where formal and informal child care services are close and available, changing a job to one with standard or flexible timetables, minimising work trips, working at home, arranging most intensive work periods to coincide with the grandmother’s holidays, etc. All these practical ways to adapt the arrangement to the environment also have impacts on structures, as they may cause a concentration of requests for services or, on the contrary, consolidate family communities. Structures may be reinforced by individual choices or influenced by the expression of new demands. In this section, we focus on this second dimension, in order to understand some innovations which may produce structural changes.

1.1. Day care services with flexible opening hours

In countries where it is largely provided, like Finland or France, formal child care is a dominant care arrangement for working lone parents. Traditionally, formal care has provided standard and rather inflexible services. However, several lone parents of the sample have received responsive formal child care services that could be seen as

innovations within the formal care system. The most flexible example was the Finnish

24-hour day-and-night care centre that was open each day (and night) of the year. There are some lone parents who are doing 3-shift work, including weekends, and they are in need of such an extensive service. Several day care centres also have extended opening hours, for example, 6-22 o'clock on weekdays and this serves the day care needs of most lone parents.

In France, the opening hours of formal child care remain inflexible. However, the French government announced in its last action plan that extending the opening hours is a priority and such experiments have been done in Paris. The access to these services is nonetheless still quite difficult. Other experiments with atypical timetables have been done in the field of home help services (see below). Though it is not as spread as in Finland, taking into account the needs for extensive care now attain the sphere of public services, while it was limited to childminding only a few years ago. This is a sign of a growing flexibility of schedules in France.

Extended opening hours do not however solve all the practical problems in day care. The negative criticism systematically aimed at day care usually deals with the practical difficulties linked to the refusal of entry in case of sickness of the child. We may observe here that policies have been getting tougher these past few years, due to the experience of epidemics. Children in day care ten years ago or more were accepted more readily. The idea of sanitary conditions taking precedence over providing care places lone parents in a particularly delicate situation when they are out of parental leaves. In such cases, lone parents usually call family members for help. If the latter live close by and are free, they take over child care easily. However, in many cases, lone

parents have to drive more than 100 km and organise an emergency accommodation at the grandparents’ home. Otherwise, home help is required.

2. Innovative means of home help

The provision of home help services seems to have dramatically increased in all the countries during the last decade. Unfortunately, no reliable statistics are available, due to the huge number and the turnover of individuals and organisations involved in this activity. Home help provides considerable and flexible child care services to some lone parent families. The real problem is not its inflexibilities or the lack of innovations, but the difficult access, both in terms of availability and price. Nonetheless, various innovations have eased lone parents’ access to home help.

2.1. Expansion of the voluntary sector

The expansion of the voluntary sector is an important progress, which has to be supported by the welfare states. A good example is the Finnish MLCW (Mannerheim League for Child Welfare) child care service. MLCW is a voluntary organisation instructing young and other adult women in child care and providing their flexible services to families with children. The service is an innovative form of 'paid volunteering'. From the perspective of lone parents, however, this service is problematical due to its cost.

The experiment of the French ADMR (“Aide à domicile en milieu rural”) with atypical schedules is also a good illustration of this recent change. ADMR is a traditional voluntary organisation involved in various kinds of home help (child care, elderly care, etc.). As explained in the "formally assisted" subtype, this organisation experimented with a new service based on flexible child care home help. Interestingly enough, the implementation history of this experiment reveals some changes occurring in public assessment of women’s access to work.

The president of the Conseil Général of Ille-et-Vilaine (department), who is the mayor of Vitré, organised there recently a sort of conference on employment that aimed at debating the issue of access to employment. Local business representatives, in light of the new economic boom, were complaining about the lack of labour force. A few women attending the conference remarked that the positions offered by the large companies in the employment pool (Mitsubishi, SOREP, SPI, La Société Vitréenne d'Abattage) were all defined in shifts that were incompatible with child care. The President of the Conseil Général decided to investigate these atypical child care needs, in order to facilitate the access of women to these positions. The Conseil Général set up a think tank composed of itself, the family allowance organisation (C.A.F.) and the A.D.M.R., a group of associations which manages most services linked to family assistance (child care, care for older people). An experimental group was put up to co-ordinate the activities of local technical committees, composed of community representatives, the A.D.M.R., social workers and early childhood professionals.

In Vitré, the technical committee was the first to set up an experimental service after exploring the organisational and access possibilities of such a service. A compromise was quickly reached about the following criteria: the child care schedules offered by the service will cover only such periods that are not already covered by regular child care services; the care will be provided at home by certified women; applications will be selected on the basis of the family allowance rate. There

was a lot of discussion about overnight and weekend care on a volunteer basis. It seems that those needs were excluded from the experiment mainly because of finances rather than because of principle: “The calculations were quickly made for a family resorting to the service every weekend. We thought: that cannot be. The whole

budget is going to be taken by families like that.” The cost of the service is partly

covered by the user on the basis of family income per member, the rest being financed by the Conseil Général and the C.A.F. The fees range from 2,29 € to 8,69 € (15-57 FF) per hour, on a gross hourly rate of 18,29 € (120 FF). The first applications were examined in July 2000. In September, 6 or 7 requests were processed, reaching 15 by the beginning of 2001. The turnover has been quite important since parents doing temporary work have very punctual needs. The implementation of the service has raised significant practical issues linked to the difficulty of both satisfying requests and recruiting qualified staff members on a low-wage part-time basis:

“In September, it was a total chaos, because we were lacking staff. We had families that were telling us it was more... for some it was mid-September, a week earlier than planned, so we had no staff. We didn’t manage it properly and it became quite a disaster. So that’s when, since I am a volunteer at A.D.M.R, I said that I had no intention of bearing it all. I have another service to run. I told them: look, if that’s how it’s going to be, I’m out. This can’t go on. Then, the president of the association said: we just need to hire a secretary who will take care of the applications. There’s the recruiting issue. That’s too. Because what we offer is a part-time job. Early in the morning – the earliest we’ve had to deal with in some families was from 4:30-5:00 am to 7:00-7:30 am, sometimes 8:00 am, but that’s very few hours. And in the evening, we can’t place them in another family because we’re part of a convention that covers an 11-hour period. The one who starts at 4:00 am has to be home 11 hours later. So we did it with derogation. The caregivers who did it, accepted it because they could go home and rest in the meantime, since they had no other work. But for someone who has more hours, it can’t work. Getting up at 4:00 am and going to bed at 10:00 p.m. because that’s when the family gets home, it’s... That’s the problem with at-home caregivers. Considering the conditions, some say: we do that while waiting for something else to come along. You should know that we’re still looking for something else. Since companies are hiring these days, they systematically take on full-time work, rather than stick to part-time that’s not even proper. (...) At first, we had trained at-home caregivers, with a technical diploma (C.A.P.) in early childhood education or in infant welfare nurses, or C.A.F.A.D. (Certificat d’aptitude aux functions d’aide à domicile) holders. In the end, we haven’t been able to find what we wanted for the staff. Currently, we must have two or three people with an infant welfare nurse diploma, one of them is soon to go back to work in hospital. As for the C.A.F.A.D., nobody has it. We see during the interviews if they’ve had experience with children. We also have 40—45-year-old mothers who have raised their kids and think: now that the kids are students, we

need extra income.” (interview with an ADMR volunteer)

Today, the issue that matters for all parties is the duration of such a service. In spite of the fact that the experiment, originally planned to end on December 31st, was prolonged until March 31st, 2001, there seems to be great uncertainty concerning the future of the service. This is due to the lack of involvement of local representatives and reservations expressed by the C.A.F. about the current form of the operation. In fact, the experiment raises more questions than solutions as it threatens to institutionalise precarious support for precarious employment. This kind of an

atypical child care service certainly allows for individualised arrangements, but its duration in time and space represents a potential huge cost for communities. The institutions involved are thus being very cautious.

Despite the instability of the work offered and the recruiting difficulties deriving from it, all users appreciate the service. However, this example illustrates the major dilemma that voluntary sector organisations have to face: whether they depend on the state for implementing innovative and accessible services or, they are obliged to provide services at a higher price, which means that lone parents will not have access to them.

2.2. State compensation for the social security contributions of registered childminders

The French lone parents who recruit registered childminders have the opportunity to be dispensed of paying the social security contributions for them. In the AGED (Allocation pour garde d’enfant à domicile) plan of action, the state compensates this duty until the children are 6 years old. The system was reformed. The left wing governments made it progressive, after the right wing Balladur government had conceived it as distributive. Whatever the fluctuations of the plan, it is well appreciated by lone parents who enjoy the opportunity to recruit home helpers, which allows more flexibility in their schedules.

3. Mutual help between lone parents

In most of the countries, local lone parent associations have developed organised forms of mutual exchange, care circles, which are significant innovations. The wish to group seems to be a major unexpected impact of the classification of these parents as "one parent families" by the state. Even though these parents sometimes express criticism towards this categorisation, the status is an official recognition of their specificity and facilitates public expression and mobilisation. In Italy, where this categorisation does not exist, we observe a serious lack of such solidarity between lone parents.

Unfortunately, lone parents’ associations have a very short life cycle, because their founding members often stop their active participation as soon as their family situation changes or when the children start school. In many cases, there is no one to replace them. Lone parents who are activists often express the need of their organisations to be much more supported by public authorities, so that the durability of their associations could be guaranteed, as it is for associations like the parental crèches.

4. Flexibility and time inequalities

The main result of this qualitative study might be, unfortunately, to confirm the growing inequalities in the distribution of time in social life. Though the feeling of a lack of time is becoming general, due to the increasing possibilities to consume as well as to the increasing options for work and life (Nowotny, 1992), opportunities to obtain time for oneself are divided more and more unequally (Müller-Wichmann, 1984).

From this perspective, we find a large diversity of situations within our sample. Parents in low-paid jobs who cannot choose their timetable often feel that they do not have enough time even for child care. They feel that they spend too little time with their children during the week. On weekdays, those children spend only few hours with their

parents from the moment they wake up until the time they go to bed. This number of hours is spread over several periods during the day, such as breakfast, personal care (e.g. bath time, mealtimes, helping the child to dress/undress, etc.), travelling from home to school, dinner time and the period just before going to bed and, finally, a few moments before the child falls asleep. If we bear in mind, on the one hand, that some of these moments are part of the day-to-day routine when the mother-child relationship is of a practical or functional nature rather than an opportunity for exchanging affection and, on the other hand, that after a day’s work many of these lone parents are too tired to respond effectively to what their children require, then this type of need is easily understood. Some parents state that what is important is not just to have time, but to have quality time.

Furthermore, because low-paid jobs usually have family-unfriendly flexible hours, the need to have more time to spend with the child is such that the parents in question feel they are not properly fulfilling their role as carers, and this leads to feelings of guilt. The daily life of most of these parents is therefore characterised, to a greater or lesser degree, by the tension deriving from the unsatisfied need to have more time to spend with their children.

Conversely, lone parents in independent professions or who work at home have the opportunity to organise their time on their own. This flexibility is far more friendly as it allows time for child care and also, in some cases, time for oneself. Nonetheless, for the large majority of the interviewees, time for oneself, though it may exist in the evenings or at nights, is limited by both tiredness and constrained immobility. Thus, we observe that most of these lone carers only watch TV late in the evening.

The remarkable contrasts between the arrangements are thus partly made of these unequal working conditions. However, what we observe is that informal support may also give the opportunity to free oneself from care obligations. Let us notice first that family support is also here quite unequal by its character. Firstly, many people do not benefit from such support. If they benefit from high formal support, they may even need it. Yet, in many cases lone parents suffer from a lack of such support, and this prevents them from having the opportunity for flexible solutions to child care problems. Secondly, there are important inequalities in the arrangements supported by family members. Autonomous parents seem to feel less guilty about allowing time for themselves thanks to the grandparents’ help, whereas dependent ones feel ashamed if they liberate themselves from care obligations just for fun.

The study makes us understand much better how time inequalities may be observed among European lone parents. Also the professionals who were interviewed stressed that one of their main concerns is to manage not to introduce further inequalities within the services. They want to be able to give appropriate answers to child care problems emerging from flexibility of work, without preventing nurses and auxiliaries from caring for their own children under good conditions. Thus, the flexibility and irregularity of working hours is becoming one of the major problems for child care, as it leads to this equation:

- work or self care on the lone parents’ side;

- inflexibilities or instability on the formal carers’ side; - no concern on the employers’ side.

III. Contribution of SOCCARE Work Package 2 to a new definition of the