The benefits of high-quality pre-K and child care are enormous. The more a woman identified as a 'mother', the greater her share of childcare tasks relative to the father; the more hours she was sole carer of the child; the greater the gap between mother's and father's hours of care.
A new study finds that the more a woman self-identifies with her profession, the more paid hours she works and the less time she spends with the couple's children, but the more equal the childcare balance is between a couple. However, the more a woman identifies herself with motherhood, the less time the father spends with the children.
The study, from Cambridge University's Department of Sociology, extensively surveyed 148 couples with at least one child aged 6 years or younger to explore how both self-aware and – to some extent – latent individual priorities and ideologies help shape decisions about parenting.
Full-time employment is still the default option for men; new mothers are expected to remain available to care for their children .Women need to overcome internal and external barriers to commit to full-time employment, and our findings help reveal the ways in which their internalized identities guide their decisions.
Strong paternal or work-related identity only related to the father's own hours of childcare, and had no effect on the amount of childcare time and duties taken on by the mother. While, as with many countries, women's employment rates in the UK have shot up over the last few decades, this country is still dominated by a male-breadwinner/female-caregiver ideology, says Gaunt, with most mothers expected to get part-time work if at all.n fact, while the UK has one of the highest general employment rates in Europe for mothers of preschool children, it has one of the lowest rates of maternal full-time employment – with just one in five couples both in full-time work .
What choices do working parents have?
Most families currently have three options for securing child care.
1. Parents can stay at home and care for their children themselves. But this is increasingly difficult, Moreover, mothers are more likely than fathers to take time away from paid work to care for a child, which can exacerbate mothers’ lifetime earnings gap.
2. Parents can pay for child care out of pocket. But this approach is very costly for families, eating up 35.9 percent of a low-income family’s monthly budget.
3. Families is to use federal- or state-funded child care, but access to any publicly funded program, let alone a high-quality program, is very limited. Nationwide, nearly three in four children are not enrolled in a federal or state-funded pre-K program.
Women need to have the ability to make the choices that are best for them and their families in both the short and long term, and greater national investments in child care and preschool programs
For more, read the full report in
Strong paternal or work-related identity only related to the father's own hours of childcare, and had no effect on the amount of childcare time and duties taken on by the mother. While, as with many countries, women's employment rates in the UK have shot up over the last few decades, this country is still dominated by a male-breadwinner/female-caregiver ideology, says Gaunt, with most mothers expected to get part-time work if at all.n fact, while the UK has one of the highest general employment rates in Europe for mothers of preschool children, it has one of the lowest rates of maternal full-time employment – with just one in five couples both in full-time work .
What choices do working parents have?
Most families currently have three options for securing child care.
1. Parents can stay at home and care for their children themselves. But this is increasingly difficult, Moreover, mothers are more likely than fathers to take time away from paid work to care for a child, which can exacerbate mothers’ lifetime earnings gap.
2. Parents can pay for child care out of pocket. But this approach is very costly for families, eating up 35.9 percent of a low-income family’s monthly budget.
3. Families is to use federal- or state-funded child care, but access to any publicly funded program, let alone a high-quality program, is very limited. Nationwide, nearly three in four children are not enrolled in a federal or state-funded pre-K program.
Women need to have the ability to make the choices that are best for them and their families in both the short and long term, and greater national investments in child care and preschool programs
No comments:
Post a Comment