It's a Family Affair: Low-Income Children's Perspectives on Maternal Work

Parental regulation of teenagers' time is pervasive. Parents attempt to constrain, well into adolescence, what their children do with their time, when they do it and how long they do it for. This paper draws on interviews with 14-16 year olds in the UK to explore teenagers' experiences of parents' temporal regulation, and whether their perceptions are affected by the processes and meanings attached to it. Where values, meanings and rationalities around temporalities are shared, regulation can be relatively unproblematic. Sometimes however, there is a clash of frames, which impacts on teenagers' subjective experiences and can lead to strategies to escape parental regulation of time.

mentioning

confidence: 92%

Parental Regulation of Teenagers’ Time

Sarre

2010

“…In an 'active' welfare state such as Sweden (see Esping-Andersen, 2002;Ridge, 2007), financial well-being is in many respects connected to labour conditions and the citizens' ability to meet with these conditions. Several reforms at the turn of the 20th century paved the way for, or reinforced, the centrality of work (arbetslinjen in Swedish 9 ) as an underlying ideology or premise in the Swedish welfare discourse, entailing that all able bodied citizens should work to make a living, and strive towards self-sufficiency.…”

Section: Defining the Centrality Of Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Redefining participation? On the positioning of children in Swedish welfare benefits appeals

Fernqvist

2011

This article deals with the representation of children in the Swedish welfare state, and particularly how children and parents living in economic hardship are positioned in issues regarding financial aid. According to Article 12 in the UNCRC, children have a right to be heard 'in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the child'. However, children are not participants in processes concerning welfare benefits, despite the effect that the outcome of these processes may have on children's everyday life. Using welfare benefits appeals as a starting point, the article argues that the impact of the centrality of work discourse in Swedish welfare policy further emphasizes children's position as passive and non-participants in the welfare discourse.

“…Australian welfare-to-work rules suggest that lone parents cannot refuse job offers, as long as they will not be clearly financially worse off as a result. Ridge (2007) explores the perspectives of children living in single-parent families in the UK on the impact of their mothers' return to work. Although some children whose mothers returned to work missed time with their mothers, most children noted an improvement in their lives.…”

Section: Children's Own Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children’s agency and the welfare state: Policy priorities and contradictions in Australia and the UK

Redmond

2010

Since the early 1990s, liberal welfare regimes have begun to treat lone parents as workers rather than as carers. This has happened in conjunction with an ongoing 'moral panic' about the need to develop policies to invest in children, and to protect them from adult worlds. The purpose of this article is to analyse contradictions within and between these strands of policy in two liberal welfare states -Australia and the UK. The article argues that recent welfare-to-work policies in both countries bring into sharp relief the contradictions inherent in assumptions that welfare states make about the agency of lone parents as workers and carers, and of children as incompetent.