Last modified: 2010-05-25
Abstract
This paper considers the life and work in child care centres (preschools) as an example of the everyday life of parents, children and workers respectively. The paper discusses whether the basic understanding and the practice of work might fruitfully be understood through theories of everyday life.
I have so far built my understandings of a number of practices along the lines of Swedish feminist care work researchers (Szebehely, Eliasson et. al) – i.e. as marked by invisibility and a public discourse of triviality. The kindergarten/preschools/child care centre as work arena – and the everyday life there - constitutes a meeting place between agents and interests. The ‘meetings’ and the relations between the decisive agents takes place around the children, who – e.g. both in the professional discourse and from an economic point of view - are acknowledged as the central carriers of the meaning of the work. But though the children are thus often seen as the central users of the services of the centres, the decisive voices and judgements are in the hands of the parents. The parents on their side have an obligation to engage in their children’s lives and needs, despite their often quite limited insights into the daily lives of the children during pre-school hours. (Due to their own - frailty but necessary - ‘choice of career’, which have left their little darlings at the hands of the professionals). The workers – most often female - must therefore accept the basic condition, that they will often be seen by the parents and society at large - not as professionals, first and foremost, but – as necessary and rather invisible aids and substitutes for the parents.
Despite prolonged, formalised and ‘academised’ schooling and a strengthened professional knowledge base, their work is still often understood – also by the professionals themselves - as centrally driven by ‘family like’, informal qualities and personalised talents. As the basic content of the work is not immediately apparent to the accepted/paying ‘users’ of the work: the parents, the professional care workers themselves with their individual personalities rather than their formal and professional qualifications become the ‘carriers’ of the quality of the work, and the workers – rather than their representations of professional knowledge – ‘become’ central emblems of (the meaning) work. To manifest the meaning of the work the workers must on the other hand maintain, that the children and their basic daily needs (‘neglected’ by the parents - so to speak) are left to be met by the workers, who must take on this challenge, and who have historically taken on this as their main responsibility.
Over the recent years though a still more professionalised practice seems to challenge this relational construction of responsibilities between parents, children and professionals with the result of challenges also to the basic construction of the authoritative judgement of the basic needs of children.