DEPENDENCE AND INDEPENDENCE

Abstract

The contributions that adult men and women make to households in terms of paid and unpaid work have undergone substantial change, particularly in respect of women's responsibility for income generation, and have been seen as part of the processes of individualization. Recent contributions to the literature have suggested that children are now acquiring independence earlier as part of those same processes. The paper uses qualitative methods to explore the way in which parents in two-parent families, where both are employed, perceive the risks attached to children's exercise of greater independence, how they seek to ‘manage’ those risks and how far the perceptions of parents accord with those of children. We find parents’ perceptions of risk to be strong, but to have little to do with working patterns. In addition, they are often at odds with the actual behaviour of the child. Risks are managed by negotiation, in which children played an active part. We are also able to make some preliminary comments on the difficulties of interpreting scale measures in relation to interview evidence.

Les contributions de travail payé et non-payé que les hommes et les femmes adultes font aux ménages ont subi des transformations substantielles, surtout au niveau de la responsabilité des femmes à la génération de revenus, et ont été considérées comme étant part du processus d'individualisation. Des contributions récentes à la littérature suggèrent qu'actuellement les enfants acquièrent une indépendance précoce grâce à ces mêmes processus. Cet article emploie des méthodes qualitatives afin d'explorer la manière dont les deux parents employés et faisant part d'un ménage commun perçoivent les risques liés à l'exercice d'une plus grande indépendance de la part des enfants, la façon dont ils cherchent à gérer ces risques, et le point auquel leurs perceptions correspondent à celles de leurs enfants. Nous constatons que les perceptions des risques maintenues par les parents sont considérables mais peu liées aux modes de travail. En outre, ces perceptions divergent du comportement réel de l'enfant, et les risques sont générés par des négociations dans lesquelles les enfants jouent un rôle principal. Nous avons ainsi pu faire certains commentaires préliminaires sur les difficultés concernant l'interprétation des échelles de mesure liées aux données des entretiens.

Keywords:

• risk
• children
• individualization
• working parents

Mots clés:

• risques
• enfants
• inidividualisation
• families actives

The research for this paper was supported by ESRC Grant No. L326253054. We are grateful to Kathryn Backett-Milburn for her helpful comments.

Notes

1. The recent shift among academic sociologists towards seeing children as social actors in their own right (Prout & James, 1997) is interesting in this respect.

2. Three children were aged 12, six were aged 13, eight were aged 14, five were aged 15 and four were aged 16.

3. Forty-four per cent of women in the UK work part time. In the EU, this figure is exceeded only by women in the Netherlands.

4. Each quotation is followed by the family number (F4) in this case, and whether the mother (M), father (F) or child (C) is speaking.

5. This is of course reminiscent of Gilligan's (1982) pioneering work on the gendered ethics of young people.

6. It must be noted that it is highly unlikely that parents who were not in any way concerned about these issues would have agreed to be interviewed.

7. In two cases this would objectively have been considered to be the case (involving as it did, binge drinking, assault on a parent and absence from the home overnight in the case of a 15-year-old girl, and suspension from school in the case of a 12-year-old boy). In the third case (of a 16-year-old boy, almost 17), the parents, especially the mother, expressed great concern about his behaviour, but no law had been broken.