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Working parent
About: Working parent is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 71 publications have been published within this topic receiving 1046 citations.
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TL;DR: This paper examined the phenomenon of West African parents living in Europe and North America who send their older children back home: from places of high immigrant aspiration to those of hardship and privation, concluding that West African immigrants fearing the consequences of their children's indiscipline in the West, where racism and hostility can endanger the entire family, may send unruly children back to the home country.
Abstract: This paper examines the phenomenon of West African parents living in Europe and North America who send their older children back home: from places of high immigrant aspiration to those of hardship and privation. Drawing on a project on West African immigration to Europe and on previous field studies in Africa, we conclude that West African immigrants fearing the consequences of their children's indiscipline in the West, where racism and hostility can endanger the entire family, may send unruly children back to the home country. In doing so, we believe, they build on long-standing African disciplinary efforts in hopes of toughening their children's resilience to the challenges in the new place and wait for the risk to dissipate. Key Words: African families, cross-cultural, culture/race/ethnicity, ethnography, fostering, migration. Recent decades have seen a sharp rise in the number of West African nationals in Europe and North America. Most have been young men seeking work or a degree, though women have come in greater numbers as well, whether independently or, under family reunification provisions, to join a husband (Sow, in press). More thinly documented have been the West African children who are directly affected by international migration to the West. Some of these children are left behind when a parent travels abroad for work; others come as migrants themselves, whether as the dependents of a working parent or, in more extreme cases, unaccompanied by an adult. Among the most puzzling cases are those of the children of West African immigrants in Europe or North America who are sent back to Africa, particularly children of older school age. Leaving places that seem to offer every advantage - established health and educational systems as well as the likelihood of a stable, prosperous future - these children effectively return to countries with levels of personal hardship and privation that most Europeans and Americans would find unacceptable for their own children (Aries, 1962). When asked to explain their actions, immigrant parents may point to lower costs of living and abundant child care back home. Alternatively, they may declare that a child is adapting poorly to the new place or needs to grow up knowing the family's ancestral roots. If pressed, though, nearly all West African immigrant parents living in Europe and the United States, which we describe collectively as "the West," ultimately say they want their children to gain a secure footing the West. Observations like these raise two questions. First, what might immigrants of recent West African origin find so objectionable about countries usually described as the pinnacles of African immigrant ambition to the point that they would send their children back to live in one of the poorest regions on earth? Second, why would they so often send their children back home at just the point when the children should be preparing most intensively for a successful professional life in their new homes? Stripped of their wider social and cultural contexts, we believe the apparent facts in this case are misleading. Drawing from our past and present studies in Africa and Europe and from a range of secondary sources, we examine in some detail the West African tenet that ensuring a child's social and intellectual development requires maximal parental access to long-standing disciplinary practices. We then turn to two related concerns of West African parents about life in Europe and the United States. One is what parents see as a Western tendency to coddle and spoil children and to restrict parents' access to the discipline they may deem necessary for bringing a child into line. A child with an easy life, they fear, will have faltering interest in school and career achievement, losing the ambitions the parents had for him or her, quite possibly the main reason they made the international move in the first place. Even more serious for parents may be the repercussions of an undisciplined child's involvement in gangs, violence, and crime. …
124 citations
TL;DR: A framework for analyzing work-family balance from a field study of women employed in the American IT workforce is presented to support the theoretical argument that women exhibit a range of decisions regarding career and parenthood.
Abstract: Despite the recent growth in the number of women in the American labor force, women are still under-represented in the IT workforce. Key among the factors that account for this under-representation is balancing work-family issues. This article presents a framework for analyzing work-family balance from a field study of women employed in the American IT workforce. The findings are examined through the lens of the Individual Differences Theory of Gender and IT to show the range of ways in which work-family considerations influence women's IT career decisions. The framework is used to support the theoretical argument that women exhibit a range of decisions regarding career and parenthood: the non-parent, the working parent, the back-on-track parent, and the off-the-track parent. These findings illustrate an identifiable theme that crosses geographical regions and timeframes; societal messages are complex and difficult to digest and are processed in different ways by different women, yet they contribute to the decisions women make about their professional and personal lives.
77 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider the case where workers have heterogeneous preferences with respect to hours of work and find that the shortage of short-hour jobs most likely occurs in high-wage labor markets.
Abstract: I. INTRODUCTION Female labor force participation has increased dramatically over the past three decades. Much of this change is due to the increased participation of married women and women with children.(1) In households where both adults participate in the labor force, or where there is a single working parent, individuals will often have greater demands on their time at home and may therefore desire patterns of work hours that differ from other workers. Given the gender-based division of labor in most American households, many of the women entering the labor force may prefer shorter (and perhaps more flexible) work weeks.(2) Furthermore, as sex roles adjust to accommodate the changing work and career aspirations of women, it is reasonable to expect that increasing numbers of men will also prefer shorter work weeks. The prospects for equality of economic opportunity between men and women rest in large measure on how well and how rapidly labor markets accommodate the hours preferences of workers who desire this flexibility. In this paper we ask whether labor markets will provide the optimal number of short-hour jobs in response to an increase in demand for short hours on the part of employees. According to the simple textbook model of the determinants of work hours, the answer to this question is clearly yes. Firms have an incentive to elicit information about their hours preferences because this allows them to offer labor contracts that minimize cost. Similarly, workers have an incentive to reveal their preferences to finns because this information is used to construct wage and hours packages in which workers are asked to work the utility-maximizing number of hours at the market-clearing wage. Labor market outcomes may be considerably more complex, however, in a setting where firms rely on work incentives to regulate the effort exerted by employees.(3) We find that in a simple efficiency wage model (along the lines of Shapiro and Stiglitz [1984] and Bowles [1985], but with a heterogeneous work force) workers' hours preferences may provide an indicator of their responsiveness to the work incentives. In this setting employers will in general not be able to elicit accurate information about hours preferences from employees. We show that this market failure may lead in turn to labor market equilibria that are characterized by an underprovision of short-hour jobs. We find further that the shortage of short-hour jobs most likely occurs in high-wage labor markets. Our model suggests that the simple textbook analysis of hours determination relies upon the wrong market metaphor. The conventional approach presumes that the determination of work hours is similar to the determination of car colors. Workers have an incentive to reveal their true hours preferences and employers have anincentive to solicit these preferences for the same reason that consumers have an incentive to reveal their color preferences and car makers have an incentive to solicit these preferences. In our view, a more appropriate market metaphor for hours determination is the market for health insurance. Employees have an incentive to portray themselves as desiring long hours for the same reasons that purchasers of health insurance will want to portray themselves as having no health problems. Insurance providers must be concerned about the unobservable characteristics of individuals who are attracted to the various insurance contracts they offer. We suggest that employers face similar concerns when offering wage and hours packages. The paper proceeds as follows. In the next section (section II), we analyze the determination of wages and work hours when finns use dismissal threats to motivate a homogeneous group of workers. Section III examines the case where workers have heterogeneous preferences with respect to hours of work. In section IV, we discuss the empirical plausibility of our model. Section V provides concluding remarks. …
73 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a 200-kW ORC system with reduced size that could be installed in a steel processing plant where space is limited was designed and demonstrated with actual flue gases.
59 citations
TL;DR: The impact of maternal employment on children's socialization and mother-child interaction is of continued concern in child development and mental health (Buehler, 1992; Buehler et al. as discussed by the authors ).
Abstract: The impact of maternal employment on children's socialization and mother-child interaction is of continued concern in child development and mental health (Buehler, 1992; Gottfried & Gottfried, 1988; Hoffman, 1986; Lerner & Galambos, 1991; MacEwen & Barling, 1991; Spitz, 1988). Although a number of authors have pointed out the positive effects of maternal employment on children's adjustment (Barling, 1990; Hoffman, 1986; Hoffman & Nye, 1974), others have expressed concern over mothers' long and inflexible working hours, the lack of part-time jobs that pay adequately, and children's need for consistent adult supervision and high-quality child care (Howell, 1973; Hughes & Galinsky, 1988; Lerner & Galambos, 1991; Ross & Mirowsky, 1988; Voydanoff, 1984). Research indicates that maternal employment is a multidimensional variable that has a differential impact on children depending on the number of hours a mother works, her job description, job stability, and role satisfaction (Bronfenbrenner & Crouter, 1982; Gottfried & Gottfried, 1988). Moreover, a mother's perceived level of stress and her feelings of well-being, whether as an employee outside the home, a full-time homemaker, or both, may be critical determinants of positive maternal parenting behavior and children's adjustment (Campbell & Moen, 1992; MacEwen & Barling, 1991; Patterson, 1990; Spitz, 1988). Maternal employment experiences may also have different effects on children's adjustment and family interaction depending on the children's ages and gender, as well as the number of children in the family (Bronfenbrenner & Crouter, 1982; Campbell & Moen, 1992; Kelly & Voydanoff, 1985; Zaslow, Rabinovich, & Suwalsky, 1991). Some mothers, particularly divorced ones, do not have the luxury of choosing whether to become a working parent, because the family's economic needs override personal preference. Current statistics, for example, indicate that nearly two thirds of mothers with dependent children are employed outside the home (MacEwen & Barling, 1991). Campbell and Moen (1992) report that, in 1988, 54% of single mothers and 57% of married mothers with preschool children were in the labor force. Maternal Stress and Well-Being Rutter (1988) has described stress as a centuries-old concept that still remains lacking in both adequate definition and understanding. Lazarus and Folkman (1984) describe stress as a "rubric consisting of many variables and processes" (p. 12). One such process is psychological stress, which the authors describe as "a particular relationship between the person and the environment that is appraised by the person as taxing or exceeding his or her resources and endangering his or her well-being" (p. 18). Psychological stress may be a result of cumulative and/or severely taxing life events such as divorce, ill health, or the death of a family member. Other sources of psychological stress, however, are the routine events or daily "hassles" that accumulate, frustrate, and irritate family members (Kanner, Coyne, Schaefer, & Lazarus, 1981). Such hassles include relatively minor-but annoying-practical concerns, such as misplacing or losing things, traffic problems, demands of children, concerns about money, and pressures from work overload. The limited research that is available concerning the effect of maternal hassles on the mother-child relationship suggests that these stressors may negatively influence both a mother's perceptions of her child's adjustment and the quality of mother-child interaction (Crnic & Greenberg, 1990; Gelfand, Teti, & Fox, 1992; Patterson, 1988). Hassles may also influence these variables indirectly through their negative association with mothers' feelings of well-being, a construct that has been reported to be positively associated with child outcomes and the quality of mother-child relationships, especially among divorced families (Forgatch, Patterson, & Skinner, 1988; Garmezy, Mastin, & Tellegin, 1984; Kanner et al. …
49 citations
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Performance Metrics
| Year | Papers |
|---|---|
| 2021 | 7 |
| 2020 | 4 |
| 2018 | 3 |
| 2017 | 2 |
| 2016 | 2 |
| 2015 | 2 |