CHILDREN’S AND PARENTS’ EXPERIENCES ON EVERYDAY LIFE AND THE HOME/WORK BALANCE IN FINLAND
Abstract
Paid work and the high-pressure working life are reflected in the everyday life of Finnish families with children. This article introduces a research project where 29 children aged between ages 5 and 7 and their 13 wage-earner parents were interviewed in order to discover to what degree they are able to achieve a home/work balance in their family lives. There is a lack of such research that examines children’s and parents’ experiences simultaneously and comprehensively, as this study does. The children’s experiences were analyzed with an existential-phenomenological method, while the parents’ experiences of how their work affects everyday life were interpreted within a hermeneutically advancing interpretation process. This research describes the challenging combination of work and family, the demanding relationship between children and parents, and the ways in which parents approach balancing work and everyday life when parents’ paid work, stress, and fatigue follows them home. Parents’ working life moulds the rhythm of their children’s everyday lives, which are structured by the departures and arrivals at home and at their daycare centers. This article makes visible Finnish families’ daily worries and how they cope with everyday life. The research highlights the question of how to secure both children’s and parents’ rights to a safe and anxiety-free everyday life.Downloads
Metrics
Authors contributing to the International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies agree to release their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported license. This licence allows anyone to share their work (copy, distribute, transmit) and to adapt it for non-commercial purposes provided that appropriate attribution is given, and that in the event of reuse or distribution, the terms of this license are made clear.
Authors retain copyright of their work and grant the journal right of first publication.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
Rights Granted After Publication
After publication, authors may reuse portions or the full article without obtaining formal permission for inclusion within their thesis or dissertation.
Permission for these reuses is granted on the following conditions:
- that full acknowledgement is made of the original publication stating the specific material reused [pages, figure numbers, etc.], [Title] by/edited by [Author/editor], [year of publication], reproduced by permission of International Journal of Child, Youth & Family Studies [link to IJCYFS website];
- In the case of joint-authored works, it is the responsibility of the author to obtain permission from co-authors for the work to be reuse/republished;
- that reuse on personal websites and institutional or subject-based repositories includes a link to the work as published in the International Journal of Child, Youth & Family Studies; and that the material is not distributed under any kind of Open Access style licences (e.g. Creative Commons) which may affect the Licence between the author and IJCYFS.