Balancing career and family life

How do young parents manage to provide adequate care for their children while struggling to keep their jobs?

Christine Leșcu, 30.10.2013, 12:51

Lucky enough to have one year’s maternity leave, Romanian mums are not so lucky returning to the workplace. On top of the fact that there are much fewer day care centres than the demand would prompt, jobs are hard to come by. According to a 2012 study, 47% of parents went back to work after childcare leave, while 17% chose to stay at home. In addition, most women who go back to work only have two children, while those with more than two children generally prefer to stay at home.

The costs of providing day or after school care for more than two children are mostly beyond people’s means. Employers told sociologists that 80.3% of returning employees come back to the same position they left. However, experts in vocational training said that some employees going back to work risk unemployment soon after, because their leave of absence prompted a redistribution of tasks in their workplace. Also, even though most employers and co-workers without children say that their colleagues with children are punctual and well performing, they tend to take leaves of absence much more often.

Considering all these challenges, we asked sociologist Florian Nitu, one of the experts who ran the study, what do women tend to choose when their maternity leave ends? He said that after returning to work, they leave children between one and three in the care of their grandparents:

“They obviously prefer leaving their children with their grandparents. Most times, grandparents offer much better supervision than a day care worker, but the latter provide much better education. Today, parents are very interested in the educational component of a child’s upbringing.”

Most children above the age of three are sent to primary school. Florian Nitu explains:

“The study shows that women, and parents in general, believe that primary school helps the development of their children. Children sometimes have the possibility to learn a foreign language there, or even how to properly hold a pen to write. They learn songs, poems and dances, and also to socialise. These are things that people appreciate. Confidence in day care services depends on the type of institution. Almost 80% of parents have higher confidence in state-run primary schools, as opposed to 50% who have more trust in private ones. The public system is appreciated. Nurseries don’t get the same degree of confidence, so most people don’t use them.”

The Ministry of Labour, Family and Social Protection is currently running a European funded project to increase the level of confidence that parents have in the primary school system, in partnership with a private company, a project entitled “Balance. Family and Career”.

The project has several components: the sociological study we quoted above, setting up a network of teacher trainers all over the country, and setting up two centres of excellence in Bucharest and Brasov to provide an example. Here is Manuela Manea, coordinator of the project from the Ministry of Labour:

“With this project, we tried to see what financial and legal problems may appear when local authorities try to set up such facilities. We used structural funds to modernise and furnish them at an adequate level for the children admitted here.”

We also spoke to a teacher involved in the project, Marilena Balaciu, who told us this:

“I’ve only been here for a month and a half, but I have achieved things I could not have hoped for, on the emotional side. Any beginning is difficult, and that goes for us too, teachers, children and parents. However, I did manage to grow close to parents and kids alike.”

At the same time, children receive an age-appropriate education, which some parents cannot offer at home, as Antoaneta, the mother of a primary school boy, told us:

“It is to his benefit, and it works for me too, he learns much more than he would at home. He doesn’t want to learn these things from me. This is much better, you can see the change. Before he went there, he was just fooling around, he was just doodling, but now he is in competition with his older sister, and claims he does better than her.”

Crina kept her boy at home, and he was cared for by his grandparents. This year, however, he went straight to the last year of primary school. We asked her why:

“We wanted him to go to primary school earlier, by his grandma wouldn’t let him. In the end we persuaded her to agree, because it’s better for him, and because that way she could take a rest. For instance, when he was at home he didn’t take an afternoon nap, but now he naps both at school and at home. He even learned more than he did at home. He pays much more attention while he’s doing his colouring, because he does that in school alongside all the other children, which he is now doing at home, too.”

Faced with the need to encourage population growth and bring mothers back to work, the authorities have to promote policies that allows parents them to balance work and family life, reflecting the wishes of both employers and parents, believe the authors of the study “Balance. Family and Career”.