Introduction

This chapter presents an important dimension to our understanding of unpaid care, by focusing on the role of children as active caring agents within their families. In general, children's active agency within households and the contributions they make to family life have tended to be neglected or ignored. Policy discourses have tended to constitute children as passive, dependent family members in need of appropriate adult care and control. Where children have gained recognition as caring family members, it has been as ‘young carers’ caring for sick or disabled parents (Becker et al, 1998). In particular, children living in working families have been treated as problematic and as burdensome responsibilities, and in workless families as potential obstacles to employment. Parents, especially mothers, are seen as struggling to manage a satisfactory work and family life balance, and this struggle is often characterised as a double shift or a double burden. In these discourses children appear mainly as problems to be resolved, part of the burden, as needy, largely passive individuals who are the main family members in need of care and attention. As a result, the issue of children and parental employment has been mainly confined to a policy agenda focused on adult employment. While acknowledging the challenges that working and caring presents for working parents, especially women, this dominant perception of children as passive and needy within families presents a very one-dimensional view of the complex social and relational dynamics that exist within households, between parents, children and siblings.

This chapter is based on children's accounts of their contributions to family life and reveals their involvement in a complex range of care and support within their families; including childcare, domestic labour, financial assistance and emotional sustenance. As such, it provides us with an opportunity to explore a very particular set of social and familial relationships, and gain some insight into the roles children can play in sustaining family cohesion around issues of work and care. The issue of children's perceptions and experiences of maternal employment is an important one, especially for children in lone-mother households.

As discussed in Chapter Thirteen by Jane Millar, the UK government has set two key policy goals directly affecting the lives of many women and children: to increase lone-parent employment to 70% by 2010, and to eliminate child poverty by 2020.