Parenting and Work in Poland

Front matter

SPRINGER BRIEFS IN SOCIOLOGY

* Parenting and ~ Work in Poland A Gender Studies g Perspective

A Springer

Contents

4.3 “I Think That a Guy Should Earn to Support His Family”. The Different Attitudes to Paid Work of Mothers and Fathers... .

Contents

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Chapter 1 A) Introduction Cheek fo

For me the concept of ‘balance’ is somehow strange, because it... assumes something like segregation or maybe even hierarchy of some elements of me, me as a person. You know? What is more important, what is less important ... So, no — I don’t buy it! [C3M4 Pawet]

Abstract The first chapter is of introductory character. I set the aims of my analysis which is based on the in-depth interviews about the reconciliation of parenthood and paid work. The book resolves around the narratives of 53 parents of children aged 0-8 years living in Poland. The interviewed parents differ in terms of social and economic backgrounds, family situation (coupled and single parents, divorced parents, reconstituted families) and place of living (countryside, small, medium and large cities). I describe the research sample and methodological choices I made during my fieldwork. These introductory remarks lead to a summary of the main themes of the book: parenting in the context of the organisation of paid work, care work and domestic work, gender and economic inequalities, as well as the role of the welfare state. This chapter ends by looking ahead through summaries of each of the following five chapters.

Keywords Parenthood - Paid work - Care work - Domestic work - Poland - Family policy

1.1 Aims of the Book

Recent discussion on parenthood in the social sciences has concentrated on the work/ life balance, i.e. how people manage to combine and fulfil the obligations resulting from different roles they play in everyday life. Such an approach focuses on two aspects of life that are crucial for parents in contemporary societies—paid work in the labour market and relations with children that are based on care obligations. The construct of a work/life balance seems to be a handy theoretical tool that helps in the

© The Author(s) 2021 1 K. Suwada, Parenting and Work in Poland, SpringerBriefs in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66303-2_1 analysis of parenting experiences today. Therefore, when in 2015 I started to consider how to research parenting experiences in contemporary Polish society, I decided to use the conceptual framework of the work/life balance. The main aim of my project was to identify strategies for combining work and family life adopted by Polish parents of children under eight. To do that, I conducted in-depth interviews with 53 parents who had different economic and family situations. Already at the stage of undertaking the fieldwork, it turned out that my aim would be hard to achieve. The experience of parenting described by my interviewees indicated that in many cases it was very difficult to actually set the boundary between paid work and the rest of their lives. In some cases the boundaries between paid work, care work and domestic work were blurred—for example in the situation of parents having their own animal farms or parents with disabled children. Other cases indicated that contrary to the hidden assumption in the construct of a work/life balance, paid work does not hinder parenting, but rather enables it, helping people to fulfil their parental obligations. Finally, many interviewees were not satisfied with their jobs, so for them the problem was not combining paid work with parenting, but rather the unsatisfactory working conditions of the Polish labour market. Consequently, some of the interviewees, those who were more reflexive, critically approached the concept of a work/life balance and did not accept it, as in the case of Paweł, whose words introduce this book.

My aim here is thus to move away from thinking in terms of a work/life balance when it comes to parenthood in contemporary societies. I claim here that this construct is not only inadequate to describe the experiences of various parents, especially those who do not fit the model of dual-earners, such as middle-class couples living in big cities, but also, following Alvin Gouldner’s reasoning, is a theoretical concept that is loaded with value judgements that promote a particular normal/permitted world (Gouldner 1970). In this world all individuals are expected to work for pay and gain satisfaction from it, yet at the same time they should not spend too much time on paid work in order to free up time to spend with their families. As I argue in Chap. 2, the construct of a work/life balance is based on several hidden assumptions that derive from particular views and norms on how society should be organised. Consequently, these assumptions fail to take into account the experiences of people who do not fit this ideal model and do not provide a reliable description of social reality. This book is written from a sociological perspective, so its aim is to critically analyse what is happening in family life in the contemporary institutional settings of one European society.

I concentrate here on the experience of parenting in Polish society at the beginning of the twenty-first century. My analysis does not only concentrate on how men and women engage in parenting and fulfil their role of parents, but also shows how individuals’ behaviours are grounded in the broader social and institutional context shaped by the welfare state and its various instruments. I claim here that the ways men and women engage in parenting result not only from their personal choices and preferences, but also from opportunity structures that are determined by the family policy system, organisation of the labour market, cultural norms about care, and structures of social, in particular gender, inequalities. Thus the aim of this book is to

1.2 Methodology of the Project 3 examine how Polish parents deal with various obligations arising from having children. This subject also serves as a pretext to observe contemporary Polish society through a critical lens, one which reveals how various forms of social inequalities in family life are maintained and reproduced by the welfare state. To do so I refer to several theoretical perspectives, in particular the theory of ‘agency and structures’ as well as the concept of doing gender. The theories of agency show how individual choices are grounded in broader structures that limit people’s actual behaviours. I am especially interested in how individuals deal with their parental obligations in particular structures that derive from the institutional solutions of the Polish welfare state, as well as how they do so within dominating cultural norms about motherhood and fatherhood, care work, paid work and gender roles. The concept of doing gender helps to grasp how various gender inequalities are reproduced and sometimes reconstructed in everyday life. The parenting experiences of men and women significantly differ, and these differences cannot be solely explained by the biological differences between men and women, but rather are grounded in the social structures of a patriarchal society. Last but not least, parenting experiences are not only affected by gender inequalities, but also many other social inequalities that are characteristic of Polish society. Therefore, in my analysis I also look at the parents’ economic resources and try to depict how they determine the opportunity structures of different parents. The perspective of economic inequalities, even though quite obvious, is not often adopted in describing the experiences of parenthood in contemporary European societies.

1.2 Methodology of the Project

This book is based on a research project entitled ‘Strategies for Achieving a Work- Life Balance in Polish Society at the beginning of the 21st Century. A Sociological Analysis’ that was funded by the National Science Centre in Poland from 2016 to 2020 (decision number UMO-2015/19/D/HS6/02338). The goal was twofold. One of my aims was to identify how people combine parenthood with paid work to achieve a work/life balance. The second aim concentrated on the organisation of care and domestic work in Polish households. In both of these aims the perspective of inequalities in economic status and gender was very important. To achieve these goals I designed research consisting of three elements that according to a mixed-method approach would describe and analyse a social phenomenon in its complexity to produce more knowledge on the matter (Moran-Ellis et al. 2006). By applying different methods, I attempted to gather different data from various sources that consequently helped to understand the diverse dimensions of parenthood experiences in contemporary Polish society, in particular to grasp the dimensions of inequalities in economic status and gender. Such an approach is characteristic for a triangulation strategy in which using different methods helps to collect data about one social phenomenon ‘from multiple perspectives and in different contexts’ (Rothbauer 2008, p. 893). Thus my research consists of three parts. Firstly, there is analysis of the Polish family policy system (in Chap. 2). I was particularly interested in how the system had changed in recent decades and how it shaped opportunity structures for parents in the 2010s. I refer here to different theories of the welfare state, in particular to the concept of genderisation proposed by Steven Saxonberg (2013), and try to answer the question of how different instruments of family policy affect prevailing gender inequalities. This analysis was based on government documents containing justifications for the reforms introduced from 2010. Analysis of the Polish family policy system is important to outline the background for describing the experiences of Polish parents.

The second part is based on the quantitative data gathered by Polish and European statistical offices, as well as on data from the European Value Survey (EVS) and the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) module ‘Family and Changing Gender Roles’. Both of these survey programmes are large-scale, longitudinal research which include questions about paid work, care work and domestic work, as well as attitudes to and beliefs about gender roles and family life. My analysis concentrates on 2017 EVS data on Polish society, whereas for the ISSP data is taken from 2012. Additionally, in Chap. 5 on domestic work I refer to survey data from the Public Opinion Research Centre in Poland (CBOS), which conducts regular studies on the division of domestic work in Polish households. The last edition of the study was conducted in 2018. Similarly, as in the case of analysis of the Polish family policy system, survey data serves to provide a background for analysis drawn from in-depth interviews with Polish parents. Additionally, all this data from CBOS/EVS/ ISSP complements the qualitative analysis with a quantitative element to create a more robust foundation from which deductions may be formulated to apply more generally to society as a whole.

Finally, the third part of my research project is based on in-depth individual interviews conducted with Polish parents between June and October 2017. In total 53 parents were interviewed.’ The aim was to examine how Polish parents deal with various obligations arising from parenthood and paid work. These interviews focused on the organisation of care work for small children and how this is reconciled with paid work, therefore the interviews were conducted with parents of children aged 1—8. The preschool years are the most demanding for parents in terms of care work. Small children require lots of attention and cannot be left alone without a caregiver. During this period working parents rely on outside support, in particular from the welfare state and family members. The interviews were based on the semi-structure guides that were divided into three parts. The first part was about the organisation of everyday life, in particular on how care and domestic work were carried out. The second part concerned the situation in the labour market of the interviewed parent, their approach to paid work, as well as relations with employers and co-workers. In the third part, parents were asked how they used different instruments of family policy, in particular how they used parental leave, if they

'T personally conducted 32 interviews. The rest of the interviews were carried out by other researchers prepared by me, who followed the same interview scripts.

1.2 Methodology of the Project 5 sent their children to nurseries and/or kindergarten, and how they used cash benefits from the ‘Family 500+’ government programme. The aim was to encourage parents to express reflexive considerations on how they organised everyday life. The qualitative approach brought forward the perspective of an individual who functions in particular social, cultural and institutional contexts. I assumed that the interviewed parents were reflexive agents who could assess their situation and their opportunity structures resulting from external factors. And indeed, regardless of their level of education, parents willingly shared their reflections about institutional settings. The experiences of interviewees show how parents make use of existing possibilities and deal with their restrictions. Additionally, they help to identify how individuals interpret their life situation (Denzin and Lincoln 2005; Heyink and Tymstra 1993).

The collection of interviewees was based on purposive sampling. At the beginning interviews were conducted with parents who responded to my announcement about the project on the internet (mostly from parenting groups on social media), in childcare institutions and on playgrounds. Then I used a snowball sampling method. The sampling purposively included parents in different family situations, as well as in different socio-economic situations, different labour market situations, or living in different places (cities, towns or the countryside). As a result, 53 parents were interviewed (29 mothers and 24 fathers) aged 24—48. Most interviewees worked full-time, only six interviewees were unemployed and six were on extended parental leave. Forty interviews were conducted with coupled parents, but each person from the couple was interviewed separately. Thirteen interviewees were single parents (eight mothers and five fathers). Five parents had at least one child with a severe disability. Thirteen interviewees lived in the countryside or a town, 22 in small cities, and 18 in big cities. Six parents were in a very good financial situation and did not worry about money at all. Ten parents experienced severe difficulties in making ends meet. The remaining interviewees had an average financial situation, they could meet basic needs, although could not always afford one-off expenses, and so needed to carefully calculate their everyday budgets. All coupled parents were in a heterosexual relationship, though two single mothers either at the time of interview or previously had been in a relationship which was not heteronormative—one was in a relationship with a woman, the other in a relationship with a trans man. As this latter group only amounted to two individuals this did not warrant the creation of a separate category in my analysis.

All interviews were recorded and transcribed. All interviewees were guaranteed confidentiality, thus all names and personal details that might identify a person have been changed in the citations used in this book. I also decided not to include the age, level of education or occupation of the interviewees, nor the age of children, this is to make it more difficult to identify people based on the fragments of the interviews. There are several reasons for this. I shall focus on two of them. First, the researched individuals were reassured about confidentiality and that the information shared during the interview would not be shared with other people, in particular their partners. Family life can be an area of great conflict and not all disagreements can be solved by a couple. Couples do not always share similar opinions about gender roles, family models, or how to raise children. During the interviews individuals often complained about their partners. Since this book is available to everyone, I need to ensure that my interviewees cannot be identified by the citations. Secondly, parenthood, gender roles and the organisation of care work are not value-free. The opinions shared by the interviewees were very different—some of them were more conservative, others represented a more equalitarian approach to many issues connected to parenthood. During the analysis it is not always possible to maintain neutrality, especially if the researcher tries to provide a critical analysis of the social phenomenon. Thus I know that not all interviewed parents would be happy with my reasoning and conclusions, especially about gender inequalities. That is why I have attempted to make it difficult for my interviewees to recognise themselves in the citations. I do not want them to feel upset by my interpretations of their words. At the same time, I know that they might recognise their citations, if they do so, I want to make clear that my aim is not to judge anyone. My conclusions arise from my approach to sociology, which I understand as a tool for providing critical analysis of contemporary societies. In my research project I aim to critically describe the experiences of parenting in Poland today from the perspective of gender and economic inequalities. Thus to limit the personal characteristics of interviewed individuals, the citations are signed with pseudonyms and abbreviations, which indicate only gender (W—women, M—men) and family situation (S—single parents, C—coupled parents) of the interviewees and with randomly assigned numbers.

The transcripts of the interviews were analysed in qualitative research software— MaXQDA12. The qualitative analysis of the interviews followed the mixed strategy of thematic and open coding (Ayres 2008; Benaquisto 2008a, b; Gibbs 2011). Initial codes were distinguished based on the theories and themes that appeared during the interviews. Yet during the analysis new codes emerged and were systematically added to the code tree. At the end of the analysis, there were 467 codes, which were assigned to 6690 citations. During the analysis I adopted a strategy of social constructivism, according to which social reality is constructed through human interactions and actions, thus different individuals assign different meanings to different phenomena. These meanings result from their own experiences, but also arise from interactions with other people, in particular family members, friends and co-workers. This also applies to phenomena linked to social inequalities (Harris 2006, 2010). Thus during my analysis of the interviews, I was particularly attentive to meanings and interpretations given by the interviewees. I treated the interviewees as competent actors, who can describe their experiences and the social context in which they function.

1.3 Outline of the Book

The book comprises six chapters, including the introduction and conclusion. In this chapter, I present my research project and summarise the methodological choices I made during the collection of data. Chapter 2 is of introductory character, the aim of which is to outline the background for the following analysis. I start with a

1.4 My Contribution 7 description of the most important social changes that have had an impact on parenting in contemporary times. I propose to look at parenthood through the lenses of three types of work: care work, paid work and domestic work. Such an approach places some distance from the concept of a work/life balance. I also explain why I decided to use the theoretical perspectives of agency and of doing gender. The chapter concludes with analysis of the Polish family policy system, which helps to describe the opportunity structures available to parents living in Poland.

Chapters 3, 4 and 5 are of analytical character and provide analyses of the three types of work: care, paid and domestic. Chapter 3 deals with the issue of care work in the context of care norms and gender beliefs, as well as support from the welfare state. I describe how parents share parental leave in the context of gender inequalities, and how they fill the care gap that results from the incongruency of the parental leave system and institutional care for children. The chapter concludes with a description of the hardship of care work. Chapter 4 is devoted to the organisation of paid work. I argue that paid work is seen as an important obligation resulting from parenthood rather than as an obstacle to it. Then I describe different attitudes to the paid work of men and women before concluding with analysis of time pressures resulting from lack of time. Finally, in Chap. 5 the division of domestic work is studied. I discuss the prevailing gender inequalities in the household and show how, regardless of changing gender roles, men avoid domestic duties while women undertake the role of managers in everyday life. The chapter also presents what strategies parents adopt to reduce the amount of time spent on domestic work and how those strategies are connected to economic inequalities.

In Chap. 6 I attempt to summarise how Polish parents deal with various obligations resulting from care work, paid work and domestic work in the context of gender and economic inequalities. I argue that men and women, as well as individuals with different levels of economic resources, have different opportunity structures, and consequently have different choices available in how they want to organise their everyday life. I argue that the right of choice substantially differs for men and women. The crucial issue here is the power relations in the couple. To describe these power relations I refer to two types of power: situational power and debilitative power. Then I proceed to the role of the Polish welfare state in reproducing gender and economic inequalities. The chapter concludes with a new set of questions that arose during my research and proposes areas for further studies.

1.4 My Contribution

There is a long tradition of sociological study of Polish families. Presently there are many studies conducted on various aspects of family life, including parenting. Yet most of the publications are written in Polish and are not available for a broader audience. Thus my intention was to describe the experience of parenting in contemporary Poland to an English-speaking audience. There is not much research on parenting in post-communist European countries. Most sociological books on parenthood deal with the experiences of parents in Western Europe, whereas I argue here that the experiences of Polish parents are distinctly different. Polish society is still very conservative in terms of gender roles. Owing to low salaries and economic pressures Polish women work full-time in the labour market more often than women in Western Europe. All of this occurs in the context of limited support from the welfare state in institutional care for children. Consequently, gender and economic inequalities are crucial dimensions that need to be taken into consideration when trying to understand the organisation of family life in Polish society. That is why I believe my research can provide a new perspective on parenting in contemporary Europe. The mixed-method approach enables a description of the experience of parenthood in a broader context, and shows how opportunity structures of different parents are created. What is more, analysis through the lenses of three types of work helps to move away from the concept of a work/life balance that has become very prominent in recent decades in family studies.

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Chapter 2 A) Parenting, Gender and Work: A asii Sociological Perspective

Abstract This chapter presents the issue of parenthood as a subject of sociological inquiry in the context of broader social and cultural changes. I demonstrate why parenthood should be perceived as a process that is strictly connected with social, cultural and institutional contexts. Keeping this in mind I argue that there is no one proper way of doing parenthood. The most important aspect here are the links between parenthood and paid work. I critically approach the concept of work/life balance that is vastly popular in contemporary social sciences, but in my opinion is not always adequate to describe parenting in a post-communist society. I propose to look at parenthood through the lenses of three types of work: care work, paid work and domestic work. I claim that such approach helps to grasp different ways of parenting in contemporary times, as well as to recognise persisting gender and economic inequalities.

Keywords Parenthood - Parenting - Poland - Care work - Paid work - Domestic work

The experience of parenting is widespread for most people who lived in the twentieth century and are living at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As demographic analysis shows, throughout industrialised societies only 10-20% of people remained childless. In Europe the lowest proportion of childless people is characteristic for the cohorts born in 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. In Poland only 10% of women born between 1950 and 1954 remained childless (Rowland 2007). Yet even though in younger cohorts (born after 1960) researchers have observed increasing childlessness in European countries, the proportion of childless women rarely exceeded 20% (Sobotka 2017). In the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region the share of childless cohorts is the lowest in Europe (5—15%) for cohorts born between 1900s and 1970s. This data indicates that being a parent is an experience shared by at least 75% of people in older generations. Other studies also indicate that younger generations are willing to become parents—for example in Poland in 2011 only 12% of

© The Author(s) 2021 11 K. Suwada, Parenting and Work in Poland, SpringerBriefs in Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66303-2_2 childless people aged between 18 and 39 do not want to have children at all (Kotowska 2014; Mynarska 2011). All of this suggests that most people in contemporary Western societies experience or will experience parenting during their lifetime. Thus the issue of parenting is highly important for sociologists. It can be assumed that parenting greatly affects the organisation of people’s everyday life and society in general.

What is the sociological definition of parenthood then? There is no simple answer to this question. First of all, there is a need to distinguish between parenting and parenthood. To do so, I refer to the distinctions proposed by Tina Miller in her two books, one on motherhood (2005) and one on fatherhood (2011), in which she clarifies that mothering and fathering refer to personal experiences mothers and fathers have in their lives, whereas motherhood and fatherhood are defined in a wider societal context as constructed categories which indicate what individuals as mothers and fathers should do. Parenting is a personal experience of individuals that takes place in the context of parenthood models which define parents’ roles and obligations. So even though parenting is a biological phenomenon, which results from a human being’s biological ability to reproduce, it is not a homogeneous experience for all individuals. The ways people realise their role as a parent are diversified and differ between various societies and cultures, between historical periods, as well as between men and women, people from different social classes, living in different places, having different family situations and so on. In this book I concentrate mostly on parenting, so on parents’ practices and experiences that take place in a particular social, cultural and institutional context, i.e. in Polish society at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The models of motherhood and fatherhood together with gender beliefs are an important background, which highly influence the way men and women practice parenting.

2.2 Parenting and Social Changes

Parenting today is strictly linked with the broader organisation of family life and work. To describe contemporary times sociologists often use the term ‘late modernity’. Late modernity is characterised by rapid and constant changes of social reality, as well as uncertainty and ambiguity (Giddens 1991). As Krystyna Slany underlines, in the new theories of contemporary times transformations are described in at least four dimensions: (1) technological changes linked with science and knowledge; (2) economic changes affecting the organisation of work and production; (3) social changes resulting from new social movements, in particular the feminist movement and the sexual revolution, which altered models of family, marriage and other social relations; (4) cultural changes with which new norms, values, ideologies and identities appeared (Slany 2002, pp. 24-25). In the context of this book social and cultural changes are the most important, since they have mostly affected the prevailing models of motherhood and fatherhood and have led to renegotiation of the contract between men and women. Yet economic changes have also had an