CODIFICACIÓN AXIAL Y CATEGORIZACIÓN DEFINITIVA

The participants clearly dealt with the complexities of their own beliefs and values as well as complexity in the environment when making decisions about childcare. ‘Sally’ did not use formal childcare when her child was very young, preferring to work at night when her husband could look after the baby, but she explained that now that the first child is older and she is expecting her second, she sends the child to day-care on two mornings per week to develop the child’s social skills and to give herself a much- needed break.

‘Helen’ spoke about how she wanted her child to go to day-care for three days per week to give herself a break:

[We need something] for us who say OK I’m not going to paid work at the moment but I do need a break. … I wanted to get her in and everywhere said no absolutely not. A new one was built across the road from us and I rang up and I said OK I’d like to book her in there, I’m not going back to work until July and basically I said I’d like 3 days a week. [This centre could offer her a full-time place but not a part-time place.] I said “Well I don’t want to take a position away from a mother that really needs it because she’s got to go to work” because the baby units are that scarce you just, you can’t get them.

Another complex situation involved ‘Ingrid’, a very experienced mother with her youngest attending two different pre-schools. ‘Ingrid’ needed childcare because she was studying at university but used two preschools rather than one childcare centre because she believed the preschools provided a more educational form of care. Early in the discussion she stated: ‘I’m a very strong believer that mothers should be at home with their children in the early years. They’re the most important years where your bonding is created. So it’s important to be home for your children during those first 2 years.’ Later in the interview she spoke about her struggle to obtain suitable childcare and pursue her own education, focusing on a range of issues including cost of childcare. The following exchange is included to illustrate the experience of complexity and competing demands. ‘Ingrid’ started off speaking about the cost of childcare, and the researcher took the opportunity to explore an apparent contradiction between her stated values and her actions:

‘Ingrid’: Talking from my own experience like before I went to Uni I was trying to do a diploma at TAFE and I found it incredibly difficult financially because day-care is so expensive and having six children and only one wage coming into the household, being able to go to TAFE and put my child into care whilst I was trying to improve my education, it was very difficult and I ended up having to pull out of TAFE for those reasons.

Marty Grace: Oh did you?

‘Ingrid’: Yeah, so I think it’s, yeah I really believe that, that the price of having to put your child into day-care and whatever has to come down to meet the lowest socio- economic people of society because we’re only looking after those people with higher incomes. I’m sure that there’s a lot of low socio-economic people that would love to be able to go and do things, you know to improve their education and whatever but because of fees they’re unable to do that.

Marty Grace: So was the childcare good enough quality for you or was it just the fees, you know how you were saying before that your child goes to pre-schools because you think that there’s better, more stimulation there so thinking about the quality of childcare, do you have any comments to make on that?

‘Ingrid’: I actually, I would rather have had my child at home and have been spending the time with my child. I feel that as a mother we are more able to provide educationally for our children. I don’t think my child got enough stimulation in childcare but then I myself am one of those women that I suppose look for opportunities to teach my child like if I’m vacuum cleaning and he wants to know how the vacuum cleaner works I go into great detail about how the vacuum cleaner works. … I don’t really find childcare centres stimulating enough because if my child’s at home with me they get to go out and do things with me and I don’t know whether I’m a different mother but I tend to teach my children as I’m doing things.

Marty Grace: And yet when you wanted to go to TAFE you would have been happy to have your child in care for some of the time while you were at TAFE even though you thought it wasn’t as good quality as being with you?

‘Ingrid’: Yes, yes. That was only because it was a means to an end for me to educate myself. I can’t take my child with me therefore I have to put them in day-care. If I’d had a facility, you know if TAFE made it possible for me to take my child with me which they did at first, they were really good for the first 12 months they allowed me to take him with me to TAFE which was wonderful and everyone you know enjoyed having him there but once he got mobile it became a bit more difficult and so then I had to put him into day-care for that second half of my degree but I was 6 months short of finishing and it didn’t work.

The complexity of ‘Ingrid’s’ position provides support for the warning that a simple answer to a simple survey question about parental preferences in relation to childcare cannot be interpreted as a definitive indication of what parents want (Probert & Murphy 2001). In another apparently contradictory example, ‘Tamara’ stated bluntly,

regarding using childcare in order to return to employment: ‘I’m one of those, I won’t go, I don’t believe in someone else raising my children’, although earlier she had recounted her experience of using childcare as a full-time employed single mother with her first child: ‘I was one of the lucky ones, my son adjusted, he never cried. I never had a problem with him so I was lucky, I didn’t have him hanging on to me and I never worried that he’s missing me.’

For some participants, what they wanted to do was different from what they thought they should do. For others, what they believed in and planned in advance turned out not to suit them once put into practice. The following exchange acknowledges some of the complexity experienced by the participants:

‘Frances’: There’s lots of people who go back, not just for the money but … for their own stimulation. … But along with that stimulation comes guilt because although you want to go back to work you feel guilty because [you are asking yourself] “Why don’t I want to stay home with my child 12 months?”

‘Tamara’: Well that’s what I’m saying because of the money or their own sanity.

‘Ruth’: See I, like, my ultimate from the day I wanted to have children was to stay at home until they went to school. Now that I’ve actually had children the thing that scares me the most and the thing that really gets to me is if you go to a barbecue or something and I will tell people like I’m a hairdresser, I won’t ever say that I stay at home full-time because the minute you say that you stay at home full-time I’ve had people in other towns, not here that have actually gone ‘Oh shit she can’t talk’ and it’s like my conversation revolves around Elmo and Sesame Street and High 5.

‘Leanne’ spoke about the need for mothers to be able to access childcare for any reason, including having a regular break, linking this issue with the mental health needs of mothers:

I think too postnatal depression and things like that hit people at different times. I mean you might have three and you don’t suffer from it but come the fourth … you do suffer from postnatal. I suffered it for one and I found that because I wasn’t working and I wasn’t studying the childcare centres made it very difficult for me just to have a break and I actually had to get a medical certificate from the doctor to let me have someone to help me.

One of the other participants, ‘Tamara’ spoke up in favour of the need for some restrictions ‘That’s because of the mothers that do abuse it and that’s why there need to be rules.’ In this focus group the participants identified a range of needs and

circumstances, and some questioned whether childcare centres could respond to the full range, suggesting a need for respite centres to offer a range of services to mothers, babies and young children. The participants in this group knew of a respite centre operated in their town by an order of nuns. Some of the participants clearly felt alienated from the people running childcare centres as shown by the following exchange14:

‘Ruth’: It’s always the honest people [who suffer]. I always find personally I’m always honest and up front and then I’m the one that always gets penalised and the ones that lie, ‘Frances’: Yeah you feel like that don’t you?

‘Ruth’: Oh definitely, yeah. I know oh I’m getting off track I was going to say when you go to day-care centres and trying to get kids into day-care centres because they say there’s no positions on the phone and you walk in and oh yes we’ve got a whole week free would you like it?

‘Frances’: It’s very cliquey. I think for any purpose would be brilliant. … ‘Helen’: Could they set up something like a respite centre?

Another issue raised in the focus groups included the changing patterns of childcare supply and demand, depending on the politics of the government of the day:

I think childcare is more expensive now than it was when [daughter] was first born. … When your children are born you’re stuck with the childcare that you get from that government. [‘Judith’]

Participants saw childcare as fluctuating between being expensive but easy to get and being affordable but hard to get. ‘Judith’s’ comment above could be seen as positioning herself as helpless in relation to government action, but the sense of her statement was more pragmatic than helpless. By articulating a link between political philosophy and childcare policy, she was actively assessing her environment, rather than acting as a passive recipient of services or lack of services. However, the notion of being ‘stuck with’ the provisions of the day pragmatically acknowledges a recurring theme within the focus groups – the need for the women to make their own

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lives work with whatever was available to them at the time. Two of the participants were active in organizations − Neighbourhood House, Australian Breastfeeding Association and a child disability support group − that provided or lobbied for responsive services, but on the whole, it seemed that the participants were much more likely to take an individual approach to improvising their arrangements than to look to collective action. This position is understandable, given that there is no obvious existing collective organization taking up the issues raised in the focus groups. It seems that mothers are more likely to invest their precious energy in action that will meet their short- to medium-term needs rather than investing in advocacy with uncertain outcomes and long timelines.