Contenu du sommaire : Les modes d'accueil des jeunes enfants : des politiques publiques à l'arrangement quotidien des familles

Access to Early Childhood Education Centres (ECEC) is highly dependent on local dynamics: regions are unequally provided with crèches, families have a range of different needs, and regional variations in access norms to Early Childhood Education Centres are set by children's services. This article, based on a qualitative survey of families and professionals, analyses the challenges of meeting the demand for places in ECECs. It clarifies the decisions required in the work of defining demand, work that involves the social work registers of listening, of administrative activityand child protection, adjusted to the local contexts. The agencies therefore tend to highlight two main issues, namely ensuring social diversity in Early Childhood Education Centres, and providing a public response to particular demands.

The aim of this article is to study the link between management and the process of reorganising occupations within Early Childhood Education Centres (ECEC) by looking at the unique history of an early childhood municipal service, emphasising the power relations within the childcare structures. Based on an exhaustive case study of 98 semi-directive interviews in 11 ECECs in one of the largest urban communities in France, we identify four organizational configurations and their associated management problems.

The recently relaunched policy of schooling children from 2 years of age is both a means of caring for young children and a measure to combat social inequalities in academic success. Firstly, we review the objectives of this national policy initiated in the early 1980s, before examining its realities through an empirical survey conducted in a nursery class in a priority education area. By combining observations of children and interviews with their parents and teacher, backed up by video montages, we show how the demands of school which young children face from the outset put some of them in difficulty, either in terms of physical discipline or their investment in schoolwork. The analysis also underlines the link between the participation of children in classroom activities and their peer-to-peer interactions, in order to show how differentiated sociocultural and gender-based responses to the expectations of school are also intertwined with the development of social relationships between children.

Since the early 2000s, public policy has encouraged companies to take action in the field of work-family life balance by developing mechanisms that go beyond their legal obligations, making them a negotiating and strategic issue. This explicit call for businesses to take the initiative combines tax incentives, incentives for sharing good practices, and encouraging collective bargaining. The objective of this article is to explore the extent to which firms respond to these public incentives. It is based on a study for the CFDT (Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail) of 16 large and medium-sized multi-site companies representing a varied spectrum of activities and geographical locations. This qualitative study, which brings together the views of management with those of the CFDT representatives, provides an insight into how employers and trade union representatives take up the question of work-family life balance, the results they achieve, and the obstacles they encounter in their action in this area.

Early childhood policies in France aim at providing families with an array of childcare arrangements, allowing parents to continue their professional activity if they so choose. However, some types of childcare, such as crèches, are still difficult to access. These difficulties have already been highlighted by cross-sectional data. Data from the Modes de garde et d'accueil des jeunes enfants [Survey of childcare arrangements of young children] survey conducted in 2013 allow completing this approach with the help of a monthly retrospective calendar detailing the use of various childcare arrangements since birth. We use sequence analysis to describe these pathways, as well as family characteristics, up to school entry. We find great stability in trajectories of early childhood care for young children in France with respect to access to formal modes of childcare, whether individual or collective. Nevertheless, 15% of children go through several changes in the type of childcare used or are looked after through informal arrangements. This latter form of childcare, which involves grandparents in particular, is more frequent in households characterised by less advantaged socio-professional occupations.

What are the motivating and limiting factors for mothers in deciding to interrupt, reduce, or continue their professional activity during the years of early childhood? The reasons given by mothers of children under three years of age reflect the dilemma they face between their desire to care for their children and to preserve their professional lives, to minimise childcare costs while maintaining a salary. Job stability, status, occupational category, and educational level appear to be decisive in maintaining employment, but neither restrictive working hours nor marital status distinguish those women who choose to stop working from those who choose to remain in work. The question of childcare, however, is posed in a different way for working mothers, depending on whether they are single or in a relationship. The use of formal or informal childcare is the only alternative available to allow single women access to flexible working hours without reducing their working time, while the partner can ensure continuity of childcare for women who are part of a couple. In particular, mothers' irregular hours favour parental childcare and the involvement of fathers.

Full-time working women's activity gives rise to a variety of work-family life balance experiences. The type of child care is a source of organisational tension, both temporal and subjective, for both work and family life. The “subjective distancing” is undermined where there is intrusion of work into family life and of family life into work. It is difficult to quantify this mental workload of permanent conscious attention. It is relative, in the sense that its weight varies from one woman to another, and it varies at different points on the socio-professional trajectory. Mothers are often trapped, due to the weight of social roles. As a result, certain forms of “resistance” amplify the stresses of the work-family life balance.

On the margins of formal childcare arrangements, some parents rely on informal help from grandparents for the care of young children. This article strives to demonstrate that grandparental help is not homogeneous – it takes various forms. Based on qualitative interviews, this analysis makes it possible to identify different types of childcare, their modalities, and their determining factors: intensive childcare, temporary childcare assistance, routine care, and finally, recreational care. On one hand, individuals will mobilize certain types of childcare more or less according to social milieu. On the other hand, they can mobilize the same kind of care in different ways, depending on their individual manner of adopting the norms of good grandparenting. Taking family structure and social milieu of origin into account highlights the unequal grandparenting resources of individual parents. This leads to considering the grandparenthood mode of childcare as being varied rather than uniform.

Single-parent families find it more difficult to reconcile childcare and maintaining employment, generally essential to the household's standard of living. These obstacles become more pronounced among immigrant families, which more often face social and economic insecurity. Drawing on two recent surveys, this article compares the preferred and adopted childcare solutions of families with young children, in relation to the marital and migratory status of the mothers. Single immigrant mothers prefer and use nurseries more than other groups of mothers. All other things being equal, the types of childcare chosen and used by these women do not present any real differences with of non-immigrant women in single-parenting situations. However they differ from their immigrant counterparts living with a partner.

The recent parental leave reform of 2014 introduced parental sharing of the allowance associated with parental leave, in order to encourage greater use of such leave by fathers. Is the low proportion of fathers who take advantage of parental leave the result of their lack of knowledge of this scheme or, as some advocates of the reform have claimed, the result of a fear that utilising such leave would hamper their careers? According to 37 interviews with men who took parental leave, while the employment conditions of both parents play a role in the decision to take male parental leave (stable employment of the mother, hypogamy), the conditions of taking parental leave that men set themselves also seem decisive. Indeed, fathers only seem to envisage taking leave providing they do not solely” care for children during this period, a sign of possible different levels of engagement between men and women.

The choice of childcare is an acute question for parents of young children in a context of rising numbers of two-parent working families. Although the availability of crèche-based childcare is less widespread than the availability of childminders, parents show a fairly clear rejection of the latter and award them their trust less spontaneously. Based on a study of interviews with 32 couples, the article examines the reasons for this persistent disqualification of childminders, emphasizing the social differentiation of this judgment according to gender as well as to the parents' social position and evolution. While upper-class parents tend to exclude the use of childminders in a manner resembling a presumption of class-related incompetence, middle and working-class parents express differentiated educational and socializing expectations inspired by a cultural interest in psychology, an academic reinterpretation of early learning, and an attachment to the crèche as a preparation for kindergarten that instils discipline and autonomy in children. These expectations are compounded in the working-class couples interviewed by a fear of entrusting their children to women who cannot be controlled and who they suspect operate outside the restrictions imposed upon employees.

In the context of a rising interest in the “defence of children” and an emphasis on early learning, the educational skills of childminders are disregarded from the outset, despite policies designed to reinforce a professional approach. How then can they establish their professional legitimacy in the educational field amongst parents who often prefer crèches for their children of walking age, which they believe are a better preparation for kindergarten? This article is based on two corpus of in-depth interviews with childminders (36 interviews in Loire-Atlantique and Haute-Vienne carried out between 2010 and 2014) and parents of young children (32 couples interviewed as part of a qualitative post-survey follow-up to the Modes de garde et d'accueil des jeunes enfants [modes of childcare and child reception facilities for young children] survey 2015). It highlights several strategies to increase professional recognition (material evidence of work such as a games room, activities, and notebooks, in response to the suspicion of inactivity attached to the image of a housewife).The article shows that strategies to increase professional recognition are implemented by most of the childminders encountered, not only by those who regard themselves as the most “professional,” or are designated as such by more qualified employees supervising their work.Finally, the article stresses that efforts aimed at professional legitimacy are all the more effective since proof of educational skills, far from having a unilateral meaning, are open to varied interpretations, both on the part of parents with differentiated social characteristics as well as bychildminders themselves.

In this article, we analyse the challenges and impact of the new territorial reform on the design of social policy and the details of its implementation at local level. The law on the new territorial organization of the Republic (NOTRe, 2015) — following the law to modernize territorial public action and affirm the status of large cities (MAPTAM, 2014) and the law on the delimitation of regions (2015) — once again raises the question of the future role of the region in social policy. We propose a critical perspective of this reform, which refocuses the action of the départements on solidarity while maintaining their role as “leader” in an uncertain position between the consolidation of large regions and the increasing importance of intercommunal and metropolitan powers. However, the plan to transfer some social jurisdiction to metropolitan entities raises more questions than it answers, and reveals the very limited commitment of these entities to this field. The decentralisation issue ultimately lies less in the established distribution structure of policy responsibilities than in the gradual elaboration of a new social response, replacing the usual vertical and sector-based interventions with a more transversal and decompartmentalized approach which is not only corrective and restorative, but also more preventive and inclusive.