Parental Labour - Labour Market Acceptance Driven by Civil Activism

Abstract

There are global demographic tensions generated by ageing and increasingly shrinking population in developed economies, and rapid population growth (especially young cohorts) in developing countries. These challenges require social support for parents and parenting, however increasingly robust and sophisticated austerity policies roll back existing social services and decompose even the very idea of the welfare state. Social activism, including feminist and gender movements, calls for institutional shifts. Changes must affect statistics by facilitating to (re-)incorporate into economy and Economics parental labour - together with household activities and other traditionally neglected forms of (often primarily social) value creation. Our study, which explores parental labour in the context of the transformational effects of civil society, indicates that: 1) in developed countries it is characterized by similar, often contradictory effects and trends - as any other work. Parents have to mobilize increasingly sophisticated - and expensive - skilled work, involve more and more experts in order to ensure their children’s sound physical, intellectual, moral, artistic development. These trends - together with the stagnation of labour income, population aging and decline - drive growing participation of women in market-framed, salaried value creation. 2) Empirical data collected through surveys and case studies enabled us to identify institutional changes which characterize responding students and young adults, as well as volunteers participating in multi-coloured activities carried out by diverse civil society organizations. 3) Younger generations perceive parenting as labour, an important mechanism of value creation. It interplays with growing awareness of the significance of gender issues and the importance of overcoming and preventing the further growth of inequality in the context of digitalization. We conclude that the analysis of parental labour, which has a profoundly and deeply multi-disciplinary character, requires a process approach and methodological pluralism. Our research indicates growing socio-economic acceptance of parental labour that capitalizes on civil activism feed backing with institutional changes constitutive and generative of the civil society’s transformational dynamism. This interplays with the self-empowering civil society’s capacity of agency, its capability to contribute to the emergence of a cooperative, sharing, and genuinely sustainable knowledge driven-society.