Blog #10

Adaptive survival strategies that women in Chaundry’s study used after the welfare reform constantly changed as the women changed their care preferences and strategies. Mothers also changed their survival strategies “according to changing circumstances, adjusting to changes in their work course to make their care correspond and vice versa. Mothers adapted their changing strategies to the changing context of welfare that emphasized work.” (Chaundry 179) All the mothers that were worked with in this study, saw work and care as strategically interrelated. While some arranged their child care arrangements to coincide with their work schedules, some mothers made it a point to make their work schedules coincide with their child care schedule. A lot of mothers had trouble trying to decide what to put first, child care or work. Some mothers started with putting work before child care, but ended up putting child care before work. Cassandra was a good example of this. Cassandra worked as a nurse at a hospital and tried to make her shifts at work fit her childcare schedule, but in the end she adjusted it so her child care schedule fit her work schedule. Another strategy that a lot of women follow is having their priorities change once the children start to get older. With young children, a lot of mothers worked less, or they would stop working completely because they could not find a balance between the two or they could simply not find childcare. As children get older though, these mothers realize that they can start putting work first and their schedules are much more flexible. Mothers in the sample spent a lot of time and energy developing strategies that would help them balance work and childcare schedules. a lot of these mothers had multiple care arrangements and it can become very exhausting. Ramona was a good example of this, she cycled through several work and training experiences and seemed to develop an expertise in moving between strategies combing care and work and the advice she gives to other mothers is this, “A mother can make more if she works full-time, but then she has to find two, three, four places to leave her kids, and some of these are with strangers. I think it’s better to work part-time, even two part-time jobs, or find work at home.” (Chaundry 181) A few other strategies mothers used were accepting that they were going to work for most of their children’s early development and finding different ways to cope with it and many mothers used very low-cost care.
How these strategies pointed to interrelations between work and care were all over the place. You can’t work without care and you cannot give your child care without working to pay for it. The struggle of finding a balancing schedule between the two seemed to be the biggest problem for mothers and then of course is the problem of finding good enough quality of care for the amount of money that these mothers could afford. Child care and work go hand in hand, what you get out of your childcare depends on your job, the income you receive from it and the schedule you can make out of it.
After reviewing the course material on welfare reform and reviewing Chaundry’s findings and recommendations about survival strategies, I think they are kind of similar. It seems that the course material was relying heavily on these mothers getting help from the government and everybody else. It seemed as if they were really trying to push to get these laws passed that will help mothers and give them a chance. Chaundry on the other hand seemed to be trying to find ways for mothers to do it on their own. It seemed as if in Chaundry’s findings, the mothers knew the situation they were in and they knew that they weren’t going to get any help from the government or anybody else anytime soon so they found ways to do it on their own. These mothers in Chaundry’s study were finding strategies that they themselves could play out, not strategies that relied on the government’s assistance. It seemed as if the course material on welfare reform was trying to find ways to fix the problem through education and government assistance, but the mothers in Chaundry’s study has many different ways to fix the problem, it was just about finding the ones that worked the best and fit their schedule and lifestyle the best.