Britain's premier researcher into how men, women and children spend time with each other has come up with a challenging prognosis for the future of adults' relationship to children's time. Professor Jonathan Gershuny has been studying the ways that work, skill and the gender division of labour have been changing since the 1960s.
There's been a dramatic reversal. The lower skilled working class have historically worked the longest hours, and leisure was the badge of the upper classes. Now, says Gershuny, 'busyness' is prized. Our labour market is polarised between the people with 'human capital' - the university educated with special skills to sell, who are working the longest hours, and the least skilled, who are often 'time rich' and underemployed. They're poor, and they are increasingly marginalised.
The 'human capital' rich secure their future not by bequeathing their economic wealth to their children, but through investment in their children's 'human capital'. We all recognise the middle class parents squeezing childhood through crammers, tutors, anything to get their kids straight A's and a good university place.
So, the better off families thrive on busyness, and a lengthening working week, and on investing in their children's ability to become super-workers.
This research has strong implications both for the status of childcare workers, and for the kind of children who are likely to profit.
Better-off workers will buy childcare as a solution to their own parenting needs, and as an investment in their children's 'human capital.' But the childcare will be provided by workers whose own 'human capital' skill in the old days means that they won't be part of the new elite - they'll be exploited by it.
In Britain there's a fatalistic feeling about this, as if it were not only inevitable, but natural. However, it need not be so. In Finland, for example, the economy is defined by a shorter working week, a highly educated and skilled work force, greater equality between classes and genders, well-resourced and well-regarded public childcare, and flexible and funded parental leave.
It is not nature, it is politics.
* J Gershuny, Busyness: A Modern Badge of Honour. Institute for Social and Economic Research, 2005.
