ОДГОВОР НА ИЗАЗОВЕ РОДИТЕЉСТВА/МАТЕРИНСТВА ДЕЦЕ ОСНОВНЕ ШКОЛЕ
RESPONDING TO THE CHALLENGES OF BEING A PARENT/MOTHER OF PRIMARY SCHOOL CHILDREN

Author(s): Mirjana V. Bobić, Milica Z. Vesković Anđelković
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Education, Sociology
Published by: Институт друштвених наука
Keywords: primary school children; problems; parents; after­-school care; extracurricular activities
Summary/Abstract: The paper operationalizes two goals objectives of the revised Birth Promotion Strategy, adopted by the Serbian Government in 2018: to balance work and parenthood and to lower the psychological cost of parenthood. The paper is structured around the results of the complementary, quantitative and qualitative field research, undertaken in 2019 in major Serbian cities and suburban settlements with the aim to determine the extent of parents’ use of and satisfaction with the services provided by primary schools – i.e. after­school care and extracurricular activities, as well as to seek the opinions of other relevant stakeholders – headmasters, professional staff (teachers, pedagogues) and parents – on the challenges children faced and the possible solutions in the infrastructure and school environment, the educational process (curricula, contents, teaching aids and methodologies, class organization, the quality of school staff, school year calendar, teacher–pupil relationship etc.), in the family, society and so forth. The research was exploratory (online survey and 9 interviews) and the respondents were predominantly women/mothers, mainly from Belgrade, highly educated, employed, professionals and artists, self­assessing as having decent living standards and, thus, belonging to the middle class, and whose children usually did not use the services provided by schools but rather attended paid activities and relied on informal support networks (grandparents and relatives). This is used as evidence in support of the hypothesis on the reproduction of the cultural habitus and social inequalities of middle class already at the early stages of education.

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