Children's Roles in Social Reproduction: reexamining the discourse on care through a child lens.

• Author: Camilletti, Elena
• Position: Gender and Development

Introduction: Care, gender and children - key debates

Care and domestic work encompasses all activities required to provide goods and services to meet the physical, mental and emotional needs of individuals and households (Himmelweit, 2007). It involves direct interpersonal care, such as bathing and feeding children, but also indirect activities, such as cooking, fetching water and collecting fuel, essential for the daily household 'social reproduction' (Razavi, 2007; Elson 2000; ILO, 2016; Esquivel, 2014; Laslett and Brenner, 1989; UNRISD, 2016). It can also include 'passive' activities, for instance supervising a young child (Budlender, 2008). When unpaid, it is generally performed by women within the household or community. Different care and domestic activities require different degrees of time and physical, emotional and mental energy, depending on the individuals who carry them out, for whom, where and under what circumstances. In low-resource settings, such as in Asia, Africa and Latin America, where services and infrastructure to support social reproduction are scarce and unequally distributed, normal daily care activities can require significantly more time and energy than in higher-income settings (UN Women, 2015).

The issue of care and domestic work has been gaining prominence on national and global policy agendas over recent decades. This is particularly due to research by feminist scholars demonstrating that across contexts women bear the burden of unpaid household care and domestic work, and that they are also over-represented in the paid care and domestic sectors (UN Women, 2015; UN, 2017; Elson, 2000; Razavi, 2007; Esquivel, 2014). Given the nature of care responsibilities, and the social obligations linked to marriage or family relations that give rise to them, feminist researchers have stressed that these responsibilities should be considered as work. Analyses of time use data show women on average spend 2.5 times more time on care and domestic work than men (UN, 2017), and when added to paid work, women spend more time working than men (Budlender, 2008; Razavi, 2007; Elson, 2000). This is due to a range of factors including labour market conditions, scarce social infrastructure and services, including care services, as well as social and gender norms that place major care responsibilities primarily on women.

This work translates into economic contributions by women both at the household and macroeconomic levels. At the macroeconomic level, the production of goods for own household use, such as fetching water and collecting fuel, are considered economic activities, and (theoretically, though not always in practice) included in the UN System of National Accounts (SNA), the internationally agreed standard for measuring national economic activity forming the basis for GDP calculations (Budlender, 2010). By contrast, the unpaid production of services for own household use are included in the non-SNA general production boundary, and thus excluded from GDP calculations (Elson, 2000). Thus although women contribute through their unpaid care and domestic work to the economy, this contribution is largely unrecognised. Yet, estimates by feminist researchers indicate that women's care and domestic work can be equal up to 50 percent of GDP in countries such as Australia (Esquivel, 2014, 2013; Sepulveda, 2013).

Feminist researchers have warned that due to these responsibilities, women can experience 'time poverty', lacking time for rest and leisure, and participation in the social, political and economic life of their communities (Antonopolous, Masterson, Zacharias, 2012; Esquivel, 2014). These responsibilities may also prevent them from gaining access to formal employment, and as a consequence they may face unemployment, underemployment or informal, low-paid jobs, with limited labour rights or access to social protection (Antonopoulos, 2009; Addati and Cassirer, 2008). These challenges are exacerbated by the lack of investments in public services or infrastructure, as well as by cuts in public expenditures on social benefits and services under austerity policies following economic crises (ILO, 2016).

Women are also over represented in the paid care sector as domestic workers, babysitters, early childhood and elderly care workers. This reflects structural social and economic issues ranging from gendered occupational and labour market segregation, creating limited opportunities for women in non-feminised sectors, to norms about care and domestic jobs as jobs for women and about women as primarily carers (ILO, 2016). Such feminized work is often undervalued and low-paid, perceived as being low skilled, with limited rights to labour or social protections (Cockburn, 2005; Addati and Cassirer, 2008; Antonopoulos, 2009; Cook and Dong, 2017; Lund, 2010).

In making care and domestic work visible, feminist researchers have pointed to the discriminatory nature of norms embedded in care relationships and social policies, and institutions more broadly. They have exposed and critiqued assumptions that care is a natural expression of womanhood, and consequently that women are principle carers, assumptions which have often underpinned the separation of the domestic sphere of care from the public realm of policymaking (Pearse and Connell, 2016; Rama and Richter, 2007; Esquivel, 2014; Elson, 2000; Razavi, 2007).

This body of scholarship has been translated into advocacy and political demands for greater recognition, reduction and redistribution of such burden from women to men, and from households to the public sphere (Elson, 2000; UN Women, 2015; UN, 2017). The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5.4 (1) reflects such demands in calling for 'the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate'.

While women bear the highest burden of care and domestic work, empirical evidence, albeit limited to a few contexts and issues, shows that both boys and girls are not only care-recipients, but that they too contribute to meeting social reproduction needs both within and beyond their households. On a conceptual level, feminist ethic philosophers have stressed that care is a dynamic, reciprocal and mutually supportive relation between different members of a household and society, encompassing feelings as well as responsibilities, and different stages of caring for, caring about, taking care of and receiving care (Tronto, 1982, cited in Cockburn, 2010, 2005; Rummery and Fine, 2012; Crivello and Espinoza Revollo, 2018). However, children's roles in care and domestic work have rarely been considered in-depth within the scholarships on care and domestic work and social reproduction, despite the evidence that, to different degrees and under different circumstances, children assume care and domestic responsibilities from an early age. These roles by children have often remained marginal in the literature, which focuses primarily on adult provision of this work (Cluver et al., 2012; Robson et al., 2006; Evans and Atim, 2011; East, 2010; Becker, 2007). While some studies mention girls as helpers to their mothers (see for instance UN Women, 2015 and the 2016 Report of the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on Women's Economic Empowerment), this has often been done in a way that groups 'women and girls' in a single category due to their common biological sex, with limited efforts to understand women's versus girls' needs, vulnerabilities and aspirations, and even less attention to the circumstances under which boys and men provide care and domestic work.

The empirical evidence on children's care and domestic work, and the conceptualisation of care and domestic work as interdependent and reciprocal, call for a life-course and intergenerational approach to the analysis of social reproduction issues. Such an approach would include a focus on children's roles in the provision of care and domestic work in addition and in relation to that of other family members, on how children's roles are gendered and how they evolve over time, and what impacts such work has on their wellbeing. Adopting this 'child lens' would help to illuminate the drivers of the (unequal) allocation of care and domestic responsibilities across generations and genders within the household, and within society more broadly. It would also further our knowledge on how discriminatory gender norms that contribute to such inequalities are reproduced intergenerationally and over time. Finally, it would help to identify context-specific thresholds beyond which children's provision of care and domestic work can negatively impact their wellbeing and development.

This article makes a contribution to this literature by reviewing the empirical evidence on children's provision of unpaid and paid care and domestic work. We explicitly focus on developing countries, where the burden of care and domestic work performed by children and adults is heavy due to material deprivation, inadequate services and infrastructure. We consider key dimensions of children's care and domestic work: its characteristics, the time children spend on it, and whether it is unpaid or paid. We then investigate what drives children's provision of care and domestic work, analysing first, its individual, second, household-level, and thirdly, the policy and structural determinants, while remaining cognizant of the interlinkages between these levels. Fourthly, we examine existing evidence on the beneficial and negative effects of children's provision of care and domestic work on their own wellbeing. On this, the evidence is particularly inconclusive and points to the importance of further research to understand thresholds beyond which children face costs due to engaging in care and domestic work. We conclude by highlighting key evidence gaps, discussing conceptual issues...