Browsing by Subject "mobiiliteknologia"

Aims. The purpose of this study is to describe the means families utilize to secure the after-school-time their young children spend without adult supervision. The statutory after-school care for 1st and 2nd graders offers the working parents flexibility when organizing the work and family time. Yet the families of as young as nine-year-olds are left with no organized after-school activities. This study relies on previous studies on after-school-program quality, flexible working time arrangement, family time management, digitalization and Anglo-American after-school programs. The main research questions are: 1. How does the after-school care appear in everyday family life? 2. What are the means parents use to secure the child's after-school time? 3. How do parents utilize digital technologies in securing the after-school time? Methods. The data for this study were collected in two separate sets. The first data set consists of 5 texts describing everyday life of families with young school children. The texts were provided by working mothers of children entitled to after-school care. The second set of data was collected through semi-structured interviews of 9 working mothers of children no longer entitled to after-school care. The interviews were conducted to include data on the strategies families choose to secure the after-school time when adult supervision is no longer organized by the community. The data were analyzed using content analysis and cross-sectional qualitative data analysis. This method allows to emphasizing the common nominators of the various data sources instead of the experiences of one family. Results and Conclusions. The after-school care could be related to various every day elements of a household. The main elements were safety, nutrition and care and social environment. Parents use several strategies to ensure the well-being and safety of a child without adult supervision. Of mobile technologies, digital communication was recognized as part of parental control but not as ethically debatable surveillance. Parents highly appreciate the school-organized after-school programs and wish to see more activities of that type for their children.