The first part of this book is concerned with how families engage with organisations and services as they seek to combine caring, working, training and education. Issues relating to the broad themes of family life and working life have received much attention in recent decades. Governments, employers’ organisations, trades unions and professional associations, along with a range of voluntary sector agencies and groups, have considered a range of policy and practice ideas to support families with children and other caring responsibilities. The changing patterns of fertility, childbearing and childrearing, combined with presumptions about engagement in the labour market, regardless of parenting status, have led to tensions for many as they seek to combine caring work and paid employment. Further, government policies in most post-industrial societies now consider paid employment as the main means of alleviating poverty and deprivation. The gendered nature of much caring work, as well as engagement with services such as education, is taken for granted. Thus women and mothers are seeking to combine care and employment responsibilities and to organise and deliver care in ways that minimise distributions to paid work. Men and fathers are more involved in care work than previously but there remains much to be changed if they are to be enabled to take on further responsibilities in caring and domestic work, and be willing to do so.

The three chapters in this part of the book present an analysis of recent empirical work on these issues. The first chapter by Cunningham-Burley, Backett-Milburn and Kemmer (Chapter Two) presents data drawn from interviews with lone and partnered mothers in non-professional, non-managerial occupations. This project was funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation as part of a programme of research on work and family life. Findings reported in the chapter illuminate the range of negotiations and tensions that mothers in paid work outside the home report. Family responsibilities were a top priority for these women as they sought to keep the spheres of home and work separate. This boundary could be maintained as long as a crisis situation or important activities did not suddenly emerge and become imperative. Nevertheless women were keen to be seen as reliable workers who did not need time off.