ABSTRACT
Parents’ recollections of their own experiences of shared care may not have been very accurate but they indicated some differences compared with the current generation of children. A higher proportion of middle-class parents recalled their main carer as being a relative than was the case for their own children. This chapter focuses on parents’ current descriptions of how and why they did what they did, so that the evidence about the influences of the past on present care practices was more superficial. In a single interview it was possible to ask specifically about only a few aspects of parents’ experiences and opinions. Patterns of both internal and external sharing of childcare are crucially affected by the varying ways in which the time of both the mother and the father is distributed between paid work and domestic or social activities. Ideas about parental responsibility were intimately linked with attitudes towards working mothers.
