Page 47 - Igor Ž. Žagar in Ana Mlekuž, ur. Raziskovanje v vzgoji in izobraževanju: mednarodni vidiki vzgoje in izobraževanja. Ljubljana: Pedagoški inštitut, 2020. Digitalna knjižnica, Dissertationes 38
P. 47
inequality, poverty and education in the post-yugoslav space
Figure 5: Parental Views on Necessities for School-Age Children
Coping strategies, all of which became less effective over time, in-
cluded work in the grey economy, mostly women doing cleaning jobs or
babysitting, often combined with fear of someone telling social services;
selling any valuable household items; small subsistence food production, or
taking food from other family members who grew their own; and borrow-
ing on neighbours’ credit cards, preferable to the high interest loan sharks
who, at least in Zagreb, advertise on every street corner. After family and
friends, families valued Centres for Social Work highly, with some praising
the compassion of their social workers, whilst others saw them as, at best,
indifferent. Interesting, given the publicity they get, NGOs, soup kitchens,
church organizations and the like were much less important and those who
had tried to use them found frequent changes of rules worked against them.
Our work reinforced earlier studies that show how children who most need
pre-school are least likely to go, with Croatia having rules that positively
discriminate in favour of working parents, together with huge regional dif-
ferences in rates of access (Matković and Dobrotić, 2013). One of the, per-
haps, most surprising of our findings was that parents tended to have high-
er expectations of their children in terms of the future, levels of education,
likely employment, and so on, than the children we interviewed.
The diagram shown here (Figure 5), included in the final report, points
to things that parents deem necessary for children but that they cannot af-
ford: 30% cannot afford but consider it important for children to go on a
school excursion; 36% on extra-curricular activities. 80% of parents said
that a computer and internet was necessary, as it certainly is, increasingly,
for educational purposes, and yet almost 50% could not afford it. Indeed,
in the study, we referred to a literature on health that discusses unexpected
47
Figure 5: Parental Views on Necessities for School-Age Children
Coping strategies, all of which became less effective over time, in-
cluded work in the grey economy, mostly women doing cleaning jobs or
babysitting, often combined with fear of someone telling social services;
selling any valuable household items; small subsistence food production, or
taking food from other family members who grew their own; and borrow-
ing on neighbours’ credit cards, preferable to the high interest loan sharks
who, at least in Zagreb, advertise on every street corner. After family and
friends, families valued Centres for Social Work highly, with some praising
the compassion of their social workers, whilst others saw them as, at best,
indifferent. Interesting, given the publicity they get, NGOs, soup kitchens,
church organizations and the like were much less important and those who
had tried to use them found frequent changes of rules worked against them.
Our work reinforced earlier studies that show how children who most need
pre-school are least likely to go, with Croatia having rules that positively
discriminate in favour of working parents, together with huge regional dif-
ferences in rates of access (Matković and Dobrotić, 2013). One of the, per-
haps, most surprising of our findings was that parents tended to have high-
er expectations of their children in terms of the future, levels of education,
likely employment, and so on, than the children we interviewed.
The diagram shown here (Figure 5), included in the final report, points
to things that parents deem necessary for children but that they cannot af-
ford: 30% cannot afford but consider it important for children to go on a
school excursion; 36% on extra-curricular activities. 80% of parents said
that a computer and internet was necessary, as it certainly is, increasingly,
for educational purposes, and yet almost 50% could not afford it. Indeed,
in the study, we referred to a literature on health that discusses unexpected
47
