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This contribution highlights the care management strategies and resilience of families during the pandemic in reconciling work and childcare through a qualitative study of working parents aimed at investigating in depth the experiences and reconciliation strategies used to cope with the pandemic. The results reveal an ambivalent evaluation of the experience: working from home was an opportunity for growth in the family dimension, in the children's ability to organize themselves and in their awareness of their parents' work; nevertheless, the challenges regarding reconciliation were experienced negatively, generating fear, guilt, inadequacy, stress, and fatigue. The study also highlighted, even amidst the many difficulties experienced, the emergence of new resources and skills learned that made it possible to cope with a highly risky situation: resilience, a greater understanding of priorities, a lessening of the sense of control and the acquisition of a more accomplished degree of reflexivity and awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work and family reconciliation is a key issue for many countries; in Italy, it is also an important and crucial challenge. Though initially considered a predominantly female issue impacting the maternal employment rate, the importance of fathers in the family domain is now widely acknowledged in policy discourses (such as leave policies). However, an emphasis on ‘fathers’ rights’ has not yet produced the expected improvements in term of men’s sharing care responsibilities and fathers’ involvement in children’s lives. This paper first describes the legislative context along with data on the use of leaves by employed parents. Then three company case studies in the North of Italy are presented and analysed, where both managers and fathers were interviewed to understand the facilitators and barriers for fathers’ leave-taking within companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to analyze the complex relationship between motherhood and work, a relationship considered ambiguously, both from the socio-economic literature and the current European policies. The relational perspective allows us to capture the distinctive elements of this relationship and also enlarge the usual sociological point of view: we can avoid the reduction of motherhood to procreative choices and a consequent flattening of policies to a functional and feminist frame of reference focused on the workfare culture and individual rights. Making use of the analysis of specific and updated statistical data and of interesting international researches - we sought to capture the true complexity involved; it necessarily refers to the process of structuring personal identity, to the underlying rating on the self and to the reflexivity's practice that makes it possible. Reflexivity and relationality seem to constitute the essential terms of reference for understanding the "new female identity"; it's a multi faced identity not reducible in simple macro-categorization. Reflexivity and relationality play on two fronts: internal and external. Reflexivity is what allows to link subjective inclinations, preferences, talents and cultural and structural emerging properties; at the same time relationality is the criteria that guide the choices concerning the sphere of family, work and their relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]