Demand for Flexible Child-Minding Schemes, Aalborg 1990

Children and children's conditions, upbringing and child-minding - private as well as public - are important issues today, not least because the development of society in many ways makes heavy demands on families with small children. # These demands may be in the form of changed working hours where the tendency for many years has been that an increased number of people are at work outside the traditional working hours. # It may be a consequence of this that everyday life has changed so that it is felt to be more split up today than ever. # In many cases the parents' changed working hours have resulted in a need for - and thus an increased demand for - a variety of types of child-minding spread over an increased number of hours. Demands are made on public service for more flexible schemes. # The question is whether the public sector should straight away extend the child-minding facilities concurrently with this demand, or whether there are other possibilities based on close collaboration between the parents and the public authorities. # On the basis of these considerations the Institution Department (Institutionsafdelingen) under the Public Assistance and Health Administrative Department in the municipality of Aalborg appointed a working group which - on the basis of the existing child-minding facilities and the objective of the city council to do away with the waiting lists - was to consider and assess possible readjustments and new initiatives in order to make the municipal child-minding schemes more flexible. # The proposals for more flexible solutions had to be based on the well-being of the children and they had to be assessed from the point of view of the users and on the basis of pedagogical considerations. In this connection the working group was to examine and map out the needs of the users and the local community as regards flexibility of the day-care offered and to assess various possible combinations as regards the group of children aged 0-6 years. # As part of the work of the working group a 'demand analysis' was made as a questionnaire was sent to 1085 randomly selected parents with children under seven years of age in November 1990. # The main purpose of the survey was to examine tendencies of the demand of the families as regards child-minding. Nowadays many parents work at times which exceed the time where public child-minding is available. # The questionnaire contains 24 main questions of which a number has sub-questions. The questions were, among other things, inspired by similar surveys carried out by the Danish National Institute of Social Research, by the Danish National Union of Pre-School Teachers (BUPL), by the Danish State Railways (DSB), and by the municipality of Viborg, and they mainly dela with the working hours of the parents, with their demands as regards opening hours at the institutions, their attitudes to alternative forms of day-care and payment, and their assessment of public day-care and the day-care institutions. # The questionnaire survey was carried out as a sample survey comprising 1085 households randomly selected from 8481 households with small children, i.e. households in which the youngest child is between 0 and 6 years. The criterion for selecting a household was that the household had at least one child aged 0-6 and that the child was born on the 10th, 15th or 20th of one of the months of the year. Consequently, the survey comprises approx. 13% of all households with small children in the municipality of Aalborg