Research Framework: In serious illness, the proliferation of therapeutic possibilities often delays the moment when death is foreseen and when palliative care, too often associated with the end of life and death, is introduced into patients’ care paths. In this context, pediatric palliative care tries to play an active role in the care relationship, beyond the idea of treatments for recovery.

Objectives: Our aim is to better understand the moment when palliative care becomes a possibility in the trajectory of serious illness, and how it is represented. We examine how palliative care fits into the parents’ experience, as well as the way in which their experience of serious illness, and more so the relational dimension of the end of life, is expressed.

Methodology: We draw on the testimonies of parents whose children suffered major illness and death. Through individual semi-structured interviews between 2017 and 2019, we collected the stories of 16 Montreal children and adolescents (10 boys and 6 girls aged between a few weeks to 19 years) with a genetic or rare disease, cancer or multiple chronic conditions of migrant and non-migrant background.

Results: Not only is the type of illness an important figure in the palliative care trajectory, care and the families’ profiles also shape their perception of a (nonetheless) positive experience of their child’s end of life.

Conclusions: Curative/palliative therapeutic perspectives have little bearing on our participants’ satisfaction with care at the end of life, as long as a therapeutic trust bond is present between the family and the health care team. Both positively and negatively, this bond of trust influences the pediatric care relationships and major illness trajectories, as well as the end-of-life experiences of loved ones.

Contribution: Through the experiences of children at the end of life as shared (mostly) by mothers, this paper discusses both curative and palliative perspectives as chosen by the parents of children facing a poor prognosis. Beyond the different philosophies that inhabit these approaches, the quality (and continuity) of the relationships established with care providers is a determining factor in the quality of the experiences documented through our study.

Mots-clés: therapeutic relationship, care, pediatrics, child, parent, critical illness, end of life, palliative, accompaniment

Research Framework: This article is based on a PhD research in socio-anthropology about the transmission of familial memory among Rwandans living in France. We are interested in the day-to-day kinship of orphans after the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda.

Objectives: The objective of this article is to provide a better understanding of family reconfigurations in post-genocide Rwanda. We will see how the care of orphans has transformed the boundaries of kinship.

Methodology: We conducted an ethnographic study based on a non-linear fieldwork from 2014 to 2019. We carried out semi-directive interviews with Rwandans living in France who were less than 20 years old in 1994, as well as with their family members, in France or in Rwanda. This was complemented with the development of kinship trees and with observations made during commemorations.

Results: We document here several hosting situations for orphans after the Tutsi genocide: foster care, children’s households and orphanages. The Rwandan government pursued family-based policy that aimed at “reunification” or placement in a family. We present configurations of households of care that may or may not involve relatives, or even protect themselves from them.

Conclusions: The genocide provoked a crisis of orphans’ care that impacted kinship relations, through acts of solidarity or hostility. Households of care and lines of transmission have seen their boundaries redrawn by affective and material exclusion and inclusion of orphans.

Contribution: The article allows us to reinscribe kinship relations and everyday kinship in a given socio-economical and historical context, that of post-genocide Rwanda. It sheds light on the family and societal changes that occur in the aftermath of genocide.

Mots-clés: orphan, kinship, genocide, Rwanda, siblings, care, family

Research framework: Since the 1990s, the French government has developed social and fiscal policies that encourage families to use home-based employment to delegate domestic, parental and care work. The objective was to encourage women’s ability to fulfil multiple social commitments. However, the studies point to the persistence of class inequalities in the practice of delegation and emphasize the workload that it implies for women.

Objectives: This article aims to understand the class and gender mechanisms at work in the practice of delegation. It thus identifies the extent to which the contemporary French reproduction regime, namely the organizational referential for the practices of taking charge of the activities that sustain human life, alleviates domestic work in families and particularly for women.

Methodology: Based on semi-directive interviews conducted in Île-de-France as part of a doctoral research project in sociology with 38 families, we will capture a set of measures emblematic of the reproduction regime through family practices: socio-fiscal incentive policies for family employment.

Results: The analysis shows that by leaving the organizational referential of the reproduction regime unchanged, socio-fiscal incentive policies for family employment maintain and even reinforce class and gender inequalities.

Conclusions: As long as the French reproduction regime does not reconsider the foundations of its organizational frame of reference, we have every reason to believe that policies encouraging the delegation of family activities will have unequal consequences.

Contribution: This article shows how the inconsistencies between referential and social practices hinder the transformative impact of public policies.

Mots-clés: public policy, family, domestic work, work-life balance, human reproduction, France

Research Framework: Inequalities in access to childcare for young children are particularly strong in France. We analyze them through the question of the non-recourse to rights and services (Warin, 2016) in order to think about families’ childcare arrangements in relation to a local public offer.

Objectives: The objective is to research the different ways in which working-class mothers choose to care for their children when faced with a very inadequate public supply of early childhood care and an allocation criteria that are not favourable to them.

Methodology: The empirical survey is based on comprehensive interviews that were carried out with mothers (N = 27) in three working-class neighbourhoods in a city with very few childcare facilities.

Results: The analysis shows different forms of non-use that mothers have of childcare facilities. These forms are linked to the social and professional situations they are confronted with, that is in connection with an inadequate local supply: an assumed or asserted non-demand; a lack of information and knowledge of the supply and administrative procedures; a failure to offer and receive alternative proposals to the crèche, informal childcare by relatives or under the table. As their children grow older, mothers express increasing needs for care that are specifically at their development and socialization, and not only the needs related to their professional activity.

Conclusions: The difficulties encountered by mothers raise questions about the quantity and quality of municipal childcare provision, as well as the cobbling together of formal and informal childcare solutions.

Contribution: To understand whether or not mothers have recourse to extra-familial childcare, we emphasize the importance of simultaneously taking into account the situation of the local supply with which they are directly confronted and their own social and professional situation.

Mots-clés: early childhood, mother, working-class neighbourhood, out-of-home care, childcare, family-work balance, child’s needs

Research framework: The difficulty of investment shown by the father towards his child, especially after the separation from the mother, is a common phenomenon in Haiti. This problematic – which exposes women and children to negative consequences – is hardly documented in the scientific literature.

Objectives: The objective of this article is to understand the way Haitian fathers portray the possible obstacles to the full investment of fatherhood in Haiti.

Methodology: A qualitative research framework was employed. Using an open-ended lead-in question, the researcher invited participants to share their subjective experience of fatherhood. A process of co–construction of meaning was conducted with the research subjects. Eleven fathers, living in Haiti without regular contact with at least one of their children, were interviewed. We did two interviews (1.5 hours each) with 10 participants, bringing the total number of interviews to 21.

Results: A thematic analysis revealed various potential obstacles to full paternal investment in Haiti, including the difficulty for the father to take his place within a matrifocal family configuration, the repetition of a failing paternal model, the tendency to adopt behaviours of avoidance (underpinned by a narcissistic vulnerability), as well as the psychic disinvestment of real fatherhood in favor of imagined one.

Conclusions: While the full investment in fatherhood seems to be regularly postponed by the fathers we met, their child remains present through their thoughts. The fathers’ participation in our research suggests a desire to change with regard to the problem.

Contribution: In addition to its contribution to the literature, this study offers avenues for future research. Recommendations for intervention are made, in a perspective of change regarding paternal investment in Haiti.

Objetivo: El objetivo de este artículo es entender cómo perciben los padres haitianos los posibles obstáculos a la plena encarnación de la paternidad en Haití.

Mots-clés: fatherhood, family dynamics, intergenerational transmission, parent-child contact, culture, parent child relationship, qualitative research, psychology

Research Framework: Debt has been little studied as a socio-economic disadvantage contributing to poor health. The literature suggests that problematic debt is linked to poorer mental health. This is attributed in part to the financial management difficulties involved, but the mechanisms of this link are poorly understood.

Objectives: This article aims to verify whether the effect of debt on mental health varies according to the financial arrangement and the distribution of economic responsibilities within the couple.

Methodology: We used the longitudinal analyses of Swiss Household Panel (SHP) data (1999-2019).

Results: While the longitudinal approach shows that the onset of problematic debt does lead to a decline in mental health, our results do not confirm the influence of financial management. However, we show that there are different types of management among indebted couples and that in most cases, only one of the spouses assumes the responsibility, the woman more often than the man. Women have the lowest level of mental health, probably because they are more often handling money of the most precarious households.

Conclusions: Financial management patterns are associated with different levels of mental health, but this relationship could not be demonstrated in an isolated event (problematic debt) measured in a one-time fashion. We hypothesize that they have a longer-term influence.

Contribution: Our study contributes to the knowledge on the socio-economic dimensions of health. By opening the black box of households, it explores financial management, a blind spot in research on the links between mental health and debt.

Mots-clés: money management, debt, longitudinal analysis, mental health, gender, swiss household panel, household finances, financial management