Abstract:

This paper focuses on the babysitting practices and attitudes of young females toward these in Kazakhstan. Since the gender revolution which started here in early Soviet time and intensified in the last decades, women actively participate in the labor force (make up 49.7% of this (the Global Economy, 2022)). The traditional expectations of a woman as wife and mother continue to put high pressure on females. Working women spend 3 hours and 36 minutes on household duties and childcare per day (Kabatova, 2022, p. 36), working men spend 3 times less time on these activities.

Consequently, there is need for help in childcare in form of kindergartens, asking relatives to babysit, or hiring babysitters. Because of the constant streaming of “successful success” and self-realization&development, women of new generations have more and more desire to build a career. Double burden they face of both domestic and paid labor accounts for sacrifice in health and self-care. Kazakhstan can be considered to belong to liberal welfare cluster that provides some compensation for maternal expenses for all women (Esping-Andersen 1990), this help shows to be insufficient. Mothers can afford to be absent from work for only one year if they still want to keep paid position. They can rely on state-funded and private kindergartens that claim to focus on rearing children in sociable, holistic, and carefree atmosphere (Ulybina 2023). Many participants stressed their dissatisfaction with kindergartens.

To explore mothers’ and baby-sitters’ perspectives on babysitting, the study was conducted qualitatively. 27 in-depth interviews were conducted, the duration of each was around 60 minutes. Preliminary results demonstrate that there are challenges when hiring babysitters. No specialized organizations provide babysitting services. Mothers search for babysitters on sites like OLX, which cannot guarantee the professionalism of workers. In addition, there are barriers concerning letting hired workers to babysit children, though family resources of help are not available to everyone, they are strongly preferred. Still many young mothers and future mothers prefer market arrangements because these allow them better power distribution in decisions about delegated childcare. Assistance mothers receive from marketed childcare positively affects their personal and professional lives. External judgment of “failing perfect mother” might be imposed by others on women hiring babysitters. Geographical and structural factors affect the kin’s role in provisioning traditional family dynamics.