Friday Essay: Parents of 9-Month-Old Babies as ‘Workers in Waiting’? How Parentsnext Monitors Single Mothers

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misbahulalam
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Friday Essay: Parents of 9-Month-Old Babies as ‘Workers in Waiting’? How Parentsnext Monitors Single Mothers

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For the first two months of Svetlana’s daughter’s life, the pair couch-surfed and lived on the streets. Granted public housing, Svetlana then worked to “stabilise” herself and slowly form “new ties”. A “former addict”, she had been “clean and sober for six years”. Her daughter faced speech delays, and with help from a social service, Svetlana had been focused on supporting her, deciding to keep her at preschool for an additional year. Svetlana’s father, who has dementia, had lately moved to an aged care facility, leaving her mother “all alone” and “very sick”. “On top of all this, ParentsNext was introduced to me,” she told me. “I wanted to Country Email List keep an open mind,” she continued, “and I did.” Read more: After Robodebt, it's time to address ParentsNext Parents as ‘workers in waiting’ The official description of ParentsNext is that it “helps parents with children under six, to plan and prepare for future study or employment”.

The program reclassifies the parents of very young children — initially six-month-old babies and now nine-month-old babies — as “workers in waiting”, who need to partake in monitored activities. Yet their designation is different from and their treatment more ambiguous than that of “the unemployed”. Participants are required to engage in one of a range of possible activities, and some of these are certainly tied to and compatible with parenting. Attending playgroup and story time sessions at local libraries “count” as legitimate activities. Paid work is Svetlana’s aspiration, and after a long break since her role as an administrator in a corporate setting, she was “terrified”. ParentsNext seemed to promise a bridge between the past and future. “The phantom phone call” was how Svetlana referred to it.

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She remembered receiving an alert: “We’ll call you at this time. And if you don’t answer, your payments might be suspended.” The phone call didn’t arrive at the specified time; her “heart was missing a beat”. Then, at the day’s close, the phone call came, confirming her eligibility for ParentsNext. She was “happy to get help”. Svetlana repeated, simply and without shame, “I need help.” In early December 2018, she went to a meeting with her ParentsNext case manager and was “bamboozled” with information about where, when and how to report. Svetlana continued to report to Centrelink, as per the conditions of her Parenting Payment (Single). She did not realise she had agreed to an additional layer of reporting requirements via a different app; on December 24, her payment was suspended, a common experience of women in this program.
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