This study aims to define Roma mothers’ views regarding their children’s education and their tendency towards crime. The study is based on an illustrative case study method. The participants of this study are mothers of Roma children between the ages of 4 and 6 who live in Konya, Turkey — more specifically in the Yenimahalle neighborhood in the town of Karatay and who do not attend any preschool programs. As a data collection tool, a questionnaire prepared by the researchers is employed, while in data analysis, descriptive analysis is used. The Roma mothers articulated that they want their children to have education and jobs; that they do not want their children to suffer in the same way they did; that the Roma culture prevents children’s education and therefore the mothers prefer to send their children to private schools, boarding schools or to schools far away from their neighborhoods by taking school buses; that they want their children to be judges, lawyers, nurses and teachers. The mothers stated that they meet the basic needs of their children; that they watch TV together and/or do housework together with their children. They also said that when their children commit a crime, they beat their children; they get angry with them and scold and/or complain to their fathers. They finally added that they can take measures for the children’s not committing a crime by talking to the children or by scolding them. Additionally, Roma mothers state that by taking the case to the fathers they can prevent their children from committing crimes.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) demand from their faculty excellent teaching output and substantial number of quality productive scholarship, hence, balancing work and family demands becomes a central challenge among academics to maintain a healthy work-life balance. The decision to have children and family shapes the career trajectories of academics as well as their research productivity in particular. Striking a balance between attending to family matters and becoming scholarly productive is a tall order among Filipino women academics, having a culture that is just beginning to adopt to the more egalitarian aspect of attending to family matters. The empirical result of this study shows that indeed, parenting is a moderating factor between work-life balance and research productivity among Filipino women academics. Female faculty members in particular are susceptible to a balancing act between family commitments most especially in producing quality researches. Family life still pervades within the spectrum of research productivity on one side and work-life balance on the other end among women academics.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which affected the whole world and caused millions to be locked at their homes, brought many difficulties in domestic life. Especially, women are the leading group that has been affected the most negatively due to the workload during the days staying at home and experiencing the constraints of traditional roles. In this study, in which descriptive phenomenology analysis was used, the aim was to reveal how mothers working as psychological counselors in schools experienced motherhood during the days staying at home during the epidemic, and how their professional skills reflected on their role as mothers. In this study, in which the criterion sampling was used, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 mothers who are school psychological counselors and could not continue their work since schools shut down during the pandemic. The data were analyzed by Giorgi’s descriptive phenomenological method. Analysis results revealed six main themes that define the experiences of the participants: adaptation to the new order, parenting codes, introspection during the pandemic, distribution of parenting roles, professional reflections in motherhood, and complex motherhood experiences. It is believed that the results obtained from this study conducted with psychological counselor mothers will contribute to parenting practices and to the content of in service trainings for school psychological counselors.

Our study examines the link between adolescents’ skills (mathematics, reading literacy, and physical fitness) and the frequency with which they participate in housework. We utilize a large longitudinal dataset of Hungarian adolescents (N = 37,461), making this, to our knowledge, the first European study on this topic. We use a rich set of background variables and fixed effects estimators to account for time-varying and time-invariant individual characteristics. Contrary to most of the literature we find cognitive skills to have no practically significant relationship with housework frequency. This discrepancy can be attributed to methodological choices (i.e., the use of the fixed effects estimator) or sociocultural differences in housework duties between the regions studied. Investigating heterogeneous effects on cognitive skills, we find girls’ literacy scores to be slightly affected by daily housework (-.02 SD), unlike boys’. The difference is more pronounced for children with highly educated parents and working mothers (-.06 SD). Substantially lower mathematics scores are detected for children who almost never participate in housework and have unemployed mothers (-.19 SD). Children who have chores to do almost every day and whose mothers are on parental leave also show signs of worsened mathematics ability (-.1 SD). Fitness levels of students who rarely engage in housework are significantly lower (-.04 SD), suggesting that some participation in household tasks contributes to physical well-being. This effect is pronounced for children of tertiary-educated parents (-.05 SD). Overall, findings suggest that household chores are cognitively neutral for most adolescents, have small physical-fitness benefits when performed in moderation, and become academically detrimental only at the extremes within specific family contexts.