L'éducation morale des familles

Abstract

Moral education within families. Infant care specialists* are marked by a great diversity of social origin and social and academic backgrounds, although the majority of them are women belonging to socially up-and-coming families and, more often than not, church-going Catholics. They make up a professional group, still low on professionalisation and often ill-distinguished from related social professions. The nature of their activities, still bearing a heavy imprint of their charitable origins, is not subject to a great degree of regulation. The miscellaneous quality of their recruitment is to a large extent a root cause and an effect of the conflicting claims of two sectors ; care (hospitalization) and prevention (maternity welfare and child welfare). These two sectors are composed of agents who are in conflict not only by social class origin but also by their 'world outlook' and the way they conceive their calling. Among these agents we find, on the one hand, members of the traditionnalist fractions of Catholicism - the daughters of a declining middle-class or the daughters of the lower middle-class peasantry. Politically, socially and professionnally conservative, they mean to limit the scope of their professional activities to the exercise of paramedical care and take their cue from the principles of the most traditional version of Christian charity. On the other hand, we also corne across members of the modernist fractions of Catholicism ; trade-union affiliated and more politically conscious, they are the daughters of the mainstream middle-class which has made its way through Personal merit and promotion. Although relatively under-qualified, they attempt to lay down an alternative definition of their profession as Infant care specialists - one centred on psychology and aimed at exerting some positive educational influence on the families themselves. * Not to be confused with 'Child Welfare Workers', who are government-paid agents of the public health authority.