The grandparent complement. Daily arrangements, family solidarities and social inequalities through the lens of grandparents' care of young children.

Summary In France, work-family reconciliation policies are mainly based on the development of institutional childcare arrangements. However, grandparents continue to play an important role in the daily arrangements of families. How can we explain their involvement in the care of young children? By combining the sociologies of the family and the articulation of social time, and by crossing qualitative and quantitative methods, this thesis focuses on the everyday ways in which parents manage to articulate their family and professional lives, through the study of the borderline case of the use of grandparents' help. This thesis emphasizes two logics. 1) If there is a norm of good grandparenting that regulates the way grandparents get involved in the care of their grandchildren, it emanates from the upper social categories and is not internalized in a homogeneous way in all social milieus. Parents' educational strategies and expectations of grandparents differ according to social origin. 2) Professional, family and institutional contexts act as constraints and opportunities that influence parents' daily arrangements and lead them to modify their educational strategies with regard to grandparent involvement. The analysis of the articulation of these logics allows us to identify four types of grandparental care: emergency, routine, intensive and leisure. Finally, this thesis shows the correlation between children's development and grandparental care, inviting us to think of this object as a diversified set of practices that are vectors of social inequalities.