Child care has recently evolved from a personal issue to a public problem. Popular and academic presses abound with overviews, policy statements, surveys of current arrangements, evaluations of different kinds of care, and advice to parents.¹ In the last presidential election, candidates from both parties addressed this new political issue; in the last session of Congress politicians debated a wide range of child-care proposals. The word “crisis” is bandied about.²

This book is about one specific aspect of this public problem. It focuses on a particular kind of child care—family day care, defined as “non-residential child care provided in...

Two goals compete in this chapter: on the one hand, an attempt to describe the “typical” family day care provider; on the other hand an intent to indicate the individuality of women who do this work and the idiosyncratic features of their experiences. The case studies below consequently convey simultaneously a woman’s uniquenessandwhat her story reveals about a shared experience. And it could not be otherwise. A recurrent argument in this book as a whole is that the individual characteristics that differentiate among these women are insufficient to overcome the essential dynamics of this kind of work. In...

As more women enter the wage labor force, and more household tasks are transferred to the market economy, women purchase services that they previously supplied without pay (“out of love”) in the home. The new service providers are often women as well and thus the relationships that develop between women who provide services and women who use them have emerged as a subject of inquiry.¹ For example, in a perceptive analysis of Italian day care, Chiara Saraceno notes that the increasing reliance on purchased services entails both “the redefinition of boundaries between private and public spheres and the real-location of...

In seeking “homelike” care for their children, parents are attempting, among other things, to purchase for limited periods of time the relations that (ideally) characterize the home. Family day care providers participate willingly in this notion that homelike nurturance can be bought and sold. They too expect that they will be “like mothers” to the children in their care. And, as they go about their daily activities of caring for children, they learn to love them and to treat them like their own. The setting in which they work engenders this attitude. Yet they also find this attitude difficult to...

In the previous chapters I examined dilemmas providers face in their relationships with “outsiders.” Here we turn to issues that emerge in relationships between providers and members of their own families, as they transform the home into the site of paid work. In each set of relationships—with husbands, children, and members of the extended family—providers have to negotiate with the expectation that they are there to fulfill a traditional unpaid domestic role.¹ They also have to protect their paid work against this same expectation.

Providers and their husbands often see family day care as an activity that can...

Family day care providers remain in the domestic domain; they do not thereby achieve privacy. This style of child care is increasingly drawing public—and often critical—attention. Observers may be quick to acknowledge that family day care providers can offer excellent substitute care; they also point to appallingly inadequate environments, and they note that parents are not always able to make appropriate judgments about (nor afford) adequate care.

To many, governmental regulation is one obvious and necessary solution to the problem family day care presents. Although they are not united about the best regulatory system, the precise content of...

Professionalization represents another direction in which the activity of family day care could move. Ten of the seventy women interviewed for this study stand out from the majority of family day care providers because they say that they offer a “preschool program” in their homes.¹ In linking their activities to those of early-childhood educators, they explicitly align themselves with a more professional occupation.

Discussions of professionalization and the field of early-childhood education have two strands: a consideration of the possibility of ever achieving such a status and an assessment of the desirability of doing so. Those who hold out the...

Family day care is a short-term occupation. The median tenure of a family day care provider is three years. Within one year, 30 percent of registered providers have left the field; within two years more than 50 percent are gone.¹ While these figures might be lower than the turnover rates exhibited by center-based child-care workers, they are high enough to be a source of concern: to parents seeking to find reliable and consistent care for their children, to resource and referral agencies attempting to locate caregivers for parents, and to providers themselves searching for a satisfying home-based occupation.²

An extensive...

I have tried to make this book the provider’s story, told in her words, and from her point of view. In the process I have learned that there is more than one provider’s story. Although all women in family day care face similar structural conditions, they do not all experience their work in the same way. Whether because they have access to different rewards, start with different personalities, or find themselves at different stages in their personal lives, they make different decisions about how to handle the dilemmas endemic to this occupation and, failing to resolve these dilemmas, they “burn...