Child Care

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CHILD CARE.

Child care has always been problematic. In nineteenth-century industrial society, child care was a social necessity resulting from mothers working. At the time, solutions were most often found on an individual basis, by having the children looked after by relatives, neighbors, or a nanny. As early as 1844, Firmin Marbeau in France conceived the idea of a model day care center, which constituted the first stage in the development of a comprehensive education system for working-class children, including "mothers' schools" for women who were obliged to work. The nursery, which was supposed to substitute for mothers during working hours, was to become a powerful instrument of control over social and family life, aiming to turn working women into worthy mothers and housewives. The idea was soon to be taken over in other countries.

In the twentieth century, the period between the two world wars was a time of paradoxes. Interest in the family had never been so vivid, and the role of the mother became a central issue. The obsession with demography sparked by massive loss of life during World War I gave rise to the widespread conviction that work outside the home was incompatible with a woman's natural destiny as mother and wife, and care for the child became a key political issue. The nineteenth-century conception of the child as an asset gave way to the idea of the child as a responsibility and subsequently to the child as an "idol," demanding total physical and psychological commitment on the part of the mother. As a result, motherhood came to be viewed as a vocational activity, a fundamental social function requiring careful monitoring and management, and national associations were created for the training of mothers and the protection of children. The nursery consultations and home visits set up by these bodies clearly reflected an intention to exert control over social and family life.

Numerous moralists viewed these nurseries as a necessary evil that ought to be resorted to only in case of absolute necessity and not advocated as a standard solution. An interview with applicant families prior to admission was often required, allowing the service providers to monitor the environment within which the child grew up. Evening meals, most often limited to soup, were distributed, a practice that lasted into the 1970s. Children could now be entrusted to private child minders, host families, or neighbors in return for payment. In certain villages and the suburbs of large cities, child care even evolved into a specialized activity.

The availability of child care facilities played a key role in the maintenance of women on the labor market after the birth of a child. In most European countries, given the growing ratio of women, and especially young mothers, in the workforce, the post–World War II years witnessed increasing state intervention in the domain of family politics and the development of different forms of child care. Thus, for example, several Western European countries devoted a substantial effort to facilitating child care, whether in the form of extended funding for parental leave or a considerable increase in the provision of public child care. In Sweden, parental leave was instituted in 1974, and the provision of public care centers has kept growing ever since (from 2 percent in the 1960s to 10 percent in the early 1970s and 50 percent in 1994). In 1995 a law obliged boroughs to provide access to a care center for all children aged one to six. In the Netherlands, where public accommodation for children under three was practically nonexistent in the early 1980s, an active public policy allowed the creation of seventy thousand additional places in a very short time span.

But in the years since the 1980s, a period marked by increasing unemployment and the crisis of the welfare state, these policies have been called into question, and one cannot but observe a breakdown in both the quality and quantity of child care centers. Moreover, since the downfall of the communist regimes, whose impressive network of child care facilities was the object of a specific government policy, a reduction in the number of centers has been felt throughout Eastern Europe as well.

It would be an error, however, to believe that the opposition between the traditional view advocating the return of mothers to the home to look after their children and a more progressive view, emphasizing the equal distribution of domestic and family responsibilities between fathers and mothers, coincides with the traditional split between right- and left-wing political tendencies. Thus in Sweden it was a right-wing government dominated by conservatives that passed a bill obliging boroughs to provide accommodation in a collective facility for every child aged one or more, while in France it was under François Mitterrand's socialist presidency that the AGED (Allocation de Garde d'Enfant à Domicile) was introduced, encouraging parents to provide care for their children at home.

Yet throughout Europe the growing proportion of women in the workforce and the evolution of social perspectives and pedagogy have led to an ever increasing demand for child care outside the home. In 2000, if one excepts the Scandinavian countries, which have always been in the vanguard of child care policies, the highest rate of children from three to six entrusted to outside care was in France, Belgium, and Italy. In France in the late twentieth century, 95 percent of all children in this age bracket attended a nursery school, and a range of other facilities was offered for children of school age. But the accommodation of children under three in state-financed facilities in Europe is more limited, whatever the country. In countries like England or Germany, family matters are generally regarded as belonging to the private domain, and as a result, such facilities as are available are private or depend on arrangements within the family. In the Mediterranean countries, where the social structure is still heavily marked by intergenerational solidarity, the public authorities have little say in the care provided for young children. The ratio of children under three accommodated in public-service facilities is 3 percent in Italy and practically nil in Spain, Ireland, and Germany. By contrast, Sweden, Denmark, and to a lesser degree France, Holland, and Belgium have favored the development of small-scale child care structures. In Denmark over 50 percent of the children under three are looked after in publicly financed structures, compared to 30 percent in Belgium and Sweden. In France the number of places available to children under three in collective structures has grown from 36,000 in 1969 to 267,000 in 1999, and demand keeps growing. Throughout Europe, one may also observe the appearance of individual or neighborhood initiatives like parent-managed care centers, in which parents take turns caring for each others' children to compensate for the deficit in public-service facilities.

In Germany the traditional mother-child relationship has prevailed in the western half of the country. Child care centers are still rare and recourse to kindergartens has been a late development. In the 1960s only one-third of the children between four and six would attend a nursery school, as the medical discourse on the risk of contamination and illness and family beliefs about the psychological hazards of early separation between mother and child long prevailed over arguments favorable to entrusting young children to collective care.

Thus concerns about child care have varied from one country to another, conditioned notably by differing political and institutional environments, and have been associated with health, hygiene, economic, demographic, or pedagogical issues or shaped by ideas such as the role of the mother in the household or equality between men and women. Together or separately, all these issues have come to determine family policies. Early-childhood policies have always been fraught with heavy gender connotations, as the domain of child care has long remained a female prerogative and has, as a result, been credited with only minor economic and cultural value.