Day Care
Day Care
Day care is a term that is commonly used in English-speaking North America. It refers to the care of young children by persons other than parents, guardians, or other close relatives (grandparents, for example) during a period when the children’s parents are not able to provide care. Typically, day care is associated with care for a child while the parent(s) are employed or participating in an educational program away from the home. (Programs such as preschools, nurseries, and kindergartens are typically part-time and less commonly associated with employment-related care.)
Day care takes a wide variety of forms, from what are termed “informal” arrangements (such as care in the home of a neighbor or friend, with no regulation by government), to more “formal” arrangements (such as care in a purpose-built facility with licensing by one or more levels of government). In most parts of North America informal care is more common than formal care. The numbers of children in care settings, the ages of those children, the number of adults present, the nature of activities provided in these settings, and the training of care providers vary significantly.
The care of children while their parents are employed outside the home has a lengthy history in Europe and North America. One of the very first programs to develop as a specific response to parental employment was the Infant Schools established in New Lanark, Scotland, in 1816. Robert Owen’s “Institution for the Formation of Character” was envisioned as much more than caregiving—it was an experiment in individual and broader societal development (Owen 1816). Infant schools moved beyond Scotland, and by the late 1820s similar programs could be found in North America, from Prince Edward Island to the Carolinas. However, by the late 1830s the infant school movement had died out in North America, an early victim of a complex interplay of ideologies, laborforce dynamics, class structures, immigration, social movements, and political positions that persist to the present. The public face of this dynamic was that “the mother’s place is in the home with her children”—an argument heard from the pulpit in the 1830s and a continuing force in day care debates today (Pence 1989).
As the labor force expanded in the late twentieth century to include an ever higher proportion of women, including mothers, pressure mounted for governments, at both federal and state or provincial levels, to address the very significant and growing need for day care services through the establishment of funded and regulated systems of care. Adding to pressure felt by a changing labor force has been the strategic use of research on early childhood, including research on early brain development (Carnegie Task Force 1994; Shonkoff and Phillips 2000), to make a case for “high quality” care. These forces, augmented most recently by comparative studies of child care in other industrialized countries (OECD 2001, 2004), tipped the scales in Canada in early 2005, and the Liberalled federal government committed $5 billion over five years toward the development of “high-quality developmental early learning and child care in collaboration with provinces and territories” (Governments of Canada and Manitoba 2005). When the Liberal government was defeated later that year, the new Conservative-led government withdrew support for the program. The sociopolitical dynamics of day care that arose in the early nineteenth century are still evident in the twenty-first century.
SEE ALSO Child Development; Children
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carnegie Task Force on Meeting the Needs of Young Children. 1994. Starting Points: Meeting the Needs of Our Youngest Children. New York: Author.
Governments of Canada and Manitoba. 2005. Moving Forward: Governments of Canada and Manitoba Sign an Agreement on Early Learning and Child Care. http://www.gov.mb.ca/chc/press/top/2005/04/2005-04-29-07.
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. 2001. Starting Strong: Early Childhood Education and Care. Paris: Author.
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. 2004. The Country Note for Canada: Early Childhood Education and Care Policy. Paris: Author. http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/42/34/33850725.pdf.
Owen, Robert. 1816. A New View of Society. London: J. M. Dent.
Pence, Alan R. 1989. In the Shadow of Mother-Care: Contexts for an Understanding of Child Day Care. Canadian Psychology 30 (2): 140-147.
Shonkoff, Jack P., and Phillips, Deborah. 2000. From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
Alan R. Pence