We Are Not Babysitters: Family Child Care Providers Redefine Work and Care (review)

In We're Not Babysitters: Family Child Care Providers Redefine Work and Care, Tuominen demonstrates how race and gender operate on a structural level to produce low wages for family child care providers. This book is an important contribution to the literature on women's low-wage work and the definitive book on family child care. However, my advice to prospective readers is to skip the first chapter, which distracts from an otherwise excellent book.

Tuominen interviewed only 20 individuals. Yet she takes full advantage of the previous research on family child care and masterfully uses the extensive literature on women's low wage and caring labor to back up her argument. She starts with the daily lives of her interviewees, but rather than lingering over daily interactions she connects their everyday experiences with the broader social relations and social forces (political, cultural, and economic) that impact their lives and which they in turn impact.

Through her attention to class and race, Tuominen once and for all lays to rest the notion dominant in the academic literature that working mothers struggle with an internalized ideal of motherhood that is incompatible with paid work. This is not only untrue for the majority of family child care providers, who are disproportionately women of color, but as Tuominen points out, this dilemma only ever existed for a specific segment of the population: middle-class white women. Immigrant women, women of color, and poor women have long had to work outside the home and have integrated employment into their conceptions of motherhood. This is important because the idea that family child care providers are motivated to do this kind of work in order to enact some idealized conception of the full-time mother is used against them to justify low wages. However, though the ideology of intensive mothering does not explain their entry into this work, Tuominen clearly shows that gender is a central factor organizing the provision of family child care. As she explains: "Because women bear primary responsibility for child care within families and structural supports for employed mothers are, at best, in short supply, women return to the home to provide paid child care when labor markets (organized in accordance with gendered and racial ethnic ideologies) fail to pay wages sufficient for families to afford reliable child care."

All the women in her study entered family child care in order to meet the social and economic needs of their families. However, Tuominen found variation in how they understood their choice based on differences in race/ethnicity, country of origin, and social class. Her findings, though interesting, should be considered tentative. Here Tuominen's small sample is a liability. Tuominen stands on firm ground when she is able to use the literature to back up her findings, but in areas like these, where her findings are genuinely new, future research will be necessary to validate her claims.

Social distinctions also determined her respondents' clientele and level of compensation. Bounded by geography and use of primarily "word of mouth" recruitment strategies, social networks and neighborhoods ensure that family child care providers serve families similar to them in terms of racial ethnic and cultural identity as well as social class. Low-income providers serve low-income families who pay the lowest rates, trapping these family care providers in an economic situation that keeps them poor. The state, which subsidizes the care of many low-income families, could but does not ameliorate this situation by paying family child care providers a reasonable rate.

Tuominen writes compellingly about the social forces and social relationships that impact the lives of family care providers. However, she is also interested in the agency of family care providers and the ways in which they push back. In particular, she writes a very interesting chapter about African American women who provide what Tuominen calls "Community Care Work." For these women, providing care to other low-income women in their...