Negotiated Care: The Experience of Family Day Care Providers

Introduction

INTRODUCTION 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.l 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 a private home other than the child's own"3-from a perspective that has been generally ignored: that of the caregiver. The literature specifically addressing family day care is scanty. The largest study of the issue, and the one most commonly cited, is the National Day Care Home Study (NDCHS). It has three limitations. First, the data are now ten years old. Second, it was conducted only in urban areas. Third, the goals of the study-to provide a description and evaluation of family day care-precluded attention to the kind of issues under consideration in this work; it did not offer a detailed analysis of the meaning of family day care as an occupation for the providers.4 Many of the other analyses of family day care rely on small samples and many place first the concerns of children.5 To a great extent, popular stereotypes (for the most part negative ) substitute for knowledge. A Doonesbury cartoon shows Joanie, arriving late with Jeff at the day-care provider's door. She apologizes and the provider says, "No skin off my nose. Of course the other kids have started."Joanie asks, "Started what?" "Watching the tube. You got this week's check?" The implication is clear. The stories that reach the newspapers are even more dismaying in their import. Reports Copyrighted ljIIaterial 4 INTRODUCTION abound of child abuse in unlicensed homes; in 1986 three children in New York City died in a fire while in the care of an unlicensed provider ; in 1988 a ten-month-old child died in the home of a "sitter" with a child-abuse record; even little Jessica McClure had a lesson beyond her courage and the generosity of her rescuers: she was being attended to by an unregulated family day care provider (her aunt) when she took her spill down the well.6 These largely negative stereotypes are balanced-in a kind of cultural schizophrenia-by articles expressing concern that this source of child care might be drying up and by portraits of women who, weary of their struggles in the "working world," have returned to the home and taken up family day care as a way to enrich their lives.7 But by slighting or treating impressionistically family day care, the literature has ignored an important phenomenon. Family day care represents the site of much of today's child care, accounting for the primary daily location of approximately 40 percent of children under the age of one, 38 percent of children aged one or two and 15 percent of (the full-time care for) children between the ages of three and five. Many children are in more than a single kind of care; family day care often completes the picture for older children who spend time there before and after preschool or elementary school programs. All together as many as 5.1 million children may be cared for in this setting.8 Family day care is also the site in which a large number of childcare workers are located.9 In 1981 the NDCHS suggested there were as many as 1.8 million different family day care providers in this country. (A piece of proposed federal legislation uses the term "family child care provider," which it defines as "1 individual who provides child care services for fewer than 24 hours per day as the sole caregiver, and in a private residence."lQ This terminology, like that used by the NDCHS, makes no distinction between women who care for unrelated children and women who care for related children. As the data in this study [like that collected by the NDCHS] show, many women who offer child care in a private residence care for both relatives and nonrelatives . 11) This book goes beyond stereotypes to offer a close analysis of the family day care provider's daily existence. It...