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149 How could any affluent country, if only out of long-term self-interest, allow so many of its children to grow up in nightmare childhoods? Ten years ago a visiting Norwegian sociologist asked me that question in an urgent and genuinely puzzled way. She had just come from a conference in San Francisco on U.S. public policy and family poverty, and she was reeling from the human import of the statistics about child poverty that she had heard. I have never forgotten her question and its stark perspective on the irrationality and injustice of U.S. policies relating to children and families. Before turning to the larger political context, I will report from recent ethnographic research that illuminates the complex ways in which families in California are trying to cope with gaps of provisioning for the care of their children . These case studies bring lived experiences into conjunction with statistical profiles of widening and racialized social class divides. The case studies also illustrate varied and sometimes contested cultural framings of “care,” “need,” and “obligation.” My discussion draws upon feminist theories of care, which are useful in interrogating the dramatic inequalities and the market logic that characterize the current U.S. childcare system. I will conclude by sketching an alternative vision that frames caring as a collective responsibility, and children as a social rather than privatized good. Qualitative Case Studies of the Contemporary U.S. Childcare System Skocpol (2000) has observed that public programs in other industrial democracies correct for difficulties and inequities in the private wage market. However, especially since the 1980s, U.S. public policies have tended to exacerbate market disparities. Althea Huston’s analysis of U.S. childcare policies illustrates this point (Huston 2004). The federal welfare reform legislation of 1996 forced The Crisis of Care Barrie Thorne c h a p t e r 1 1 v impoverished single mothers to take on full-time jobs, mostly at and sometimes below minimum wage. But the legislation did not provide adequate support for the care of these mothers’ children. Over the past two decades the ability of lowand middle-income U.S. families to provide care has been eroded not only by cutbacks in state provisioning, but also by heightened job insecurity and the intensification of wage work (Hochschild 1997; Wallulis 1998). There is, in short, a growing crisis of care. As Huston notes, the United States has a “market-based child care system that is highly decentralized and variable,” and in the absence of adequate public subsidies , access to and the quality of paid care strongly correlate with income. The affluent have multiple market options that are flagged, like products on a supermarket shelf, by a nuanced array of labels—nannies, babysitters, housekeepers, au pairs, preschools, day care—and for school-aged children, fee-based afterschool programs, lessons, and other specialized activities focused on sports, music, drama, dance, computers, and science. The result, especially among upper middle-class families in metropolitan areas, is a trend, in effect, toward gated childhoods, with children’s out-of-home time organized almost entirely through markets that exclude those without the means to pay. In these privatized and relatively homogeneous enclaves, kids often have little contact with those who are less privileged in racialized hierarchies of social class. At the other end of the class spectrum, parents from lower (and even middle) incomes lack the means to purchase quality paid care. Even if they qualify for government subsidies, they often confront long waiting lists. Low-income solo mothers and their children who are without kin or friends able to lend a daily hand lead especially pressed lives. Furthermore, low-income workers are the least likely to receive “family-friendly” benefits from employers, such as paid sick leave, vacation leave, and job flexibility, and they are much more likely to have to work evenings or nights (Heymann 2000). Deterioration in the quality of public schools and in services like public transportation, parks, and libraries compounds the problems. The California Childhoods Project How do employed lower-income parents provide for the care of their children? Between 1996 and 1999 Marjorie Faulstich Orellana and I worked with multilingual teams of graduate and undergraduate students to gather data about the daily lives of children, ages five through twelve, growing up in a varied social class and racial ethnic circumstances in urban California. We set out to trace the local effects of a series of large-scale trends...

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