Negotiated Care: The Experience of Family Day Care Providers

Chapter 4: Providers and Their Families

Chapter 4 PROVIDERS AND THEIR FAMILIES In the previous chapters I examined dilemmas providers face in their relationships with "outsiders." Here we tum to issues that emerge in relationships between providers and members of their own families, as they transform the home into the site of paid work. In each set of relationships -with husbands, children, and members of the extended family-providers have to negotiate with the expectation that they are there to fulfill a traditional unpaid domestic role.1 They also have to protect their paid work against this same expectation. Providers and their husbands often see family day care as an activity that can augment the household income without denying the family the benefits of a full-time wife and mother. Underlying this view is an assumption that paid and unpaid work can be merged relatively easily. As any reader of the contemporary literature on industrial home-work or telecommuting knows, however, these homeworkers struggle to negotiate the simultaneous demands of employers and family members. Home-workers often find they can not meet production quotas unless they purchase supplemental care for their children and enlist the labor of family members; they work long hours for low pay and limited benefits.2 The literature on (nonwage) home-based work is less clear-cut about effects. As noted in the Introduction, analysts who focus on the dynamics of industrial home-work have often argued that because nonwage activities "at or from" the home emerge from a different relationship with the formal economy, they allow workers greater autonomy.3 Alternatively, many analysts who easily combine the two types of paid work in the home argue that all of these activities can have advantages for women who want to remain at home.4 Feminist historians argue differently about the effects of home-based work, even when they separate out cash-producing activities from unpaid Copyrighteflt fIIaterial 112 PROVIDERS AND THEIR FAMILIES domestic labor. They make two related points. The first is that these activities are not recognized as "real work," either by other family members or by the women themselves. The second is that these activities are entirely compatible with a traditional sexual division of labor.5 Karen Brodkin Sacks, for example, describes the involvement of women in a broad range of money-making activities such as "taking in piecework or boarders . . . , doing sewing, laundry or baking . . . , [or] running a small store or pushcart." And she argues that such informal activities have "played a key role in building working-class communities [that] heightened intracommunity dependence on the one hand and ... gave it a margin of independence from outside (and likely hostile) interests on the other." She also notes that these "family and community links . .. provided a significant basis of support for sustained workplace resistance."6 But she does not explore the possibility that these activities might also have provided women with the basis for challenging the very role with which they appear so congenial . Thus with Alice Kessler-Harris, she concludes,7 Most jobs in the informal economy ... were not only consistent with women's conventional roles at home, they reinforced them. Far from altering the balance of family relations , they perpetuated the notion that women could extend family income by being good wives and loyal family members. Moreover, they tied women into networks of kin and neighborhood activities that in tum tied the family into the social and economic life of the community, reinforcing the family's position within it and providing a larger context for women's hard work. There is some truth to all of these perspectives, but at least as they may apply to the specific case of family day care, there remains a core of misperception as well. If family day care providers are not themselves wage employees, they are often locked into inflexible work patterns shaped by the needs of clients who are wage workers. If the work of family day care has some advantages over work outside the home, it has disadvantages as well. And, as we will see, if family day care is sometimes compatible with domestic responsibilities, it can also conflict with and disrupt these tasks. Providers and members of their families do not always initially think of family day care as a real job. But they often come to acknowledge that it makes a genuine contribution to family survival and imposes significant and legitimate demands on the provider's time and energy. Thus although the provision Copyrighted Material [3.17.28...