Producing the patchwork: the hidden work of mothers in organizing child care

ABSTRACT

This article aims to explore how child care is organized in families, documenting how mothers produce their individual child care solution, or “patchwork”, within the context of Canada’s underfunded and fragmented child care system. In a sample of 109 mothers from Alberta, Canada, where child care is conceptualized as primarily a private family responsibility, we use an ecocultural theoretical framework and a gender lens to 1) identify the constraints that influenced what kinds of child care mothers used, 2) explore the organization of day-to-day child care arrangements, and 3) explicate the accommodations and flexibility required to sustain the family routine. We show that in addition to previously recognized categories of child care—formal, informal, and mixed—families also used multiple informal and parent-plus (i.e., parental plus non-parental) child care. The procurement and management of child care—particularly when multiple care providers were involved—was gendered, often invisible, and required substantial accommodations and flexibility by mothers. We propose a day-care plus policy model of child care, where formal arrangements are supplemented as required. This policy model could help families avoid the complex scenarios we conceptualize as chaotic flexibility and assist families in achieving sustainable flexibility in the organization of care.

KEYWORDS:

• Child care
• child care arrangements
• gender lens
• family policy
• ecocultural theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Meyers and Jordan (2006)’s accommodations’ model has been used in a number of US-based quantitative studies to examine selection into early childhood programmes for low-income families (Coley, Votruba-Drzal, Collins, & Miller, 2014; Crosnoe, Partell, Davis-Kean, Ansari, & Benner, 2016), as well as use of formal and informal child care for families from different ethnic backgrounds (Ackert, Ressler, Ansari, & Crosnoe, 2018). We use Weisner’s conceptual framework because of the focus on ecocultural contexts, which are critical in understanding the complex organization of care.

2 The phrase ‘crazy quilt’ was used earlier by Italian Sociologist Laura Balbo (1992) to describe the way that women used limited resources to patch together often limited resources to meet the needs of their families. As explained by Balbo, a crazy quilt is one of the earliest forms of quilts that women made out of scraps of available fabric, the final product resembling a jigsaw puzzle.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Alberta Centre for Child, Family and Community Research; Muttart Foundation.