The nursery workspace, emotional labour and contested understandings of commoditised childcare in the contemporary UK1

 1. The authors would like to thank all the careworkers who participated in this study for sharing their experiences with us, Julie MacLeavy, three anonymous reviewers, and Stacy Oliver at Trees Nursery (Southampton) for her especial care.

Abstract

Day nurseries are now the most prevalent form of childcare in the UK after grandparents. Yet, in contrast to the considerable administrative attention these spaces attract in terms of certification and oversight, little is known about nurseries as places to work. We extend existing scholarship through an analysis of care practices and emotional labour in day nurseries based on 400 h of participant observation and interviews with twenty-two care workers at five facilities in the South of England. We argue that although hard, draining work, nursery workers can also experience profound emotional connections with the children in their care. We then extend our analysis to argue that various kinds of boundary-work are undertaken in nursery space to both validate strong feelings (including love) between care workers and children, and maintain conceptual coherence over the emotional entitlements of parents and care workers in the context of emotional bonds between carers and children which blur sharp divisions between ‘kin’ and ‘non-kin’. Finally, we mobilise these findings to challenge dominant theoretical conceptualisations of commoditised care as incapable of providing nourishing emotional bonds, as well as portrayals of day nurseries as a priori ‘non-nurturing’ spaces which circulate widely in the UK popular press.

A excepción del cuidado de niños por sus abuelos, jardines infantiles son la forma más prevalente del cuidado de niños en el Reino Unido. A diferencia de la atención administrativo prevalente que estos espacio se atraen con respeto a certificación y descuido, hay poco conocido sobre los jardines infantiles como lugares de trabajo. Extendemos la erudición existente por un análisis de los practicas de cuidado y el trabajo emocional en los jardines infantiles basado en 400 horas de observación participante y entrevistas con 22 trabajadores sociales de cinco facilidades en el sur de la Inglaterra. Discutimos que aunque el trabajo es duro y difícil, los trabajadores en los jardines infantiles también pueden experimentar conexiones emocionalmente profundos con los niños que se cuiden. Después extendemos nuestro análisis para discutir que hay varias maneras en que los trabajadores intentan construir limites en el espacio del jardín infantil para ambos validar emociones fuertes (incluyendo amor) entre trabajadores y niños, y mantener coherencia conceptual sobre los derechos emocionales de padres y trabajadores sociales en el contexto de lazos emocionales entre los trabajadores y los niños que hacen que los divisiones entre ‘familiares’ y ‘no-familiares’ sean menos claros. Finalmente movilizamos estos hallazgos para cuestionar las conceptualizaciones teoréticos dominantes del cuidado mercantilizado como incapaz de proveer lazos emocionales alimentados; también como representaciones de jardines infantiles como espacios ‘no-amorosos’ a priori que circulan ampliamente en la prensa popular del Reino Unido.

Les crèches constituent maintenant la forme la plus importante de la garde des enfants au-dessous celle des grands-parents dans le RU. Malgré cette présence et au contraire à l'attention administrative prêtée à ces espaces, on ne connaît que très peu les crèches comme lieux de travail. Nous prolongeons la littérature existant à travers une analyse des pratiques de soin et du travail émotionnel dans les crèches menée à partir de 400 heures d'observation participante et des entretiens avec 22 employés dans cinq établissements dans le sud de l'Angleterre. Nous maintenons que malgré leur travail épuisant, les employés des crèches peuvent éprouver les liens émotionnels et profonds avec les enfants qu'ils gardent. Nous prolongeons ensuite notre analyse pour argumenter que dans les crèches il existe des formes variées d'entretien des limites. Ce travail sert d'un côté de valoriser les ressentiments forts (y compris l'amour) entre les employés et les enfants ainsi, et de l'autre de maintenir la cohérence conceptuelle parmi les droits émotionnels des parents et des employés des crèches car les liens entre les employés et les enfants brouille les divisions brusques entre relations familiales et non-familiales. Enfin nous utilisons nos résultats pour contester l'idée que le soin dans les crèches commerciales ne soit pas capable de fournir les liens émotionnels nourrissants ainsi que l'image circulée dans les médias britanniques qui représente les crèches comme les espaces nécessairement «non-soignants».

Keywords:

• childcare
• day nurseries
• care work
• emotional labour
• commoditised care
• affective practice

Keywords:

• el cuidado de niños
• jardines infantiles
• trabajo de cuidado
• trabajo emocional
• cuidado mercantilizado
• práctica afectiva

Keywords:

• garde des enfants
• crèches
• travail de soin
• travail émotionnel
• marchandisation du soin
• pratique affective

Notes

 1. The authors would like to thank all the careworkers who participated in this study for sharing their experiences with us, Julie MacLeavy, three anonymous reviewers, and Stacy Oliver at Trees Nursery (Southampton) for her especial care.

 2. The oft-cited ‘evidence’ of raised cortisol levels of children in nursery, upon which James (2010b) and others rely, is disputed: see especially Bishop (2011).

 3. See Osgood (2012) for more on the way nursery workers are maligned in the UK popular press. See McDowell et al. (2005), Osgood (2012) and Vincent and Ball (2006) for more on anxiety about working motherhood in relation to the rise of day nurseries in the UK.

 4. A dependent child is defined as under 16 or between 16 and 18 and still in education.

 5. For example, extrapolating from a sample of 542 dual-career partnerships (both partners in full-time employment in professional/managerial occupations) in case study locations of Reading and Newcastle. Gregson and Lowe (1994: 42) estimated that ‘between a third and a half of such households with pre-school age children employed a nanny’. The experiences of this relatively small group contrast sharply with those of the respondents to a 1994 childcare use survey which found that only 2 per cent of working mothers with dependent children used nannies (Finlayson, Ford, and Marsh 1996), as well as more recent data (see Figure 2).

 6. Thrift, for example, has identified attending to the (seemingly) ‘mundane emotional labour of the workplace’ (2008: 171) specifically as an important means of understanding how affective environments come into being.

 7. See Atkinson, Lawson, and Wiles (2011) for a review of this literature.

 8. See Chaney and Garcia Castro (1989) for more on fictive kinship relations in the context of in-home care workers.

 9. As Fauth et al. (2011: 6) note, until the 1990s child-minding had constituted the most common form of commoditised childcare in the UK.

10. Even as they focus their research on the in-home domestic labour of nannies, Gregson and Lowe (1994: 92) note that the demands of households with two working parents to find appropriately scheduled childcare had already led to ‘the growth of private nurseries in the 1980s’.

11. From the Forum on Child and Family Statistics (US), see http://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/famsoc3.asp and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2010).

12. Although we did not find the kind of antagonism as Vincent and Ball (see Part 4).

13. We did not interview any care workers from the nurseries our own children attend.

14. Thanks to one of the paper's referees for drawing our attention to Hopes and Dreams nursery, Islington, http://www.hopesanddreams.co.uk/nursery-school-north-london/EC1-N1.html

15. A single exception was a Polish-born worker who did not feel comfortable being recorded. This interview was documented by note-taking.

16. Although Nelson (1990a) focuses primarily on emotional limit-setting, some of the participants in her study did indicate that they found emotional gratification in their relationships with the children they cared for.

17. It is interesting to reflect on Dahlberg and Moss' (2005) account of municipal pre-schools in the Reggio Emilia district of Northern Italy, in which they argue that rather than seeking to echo the iconography of familial homes, nurseries should instead create spaces that focus more directly on problem-solving and critical thinking. We would suggest, however, that similar types of educational goals are indeed explicit within the Early Years curriculum in the UK, even as learning and teaching in our nursery settings invoked home-looking settings in their pedagogy.

18. Indeed, research suggests there may be similar efforts on the part of mothers to assert their role as primary caregivers relative to care workers, as O'Connell (2010) argues occurs in the UK case through the medium of food.

19. These comments are somewhat difficult to read given the extent to which high childcare costs in the UK can restrict its use (or serve as a rationale for part-time working by mothers).

20. Children in the UK begin primary school education in the academic year in which they turn 5. Pre-school generally refers to the 3–5 age group.