I Love Children, and Four–Pence a Week is Four–Pence!: Contradictions of Caring in Family Day Care

Abstract

The laundress who looks after her neighbour’s children in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (as cited in Brennan, 1994, p.131) saw no contradiction in charging for services which mothers provide freely. Others are not so sanguine. Another paradox identified when family day care was established in Australia was that while the service provided desperately needed child care for women in the paid workforce, it did so at the cost of the mainly working–class women who cared for others’ children in their own homes. Our research on the knowledge and skills of family day–care providers in Western Australia has attempted to explore some of these contradictions inherent in family day care. In–depth interviews of a subsample of licensed providers explored, among other things, reasons for becoming a provider, perceived differences between family day care and “natural” mothering, and the impact family day–care training has on ideologies and practices of mothering. In this paper we report on those interviews and examine the ways in which family day–care providers acknowledge and deal with these contradictions of care. We examine the implications of these findings to the current debate about child care and the roles of mothers.

Key Words:

• Family Day Care
• Ideologies of Mothering
• Child Care