Child Care in Context

Cross-cultural Perspectives

Michael E. Lamb, Kathleen J. Sternberg, Carl-Philip Hwang, Anders G. Broberg

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317760061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Child care is an integral part of the web of influences and experiences that shape children's development. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach that covers both historic and economic contexts, this unique book characterizes child care in 18 countries on five continents. Specific historical roots and the current social contexts of child care are delineated in industrialized as well as in developing countries. To increase the depth of crosscultural analysis and integration, commentators from countries and disciplines other than the authors comment on the issues raised in each chapter.

1

Sociocultural Perspectives on Nonparental Child Care

MICHAEL E. LAMB
KATHLEEN J. STERNBERG

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

Anyone visiting a bookstore in Western Europe or the United States in the last 10 or 15 years might emerge with the idea that arrangements for nonparental childcare represented a new set of problems. In fact, decisions and arrangements about children’s care and supervision are among the oldest problems faced by human society. The fact that they have not been frequently discussed says more about the failure of the men with political and intellectual power to discuss a women’s issue than about the novelty of the issues themselves.

Unfortunately, the long history of attempts to make childcare arrangements has not reduced the complexity of the issues faced by contemporary parents and policymakers, although it has ensured that a diverse array of solutions or resolutions have been developed. The chapters in this book sketch some of the arrangements that have developed in various parts of the world. The goal of this chapter is to provide a framework for analyzing these individual solutions and making cautious and informed comparisons. The first section sketches the behavioral ecology of childcare. We then discuss the various purposes that nonparental childcare can be designed to serve. In the third section, we describe the ideological dimensions along which countries can be arrayed and the resulting dangers of superficial generalization from one country to another. In the penultimate section, we summarize implications for the three audiences–policymakers, researchers, practitioners–addressed by the contributors. Finally, there is a chapter-by-chapter preview of the book.

HUMAN ECOLOGY

The evolution of Homo sapiens created a species for which decisions about child-care arrangements and the division of time and energy among child care, provisioning, and other survival relevant activities have always been necessary (Lancaster, Rossi, Altmann, & Sherrod, 1987). For biological and anatomical reasons, humans are born at a much earlier stage of individual development than the young of any other mammalian species (Altmann, 1987). As a result, a larger proportion of development takes place outside the womb in humans, and this ensures that the period of dependency, and thus the process of socialization, are greatly extended. As a consequence, parental investment in each child must be extremely high in order to maximize the child’s chance for survival. In addition, humans have long been forced to develop complex and extended alliances and arrangements with others in order to ensure the survival of both themselves and their offspring. Many theorists believe that pair-bonding represents one adaptation to the basic needs of human parents to cooperate in the provisioning, defense, and rearing of their offspring (Lancaster & Lancaster, 1987): The family emerged as a result. In some environments, multifamily units developed to maximize individual survival in circumstances where, for example, hunting or gathering required cooperative strategies.

Studies of modern hunter-gatherers provide insight into the social organizations that might have developed in such circumstances. In many of these societies, within-family divisions of responsibility between men and women are paralleled by cooperative hunting strategies among men and cooperative gathering strategies among women. Depending on the task, the season, the children’s ages, the availability of alternatives, and the women’s condition, children accompany one or the other parent, or are left under the supervision of adults or older children. Although the strategies of provisioning, protection, and childcare are different in industrialized countries and even in those societies where pastoral or agricultural traditions have replaced nomadic hunting and gathering, similar choices must always be made. Exclusive maternal care throughout the period of dependency was never an option in “the environment of evolutionary adaptedness” and there are no societies today in which it is the typical practice. Indeed, exclusive maternal care was seldom an option in any phase of human history; it emerged as a possibility for a small elite segment of society during one small portion of human history. It is testimony to the power of recent mythology, and ignorance of the dominant human condition throughout history, that exclusive maternal care came to be labeled as the traditional or natural form of human child care, with all deviations from this portrayed as unnatural and potentially dangerous. Such deviations abound, with the available options and individual choices determined by economic circumstances, local social demography, history, and cultural ideology. Of these, economic forces–particularly the need for women to work outside the home in order to support or help support their families–play the major role in determining whether and what types of nonparental care arrangements are made. Indeed, in many nonindustrialized countries, custodial child-care facilities have developed to provide care for the unsupervised children of urban working parents (see Nsamenang, chap. 12). To complicate matters, however, economic, demographic, ideological, and historical forces often exert inconsistent and contrasting pressures, as when economic circumstances force ideologically unacceptable practices. In most Western Europe and North American countries, for example, the utilization of formal nonmaternal care facilities has increased more rapidly than the positive attitude toward such forms of care. Economic circumstances have forced families to make nonmaternal care arrangements of which many parents, and others in their communities, disapprove. It is not uncommon for ideology to be shaped by practice rather than vice versa, and for ideology to exert a cautious brake instead of becoming the driving force behind such change. The central prominence of economic forces can be illustrated with many examples.

Consider the experience of Sweden. Sweden has a remarkably comprehensive, well-integrated, and carefully planned national family policy (Broberg & Hwang, 1991; Lamb & Levine, 1983). Among the benefits available to Swedish parents are extended periods of paid parental leave and subsidized child-care facilities providing exceptionally high-quality care to children whose parents have exhausted their parental leave. The system in Sweden did not emerge simply because the Swedes decided it was best for parents to stay home with their young infants or that Swedish children would benefit from out-of-home care. Instead, Swedish family policy was developed because the rapid industrialization of Sweden and the sustained demands for the products of Swedish industry produced a national labor shortage. In order to increase the number of women who were employed and to increase the willingness of young families to bear and rear future workers, it was necessary to develop a comprehensive system in which women were well paid, in which early child care could be accomplished without professional or financial sacrifices, and in which the assured availability of high-quality nonparental child-care facilities made it a positive experience to have and rear children. The ideological packaging around the system sometimes obscures the basic economic forces that led to its evolution. Of course, the character of the resulting system depended on many unique features of the Swedish nation, as pointed out later in this chapter, but economic forces made a system necessary.

As in Sweden, the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe make child-care facilities widely available in order to facilitate the increased participation of women in the paid labor force. These governments were not motivated by ideological commitments any more than the brief attempts by the U.S. and Canadian governments to become involved in the financial support and supervision of nonmaternal child-care facilities during the World War II. The establishment and funding of day-care centers in both countries was motivated solely by the need to encourage women to work in wartime industries while potential male workers were away at war. Not surprisingly, support for the day-care centers rapidly disappeared when the men were demobilized. In place of “Rosie the Riveter” emerged the myth of the traditional American family, a powerful mythology that led women out of the paid labor force into domestic roles and responsibilities.

Finally, in what is now Israel, small agricultural settlements called kibbutzim were established in the early part of the 20th century by Jewish socialists from Eastern Europe who were determined to establish a new life-style by cultivating the land of Israel after centuries of exile. The malaria infested swamplands and rocky desert soils posed severe problems for the idealistic and inexperienced farmers. The poor economic and housing conditions and the need for women to participate in the labor force made it expedient to have one person, usually a woman, take care of several children rather than to sanction each mother to care for her own child. Children lived in collective dormitories and visited their parents for several hours every day. Over the ensuing decades, the emergence of the communal child-care system has been attributed to ideological commitment while the role played by economic necessity has been down played. Interestingly, most of the kibbutzim have prospered economically and have left behind many of their socialist and communalistic ideals. Their contemporary life-styles contrast with the values on which the kibbutz system was founded, leading to frequent inconsistencies between the expressed goals of the childrearing system and its actual manifestation.

The tendency to develop post-hoc ideological explanations is pervasive, and tends to obscure the central role of economic circumstances in the development of nonparental care arrangements. We know of no society or country in which the basic demand for nonmaternal child care has not been driven by economic forces.

THE GOALS AND PURPOSES OF NONPARENTAL CHILD CARE

The crucial role of economic forces–in particular, the increasing need for women to seek employment outside the home–forces us to ask whose interests nonparental child-care arrangements should or do serve. Developmental psychologists have studied the effects on children and opponents of nonparental care often cite adverse effects on children to justify their opposition, thus one might mistakenly conclude that nonparental care was designed to serve the needs of children. This is simply not true. As shown here, and as the other contributors to this book repeatedly indicate, nonparental care arrangements have proliferated because parents need to be employed and cannot simultaneously care for their children.

With economic need driving the demand for and availability of nonparental child-care facilities, nonparental care has been used in various countries to serve a variety of purposes. The five most important purposes are briefly discussed here: protection of class interests, fostering equal employment opportunities, acculturation and ideological indoctrination, the encouragement of economic self-sufficiency, and the enrichment of children’s lives.

FIG. 1.1 Children sitting with metaplot near a residential tent at Kibbutz Shar Ha Amakim (1935).

Protection of Class Interests

First, group care facilities have been made available by one segment of society to their less fortunate compatriots to serve the needs of those in power. In the 1820s and 1830s, for example, settlement homes were established in the United States to care for poor children (Getis & Vinovskis, chap. 6). They were established by the wealthier ruling classes not because they wished to benefit and enhance the welfare of the poor, but because they wished to protect themselves from the poor. Settlement homes removed poor children from the streets and thus prevented them from turning to crime–and preying on the middle classes–to support themselves. Similarly, infant schools (bewaarplaatsen) were established in the late 1800s by upper-class Dutch women with the clear purpose of “civilizing” poor children in order to protect society from rebellion and crime (Clerkx & van IJzendoorn, chap. 3). And although exclusive maternal care was viewed as the best way of restoring Dutch society in the postwar era, the Dutch established special remedial nurseries to socialize poor children and educate their mothers. These mothers were not allowed to be employed to ensure they would benefit from their reeducation and not threaten the prevailing national disapproval of day care.

FIG. 1.2 Children with metapelet in the sand box 50 years later 1985.

Fostering Gender-neutral Employment Opportunities

Child-care policies in many countries have been designed at least in part to equalize the potential employment opportunities of men and women. The formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe, for example, made this a central feature of their family policies. Ironically, there are very few countries in which equality of opportunity has really been achieved, despite the costly and extensive investment in child-care facilities. Even in countries like Sweden, with a long-established and popular commitment to gender equality, almost all child-care providers are women. Ironically, whether or not it is economically necessary or possible in some countries for both men and women to be gainfully employed outside the home, most women who are employed are engaged in female-type activities–often the same activities they would otherwise perform at home without pay. And, in most countries, women do not enjoy equitable pay, whether or not their professions are integrated.

Acculturation of Immigrants

Child-care facilities have frequently been used to facilitate acculturation or ideological indoctrination. In northern Italy, for example, the number of children in preschools nearly doubled in the 1960s because the educational philosopher Ciari believed that preschools could be used to create common cultural foundations for children from different backgrounds (Corsaro & Emiliani, chap. 4). In Israel, the speed with which successive waves of Jewish immigrants have risen to positions of economic and political power can be partially attributed to the participation of immigrant children in preschool programs, where they learn Hebrew and the norms of Israeli Jewish culture (Rosenthal, chap. 9). In turn, the children socialize and teach their parents. In the People’s Republic of China, child care was made available in the early 1950s to ensure that children learned the importance of hard work and individual sacrifice (Lee, chap. 11). Universal day care also permitted parents to participate in reeducation programs, sponsored by the new communist government as part of their plan for the reconstruction of China. Finally, Shwalb and his colleagues (chap. 10) point out that preschool education was made widely available to 4- and 5-year-old Japanese children in 1941 in part because the government wanted to use kindergarden as a means of fostering nationalism.

Reduction of Welfare Dependency

The provision of child-care facilities has often been utilized as a tool to encourage women to seek job training or paid employment and thus to cease being the beneficiaries of welfare. In the United States, pursuit of this goal has led to major revisions of the welfare system in the 1980s. Ironically, this goal has been advanced with greatest vigor in the United States by those right-wing politicians who have opposed other governmental involvement in child care. Similar goals have been pursued in Israel by politicians of diverse ideological persuasions.

Enrichment of Children’s Lives

Some child-care facilities and policies have been developed because they want to enrich the lives of children. The development of the U.S. Head Start program in 1965 exemplified such a motivation to provide child care, especially for the poorest and most disadvantaged members of society. Campos (chap. 14) describes the more recent development in Brazil of a compensatory educational program explicitly modeled after the Head Start program. Another example can be found in Italy where the Catholic church, despite its strong opposition to nonmaternal care, viewed preschools as an effective technique for socializing children from impoverished homes whose parents were considered incapable of effective socialization (Corsaro & Emiliani, chap. 4). Only later was preschool deemed acceptable for children from better socioeconomic circumstances. In Great Britain, day care is considered a service for children at risk and those whose parents cannot cope (Melhuish & Moss, chap. 5). Popular disapproval of day care in general is reinforced by a policy of channeling government funding to day-care centers serving disadvantaged, troubled, and disabled children. In Canada, meanwhile, it took the recommendations of a government task force in the mid-1980s to recast day care as a service of potential value to all Canadian families, rather than as a service for disadvantaged and immigrant children (Goelman, chap. 8). In many parts of Africa, private and public agencies have established child-care facilities to care for children who would otherwise be unsupervised while their parents are at work (Nsamenang, chap. 12). In most cases, however, concern with enriching the lives of children does not motivate the initial development of nonparental care facilities; it represents an attempt to make the best of existing practice. Parents and their governmental representatives may hope for care of adequate quality, but there is ample evidence that parents often accept...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• The Contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Sociocultural Perspectives on Nonparental Child Care
• I Case Studies From Western Europe
• Commentaries
• II Case Studies From the North Atlantic
• Commentaries
• III Case Studies From Asia and the Middle East
• Commentaries
• IV Case Studies From Africa
• Commentary
• V A Case Study From South America
• VI Epilogue
• Author Index
• Subject Index