Child Day Care

Using Philadelphia as a case study, A Mother's Job explores the history of day care from the perspective of families who used it, tracing day care's transformation from a charity for poor single mothers in the early twentieth century to a legitimate and culturally accepted social need for ordinary families -- and a potential responsibility of government -- by the 1950s.

In this important book, William T. Gormley, Jr., argues that child care is a social problem of critical importance and that there are compelling reasons for government intervention. Because child care quality affects how children grow up - for better or for worse - the government has a responsibility to improve and reshape the child care system. Gormley offers a balanced, comprehensive analysis of market, government, and societal failures to ensure quality child care in the United States. He finds that unreliable child care contributes to family stress and undermines efforts to achieve educational readiness, welfare reform, and gender equity; that regulators and family support agencies do not distinguish sharply enough between good and bad child care facilities; and that government and businesses provide inadequate financial and logistical support. As a result, children suffer, as does society as a whole. Everybody's Children presents evidence on how different states and communities have responded to child care challenges. Gormley prescribes the roles to be played by federal, state, and local governments, for-profit and nonprofit child care providers, churches, schools, and family support agencies. He offers a number of reform strategies and argues that different levels of government and societal institutions must work together to achieve the goals of efficiency, justice, choice, discretion, coordination, and responsiveness - and, ultimately, to create the best system possible for our children.

Why has child care legislation developed along its present course? How did the political players influence lawmakers? What do the politics of child care legislation over the past thirty years indicate for the future? Based on more than one hundred interviews with legislators and executive branch officials, archival research, and secondary sources, this book looks at the politics behind child care legislation, rather than analyzing child care as a work and family issue. Identifying key junctures at which major child care bills were introduced and debated (1971, 1990, and 1996), Sally Cohen examines the politics surrounding each of these events and identifies the political structures and negotiations that evolved in the intervening years. In addition, Cohen looks at the impact the election of President Clinton has had on child care policymaking, and how child care legislation became part of other issues, including welfare reform, crime prevention, school readiness, and tax policy revisions.

An examination of the reasons why women become paid childcare providers.

In this timely book, Matia Finn-Stevenson & Edward Zigler argue that the federal government cannot solve the problems of school-linked child care & family support services-that, like education, these problems should be solved locally. The authors use their School for the 21st Century program as an example of how schools can provide child care, outreach services, home visitations, & health & nutrition services-in addition to reading, writing, & arithmetic. Whereas Part Two of the book discusses the authors' School for the 21st Century program in considerable detail, Parts One & Three address a broader range of issues concerning the effects that early education has on later school success & the various policy & conceptual approaches that have been tried, both nationally & internationally. The authors also critically review the research on the effects of child care & environment & on family support services.

"The focus of this short, well-written, and interesting book is employer support for child-care provision in the US. Topics include the need for and history of child care outside the home, the different types of support offered by employers (with examples), and the pros and cons for providing that support. An argument against expecting government assistance is presented. For Auerbach, a sociologist, an important consequence of the development of employer support is the legitimization of mothers working outside the home and children being cared for by nonfamily members. As a whole, this book provides a concise historical survey of this narrow topic." Choice

Day care was originally conceived by Soviet educators as a vehicle for fostering the roots of collectivism, patriotism, and love of work in children. As idealist dreams faded, objectives were reshaped to serve conformity, instill unquestioning obedience, and minimize individual differences. The author compares child care during the 1970s and early 1990s and finds important changes in overall goals and principles. Where once meticulous attention was paid to state-provided curricula and objectives that encouraged uniform thought and behavior, Ispa found in her recent trip that some teachers were beginning to encourage independent problem-solving, initiative, and recognition of differences among individuals. Ispa makes many fascinating comparisons between Russian and American day care, both in terms of facilities and attitudes toward children and their parents. This is an important contribution to the study of childhood around the world.