Class politics in the sandbox? An analysis of the socio‐economic determinants of preferences towards public spending and parental fees for childcare

This article analyses the socio‐economic determinants of public preferences towards public spending and parental fees for childcare and how they are conditioned by institutional contexts. Previous studies of childcare policy preferences have focused on attitudes regarding the provision of care. However, when it comes to questions of financing, we know astonishingly little about how supportive individuals actually are of expanding pre‐school early childhood education and care, and how support varies across different socio‐economic groups in society. This is an important research gap because childcare provision and how it is financed have redistributive implications, which vary depending on the institutional design of childcare policy. Using novel and unique survey data on childcare preferences from eight European countries, we argue and show that preferences towards expanding childcare are more contested than it is often assumed. The institutional structure of childcare shapes how income matters for preferences towards how much should be spent and how provision should be financed. Where access to childcare is socially stratified, the poor and the rich develop different preferences towards either increasing public spending or reducing parental fees in order to improve their access to childcare. The findings in this article suggest that expanding childcare in systems characterised by unequal access can be politically contested due to diverging policy priorities of individuals from different social backgrounds.     

Return of the Nanny: Public Policy towards In‐home Childcare in the UK,Canada and Australia

Research on early childhood education and care (ECEC) policy focuses overwhelmingly on formal, centre‐based provision and, to a lesser extent, on family day care (or childminding) provided in the homes of registered carers. Comparatively little research addresses the policy treatment of care provided in the child's home by nannies and au pairs. This article examines the position of in‐home childcare in Australia, the UK and Canada, and the varied nature and extent of public funding and regulation. Introducing a new dimension into comparative studies of ECEC, it also explores how shifts in migration policy in each country have intersected with ECEC funding and regulation to reshape the recruitment and employment of in‐home child carers. Australia, the UK and Canada are all liberal, market‐oriented countries, but there is considerable diversity in the way governments support and regulate in‐home childcare, their rationales for so doing, and in the connections between childcare and migration. We argue that connecting the analysis of in‐home childcare to migration policies raises new questions about the classification and comparison of ECEC policies.     

Problematising Australia's Nanny Pilot Program as evidence‐based policy: A reconstruction of the problem of childcare

In a notable departure from long‐standing childcare policy in Australia, in January 2016 fee relief was extended to nannies providing in‐home care in a 2‐year pilot program. This policy is significant as fee relief is not tied to the meeting of regulatory requirements designed to ensure quality early learning and care for young children. Drawing on Carol Bacchi's approach to policy analysis, this paper extends previous problematising of evidence‐based policy by highlighting the value of first considering how a policy ‘problem’ has been constructed. We propose that the nanny pilot is an ideologically driven policy that has emanated from a construction of childcare that is adult (parent)‐centred and marginalises the needs and interests of young children. Accordingly, certain evidence is privileged while other evidence is ignored, with the ensuing policy focused on economic imperatives rather than quality early learning and care experiences for young children. We draw on an analysis of parent, peak body and researcher submissions to the Productivity Commission's 2013–2014 childcare inquiry, nanny‐focused research, and data from three national surveys to explore the limitations of such a policy approach. The utility of problem reconstruction as a means of disrupting policy‐informed evidence and the legitimisation of purported evidence‐based policy is considered.     

“Learning from Others”: English proposals for early years education and care reform and policy transfer from France and the Netherlands, 2010–15

The United Kingdom has been a laggard in developing early years education and care, but the Labour Governments of 1998–2010 increased childcare places significantly, and the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition of 2010–15 continued to expand provision, despite its stringent austerity policy. However, the problem of securing availability, affordability, and quality persisted. The Coalition Government (very unusually) transferred policies from its Western European neighbors (the Netherlands and France) in order to address these issues. We show why differences in context made the kind of policy transfer that took place inappropriate and how this was related to the fate of the reform proposals.     

Childcare policies and services in Hong Kong after the handover: Beyond a feminist critique

This article reviews the development of childcare policies and services in Hong Kong after the handover, gauging it with two standards: promoting the equal development of children and gender equality in our society. Statistics derived from data taken from multiple sources show that the government has been sticking to a “positive non‐intervention approach” to welfare development and that the male breadwinner/female carer model prevalent in this region was shaped and strengthened by current childcare policies and services. The current provision of childcare services is insufficient to guarantee the equal use of childcare among children of different socioeconomic backgrounds, or to ease the tension between the needs of childcare and job requirements in a family, or to emancipate married women from the domestic sphere. A “generative welfare approach” that collects fiscal resources and redistributes them strategically with a systemic mind‐set has been suggested for social policy and service planning, including spending the money in the right place, launching smart and practical policies that can achieve both pragmatic effects and ideological improvement in the area of gender equality, providing financial support or subsidies to a company for the provision of parental leave, and increasing the provision of quality childcare services.     

Who uses public childcare for 2‐year‐old children? Coherent family policies and usage patterns in Sweden,Finland and Western Germany

European countries have increased their public childcare provision for children under age 3. However, it is unclear if and how usage patterns differ across countries. This study examined the relationship between the socio‐economic characteristics of mothers and the use of childcare for 2‐year‐old children. Using European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions data for the years 2005–2008, we analysed the characteristics of mothers and usage patterns in Sweden, Finland and Western Germany. To single out the effect of maternal employment, working and non‐working mothers were investigated separately. Our findings showed that, in Sweden, a country with strong support for dual‐earner families, usage was largely independent of mothers' characteristics. However, in Western Germany, where more support is given to male breadwinner families, and in Finland, a country with pluralistic family support, highly educated mothers were found to be more likely to use childcare than were mothers with lower levels of education.     

How long is the queuing for public childcare facilities in Korea? An empirical analysis of Korean households' childcare mode choice with the limited availability of public childcare facilities

This paper empirically investigates Korean households' choice of childcare mode using the Korean Childcare Users Survey (2012). A multivariate logit model with partial observability (hereafter, PO‐logit model) is employed to address the issue of Korean households' demand for public childcare facilities exceeding capacity limits. Our estimation result rejects the hypothesis of no queueing at conventional significance levels to advocate use of the PO‐logit model in explaining Korean households' childcare choices. We decompose choice probabilities of public childcare facilities to estimate the size of queuing. Our results imply that 31.8% of parents preferring public childcare facility are forced to choose other childcare modes due to capacity limit.     

Reducing Inequality in Childcare Service Use across European Countries: What (if any) Is the role of Social Spending?

Childcare services are increasingly put forward as one of the most important policy levers to combat poverty and inequality. However, higher income families use childcare services to a much larger extent than lower income families. Almost all European countries increased expenditures on childcare over the past years, but has an ever‐increasing public spending on childcare provision led to more equality in its use? In this article, the relationship between spending and childcare use as well as between spending and inequality in childcare use over the period 2006–12 is empirically analyzed using a random effects model drawing on country‐level panel data (n = 156), derived from the EU‐SILC and OECD SOCX databases. Since governments can spend money in different ways, it is discussed whether a public or a market‐based strategy to subsidize childcare provision is related to more equality. The results suggest that more spending leads to higher levels of childcare use, but not directly to lower levels of inequality. For achieving equity in childcare use, government investment should lead to an expansion of childcare places across the income distribution. The findings allow the formulation of new hypotheses regarding the role of the private market in childcare services provision.     

Social Competence with Peers in Third Grade: Associations with Earlier Peer Experiences in Childcare1

The early developmental antecedents of individual differences in children's social functioning with peers in third grade were examined using longitudinal data from the large‐scale National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) study of early child care. In a sample of 1,364 children, with family and child factors controlled, the frequency of positive and negative peer interactions in childcare between 24 and 54 months and the number of hours spent in childcare peer groups of different sizes (alone, dyad, small, medium, large) predicted third graders' peer competence at three levels of analysis: individual social skills, dyadic friendships, and peer‐group acceptance. Children who had more positive experiences with peers in childcare had better social and communicative skills with peers in third grade, were more sociable and co‐operative and less aggressive, had more close friends, and were more accepted and popular. Children with more frequent negative experiences with peers in childcare were more aggressive in third grade, had lower social and communicative skills, and reported having fewer friends. When children spent more time in small‐sized peer groups in childcare (four or fewer children at 24 months of age up to seven or fewer at 54 months), they were more sociable and co‐operative in third grade, but their teachers rated them as more aggressive, suggesting that such children may be more socially outgoing and active both positively and negatively. Like those who spent more time in small peer groups, children who spent more hours in medium‐sized groups received higher ratings for peer aggression by their third‐grade teachers. Children who spent more time with one other child in childcare or in small peer groups had fewer classroom friends in third grade as reported by the teacher but not according to maternal report or self‐report. There were no significant associations between the amount of time children spent in large childcare‐based peer groups and third‐grade peer social competence.     

Opportunity for Childcare: The Impact of Government Initiatives in England upon Childcare Provision

This paper considers the impact of recent government initiatives upon childcare provision for children under the age of five. It is based upon interviews with parents and providers from two contrasting wards in Liverpool. The aim of the research was to identify key issues and concerns with regard to childcare, and perceptions about the impact of developments within social security and education provision. Government policies have concentrated on supporting working parents who need to pay for formal childcare, and on providing an earlier start to the formal education of young children. There is a fear that this focus may be failing to recognize and support the diversity of families and their childcare needs.     

Developing Early Years Childcare in England, 1997–2002: The Choices for (Working) Mothers

The UK has long been near the bottom of the EU “childcare league”. Attitudes of policymakers towards employment for the mothers of young children were ambivalent up to and including the Thatcher years, and the problem of “reconciling” work and family was historically deemed to be a private decision. This changed in 1998, when the Labour government put forward the first ever national childcare strategy. This paper argues that the aims behind the strategy were intimately linked to the attack on poverty and social exclusion in that: (1) efforts to stimulate provision focused on disadvantaged neighbourhoods; (2) subsidy was provided for early years education , rather than care (in order to give children a better start in life); and (3) stimulating provision was intended to promote women's employment, especially among lone‐mother families, thereby improving the material welfare of poor families. The means of expanding childcare have taken the form of a complicated set of demand‐ and supply‐side subsidies, reflecting the ongoing commitment to a mixed economy of childcare. The paper argues that this has implications for access and quality, and that there are tensions between the social investment approach to childcare on the one hand, and the desire to promote mothers’ employment on the other.     

Childcare Expansion in East Asia: Changing Shape of the Institutional Configurations in Japan and South Korea

The provision of childcare in Korea and Japan has traditionally been intensively conducted within the family. Recent social and demographic transformations have been profound and these have resulted in significant policy changes in both countries. This study examines the institutional configurations of the provisions of childcare among the state, market, and family and how they have changed in Korea and Japan over time. The institutional configurations were quantitatively evaluated based on an estimation of care time. Our findings suggest that care time provided in market and state facilities has become much larger in Japan than in Korea. In both countries, the care time provided by market facilities is much larger than in state facilities. Over the years, both market and state provisions of care have increased in Korea whereas state care provisions have decreased and market provisions have increased in Japan. However, this does not mean that the centralization of the family in the provision of childcare has shifted. In fact, the care time within the family has increased in both countries, suggesting that Korea and Japan have become more caring welfare states.     

The Relations between Infant Negative Reactivity,Non‐maternal Childcare,and Children's Interactions with Familiar and Unfamiliar Peers

The present study examined the influence of children's experiences during non‐maternal childcare on their behavior toward unfamiliar peers. Participants included children classified as negatively reactive at four months of age (N = 52) and children not negatively reactive (N = 61), who were further divided into those who experienced non‐maternal care and those who did not. Children were observed during childcare at 24 months of age and in the laboratory with an unfamiliar peer at 24 and 36 months of age, where their wariness, dysregulation, and social engagement were assessed. Within the negatively reactive childcare group, children's positive interactions with peers during childcare at 24 months predicted lower levels of wariness toward an unfamiliar peer at 36 months. This relation was not significant for children not classified as negatively reactive. The findings suggest that the influence of non‐maternal childcare is dependent on a child's temperament and on the nature of peer interactions during care.     

Access to Childcare in Europe: Parents' Logistical Challenges in Cross‐national Perspective

A burgeoning comparative literature has identified the centrality of childcare policy and provision in promoting parental, and specifically maternal, participation in paid employment across countries. This literature has focused on the importance of macro‐level institutional arrangements, with a special emphasis on variation in availability of, and access to, formal early childhood education and care services. However, there has been limited comparative exploration of what this means in practice at the micro‐level: the everyday challenges parents face when attempting to navigate the childcare system and the labour market simultaneously. Taking inspiration from human geography literature on the concept of ‘space–time fixity’, we present cross‐national findings on the logistical challenges of arranging childcare. Evidence is drawn from interviews with parent‐ and childcare‐related organizations in six European countries: Germany, Hungary, Italy, Slovenia, Sweden and the UK. Our research provides a richer understanding of childcare availability than would a sole focus on formal childcare services, by elucidating the difficulties parents face in organizing access to these services, which can be a challenge to some extent even in contexts where childcare services are comprehensive and affordable.     

Classroom Composition,Childcare History and Social Development: Are Childcare Effects Disappearing or Spreading?

Core findings of the ongoing National Institute of Child Health and Human Development study of early child care and youth development through the end of the primary-school years are summarized, highlighting the fact that both positive effects of good quality care on cognitive-linguistic-academic functioning and negative effects of extensive exposure to childcare on social development dissipate over time. Results showing that more time spent in any type of care or in center-based care in particular predict somewhat elevated levels of externalizing problems are given special attention and considered in light of new results from the early childhood longitudinal study showing that being in kindergarten classrooms comprised of many children with extensive childcare histories contributes to externalizing behavior over and above children's own personal childcare histories. Implications of these latter results for the study of childcare are considered, especially with respect to the meaning of evidence documenting apparently dissipating childcare effects.     

Gender,work, and childcare in Kazakhstan,Mongolia, and Russia

The current study seeks to understand the nature of gender relations within a post‐Soviet welfare model in Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Russia. On the basis of the analysis of key labour market indicators, parental leave, and childcare policies, it finds that the welfare models in the three countries are hybrid, and neither authoritarianism in Kazakhstan and Russia nor democracy in Mongolia lead to substantive gender equality outcomes. Persistent gender inequality in these countries is underpinned by the neo‐liberal approach to welfare provision, conservative social norms, and limited agency of civil society to influence the policy agenda. Nonetheless, these states have distributed to the population with an emphasis on working mothers, and this policy choice has been driven by economic, demographic, and political considerations, which ultimately serve to support, rather than transform, the patriarchal power structure in these societies.     

Pathways to gender equality: A configurational analysis of childcare instruments and outcomes in 21 European countries

The ability to produce desired outcomes represents an important basis of the legitimacy of social policies. Nonetheless, policy outcomes have not systematically figured in the analysis of childcare regimes despite growing political interest in issues such as female employment, gender wage gap, and men's involvement in childcare. In this article, we use fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to investigate the relationship between the configuration of policy instruments, attitudes toward childcare and outcomes in 21 European countries. Our results show that there is only one mix of policy instruments consistently linked with positive gender equality outcomes and this route has the quality of the universal caregiver model. It also demonstrates that both a combination of policy instruments and favorable attitudinal factors are necessary to produce desirable outcomes in the gender division of paid work and unpaid childcare.     

Attitudes towards childcare policies,policy feedback and path dependency: Czech Republic contrasted to Norway

This article explores the recent changes in mothers’ employment, childcare policies and attitudes towards gender equality in the labour market, in the Czech Republic and Norway, how these factors interact and what impact they have on the provision of childcare. Analysis suggests that there is convergence of the Czech Republic with Norway in terms of female employment, but divergence in childcare policies. The policy feedback – the mutual interrelatedness of attitudes towards mothers’ employment and childcare policies – has shaped refamilialising policies in the Czech Republic, whereas in Norway policies that support gender equality in work and family have emerged.     

Economic well‐being of low‐income single‐mother families following welfare reform in the USA

This study explored changes in net disposable income for low‐income single‐mother families before and after the 1996 welfare reform in the USA. Although many studies on welfare reform have focused on employment or total family income as a way to measure low‐income single‐mother families’ economic well‐being, little is known about their net income after expenses related to entering the workforce. This study analyzed net disposable income after tax deductions and childcare costs to provide a more accurate understanding of income changes using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation conducted by the US Census Bureau. The results revealed that while low‐income single mothers were working more after welfare reform, their net disposable income decreased during this time because their earnings were low and offset by an increase in childcare costs and a decline in means‐tested benefits, including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits. Key Practitioner Message: ● To understand effects of the 1996 welfare reform on low‐income families’ economic well‐being; ● To understand comprehensive income sources and work related expenses of low‐income families; ● To provide policy suggestions for comprehensive childcare subsidies to support low‐income single mothers’ employment.     

Working parents with young children: cross-national comparisons of policies and programmes in three countries

Multiple global trends are putting pressure on governments to develop policies and programmes that meet the needs of families with children aged 0–3. This cross-national analysis focuses on policies and programmes of parental leave and childcare in the United States, Sweden and Japan. Cross-national studies of early childhood education and care are reviewed. National profiles are provided of demographic, economic, political and socio-cultural characteristics and of parental leave and childcare policies and programmes. Policies and programmes are compared in relation to equity of coverage and support of basic parental childrearing and child-protection responsibilities. Issues raised highlight the need for unified programmes and policies, and continuing global dialogue regarding the needs of this population.