Caring is the natural corollary of having children, i.e. much—if not everything—one does as a parent. And though it is often hard work, caring and the dependencies, relationships, affective experiences, intimacies and conflicts it engenders are the most authentic and valuable for many who are parents. It is because of its affective inevitabilities perhaps that the routine organisation of care—and that of young children in particular—is so central to many parents’ lives regardless of employment responsibilities, income and wealth, the benefits and services available to assist one as a parent and, for some, the child’s age. Indeed, many parents actively make decisions about their children’s routine care arrangements as their children grow up, just as they make decisions about other issues related to their children’s upbringing. Yet parental and family decision-making in relation to routine childcare during the early years has rarely constituted an object of analysis in its own right: the focus on childcare arrangements has most often been in focus in theoretical and empirical debates about mothers’ employment decisions and maternal employment rates .
This book addresses this gap by shifting attention to the organisation of young children’s routine care through the perspective of individual parents and couples. In doing so, it takes care seriously in that it prioritises a focus on care arrangements as an object of analysis, related to, but conceptually distinct from mothers’ employment and care decisions. Though the volume also discusses parents’ post-partum employment transitions and trajectories, this is of secondary focus. In short, young children’s routine care is not treated as an employment barrier whose satisfactory delegation enables mothers’ labour market participation , but an important issue in its own right, worthy of scholarly attention. Thus, the book sets out to explain how families of young children arrive at the specific routine care arrangements that they rely on, especially when these arrangements involve carers other than the parents. It does so by drawing on extensive in-depth interview material with Romanian mothers and fathers from very diverse walks of life and during two different time periods. Its main contribution is the articulation of a theory of process concerning routine childcare arrangements. Recognising the uncertainties, moral predicaments and constraints in the context of which young children’s caring and its delegation takes place and is decided, the explanatory framework formulated highlights how culture informs parents’ thinking about and decision-making in relation to routine care arrangements for children under age five in the form of ideals of care and the hierarchies they were found to form. The conceptually formulated explanation also captures the influential role played by family policy provisions, reinforcing Monique Kremer’s (2007) argument that welfare states should be thought of as ‘caring states’: through various policy instruments, they fundamentally shape how the care of children (and other dependents) is accomplished by embodied individuals.
1.1 Mothers’ Work-Care Decisions: Limitations of a Research Agenda
What we know about parents’ decisions concerning young children’s routine care arrangements we know mainly from research on mothers’ (in some cases parents’) employment and care decisions following childbirth . One strand of empirical research on this topic, most common in English-speaking nations, has been the use of large-N methodologies to predict maternal or environmental characteristics most strongly associated with particular ‘care arrangements’ and employment patterns, typically operationalised as hours worked. Most of these studies have been interested to identify the factors most closely associated with the outcomes of interest, often highlighting the impact of demographic particularities such as children’s age (Borra and Palma 2009; Fram and Kim 2008) and mothers’ ethnicity/race (Fram and Kim 2008), that of environmental factors such as the costs of childcare alternatives (Borra and Palma 2009; Debacker 2008; Lokshin 2004; Lokshin and Fong 2006) and the availability of formal childcare services (Du and Dong 2013; Habibov 2015; Vandenbroeck et al. 2008) or the role played by ‘process-oriented’ factors such as mothers’ employment decisions (Borra and Palma 2009) or maternal stress (Peyton et al. 2001) . Invariably , however , these studies have been geared towards explaining mothers’ work-care arrangements. Furthermore, children’s ‘care arrangements’ often refer to the principal non-maternal care alternatives relied on while in work, but these studies neither propose, nor make use of a conceptually coherent, exhaustive taxonomy of care arrangements (for an extensive critique, see Kovács 2015a).
Mixed method and qualitative studies have been much more insightful when it comes to understanding individual mothers’ and couples’ decision-making concerning routine care arrangements for their young children. Pungello and Kurtz-Costes (2000) in the US and, unrelatedly, Himmelweit (2002) in the UK conducted medium-N studies to find out whether and in what ways employed pregnant women’s attitudes1 and perceived constraints regarding employment and the delegation of childcare changed post-partum. Both studies revealed that first-time mothers’ experiences of caring for their children themselves and delegating caring to others, respectively, had differentiated effects on their attitudes towards childcare and employment later on and on constraints perceived in relation to employment after giving birth. Both studies concluded that consistency between attitudes and behaviour further strengthened the former, while inconsistencies were likely to result either in behavioural or in attitudinal change. In other words, maternal attitudes towards work and care were found to be adaptive in light of experience. The novelty of Himmelweit’s (2002: 15–16) decision-making model was showing how adaptive maternal attitudes sat at the heart of a positive feedback mechanism regarding maternal employment and full-time motherhood , respectively.
Duncan and Edwards (1999) articulated another conceptual model for explaining mothers’ work-care decisions in their extensive qualitative study of British lone mothers’ employment decisions . They questioned the extent to which women make employment decisions using an economistic rationale , as a result of favourable cost-benefit analyses . They concluded that for mothers decisions about employment and motherhood were of a moral nature (see also Duncan et al. 2003, 2004) . They proposed an explanatory framework drawing on this particularity of mothers’ reasonings and decisions related to the accommodation of childcare responsibilities and the need, obligation or desire to work for pay. The organising concept of their model is what they termed “gendered moral rationalities” , defined thus:
We term the understandings the lone mothers held about their identity as mothers, and as lone mothers in particular, espec...