Selective Identification, Quiet Distancing: Understanding the Working-Class Response to the Nordic Daycare Model

Abstract

In Norway, our empirical case, enrolment of children under three years old in formal daycare has increased rapidly during the last 5–6 years, especially among the working class. This has happened despite working-class parents' traditional reluctance to use such childcare services for the youngest children. As a pedagogical project, formal daycare mirrors middle-class cultural traits that seem to clash with traditional working-class notions about young children's needs. Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative study, this paper explores this new element in working-class parenting. The analysis suggests that working-class parents' response to daycare unfolds as a dual process; it involves participation and identification as well as distancing and separation. This pattern of selective identification and distancing is interpreted as a type of boundary management that structures working-class childhoods in particular ways. To facilitate a discussion of the wider cultural context that working-class parents' response both reflects and potentially reproduces, we contrast it to middle-class parents' ways of relating to daycare. Koselleck's (2004) analytical concepts of ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’ are used to explore such linkages.