We are not babysitters: family child care providers redefine work and care

Abstract

We Are Not Babysitters, Mary Tuominen dispels not only myths about why women choose to be family child care providers and what it means to them, but also exposes how our social attitudes about care and our public child care policies shortchange these providers, most of whom are working mothers themselves with their own tenuous hold on self-sufficiency. A must read for policy makers, advocates, and practitioners.-Marcy Whitebook, founding executive director, Center for the Child Care Workforce (Washington, D.C.), and director, Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, University of California, Berkeley This book is a wonderful addition to the literature on care giving. We Are Not Babysitters provides an illuminating analysis of the relation between the larger values of society and the indifference to the needs of both the care receivers and care givers. Tuominen's sophisticated analysis creates a marvelously acute picture of the way family child care in the home is constructed and offered.-Arlene K. Daniels, professor emerita, Department of Sociology and Women's Studies, Northwestern University Using in-depth interviews with child care providers, Mary C. Tuominen explores the social, political, and economic forces and processes that draw women into the work of family child care. In We Are Not Babysitters, the lives and work of twenty family child care providers of diverse race, ethnicity, immigrant status, and social class serve as a window into understanding the changing meanings of community, family, work, and care. Their stories require us to rethink the social and economic value of paid child care providers and their work. Mary C. Tuominen is an associate professor of sociology/anthropology and women's studies at Denison University, Granville, Ohio and the co-editor of Child Care and Inequality.