children in isolation limits understandings of childcare experience, since ..... of trust and caring that secures children's comfort when away from parents. Greater.
Ethnography and Childcare Practice Mara Buchbinder, Jeffrey Longhofer, Thomas Barrett, Peter Lawson, Jerry Floersch Hanna Perkins Center for Child Development – 2005
Abstract This paper examines the use of ethnographic methods to study non-parental childcare. The extant research is summarized by identifying four dominant perspectives: 1) caregivercentered, 2) mother-centered, 3) child-centered, and 4) societal. Ethnographic research has enhanced researcher and practitioner understandings by providing entry into the childcare center as an important site not only of development and education, but also of social reproduction and enculturation. However, we argue that studying the perspectives of caregivers, mothers, and children in isolation limits understandings of childcare experience, since experience is shaped by continuous interactions among participants. This article outlines a more holistic ethnographic approach that could enhance social work practice by contributing to understandings of the relationships among caregivers, mothers, and children, and how these relationships influence children’s social and emotional development. We conclude by proposing an agenda for ethnographic childcare research. KEYWORDS: childcare, social and emotional development, ethnography, qualitative research methods, research with children.
1. Introduction In recent decades, patterns of childcare in many parts of the world have shifted from privatized to social endeavors. In 1998-1999, the percentage of children ages 0-3 years old attending childcare centers were 64% in Denmark, 54% in the United States, 48% in Sweden, 45% in Canada, and 40% in New Zealand (Society at a Glance: OECD Social Indicators, 2002). For children between 3 years old and the age of mandatory school enrollment, the numbers are even higher: 99% in France, 98% in the Netherlands, 95% in Italy, 91% in Denmark, and 90% in New Zealand (ibid). Despite these high numbers, cultural values of childcare in many Western nations remain grounded in particular notions of proper mothering. Macdonald (1998) explains: “We live in a unique historical moment: full-time, at-home mothering is no longer the dominant mothering practice, even for middle- and upper-class women, yet the ideology associated with this practice is still powerful” (26). Because the majority of children in many countries worldwide are now being raised in the dual contexts of home and childcare center, researchers need to understand the significant role of non-parental childcare in the international arena. Childcare centers are an important site of inquiry not only because of their implications for children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development, but also for their influence on parents and childcare providers. Too often, research on center-based childcare has a narrow focus on child development or childcare quality (Andersson, 1989; Greenspan, 2003; Peirrehumbert, 2002; Vandell, et al., 1988), without considering the broader effects of the childcare milieu. Anthropological and sociological perspectives can enrich the developmental literature by linking childcare experience to broader
social and cultural phenomena. Ethnography, an important research method used by qualitative researchers, represents a largely untapped resource for researchers in childcare settings. Rather than view the childcare setting as an external variable that affects child development in measurable ways, ethnography positions the childcare center as a cultural reality embedded deeply in the social fabric of everyday life—for both children and their caregivers. The use of ethnography to study childcare offers social work a unique opportunity to simultaneously understand micro and macro levels of childcare practice. The childcare center is a site for everyday practices where cultural values, government policies, family systems, and practice theories are integrally combined. Childcare centers can be state-financed programs to assist disadvantaged families, like the Head Start program in the United States. Often, the childcare setting is the first opportunity for a child’s psychosocial history to emerge publicly, as an issue for social work intervention. Moreover, institutions often embrace theories of child development that guide workers in their interactions with children and parents. Ethnography, through its examination of individual behavior within a macro, sociocultural context, enables social work researchers to integrate micro level practices into broader constructions of theory. In order to explain its relevance to childcare research, we provide a brief overview of ethnography. Then, we review the ethnographic literature on childcare contexts and demonstrate how four perspectives dominate the field: 1) caregiver-centered, 2) mother-centered, 3) childcentered, and 4) societal. Finally, we propose a model of childcare ethnography that examines the interrelationships between these four perspectives and their representatives’ experiences. We will use “childcare” to refer to non-parental, center-based childcare institutions.1 2. Ethnographic methods and methodology Simply put, ethnography is the study of people as they go about their everyday lives (Emerson, et al., 1995). As such, ethnography is well-suited to the study of childcare. According to the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, human actions signal a world of multiple social meanings that must be understood through recognition of various contextual clues (Geertz, 1973). Interpretation emerges from “thick descriptions” of cultural phenomena. Although originally used by anthropologists and sociologists to explain unfamiliar cultural practices, ethnography is increasingly used by researchers in a wide array of disciplines, including social work, psychology, nursing, medicine, history, economics, and organizational behavior. Ethnography owes much of its current popularity to a shift away from the positivist approach, which insists that social research be modeled after the physical sciences, and emphasizes the discovery of universal laws and descriptions using neutral observation language (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983). According to Jessor (1996), the postpositivist climate (see also Fook, 2002) has fostered a challenge to “canonical prescriptions about the proper way of making science” (3), while emphasizing “epistemological openness and methodological pluralism” (5). Rather than using experimentation and manipulation of variables, a naturalist approach to social research explores social phenomena as they exist in the world, unaltered. In this paradigm, ethnography has emerged as an increasingly important research method. 2.1 Goals and methods Researchers use ethnography for several different purposes, including the elicitation of cultural knowledge, the holistic analysis of societies, and the understanding of social interactions and meaning-making (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983). The latter is most relevant to the study
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of childcare, although it can also be useful to conceive of the childcare center as a cultural institution with a local knowledge structure. In interpreting social behavior, ethnography privileges context and meaning, as well as the systems of power that constrain them (Agar, 1996). Whereas other empirical research on childcare seeks to chronicle observable phenomena, ethnography focuses on the interpretation and meaning of social phenomena. Ethnography involves the intensive, continuous, and often microscopic observation of small samples (Corsaro, 1996). Traditionally, the focus is on a single setting or group, and is small in scale2, making the childcare center an appropriate site for ethnographic research. Based on the premise that the best way to understand people’s lives is to access information from various sources, ethnography draws on several different data collection methods, including quantitative ones. Ethnographic methods employ what Agar (1996) calls encyclopedic anthropology, a synthesis of historical, political, and economic aspects of the cultural context that impinge on daily experience. Despite its attention to context and history, the hallmark of the ethnographic method is participant observation.3 Participant observation hinges on the notion that to understand human action, we must use a methodological approach that gives access to the rich, social meanings that guide behavior, and that our innate capacities as social actors can provide us with such access. As Hammersley and Atkinson cogently argue, “This [innate capacity] is not a matter of methodological commitment, it is an existential fact” (1983: 15). In this way, ethnography is attuned to the reflexive aspect of social research—it is part of the world it studies (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983). Rather than trying to eliminate the “researcher effect,” an undertaking that positivist social researchers might strive for, ethnographers engage reflexively with their own position in the research context, exploiting the interpretation and understanding which that position offers (Floersch, 2004, p. 95; Mishna et al., 2004, p. 463; Shaw and Gould, 2001). 2.2 Embracing the ethnographic Ethnographic accounts have raised epistemological doubts over the past several decades as to whether or not an ethnographer can accurately represent cultural knowledge (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). These critiques arise from two extremes: at one end is the positivist critique, which argues that methodologically, the social sciences should be modeled after the natural sciences. At the other extreme is the postmodern critique, which argues that ethnography cannot produce universally valid representations of cultural phenomena because all scientific knowledge is relative and there is no single reality (Brewer, 2000). In relating these critiques to the ethnography of human development, Weisner (1996) asks, “[H]as developmental research ‘found’ ethnography at the very moment when the ethnographic enterprise is lost in a cloud of criticism, doubt, and confusion?” (312). His articulate response suggests that developmental researchers should not be swayed by contemporary anxiety over ethnographic knowledge. He advocates for ethnographic analyses of subjective meanings as well as behavior patterns and developmental outcomes that utilize the “ethnographic imagination,” rather than deal with ideological, epistemological, and taxonomical debates (ibid). Agar (1996) has used the word ethnographic to suggest a continuum of ethnographic enterprises. Agar revisited his previous notions of ethnography after working with focus group data that stimulated administrators in the drug field to think about the experience of heroin addicts in novel ways. Rather than viewing ethnography as requiring close, longitudinal observation, Agar formulated a new set of necessary conditions for ethnographic research: 1) new concepts exist at the end that did not exist in the original research problem, and 2) the
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ethnography overwhelms the reader with new patterns and information that account for phenomena in surprising and unexpected ways. Building on the works of Agar (1996) and Weisner (1996), we apply a broadly conceived notion of ethnography to the study of childcare. In the sections which follow, we explore the possibilities that an ethnographic mindset offers to researchers of early childhood and human development, and momentarily set aside the sometimes troubling epistemological questions regarding ethnography’s relationship to scientific research, knowledge production, and the representation of reality. 2.3 Methodological advantages of ethnographic study for childcare practice Ethnographic methods are complementary to childcare practice for several reasons. First, ethnography fosters an intimate rapport between the researcher and the researched that differs markedly from other research relationships, allowing researchers to access the long removed world of childhood from an insider’s perspective (Corsaro and Molinari, 2000; James, 1996). Therefore, ethnography can provide childcare practitioners and social workers with a more intimate understanding of the childcare environment, while simultaneously enhancing relationships with children. Moreover, ethnography’s emphasis on reflexive engagement with the research setting and its participants allows the research-practitioner to maintain his or her commitment to the essential tenet of social work: involvement with people. Meanwhile, the researcher must perform a reflexive analysis of his or her role in the research setting, which in turn informs childcare practice. Second, ethnography is particularly well-suited to the temporal needs of child development research. The sustained, longitudinal nature of ethnography is appropriate for the continuing study of children, while ethnography is likewise well-equipped to capture the critical transition periods that shape processes of human development (Corsaro, 1996; Peak, 1989; Rosier and Corsaro, 1993). The descriptive data which result from ethnographic study can enrich social workers’ and childcare practitioners’ understandings of the developmental, social, and cultural processes that unfold in the childcare context. Finally, Weisner (2002) argues that developmental pathways are shaped by the cultural underpinnings of daily life. Activities, as meaningful events to individual participants, are useful units of cultural analysis, and amenable to ethnographic fieldwork. Ethnography illuminates practice by focusing childcare practitioners’ attention on the cultural organization of daily activities in the childcare center, which clarifies practitioner knowledge of how best to serve clients. For these reasons, ethnography should be a key method of developmental researchers. 3. Ethnography in childcare practice: reflections from the literature Ethnographic accounts of childcare have tended to orient around one of four perspectives, rather than integrating experience from these realms. In this section, we review the ethnographic literature on childcare using these perspectives to organize the literature: caregiver-centered, mother-centered4, child-centered, and societal. 3.1 Perspective one: caregiver-centered research A substantial literature explores childcare from the qualitative perspectives of childcare providers (referred to here as caregivers5). These works draw on a variety of methods, including participant observation, in-depth interviews, focus groups, and videotaping. While not all of these studies are ethnographies in the purest sense, they are ethnographic. In exploring socially constituted meanings of care, they share an appreciation for the lived experience of caregivers
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while considering the broader historical, political-economic, and ideological context in which caregiving unfolds. The use of caregiver personal experience as an entry point and focus of inquiry (Rutman, 1996) to elucidate the macro-structural factors that shape childcare is another pivotal feature of ethnographic research. In an exploration of the experiences of nannies and au pairs in the United States, Macdonald (1998) posits caregiving as “shadow work,” a term coined by Ivan Illich to refer to unpaid work that is necessary to complement the production of goods and services in an industrial society. In addition to performing work that is traditionally marginalized and often uncompensated, caregivers must deal with additional tensions created by penetrating the boundaries of the privatized, post-industrial family. For caregivers, as for many shadow-workers, domains of caring and work overlap in ambiguous ways, requiring them to employ complex interpretive strategies to understand their roles. Rutman (1996) explains: It is partly because caregiving activities themselves are boundless and because the work of caregiving is situated in these complex personal relationships that dimensions of the labor of caregiving can remain unseen. Thus, these analyses of caregiving not only emphasize the social contexts within which caregiving occurs but also direct our attention to the often invisible aspects of caregiving as a form of women’s labor (36). One of the invisible aspects of caregiving to which Rutman alludes is the emotional labor necessary to mediate relationships and ideological tensions in order to care for children (Macdonald, 1998). Nelson (1990) conceptualizes the emotion-work of family-based childcare providers as the “feeling rule of detached attachment.” Nelson borrows Hochschild's (1983) concept of “feeling rule,” which refers to “a culturally defined script for appropriate feeling, and the emotional labor necessary to bring one’s feelings in line with these scripts” (Nelson, 1990: 229). Therefore, the feeling rule of detached attachment refers to a forced or affected emotional aloofness that enables caregivers to form boundaries around the care they provide, and seek financial compensation. In Murray’s (1998) study of two California childcare centers, caregivers perceived emotional labor as the most rewarding and challenging aspect of their work. Regardless of their years of experience, they noted the necessity of professional distance. In this context, professionalism and emotional control are equated. Caregivers thus occupy a liminal space at the “borderlands of family life” (Murray, 1998: 149). Their duties require them to penetrate these borders, but their practice is bound by a set of socialized rules for emotional engagement. Bringing care-based relationships into market-based settings creates tension across the domains of caring. Caring relationships assume commitment and attachment, while market relationships assume independence and free agency (Uttal, 2002). In one survey of satisfaction with childcare work, Canadian caregivers rated parents as both one of the most gratifying and frustrating aspects of the profession (Rutman, 1996). As Nelson explains, “The particular attachment [caregivers] develop relies on the ongoing work of creating a space, a distance which ‘saves’ them from an overwhelming emotional engagement and allows them to ask for money” (1990: 220). Murray (2001) outlines the tensions between the privatization of children’s bodies and the physical intimacy of caregiving, wherein children’s bodies are “contested sites” and evidence of the commodified relationship between parents and caregivers (525). At the same time that these market relationships unfold, the organizational processes of center life create an intimacy between workers, parents, and children that conflicts with notions of market exchange.
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These examples suggest how ethnographic research can move the study of childcare beyond empirical phenomena to examine emotion, a realm of experience that may escape superficial observation (Katz, 1999). While emotion has traditionally been viewed as innate, interior, and natural, and therefore less permeable to sociocultural forces, Abu-Lughod and Lutz (1990) argue that emotions are situated, social processes that cannot be merely understood through a biological lens. Understanding the social processes in which emotion is constituted is critical to social work practice because social workers are attuned to the specific social contexts and systems of power which are brought to bear on their clients’ lives. Ethnography can help to elucidate the discourses, power systems, and shifting social hierarchies in which emotions are constituted, which can help social workers to understand emotion as an interactive, coconstructed phenomenon grounded in the sociocultural landscape of interpersonal relationships. 3.2 Perspective two: mother-centered research Mothers’ absence from the childcare site for most of the day presents a dilemma for traditional ethnographic observation. Researchers tend to ask mothers about their satisfaction levels, preferences, and criteria for choosing childcare (Pence and Goelman, 1987), or mothers’ communicative patterns with caregivers (see section 4.1, this paper), yet these reports fail to capture the social processes and personal factors that shape mothers’ experience. Our literature review revealed a scarcity of ethnographic research about childcare that incorporated mothers’ perspectives. Often when mothers are presented in the literature, it is to challenge caregivers’ competence, or to make accusations of abuse (Murray, 2001). Uttal (2002) attends to the political and economic contexts of childcare and how they shape mothers’ experience through her societal analysis of employed mothers in the new childcare market. Macdonald (1998) notes the palpable anxieties that mothers experience from sharing childrearing with virtual strangers. She argues that this anxiety makes intimacy a feared condition of caregiving partnerships for many mothers. She describes: Because of these tensions, the mothers I interviewed frequently wanted a ‘shadow mother’: An extension of themselves who would stay home as if she were the mother, but who would vanish upon the real mother’s return, leaving no trace of her presence in the psychic lives of the children they shared” (Macdonald, 1998). Still, there has been little public discussion of the social and emotional process of transferring care of one’s child to paid caregivers. What kind of emotional labor is necessary for mothers to transfer childcare responsibilities to paid laborers on daily basis, and to justify its purpose? How might we conceive of a form of detached attachment in mothers’ daily work?6 An in-depth ethnographic approach is needed to address these kinds of questions and to better situate concepts like detached attachment in the lived experience of mothers. Uttal (1996) explored the meaning of childcare to employed mothers in the United States by conducting in-depth interviews with 31 employed mothers of diverse backgrounds and in diverse childcare relationships. She discovered that mothers develop “microideologies” about childcare which reflect their responses to cultural views of motherhood. Descriptions of childcare fell into three general categories: custodial care (9), surrogate care (3), and coordinated care (19). Mothers who described childcare as custodial saw caregivers as providers of a temporary service, and viewed themselves as the primary childrearers and providers of emotional security. In contrast, mothers who described childcare as surrogate care felt that the childcare provider’s role, resembling a domestic mother-child relationship, was paramount in childrearing.
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Finally, the coordinated care category comprised relationships of shared childrearing. These mothers viewed childcare as an extension of home and vice versa. Mothers cited comparable values and beliefs concerning childrearing as an important factor in developing this type of care. Understandings of how coordinated care is constructed and negotiated can enable social workers to work with clients in caregiving situations to develop open, trusting relationships. 3.3 Perspective three: child-centered research A recent theoretical shift in the sociological study of childhood has led to the repositioning of children from passive recipients of adult socialization to social actors7 (James et al., 1998; Mishna et al., 2004). Several anthropologists (Gottlieb, 2000; Hirschfeld, 2002) have argued similarly, acknowledging that “by viewing children as vehicles into which culture is poured, anthropology has put the cart before the horse” (Hirschfeld, 2002: 612). In his research of preschool children in Italy and at a U.S. Head Start, Corsaro (1996, 2000) conceptualizes socialization not as a process enacted on children, but rather, as a progression of interpretive reproduction in which children are active subjects in cultural processes. This theoretical shift has provoked new understandings of child socialization and development and precipitated a need for new modes of inquiry into the social study of childhood. To study children as social actors and culture-makers, it has become necessary to document children’s participation in cultural routines, their negotiation of social relationships, and the processes through which they come to make their social and cultural worlds meaningful. Childcentered ethnographic methods, which privilege children’s lived experience, have aided the pursuit of interpretive understandings of children’s lives from a critical theoretical perspective (Christensen and James, 2000). Findings from child-centered studies of childcare have tapped a number of significant themes, including: play (Strandell, 1997), peer culture and friendships (Corsaro, 1996; Corsaro and Molinari, 2000), and peer conflict (Malloy and McMurray, 1996). Researchers utilizing child-centered methods tend to focus considerable efforts on entry into peer culture as equals. Mandell (1988) argues that since meaning is a co-constructed social product, the only way to gain entry into the child’s social world is to engage in joint action with the child. Leavitt (1991) stresses that it is important that researchers follow the child’s lead in entering the child’s social world, pursuing children’s actions and not their own presuppositions. Opinions differ, however, on the extent to which it is possible to fully “shed” the adult role in participant observation with children. In her research of 2-4 year olds in two North American childcare centers, Mandell (1988) used an approach to participant observation with children which she labels the “least-adult” role. The least-adult role requires the suspension of adult-child differences (except physical size), and requires adults to occupy the role of a child when participating in children’s social worlds. To demonstrate the boundaries of her role, she frequently told children who asked for assistance, “I’m not a teacher. You’ll have to ask a teacher to do that” (Mandell, 1988: 441). She argues that this “least adult” position can minimize physical differences between adults and children in children’s minds.8 At the other end of the participatory continuum, Strandell (1997) used a detached observer perspective to explore children’s play and social interactions in a Finnish childcare center. Other than sitting on the floor, Strandell participated only marginally in children’s activities. As these examples illustrate, ethnography can serve as a useful tool to elicit children’s perspectives on their social worlds. Ethnographers engage with participants intimately, rather than merely assessing them, which better facilitates entry into participants’ worlds (Weisner, 1996). This engagement is particularly important in the context of research with children, in which adult researchers must inevitably mediate discrepancies in size, knowledge, and power in
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their quest for insider understanding (Christensen and James, 2000; Mishna et al., 2004). Although these disparities can never be wholly overcome, in treating children as cultural experts, participant observation can mitigate the intensity of hierarchical relationships between adult researchers and child participants (Corsaro and Molinari, 2000; James, 1996). In turn, this experience can assist social workers to develop reflexive understandings of how systems of power and control shape clinical relationships with children. The intensive, micro-focus of the ethnographic gaze simultaneously opens a space for further theoretical reflection, yielding new questions, problems, and concerns. While child-centered ethnographies undertaken in childcare centers have certainly led to increased theorizing of childhood and more nuanced understandings of children’s social relationships, the ability of these accounts to elucidate the reproduction of cultural processes that are specific to the childcare context is less clear. While these scholars are focused on ethnographic understandings of children and childhood, the childcare context may be incidental at best. The influence of caregiving relationships on children’s social and emotional development is obscured, and the impact of childcare on the child’s relationships with his or her own parents may be neglected. In the childcare center, all of children’s social interactions are limited by subtle, yet carefully deliberated, adult control. However, the child-centered focus can inadvertently position children in a cultural black hole unbounded by adult influence. In addition, the emphasis on children as actors can distract from the underlying processes of feeling and thinking that are essential to child development. The emotional labor of children, like their mothers, is significantly under-explored in this literature. Future ethnographic endeavors should be grounded in a theoretical understanding of development that allows for an inner life, and make explicit the link between internal emotions and the external behaviors through which they are communicated (Longhofer et al., 2004). 3.4 Perspective four: the societal perspective In addition to the caregiver, mother, and child-centered perspectives, a fourth ethnographic approach to childcare research focuses on the social processes by which power, control, and resistance are reproduced in the childcare arena. This perspective positions the childcare center as a microcosm which reflects the society’s social, political, and moral values embedded within (Leavitt, 1991). Drawing on the works of French philosopher Michel Foucault, this perspective argues that childcare is organized, professionalized, and routinized to prepare children for the discipline of school and modern institutions. Leavitt (1991) explores the practice of social control in infant-toddler childcare. Based on several years of observation at six U.S. childcare centers, Leavitt concludes that children are managed as objects through schedules, activities, and transitions that are rigid and inflexible. Using Goffman's notion of “collective regimentation” (1961: 6) Leavitt describe the routinization of children’s daily routines. Her fieldwork revealed that children nap on strict schedules that do not accomodate natural sleep rhythms. One infant was reportedly confined to her crib for a full hour, during which she did not close her eyes the entire time. Siren-Tiusanen and Robinson's (2001) ethnographic research of Finnish childcare centers reported similar challenges in coordinating sleep-wake cycles for infants and toddlers in large group settings. According to Leavitt, from an early age, children are socialized into the structures and institutions of daily life.9 Institutional power to control daily routines emerges as an inherent aspect of social relations, with time presented as an uncontrollable external force. Leavitt argues
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that a societal value for science and technology underlies this regimentation; efforts to regulate children’s time and bodies reflect attempts to make childcare an objective science. Like Leavitt, Miller and Ginsburg (1989) address broader sociological issues through an ethnographic examination of childcare practice. Specifically, they explore sociolinguistic codes and social relations to better understand how economic inequalities are manifested and socially reproduced in the childcare setting. The study examined four U.S. centers, each serving families of a different socioeconomic status. Among the significant findings were differences in social control strategies, social relations between children and staff, and sociolinguistic code use between centers. Miller and Ginsburg conclude that by the age of three, children in childcare centers are the targets of significant enculturation efforts, reproducing social class differences through language use and social relations. Childcare, therefore, is not just a setting for custodial care, but also for cultural learning and production. We must strive, however, to avoid what Archer calls “downward conflation,” the process by which “the effects of socialization impress themselves upon people seen as malleable ‘indeterminate material’” (2000: 5). When children are seen as simply produced by social forces, they are left without agency and along with the possibility of it, agential resistance. Both Leavitt (1996) and Miller and Ginsburg (1989) stress that processes of accommodation and resistance are paramount in the reproductive processes of childcare. By carefully describing resistance strategies used by infants and toddlers to circumvent caregiver control, (for example, inching out of time-out while the teacher’s back is turned (Miller and Ginsburg, 1989)), they overturn theories of structural determinism and illustrate that even society’s youngest are active agents of cultural reproduction. As with the child-centered ethnographies discussed above, the childcare context can be incidental to researchers theorizing about cultural reproduction, resistance, and change in a broader sociological sense. The societal perspective is useful for conceptualizing some of the ways that childcare shapes collective experience and institutionalizes cultural phenomena. However, this approach can risk neglecting some of the micro-interactional factors of caregiving relationships because of its expansive gaze on society. It is worth exploring, for example, that the home is also an important site of social and cultural production, and that parents play an important role in reproducing particular cultural processes. In contrast to Leavitt (1991), SirenTiusanen and Robinson's (2001) study of sleeping practices in infant-toddler childcare attends closely to the home context, examining sources of discontinuity in children’s sleep rhythms, their effects on individual children, and how parents and caregivers work together around these issues. Following Foucault, Leavitt (1991) deconstructs and reproaches routine. What she does not consider, however, are the developmental needs for routine and the particular ways that these routines are culturally mediated. Routine may serve a critical function, for children find comfort in the security of stable, reliable activities and relationships. Daily routines are important units of cultural analysis because they form the cultural pathways that shape human experience (Weisner, 2002). The ethnographic study of routines can inform social work practice by elucidating daily practices and meaningful units of experience, and how they are shaped by sociocultural contexts. 4. Toward an Ethnography of (Day) Caring The literature reviewed in the previous section reports on childcare experience from the perspectives of caregivers, mothers, children, and finally, society at large. Here, we consider how ethnographic methods may be used to deepen our understanding of the social and emotional
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relationships between these groups to improve social work practices related to childcare. Through such efforts, we can begin to integrate the disparate viewpoints of caregivers, mothers, and children and examine how they co-construct experience in the childcare setting. 4.1 Parent-caregiver interactions The literature on caregiver-parent relationships to date has focused on two main themes: 1) perceptions of each other and 2) patterns of interactions (Shpancer, 2002).This literature has tended to utilize survey design or brief interview, rather than ethnographic methods. Because of the inherent conflict between traditional childrearing values and childcare, researchers have examined parent and caregiver values and beliefs to better understand how they affect caregiving relationships. Bernhard et al., (1998) found that parents and early childhood teachers in the United States had different views of proper childrearing methods, and were unaware of basic differences in early childhood education goals, particularly with respect to cognition, social skills, and respect for authority. Using questionnaires, Holloway et al., (1988) compared beliefs and attitudes toward childrearing of Mexican mothers and childcare providers. They found that caregivers expected children to develop social and cognitive skills at a younger age than did mothers, and reported higher valuations of individualistic skills. Nelson (1990) examined the role of concordance in parent-caregiver cultural values in the Unites States. Most of the family childcare providers she interviewed held conservative notions about women’s social roles, while mothers employed outside the home had more progressive values. She notes that while social class congruity might be expected to ease tensions between mothers and providers, the significant ideological differences prevented mutual understanding. Several studies have examined communication patterns between parents and caregivers as a means of linking the home and childcare contexts (Owen et al., 2000). Attitudes toward communication and communication frequency have been the focus of most investigations into this area ((Endsley and Minish, 1991; Ghazvini and Readdick, 1994; Owen et al., 2000; Streeter and Barrett, 1999). Murray’s (1998) description of intimacy between parents and caregivers in physical encounters and daily conversations about children’s most personal affairs reveals the potential for ethnographic research to elicit a more nuanced perception of parent-caregiver social interactions than survey or quantitative measures alone can uncover. Yet, only a select few studies have examined communication as a factor in building relationships. For example, Bernhard and colleagues (1998) report that early childhood teachers believed that parents were uninterested in establishing communication with and did not respect teachers. However, parents attributed their lack of involvement in the childcare setting to practical factors such as language barriers and time constraints. Such miscommunication reveals the need to investigate communicative patterns and relationships, and how they shape childcare practice. Quality of care ultimately amounts to the quality of the relationship between the childcare provider and the child (National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, 2000). However, parent-caregiver relationships form an observable model for children, establishing a foundation of trust and caring that secures children’s comfort when away from parents. Greater understanding is needed not only of the measurable aspects of verbal communication, but also the emotional climate of relationships that surrounds and motivates such communication. 4.2 Lessons from Japan
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While ethnographic research examining childcare and caregiving relationships has been sparse in many parts of the globe, there has been an abundance of scholarly work in Japan attending to culture, socioemotional development, and relationships, in the childcare context. Researchers have been interested in the socialization processes through which Japanese children, who are traditionally indulged at home, transition relatively seamlessly to a classroom environment in which they subordinate individual wants to group needs (Ben-Ari, 1996). Building on previous studies of early childhood education in Japan, Ben-Ari (1996) suggests that while children are able to distinguish from a young age between the contexts of “home” and “school” and the behavior appropriate in each context, the cultural processes through which these distinctions are realized have not been examined. Ben-Ari’s ethnographic research focuses on sleep practices at childcare centers because problems commonly arise during nap time, such as anxiety about separation from parents, fighting with peers, and tensions between home and school practices. Like Leavitt (1991) and Miller and Ginsburg (1989), BenAri attends to collective socialization processes in childcare to explore how cultural values are reproduced and diffused. However, Ben-Ari’s focus on “embodied experiences” (Abu-Lughod and Lutz, 1990: 12) and interpersonal relationships considers individual, bodily practice as a focal point for shared experience. Ben-Ari notes that Japanese view physical contact as essential for child development. Teachers lay under the covers next to children who are having difficulty falling asleep, sharing body heat and caresses. While teachers acknowledged that these practices originated at home, they suggested their role was to gradually wean children from co-sleeping and caresses in order to prepare them for the austerity of formal schooling. By the time children are ready to go to school, they will have stopped taking naps at the center entirely. Other research has explored the strategies Japanese preschool teachers use to elicit desired behavior from children, and how these mechanisms of social control are internalized and reproduced culturally. Boocock (1989) notes that foreign visitors are routinely impressed by the relaxed yet orderly atmosphere of the Japanese preschool. Studies indicate that adults exert minimal control in Japanese preschool classrooms, allowing children to assume responsibility for classroom management and discipline (Lewis, 1989; Peak, 1989). Teachers focus on strategies that elicit cooperation, rather than disciplinary systems based on reward and punishment. Lewis (1989) argues that Japanese children internalize social norms because they are treated as effectual, responsible people who contribute to classroom authority and social structure. This explanation supports laboratory findings that suggest children are more likely to internalize social norms when they receive the least amount of external pressure (ibid). 4.3 Research implications: a proposed model for the ethnography of childcare practice Throughout this essay, we have developed a rationale for ethnographic research in childcare settings. Given the stress placed in recent studies on the social and emotional development of children as a contributing factor in their readiness to learn (Wesley and Buysse, 2003), ethnographic methods can help social workers to articulate and understand the various daily practices, relationships, and cultural forces that contribute to social and emotional development, in order to improve social work in educational and developmental fields. We advocate an ethnographic approach that integrates the outlined perspectives—caregiver, mother, child, and societal—to understand how relationships negotiate and inform the social and emotional contexts of childcare. With this approach, focusing on both relationships and communication, we may see how the child’s experience is constantly shaped and re-shaped by
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interactions between caregivers, mothers, providers, and the various social, cultural, political, and economic forces that impinge on them. We have identified eight key aspects to the proposed model, which we frame as conceptual nodes of this research methodology. They include the following points: 1. A holistic orientation to childcare experience is necessary. Researchers are not primarily concerned with the perspective of parents, children, or caregivers, but rather, with the relationships between these groups in the childcare context. 2. Attention to how caregiving relationships affect socioemotional development in children individually, as well as contribute to broader processes of cultural reproduction, is essential. 3. Culture is recognized as a key element in relationship formation. Consideration of parent and caregiver cultural values and beliefs regarding childrearing is paramount. 4. Communication is a critical starting point, but not the limit of, our understanding of caregiving relationships. Interactions also involve such non-verbal components as touch, feeling, and thought, especially with pre-linguistic participants. 5. Emotional aspects of caregiving relationships, such as intimacy, anxiety, and trust, are essential to understanding how substitute care influences child development. Special attention must be given to how such factors are affected by cross-cultural and cross-class relationships, and to how these elements contribute to later education and development. 6. Transition periods (home childcare, childcare formal schooling, caregiver caregiver, activity activity, drop-off and pick-up) are key points in time in which relationships become actualized and communication is crucial; as such, these events will be examined carefully. 7. Children’s daily practices and routines, including eating, sleeping, and play should be understood as rituals that shape development and provide the cultural setting for important processes of social reproduction. 8. Multiple methods should be employed to best capture the dynamic nature of the childcare environment and the complexity of caregiving relationships, including: participant observation, in-depth interviewing, survey measures, document review, etc. 5. Conclusion In this paper, we have suggested that social work practice and research can be enhanced by examining the childcare center not only as a site where child development occurs, but also as a source of enculturation and social reproduction. Broadening our analytic lens to include the perspectives of caregivers and parents, we have further illuminated these processes. By reviewing ethnographic methods used in childcare research, we have shown how ethnography incorporates an appreciation for both the micro-interactional (e.g., interpersonal relationships) and macro-structural factors (e.g., cultural, political, and economic forces) that shape daily life. Grounded in the notion that childcare is a fundamentally social experience, this comprehensive methodological approach infuses childcare research with key insights concerning the contextual landscape of childrearing and social and emotional development. This paper aims to set a new agenda for future research, and a methodological orientation for performing it. Drawing on the ethnographic models put forth by Ben-Ari (1996) and Lewis (1989), we propose a holistic ethnographic approach that attends to social and emotional development by carefully examining the emotional work of negotiating care and maintaining childcare relationships. This model will allow us to better understand how caregiving patterns such as Uttal’s (1996) notion of “coordinated care” emerge and unfold in the childcare setting,
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and what the implications of such models are for children’s daily experience and global development. The information gained from such a research approach will provide social workers and childcare practitioners with more subtle understandings of child development and childcare experience, which can inform practice and shape policy decisions. We urge our readers to consider the manifold ways in which ethnographic methods may be creatively employed to advance the state of the art in early childhood and social work research. Acknowledgments Support for this paper was made possible by a Research Fellowship from the Hanna Perkins Center for Child Development in Cleveland, Ohio. The authors would like to thank Maggie Zraly for her insightful review of this paper. Notes: 1. While non-parental childcare engages a broad spectrum of care arrangements, we follow Shpancer’s (2002) focus on center-based childcare because of its rapid and recent onset, and the threat it poses to traditional childcare values. 2. This notion is being challenged in the global era, through transnational studies of cultural phenomena (Appadurai, 1991). 3 In fact, participant observation and ethnography are often used interchangeably, a practice that obscures the relationship between the pair. Participant observation is just one, albeit the primary one, of the many methods used to do ethnography. 4. An analysis of why fathers remain virtually absent from this literature is outside the scope of this paper, yet worthy of further attention. 5. Our understanding of “caregiving” follows from Macdonald’s (1998) definition of motherwork as “those daily tasks involved in the care and protection of small children…[excluding] other important aspects of mothering, such as conceiving, gestating, and bearing children” (26). 6. “Attached detachment” has been suggested as an alternative way of conceiving the mother’s emotional labor (Zraly, personal communication). 7. A parallel trend can be found within developmental psychology and related disciplines. See, for example, From Neurons to Neighborhoods characterization of children “as active participants in their own development” (National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, 2000: 4). Shpancer's (1997) ecological model of childcare experience positions children as “agents of influence in (and between) the home and daycare” (17). 8. Mandell has been critiqued on the legitimacy of her “least adult role” (cf. Corsaro, 1996; Christensen and James, 2000). 9. We might also consider whether and how the routinization of children’s daily schedules at childcare centers differs from the routinization of schedules for children who remain at home.
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