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Valuing Childcare: Troubles in Suburbia
Author(s) -
Pratt Geraldine
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
antipode
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.177
H-Index - 98
eISSN - 1467-8330
pISSN - 0066-4812
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8330.00340
Subject(s) - devaluation , metropolitan area , work (physics) , reproduction , quality (philosophy) , labour economics , sociology , child care , demographic economics , psychology , economics , nursing , medicine , engineering , mechanical engineering , ecology , philosophy , epistemology , pathology , biology , exchange rate , macroeconomics
I unravel a complex weave of practices in metropolitan Vancouver that lead to the persistent devaluation of childcare. These include the assumptions that women alone are responsible for paying for childcare, the difficulty that parents have determining how skills and educational qualifications relate to high‐quality childcare and the tendency to insert childcare workers into various familial scenarios that cheapen the costs of their own social reproduction. I look closely at outer suburbs, because this is where wages for childcare are lowest and parents experience the most difficulty in arranging dependable care. Although various women doing paid domestic work are positioned differently, they share with each other the effects of gendered assumptions about domestic work.