Framing Mothers: Childcare Research and the Normalization of Maternal Care

• In Event: 073 - Regular Session. Feminist Research Methods

Abstract

The National Institute of Child and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD, 1991-2009) was designed to analyze the developmental interactions between an increasingly diverse population of young children cared for primarily by someone other than their mother, on one hand, and the various care environments to which these children were exposed, on the other. Yet while the SECCYD devoted considerable effort to breaking down such sweeping categories as “children,” “family,” and “childcare,” it continued to judge caretaking arrangements using theories, concepts, and methods grounded in a normative model of maternal care. Assumptions about the maternal architecture of child development shaped the questions the SECCYD asked, how it proceeded to answer them, and the conclusions it subsequently drew. Structured and interpreted according to widely accepted routines in childcare research, the study ultimately normalized primary maternal care and distinctly gendered parenting responsibilities even before it collected any data. In concluding that non-maternal care does not put children at developmental risk because it neither displaces children’s primary relationship with their mother nor upsets the normal gender functioning of the family, it foreclosed the possibility that non-maternal primary relationships, such as those between a developing child and a father, two fathers, two mothers, grandparents, or any other constellation of caregiving, might offer a distinct and healthy developmental path. It revealed how even investigations that purport to be sensitive to the increasingly diverse contexts in which care decisions are made can also reinforce normative understandings of the family.

Author

• Joan Wolf, Texas A&M University