Market Movers: High-Income Mothers in the Crisis of Care

• In Event: Families and the Care Crisis

Abstract

Existing research on the childcare crisis is overwhelmingly based on poor, working class, and middle-class families. We know significantly less about the childcare crisis among the affluent. Drawing on years of multi-method fieldwork, this chapter traces the experiences of high-income mothers in their search for childcare. Hemmed in by cultural expectations and a severely constrained supply, I find that even among this high-income group, mothers often face few choices and a harried race to secure care – an experience I call competitive inclusion. To navigate the high-end childcare sector, affluent mothers mobilize their financial, social, and cultural capital. Yet, their successes are attributable to more than their personal resources alone. High-income mothers are able to secure care because of a selective expansion within the for-profit “luxury” childcare sector driven by a massive growth of childcare corporations, which itself is motivated by the rise in economic inequality. These corporations, however, work to reproduce the crisis as they actively lobby against greater government spending on childcare, tying affluent families’ inclusion to other families’ exclusion.

Author

• Jennifer Woltil Bouek, University of Delaware