We are Not Babysitters

While recent decades have seen broad public concern and debate about the availability of affordable childcare for working parents, little attention has been given to the family childcare workers who provide paid care in their own homes. Why do many women who are mothers themselves become paid childcare providers? And what roles do race, class, and gender play in their decisions? In We Are Not Babysitters, Mary C. Tuominen tells the story of how and why women enter paid childcare work through the eyes and experiences of twenty family childcare providers. She explores the social, political, and economic forces and processes that draw women, who make up the vast majority of providers, into the work of family childcare. This book, based on in-depth interviews with women of diverse racial, ethnic, social class, and immigrant status, concludes that those care providers who have children of their own (nearly fifty percent of the national total), do not, as much previous research has assumed, choose this work simply or primarily so that they can stay home with their own children. Instead, Tuominen discovers a complex web of interconnected social ideologies that shape women's employment options and, thus, their decision to provide paid childcare within their own homes. When we analyze paid childcare through the eyes of care providers, we move beyond commonly held assumptions about why women enter the field. Tuominen's work provides a much-needed reconceptionalization of our definitions of work and care, as well as a rethinking of the major social and economic value of family childcare and the women who care for our children.