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Framing mothers: Childcare research and the normalization of maternal care

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In this article, I deconstruct the mechanics of normalization in the National Institute of Child and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD). Conducted from 1991 to 2009, the SECCYD was intended to improve on earlier childcare studies, which were often small, concerned with only one moment in or aspect of development, and focused on "main effects" rather than on the interaction between multiple variables in widely varying family and childcare environments. In an effort to provide a "more holistic, context-sensitive, and dynamic" analysis (NICHD ECCRN 1994, 382), the study's investigators, the Early Child Care Research Network (ECCRN), looked for links between different home environments, child characteristics, and childcare situations. Roughly 1,300 families were examined according to various factors, including race, socioeconomic status, age, gender, parental attitudes and education, family size and structure, maternal depression, maternal sensitivity and responsiveness, and mother and child temperament. The study also distinguished among childcare situations according to type, size, quality, and quantity and then analyzed the interplay, across time, between different children, families, and forms of care (382, 384-87). Yet, as I will show, while the SECCYD took great care to break down such sweeping categories as "children," "family," and "childcare," it left in place a universal standard of primary maternal care. While it successfully challenged the idea that all children and all forms of care are analytically interchangeable, it also reinforced the notion that primary maternal care is normal for all children, or the standard by which any other care should be evaluated. (author abstract)
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