| Summary: | The home as a site for childcare is linked to notions of 'good' parenting, and the employment of
a nanny is often meant to create an extended family which enables a child to be nurtured in this
private space. Qualitative interviews undertaken with fifty-one families and eleven nannies
indicate that this childcare arrangement is complex and involves shifting and divergent
constructions of what good parenting and good childcare are. This childcare arrangement often
failed because of the complexities of the employer-employee relationship, and a failed attempt at
familial attachment. A partial explanation as to why this fails is that some nannies view their
employment as a 'bad' parenting strategy, and suggest that it is the parents who should be
nurturing the children. This tension around the appropriateness of certain childcare strategies is
indicative of discourses of proper parenting and maternal ideals, and is intimately connected to
place.
Expanding on this theme, interviews were undertaken with ten daycares in the city of Vancouver
to examine how discourses of proper parenting are reworked in a 'public' space. This inquiry
introduces more directly issues of class, opportunity and the socialization of children. The
maternal ideals expressed in the first part of the study are reworked, and sometimes abandoned,
in the delivery of public childcare services. Further, there is a process of normalization that takes
place in the designation and segregation of children based on age, and whether they are 'typical'
or 'special needs'. I argue that greater attention to emotion is needed in the study of childcare,
and greater appreciation of difference is needed in the delivery of childcare. This thesis also
questions its original premise, that of looking at childcare as public and private options, and of
seeing childcare as an employment strategy. === Arts, Faculty of === Geography, Department of === Graduate
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