ABSTRACT
While editing this book, many people have asked me how child care is geographical. As Marie Truelove (Chapter 7) argues,“(g)eographical analysis can contribute to an understanding of the effects of present and proposed policies on child care, particularly their spatial and redistributive impacts” (p. 106). Ruth Fincher suggested that “the strength that geographers bring to (debates regarding the role of national governments on child care provision) is a deeper understanding of the local embeddedness of child care use and provision, within the context of a range of other local policy practices and daily life activities” (p. 166). And Isabel Dyck, drawing on interviews with suburban women, remarked that in their attempts to resolve the dilemmas created by combining mothering with wage labor “the solutions they reached, in the form of ‘safe space’ for their children, were rooted in their work in the domestic workplaces of home and neighborhood” (p. 124). In bringing together the chapters in this book I sought to provide explorations of the geographies of child care and working mothers at different scales within the Canadian and US contexts, where, unlike most European Union and Scandinavian countries, there are no national child care or family policies. The US and Canada’s patchwork provision mean that there are noticeable variations in child care; variations that are not related to local responses to local variations in child care need. As the contributors to this book showed, these variations have sociospatial implications: for instance, there are clear spatial differences in terms of delivery, and the type of child care that a child experiences is greatly dependent on where they live and their family’s social characteristics.
