ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that family day-care providers construct their work in a manner that draws from the nineteenth-century, middle-class ideal of mothering. It suggests that the style which emerges from both the structural constraints of family day care and from experiential learning, and demonstrates how, in drawing on their experiences of care giving, family day-care providers acquire a distinctive body of practical knowledge that they seek to protect. The chapter explores more fully the dilemmas of actual practice. Two kinds of dilemmas face family day-care providers: inadvertent redefinition of mothering; the tensions of mothering other people's children. Feminist analysis has uncovered the many ways in which a mother's confidence is challenged by the authority of male experts. Family day-care providers are motivated by a desire to remain in the domestic domain, to serve a 'traditional' role as mothers; they have to take on paid work because of changing economic realities.
