ABSTRACT
In the late 1970s the movement of women into the work force was touted as a major revolution, albeit a “subtle” one (Smith, 1979). A large proportion of these women were mothers, and many had very young children (under age 1). By the late 1980s enormous changes in the way children were being cared for constituted a second revolution. Of course, parents still provided the majority of care for children, yet as mothers spent longer hours and more years in the work force, care for younger and younger children for relatively significant quantities of time was, to a large extent, increasingly assigned to nonrelatives and institutions. Even when mothers are not in the work force, children spend time in early education and care, albeit for smaller amounts of time.
