ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the immediate situations and factors which led parents to share care and also some of the consequences of care arrangements for the adults and children concerned. As a first step in understanding how care patterns came about it is useful to describe systematically the reasons parents themselves gave for sharing care and for choosing their particular types of care arrangements. Parents’ reasons for sending a child to a playgroup or nursery school were usually not the same as their explanations for sharing care with individual carers, but there was some overlap with the ‘child-oriented’ care which had become increasingly important after toddlerhood. Given the wide variation in non-group care sequences, especially with regard to frequency, it might have been anticipated that these would affect motivations for group care. A major crisis consisted of a more prolonged and unexpected illness or hospitalisation of the mother for periods ranging from a few nights to two months.
