ABSTRACT
In most social movements, child-care outside the home has been seen as an instrument for reforming child rearing at home in order to create a better society, or in order to regulate socio-political conflicts. The least successful movements were those which argued for day-care centres to free the mother from her daily duties. Both the day-care centres for children and mothers/parents in need and those which the feminists called for were, and still are, marginal in the network of provisions for families with young children. In the literature on child-care outside the home, there are three characteristic attitudes to mothers: glorification, the urge to improve and exploitation. The split between the domain of paid work and the home, caused by complex processes of industrialization and urbanization, also had far-reaching consequences for the lives of children. Socialization and the transmission of knowledge through day-to-day contact with working grown-ups became problematic, especially for boys.
