Creating capabilities: Childcare policies in comparative perspective

Abstract

This article analyses childcare services in six countries, assessing this policy instrument’s potential to facilitate parents’ capabilities for arranging childcare in a way they have reason to value. It draws on Sen’s capability approach to conceptualize and assess childcare policy design across five key aspects of childcare provision (accessibility, availability, affordability, quality and flexibility) in a country-comparative perspective. The conceptualization of the multifaceted nature of childcare provides compelling insights into the complexity of comparing childcare services across countries. The ensuing analysis and comprehensive overview of national policies challenges the idea of a defamilialization policy cluster, which masks key distinctions between public and market service provision. The more nuanced conceptualization and operationalization of childcare policy design through the capability approach reveals parents’ real opportunities for arranging childcare and the varying effects of policy design across gender and class. In addition, it goes beyond implicit commodification assumptions and opens up space for parents’ potential desire for multiple care arrangement possibilities.

Family policy and women's employment outcomes in 45 high‐income countries: A systematic qualitative review of 238 comparative and national studies

“…The issue of access has been analysed also by research work that uses qualitative methods. An example is the recent debate about the use of Sen's capability approach within the realm of family policy (see Ciccia & Sainsbury, 2018;Hobson et al, 2011;Javornik & Kurowska, 2017;Mätzke, 2019;Yerkes & Javornik, 2019).…”

Childcare Indicators for the Next Generation of Research

“…Thereby such a discourse runs the risk of contributing to a devaluation of unpaid care work traditionally carried out by women in the position of mothers, daughters, or spouses (Daly, 2011;Jenson, 2009;Saraceno, 2017). Likewise, an instrumental focus on child development and maternal employment leaves little room for women's agency and choice, for example, to organize childcare according to their own desires (Yerkes & Javornik, 2018). Similarly, while the role of childcare policies for greater equality of opportunity in coming generations is becoming widely recognized (Burger, 2013;Esping-Andersen, 2015), current policy-oriented research generally takes the parents or the family as the main subject of study.…”

“…While separate indicators on outcomes tend to be relatively accessible, an increased awareness vis-à-vis the role of institutional variation highlights the need to develop conceptually informed indicators also in this regard. The increasingly common emphasis on the multidimensionality of family policies also points toward a need for these indicators to reflect qualitative differences between different modes of provision (Keck & Saraceno, 2013;Korpi, Ferrarini, & Englund, 2013;Pettit & Hook, 2009;Yerkes & Javornik, 2018).…”

“…These three dimensions are interrelated to some extent. For a service to be affordable and/or providing high-quality care, it needs to be available in the first place (Yerkes & Javornik, 2018). Affordable childcare will fail to increase the number of children enrolled if their parents do not have access to childcare places.…”

How much would family and medical leave cost workers in the US? Racial/ethnic variation in economic hardship under unpaid and paid policies

“…Researchers are increasingly using a capability approach to assess class and gender differences in access to and take-up of work-family policies (Javornik & Kurowska, 2017;Koslowski & Kadar-Satat, 2019;Yerkes & Javornik, 2018). Pioneered by Sen (1985), a capability framework is normative and assesses: (1) whether a policy, if accessible, would help participants achieve a broadly defined valued functioning; and (2) potential participants' capabilities, which are real opportunities to make genuine choices about whether and how to participate in a program.…”