Description
- Abstract:
- Why does the quality of public childcare services, even when they are ostensibly standardized, vary significantly across neighborhoods? I examine this using the case of Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. The ICDS is the world’s longest-running and largest free universal early childhood care and education program. Tamil Nadu state has had robust political commitment and bureaucratic capacity, which, reinforced by citizen demand, has led to the widespread availability of childcare services. However, these higher-order factors have been insufficient to ensure that childcare quality is uniform at the childcare center level. Centers vary in childcare practices, amenities, and center maintenance. To account for these variations, and to understand under what conditions high-quality childcare services can be produced, I draw on 12 months of ethnographic observations and over 200 interviews with childcare workers and parents in 15 poor and better-off neighborhoods. I argue that variations in the quality of childcare services result from power relations between teachers and residents within a given neighborhood. Each neighborhood is a particular social space, where residents are characterized by class and caste distinctions. Teachers use these place-based social distinctions to construct perceptions about parents’ expectations of care. In poorer areas, by casting parents as acquiescent to lower childcare standards teachers believe they can exert less effort in childcare. In better-off areas, teachers perceive parents as having higher expectations for childcare and fearing parents’ withdrawal, teachers feel they have to provide better childcare. However, whether and how teachers act on their perceptions and adapt childcare quality is mediated by their professional identities. How they see themselves as educators, social workers, or just ‘task implementers’ informs whether they go the extra mile or minimize their effort in caregiving. These adjustments can lead to lower quality of services for poor residents unless they engage in claims-making motivating teachers to improve childcare services. I also demonstrate that poor and better-off parents’ desires for childcare quality are similar, but poor parents’ demand-making is constrained by powerlessness and lack of mechanisms for grievance redress.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2023
Citation
Zumbyte, Ieva,
"ADAPTED DELIVERY: HOW CHILDCARE WORKERS AND PARENTS PRODUCE CARE IN THE NEIGHBORHOODS OF CHENNAI"
(2023).
Sociology Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:h3fpymav/
