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Key points
- A working mother with children in nonparental care is now the normative arrangement in American households.
- Most adults have experienced nonparental care growing up.
- Despite these increases, the social climate surrounding nonparental care has remained fraught.
Non-parental childcare, defined as care provided by someone who is not the child’s parents or guardians, has become increasingly common in the United States. Mirroring that trend, rates of maternal employment in the U.S. have also increased. A working mother with children in non-parental care is now the normative arrangement in American households. Complementing historical shifts in child-rearing arrangements and maternal employment, social attitudes regarding these practices have also improved, albeit not uniformly. Research has shown that positive attitudes toward maternal employment correlate positively with education levels and negatively with religiosity.
Despite a marked increase in public support, the social climate surrounding non-parental care and maternal employment has remained fraught. While nonparental care is the reality, maternal care—the traditional cultural ideal—still holds sway. In a recent (2020) survey from the Institute for Family Studies, 29% of participants said that "dad works, mom at home" was the best arrangement for children under four years old. People’s attitudes about childcare and maternal employment are important variables shaping individual decisions in this context. Attitudes, in turn, are often molded in part by early experience. Therefore, a link may exist between a person’s childhood history of daycare and their adult attitudes about non-parental care and maternal employment.
Theoretically, the impact of early care experience may inform adult attitudes in one of two directions. First, the so-called ‘backlash hypothesis’ predicts that those who experience non-parental care as a child will hold more negative views of daycare and restrict their own children from participating in such care. Such backlash may be rooted in the negativity bias—our tendency to recall negative experiences better than positive ones. Negative experiences, memories, and emotions linked to daycare may foster negative attitudes toward non-parental care in adulthood, leading parents to reject non-parental care for their own children.
Alternatively, the ‘assimilation hypothesis’ argues that childhood daycare experiences may incline individuals to hold more positive attitudes about non-parental care and maternal employment and a preference for such care arrangements for their own children. Early research has tended to support this hypothesis. Participants who experienced non-parental care in childhood had more favorable attitudes toward daycare and maternal employment compared to those who did not attend daycare as children. Individuals who experienced a working mother during childhood report more positive attitudes toward maternal employment and less rigid gender role views.
Indeed, my research interests over the past 20 have included tracking childcare attitudes, and the results have pointed consistently toward the assimilation hypothesis. In 2006, we published data from 308 participants who completed questionnaires about their history, attitudes, and expectations regarding childcare, maternal employment and future parenting. We found that "Participants who experienced non‐parental care as children had more favorable attitudes toward such care and toward maternal employment than did home‐reared participants. A dose-response effect was identified, as increased time in care predicted more favorable attitudes toward it. Females in particular had significantly more positive attitudes than males toward non‐parental daycare and maternal employment."
In 2018, we published work that built on the earlier data set to explore the same questions over time. We looked at data collected over a 15-year span from three comparable cohorts (N = 668) of students at a Midwestern university. Across cohorts "a history of non-parental childcare predicted adult attitudes towards non-parental childcare and maternal employment. Compared to participants who did not experience early non-parental care, participants who reported experiencing early nonparental care had more favourable attitudes towards non-parental care and towards maternal employment and were more open to placing their future children in non-parental care. More time spent in nonparental care predicted more favourable attitudes towards it. Females reported significantly more positive attitudes towards non-parental care than did males."
Individual attitudes, however, are shaped not only by past experiences and social conditions but also by recent and current ones. Social conditions are dynamic and subject to unpredictable changes. Notably, the recent COVID-19 pandemic has drastically altered many aspects of daily life, including parental employment and childcare. As circumstances change, so, often, do attitudes. Research from Germany, for example, has shown that "fathers’ egalitarian attitudes toward maternal employment dropped substantially post-pandemic." It is thus possible that earlier, pre-pandemic findings about non-parental childcare and maternal employment may no longer accurately reflect the social realities parents face and the attitudes they hold.
We explored this issue in our latest project (2024), which sought primarily to retest the assimilation hypothesis and reassess attitudes about non-parental care and maternal employment after the pandemic using data collected from future and current parents. We surveyed participants 226 participants with questions about their attitudes toward daycare and maternal employment, as well as a childcare history.
Across our sample, 72.5% of participants were ‘completely open’ or ‘somewhat open’ to placing their own children in a non-parental care arrangement (compared to 53% in the early, 2006 sample). However, a markedly greater proportion of participants who experienced childcare were open to placing their children in non-parental care compared to those who did not experience non-parental care (78 vs. 58% respectively). These results aligned with earlier work.
As in the previous studies, participants reported a majority preference for extended family arrangements (60.5% and 60%, respectively). Likewise, in line with previous work, a gender difference did emerge regarding attitudes toward maternal employment and toward non-parental care. Females exhibited more positive attitudes toward both maternal employment and non-parental childcare. Those who spent most of the time in childcare were significantly more open to non-parental care compared to those who spent little time in childcare, suggesting a dose-response relationship. (No differences in attitudes toward non-parental care or maternal employment were observed based on political affiliation or age).
In sum, the post-pandemic results largely align with previous findings within the same population, providing continued support for the ‘assimilation hypothesis,’ which posits a link between childhood non-parental care experience and more positive adult attitudes toward non-parental care.
