Child Care as ‘Concerted Cultivation‪’‬

As family structures and work schedules change, non-parental child care has become a necessary resource for parents with young children, with parents using a variety of forms of care. Because child care arrangements differ in their characteristics and quality, work and family researchers have devoted a good deal of attention to examining what determines the types of arrangements parents use. The purpose of this paper is to examine parents' choices of early childhood non-parental care arrangements using social class status and parenting orientation as predictors of the likelihood of spending time in different types of child care. Drawing on Lareau's parenting orientation typologies, I argue that middle-class parents will be more likely than working class parents to engage in educational activities with their children as these are manifestations of a cultural logic of parenting Lareau referred to as 'concerted cultivation'. I then argue that those parents engaged in concerted cultivation will be more likely to choose formal child care arrangements as these are educationally based, typically mimicking the school environment. The results indicate that parenting orientation may operate such that parents engaging in concerted cultivation are actually less likely to use any non-parental care at all.