Everything is Broken: How the Childcare Market Creates Inequality

Under contract with University of California Press

Unequal and inadequate access to childcare remains a serious problem for families – mostly mothers and children. For mothers, it means inhibited economic opportunity. For children, it can mean the loss of social and educational opportunity, or worse, the loss of safety. Given the decades of investment into both state- and market-led solutions, why is it that childcare remains so problematic for so many families? This book takes us into the childcare system to tell a story about access and opportunity from the inside out. Often framed as a problem of underfunding on the left or parental choice on the right, this book draws on six years of interviews with mothers, providers, and policymakers combined with extensive archival research to complicate these opposing narratives and instead examine how the restructuring of the childcare market over the past three decades is contributing to, rather than resolving, America’s inequality problem. 

Set in Boston, one of the country’s most unequal childcare markets, Everything is Broken follows the narratives of 59 mothers back through the hazy maze of the childcare system. I find that the difficulty of childcare is not linearly related to a family’s resources as one might expect. Instead, it is a categorical relationship defined by mothers’ relationships to the state and market and informed by the reshaping of the system since the 1990s. Integrating mothers’ narratives with interviews from childcare providers and policymakers in addition to extensive archival research of public documents and publicly requested data, I identify four categories of mothers around which the book is organized: high-income mothers who can afford private tuition; middle-income mothers who are squeezed between the private and public market; low-income mothers who are eligible for public assistance; and poor mothers who are prioritized for public assistance. 

Everything is Broken bridges scholarship on families, inequality, gender, and the state to challenge the idea of childcare as a household level choice. In fact, the mothers I met rarely chose their children’s caretaker. Instead, I illustrate families’ experiences as deeply embedded within and shaped by the evolving structures of the state and market. Further, I find that these evolving structures are contributing to economic inequality among families, among mothers, by restricting women’s work opportunities. From a policy perspective, my book complicates conservatives’ calls for more individual choice and progressives’ calls for more funding. To be sure, families desperately need both. Alone, however, neither solution will likely resolve the constant crisis of care. Addressing these issues will first require a bigger and broader revision of what early education and care, and more broadly family supports, can and should look like.