The provision of in-home childcare has shifted in recent decades. It has shifted as a result of welfare state restructuring, which is attributed to both changes in policy mechanisms and ideas about the objectives of social policy. The policy structures and discourses that shape in-home childcare differ across countries, and also over time, to create distinct cultures of in-home childcare. As with other countries around the world, in Australia, the UK and Canada, these cultures of care are reflective of ideas about the most appropriate forms of care for young children. These include both who should provide care, and how it should be provided.

This chapter brings together findings from earlier chapters to understand the dynamic of these distinct care cultures. To do so, it considers the embedded norms and assumptions about the objectives of, and responsibility for, early childhood education and care (ECEC), and the role of migration policy in facilitating childcare in the home. The distinctive cultures of care are linked to the histories of childcare policy (Chapter Two), policy systems and practices (Chapter Three), rhetoric and rationales for different forms of ECEC (Chapter Four), and the reinforcement of inequalities in the provision of in-home childcare (Chapter Five). In each of the study countries, the ‘problem’ of in-home childcare is represented in different ways in policy debate and discourse, and this analysis is informed by both publicly available policy documents and statements as well as interviews conducted with key stakeholders in each county. Policy debates revolve primarily around the three inequalities explored in the previous chapter: gender, class/income and race/migration. Consistent with recent contributions to the field of gender, ideas and inequality (Béland, 2009; Orloff and Palier, 2009), this chapter draws on policy debates about inequality in order to identify discourses that reflect distinct cultural ideas about the provision of in-home childcare.

First, the chapter discusses the concept of ‘care culture’, how it has been used in other cross-national research, and its potential to explain differences in care policies and practices. There is a need to go beyond traditional comparative welfare state theories to understand variation in in-home childcare in the study countries. Most important, the concept of ‘care culture’ focuses on cultural dimensions of the welfare state, although it does not ignore the importance of structural factors shaping outcomes, including gender and class inequalities produced through different care regimes (Kremer, 2007; Williams, 2010b).