Extended Kin Ties

Using Kin for Child Care: Embedment in the Socioeconomic Networks of Extended Families

By Lynet Uttal

This article examines the differences among the childcare employed by Mexican American, African Americans, and whites.  It focuses heavily on each racial group’s uses and views of childcare by relatives.  The author begins by discussing the declining use of relative childcare by employed mothers.  This type of childcare has declined by about fifty percent since 1958.  On the other side, use of daycare homes and childcare centers as a means of childcare for young children has more than tripled.  Still, the author explains that relative childcare is more widely employed among minority families than it is among White families. 

            There are many explanations for these differences, but Uttal discusses the three major ones: (1) the cultural explanation, (2) the structural explanation, and (3) integrative explanation.  The second explanation, which says that the type of childcare used is decided for economic reasons, criticizes the first one, arguing that it fails to recognize that cultural practices may be responses to structural conditions rather than differences in cultural values.  The last of the three explanations is a combination of the former two.  It criticizes both explanations for being overly simplistic, arguing that the differences arise from an intersection of both cultural and structural situations.