Emmanuele Pavolini (Università di Macerata)

“Child care in Italy: are there social class differences in the access to services?”

abstract

Child care has become increasingly central in the debate about the transformation and the recalibration of the welfare state. If the welfare state debate until the 1990s was mainly centered around policy fields such as pensions and unemployment benefits (Esping-Andersen, 1990), in the more recent years it has started to broaden up, taking into consideration also social care (Sipila and Antonenn, 1995). Especially in the last decade the literature on “new social risks” (Taylor-Gooby, 2004) and then the more recent one on “social investment” (Morel, Palier and Palme, 2012) have put at the center of the debate the issue and the relevance of child care for a series of different reasons, mainly related to the idea that the formal provision of such type of care, on one side, can help parents (mothers) to conciliate better work and family life, on the other, to improve the skills of children.

Interestingly the scientific debate on child care has largely ignored one of the dimensions more studied in the (“old” social risks) debate of the previous decades: the role of social classes. In particular if recent studies have focused on the “politics” of child care and the role of social classes (see for instance Bonoli and Reber, 2010; Hieda, 2012), the attention to the impact and to the distribution among different social classes of child care has not been too much under scrutiny.

The aim of the paper is not only to consider how relevant social class differences are in the access to child care and how the situation has changed over time, but also what role the State has. In particular the present article focuses on the Italian case and tries to answer to three questions. Do children of different social classes have in Italy the same probability to attend formal child care? What did happen in the last decade in relation to this issue, given the fact that there has been an expansion of both public and private supply (have differences disappeared or increased?)? What is the role of public regulation and, in particular, of rationing in shaping class differences in the access to formal child care?