In nineteenth-century London, women’s work rarely observed a strict schedule. “Most women”, historian Sally Alexander describes, “were casual workers in the sense that their employment was irregular, or seasonal, or both. (...) Whether she lived alone, with a man, or with her family, whether she was widowed or abandoned, whether her husband drank, the number of children she bore, her age, all these things directly altered or interrupted a woman’s working life to a much larger extent than they did a man’s.”1
Childcare was equally irregular. Women might entrust their infants to their older daughters or their own mothers; those working in the better-paid trades – like dressmaking, book-binding, hatting, or needlework – might pay to have them minded. If both husband and wife took up outside work, many working-class homes employed young ‘maids of all work’ – girls as young as six or seven who could mind babies, wash, and clean. Children of three or four who did not yet work might simply be left at home: as one boy told historian Henry Mayhew, “Mother used to be up and out very early washing in families – anything for a living. She was a good mother to us. We was left at home with the key to the room and some bread and butter for dinner.”2
Depending on her situation, work and childcare for a mother today might look more or less different from that of her nineteenth-century peers. She might work with a child strapped to her back, care for her children full-time at home, or work from home with a nanny or au pair. She might leave her children with a grandmother, an aunt, a sister, a cousin or, in a relatively recent development, in the care of their father. She might benefit from on-site childcare at her workplace, or on the contrary have her employer actively interfere with her childbearing choices. If she works for a sugarcane producer in the Beed district of western India, for example, she might be coerced into getting a hysterectomy under false medical pretenses so period pains or pregnancy don’t impede her productivity in the fields.
Amid this great breadth of scenarios, one model has gradually imposed itself: day care.3 Every day, millions of parents leave their children with one or several childcare professionals, go to work, and pick them back up in the evening. Virtually every aspect of the model besides this very basic skeleton then varies: whether families pay and if so, how much; whether public or private, state-subsidised or not; how many children there are (anywhere from a handful to two thousand) and how old they are, depending on when paid leave ends and preschool or school starts; the adult-to-child ratio, staff salaries, training, and turnover; and the pedagogical philosophy, if any, that the structure implements. All of these, and more, impact how accessible day care is, and the quality of the care delivered within its bounds.
Day care is typically designed for parents in full-time employment, who need a consistent, reliable solution. However, a growing offering has begun adapting to a wider set of working realities. The public and private sectors alike are understanding the need for more tailored, flexible options, especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Governments worldwide, particularly in the Global South, are seizing upon childcare as a powerful economic engine and poverty alleviator – and thus designing solutions compatible with informal or mobile work.4
Day care on the go
Public works programs are state-led initiatives that provide young people or precarious households with employment opportunities, typically on infrastructure projects like road maintenance or public parks. In Burkina Faso, the Labour-Intensive Public Works (LIPW) program, which ran from 2014 to 2020 and proposed temporary employment to those aged 16-35, had a requirement of 30 percent female participation. Yet it soon became apparent that childcare was a central obstacle for many women in that age range, who had to choose between passing up the opportunity for work or leaving their children unattended on dangerous premises.5 [The fact that nobody thought of this when designing the program is why we need a systematic care lens in all policymaking.]
To tackle this gap, focus groups designed mobile crèches that would follow women from one worksite to the next. Set up in local buildings, large tents, or under nearby trees, the centers are run by women also employed by the LIPW, who receive the same wage as those taking part in construction work. They are given a three-day early childhood development (ECD) training by the Ministry of Education based on the national preschool curriculum, and the intervention also includes a training component for parents. Breastfeeding is encouraged, and women are provided with moments to step away to feed their children throughout the day. After promising pilots, the model is being expanded to municipalities across Burkina Faso, and has already been replicated in Cameroon and Madagascar, with plans underway in Ethiopia and the DRC.6
The mobile crèches are part of a movement across parts of Subsaharan Africa to deploy community childcare solutions for informal workers. City employees can usually access a wide array of options, but for street sellers, market vendors, or cross-border traders – who represent up to a fifth of the labour force in countries like Senegal, and of whom a large majority are women7 – day care is rarely available. This results in children either being left to roam busy and hazardous markets, or being cared for by older siblings who end up missing school. Often spurred by grassroots women’s campaigns and implemented via partnerships between local actors and international institutions, pop-up or permanent ECD centers are being deployed in places like Nyagatare and Gicumbi (on the Rwandan border with Uganda), as well as in the sprawling markets of Accra (Ghana), Kigali (Rwanda), and Durban (South Africa).8
Day care à la carte
Day care is also innovating away from its one-size-fits-all offering of all day, five days a week. Such a schedule is ill-suited for plenty of people: stay-at-home parents who don’t need full-time care but still occasionally need to run errands, go to a medical appointment without their children in tow, or simply take a break; parents who are on waiting lists for childcare or cannot afford it full-time; those working part-time, remotely or inconsistent schedules; parents who are between jobs but need time to fill out applications or attend interviews.
With the generalisation of remote and gig work making those situations more frequent, many structures offer ‘drop-in’ day care. Parents get time to themselves, and children get the opportunity to play in new settings while interacting with other kids.
Shanghai’s municipal ‘baby houses’, for example, a concept piloted in 2022 and since deployed across the city, offer one-to-three-hour reservation-based spots. Each child aged 1-3 is entitled to twelve free visits per year, with additional visits charged at a non-profit rate.9 Local parents reportedly set up online chat groups to coordinate bringing their children at the same time. Similarly, the city of Bogotá’s much-lauded Manzanas de Cuidado (Care Blocs) offer drop-in care for the children and elderly relatives of caregivers attending the blocs, so they may engage in professional courses and recreational activities.
More about the Manzanas and other innovative models across Latin America:
However, unless part of a well-designed hybrid offering or a public model built around drop-in, making room for flexibility is often burdensome for day care structures. Despite frequently having vacant spots when children are ill or on holiday, ECE staff struggle to reliably fill them, having to make individual calls to parents in their community who might need childcare. This takes time and energy away from their central responsibilities towards children. But vacant spots mean lost revenue, a crucial concern in a time where economic pressures and falling birth rates threaten many day care structures with closure.
Alban Gamot experienced that gap himself when his son, whom he and his wife registered for ‘occasional’ day care after missing the cutoff date for full-time, was only offered one half-day slot nine months after initially signing up. Digging into the issue, he learned that about 20% of the country’s half-a-million day care spots go unused every day, while 87% of parents see their requests for drop-in denied.10 In 2019, he founded Crèche à la demande (now CALD): a digital interface linking parents in need of drop-in care to structures with available spots.
Once signed up, families get matched with the childcare structure closest to them, and/or most adapted to theirs and their children’s needs. They become part of that structure’s “bubble”, a group of families known to and trusted by them. Crèches pay a monthly subscription to be registered on the platform. Whenever a regular spot frees up – up to a month in advance when a family shares their upcoming vacation dates, or down to an hour if a child is sick or unforeseeably absent – they easily enter that information into the platform, which notifies eligible parents. The latter can then reserve the spots on a first-come-first-serve basis, at the price of a municipal daycare.
Drop-in can work well when embedded in public-private and community partnerships. This can be with town halls as well as “local gyms [putting on] fitness classes; community centers hosting evening events; libraries offering parent programs; [or] healthcare providers serving families with children”.11 Announcing the partnership between the city and CALD, the mayor of La Garde, France, said to journalists: “It’s important, today more than ever, [for the] public service to adapt itself to the needs of users. Flexibility is key”.
The flexibility trap
These developments are welcome. They signal a gradual recognition that “working parents” in the traditional sense are not the only ones with childcare needs. That anyone taking care of children, including grandparents and other alloparents, has legitimate reasons to need support; and that children themselves thrive in a healthy mix of strong attachments to their primary caregivers and lots of peer socialisation and exposure to new environments.
Innovations of this kind fit within a broader trend we could call “systematising the village” – or, as I conceptualised it elsewhere, institutionalising fluidity. In a similar dynamic to that of de-institutionalisation in child protection and psychiatry, the shift towards the home in eldercare, or the growing popularity of birth centres, some systems are attempting to partly re-create the conditions of family and community care whilst ensuring high safeguarding and health standards. In this case, mobile or drop-in day care seeks to mimic the low barriers to entry and logistical ease of, say, dropping your child at their aunt’s for a few hours, but within an organised context. While they do not aim to replace those foundational structures, they can offer a quality alternative for those without extensive support networks.
However, just like “the village”, engineered flexibility has its flaws. What looks like increased convenience or support on one side of the equation can prove to entail greater insecurity on the other. There is a sort of “flexibility trap”: in an attempt to provide one group with solutions to fit their needs, systems can merely transfer the initial uncertainty onto a different group; one, perhaps, whose interests are not considered as much in decision-making.
With drop-in, for example, some early childhood educators report greater difficulty in caring for ‘occasional’ children. Infrequent visits make it more difficult to develop trust and quality relationships, as well as implement developmental programs. Similarly, some assessments of the mobile crèches highlight difficulties linked to the very short training received by the women hired as childminders. One report warns that the promise of a pathway for them into permanent care work is an uncertain one, because their training is too limited to be valuable; and that the quality of care remains a central concern that has not been adequately measured.12
These are not huge issues, mostly logistical hurdles the handling of which should improve as the models move from local experiments to scaled solutions. But the rush to offer more flexible childcare options without putting the right working conditions in place can have dramatic consequences.
In a very complex saga I cannot do justice to in a paragraph,13 France’s recent scandal surrouding sexual violence in after-school programs has turned out to be in great part a policy failure – and not simply the result of individual criminal actions. It is a story of policymaking wanting to have it all: adapt school times to children’s natural cycles while granting cities the freedom to organise school around local realities, but without disrupting parents’ working hours, and without spending too much money. Something had to give. That thing was the quality of care and the safety of children themselves.
For another case study of how well-intentioned moves towards greater flexibility and choice in care can sometimes backfire, see my analysis of anthropologist Susie Kilshaw’s research on pregnancy loss:
Dramatic or not, these examples are symptomatic of a philosophy that underpins a lot of care systems-building: one which focuses on what care can do, but ignores the need to understand what care is.
Childcare can indeed do many things: create jobs, build skills, “boost human capital”, increase children’s future earnings, foster economic growth. From that perspective, flexible childcare is but a great avenue to enabling more of those things for a wider set of people. Flexible solutions create more jobs, build more skills, boost more capital. But while those aspects are undeniably central, and logical for cash-strapped governments and economic institutions like the World Bank to concern themselves with, focusing on exclusively those leads to worse – and often much costlier in the long run – policymaking.
If, on the other hand, decision-makers chose to understand care as a relational process, based on trust and knowledge built over time, they could design childcare solutions much more intelligently. If the French Ministry of Education centered what care is, it would be immediately obvious that hasty recruitment decisions, impossibly distributed working hours, low pay, high turnover rates, and negligible training requirements were almost mathematically going to be ripe for abuse. If Burkinabè officials centered what care is, they might consider the benefits of giving the breastfeeding mother an allowance rather than paying someone else so she may breastfeed her infant while doing construction work – even if the latter option creates two jobs instead of one.
Centering what care is requires resisting a deeply rooted hierarchy between economic analysis and experiential knowledge; between neatly measurable outcomes and long-term well-being. It requires restating, as many times as will be necessary, that children and all other care receivers are rights holders, whose interests should be integral to how the systems they depend on are built. But it is not a step we can skip if we truly want what should be the point of flexibility: opening more doors that work for more people.
Centering what care is as well as what it enables is central to The Fifth Wave’s ethos. It is why, in tandem with rigorous analyses of innovative care models, we are committed to publishing theoretical and narrative perspectives on care from scholars, practitioners, and everyday caregivers, through our interviews and essays. That ecotone is where we believe the richest insights emerge. If you know anyone building or transforming care systems who could benefit from engaging with our work, please don’t hesitate to share it with them.
Sally Alexander, “Women’s Work in Nineteenth-Century London”, in The Rights and Wrongs of Women (eds. Ann Oakley and Juliet Mitchell), Pelican, 1976.
H. Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 1861, vol.1, p.39. Cited in ibid.
I know that in some places, day care only refers to the 0-3 bracket, and in others, encompasses 0-6. I refer to it broadly here.
It is worth noting, as pointed out by Kiya Taylor, that academic studies into the needs and situations of working parents still routinely exclude informal workers, even though they represent a significant share of the workforce in many countries.
Itay Noy and Alessandra Heinemann, “Public Works That Provide Care Services”. World Bank Group policy note, 2025. Access here.
World Bank Umbrella Facility for Gender Equality, “Childcare goes mobile in Burkina Faso”. Results series note, undated. Access here.
Tomás Ramírez Reynoso and Joann Vanek, “Street Vendors and Market Traders in 12 Countries: A Statistical Profile”. WIEGO Statistical Brief n°40, 2024. Access here.
The Child Care in Markets project is led by the Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising (WIEGO) network, in partnership with the Accra Focal Cities team, Durban’s Asiye eTafuleni (AeT) worker’s rights nonprofit, and Rwanda’s SYTRIECI syndicate for domestic and independent workers.
The information about the Shanghai baby houses is from government-controlled or municipal sources.
Numbers unverified, stated on CALD’s website at https://www.cald.fr/qui-sommes-nous/.
DropInKids blog, “Drop-In Daycare vs Regular Daycare: Which Model is Right for You?”. Access here.
NK Consultancy Group. 2022. “VUP Beneficiary Survey on Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices on Community/Home-Based Early Childhood Development.” NK Consulting Group, Seattle. Quoted in Noy and Heinemann report.
This series of events will be the subject of a dedicated article on The Fifth Wave.
This is a super interesting perspective. In Norway’s subsidized childcare system, it’s very uncommon and frankly pretty difficult to get a part-time spot, or a spot that changes on a needs-based basis. You technically can send your child part time, but they discourage it and you will still need to pay (in most cases, I believe) for a full-time spot regardless. Which, granted, isn’t very much money to begin with: about €200/month. But there is some debate and frustration around this for parents who work part time or stay home and only send their kid to childcare part-time. I’ve heard that the reasons they discourage it are because it makes it difficult to plan staffing, and also to plan daily routines and activities for the kids. Some days they go on walks and trips, or have organized activities at certain times that make it difficult if kids are dropping in and out during the day. Also, I do think it has to do with kids feeling safe and secure with the same adults, and the same kids, doing the similar routines each day. Of course different families have different needs and it would be nice with some more flexibility. But it is indeed challenging to create policies and structures that meet everyone’s individual needs, so this is an example where in the end they create a solution that works for the majority.
I like the distinction between what childcare can do and what care actually is. Flexibility can solve real problems, but if trust, continuity, and relationships are treated as secondary, the system may simply move the burden somewhere else.