Constructing the Child

How should children be cared for in day care centres? What kind of care should they receive and who should provide it?

Donna Varga explores these questions as she considers the ideologies and practices that have shaped day care in Canada over the past 100 years. She explains how the emergence of developmental child psychology changed day care from a simple service for working women to a complex system primarily concerned with the moral development of the child.

Constructing the Child tracks the emergence of an orthodox child care ideology in the course of the 20th century, and argues that this orthodoxy now inhibits further developments.

An Our Schools/Our Selves book.