When a Scratch Becomes ‘A Scary Story’: The Social Construction of Micro Panics in Center-Based Child Care

Abstract

This study analyzes the everyday world of center-based child care and the climate of suspicion that permeates that world. Based on four and a half years of participant observation field research and thirty focused interviews with men and women child care workers, the author examines the existence of ‘micro panics’ which occur in child care centers when deviant labels are attached to caregiving acts or activities. Drawing from traditional Moral Panic Theory, this paper demonstrates how the context of suspicion surrounding center based child care and the ‘micro panics’ that sustain it are generated historically, structurally, and interactionally. These phenomena, in other words, are in part, a historical artifact from the 1980s moral panics concerning day care abuse, an interactional product of the gendering of child care as ‘women's work', and a phenomenological byproduct of the positioning of paid child care in the everyday lives of workers, children, and parents.