Whether childcare is seen as part of society's educational policy, welfare policy, or employment policy affects not only its form and content but also its public image. The contributors in this volume use current polices for the care of infants and preschool children to analyze debates and track the emergence of new state welfare practices across a variety of social and political configurations-and offer some conclusions about which methods work the best.

This timely book reveals how policies of childcare and early childhood education influence children’s circumstances and the daily lives of families with children. Examining how these policies are approached, it focuses particularly on the issues and pitfalls related to equal access.

This highly topical book presents recent, significant research from eight nations where childcare markets are the norm.

This book explains the differences between European countries in the supply and forms of public child care and preschool provisions by reference to the historical context in which these forms originated and to the institutional constraints underlying their development.

countries in this region have been particularly limited (for an exception to this, see Petmesidou & Papatheodorou, 2006). The underlying assumption in this volume is that despite the diversity of welfare states bordering the Mediterranean Sea, some interesting commonalities are shared by these nations. Indeed, in his contribution to this volume Gal has described these nations as belonging to an extended family of welfare states that share some common characteristics and outcomes, one of which is the role of the family. By bringing together case analyses of the welfare states in the Mediterranean which focus on children, gender, and families, we maintain that it is possible to shed light on aspects of social policy that do not necessarily emerge in most discussions of these issues in the literature. The rationale inherent in a volume that focuses on a group of welfare states is of course embedded in the welfare regime typology notion that has dominated much of the comparative social policy literature over the last two decades. The publication of Esping Andersen’s seminal work, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism in 1990 (and his related 1999 book), which distinguished between three welfare regimes, became a landmark for comparative work of social policies in various countries. Esping-Andersen regarded his typology as a useful tool for comparison between welfare states because it allowed “for greater analytical parsimony and help[s] us to see the forest rather than myriad trees” (1999, p. 73).

In recent years, changes in the labor market, including an increase in the number of young working mothers, has led to a rapid growth of employment for nannies throughout the Western world. That rapid growth, however, has come with an increase in long, nonstandard working hours and in the context of a lack of regulation or of affordable, flexible solutions to the demand for early childhood education and care. This book offers empirical research and comparative analysis of in-home childcare in Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada, three nations where governments are actively recruiting migrant workers as an affordable childcare solution, showing how in-home childcare is ultimately, if indirectly, supported by government early childcare policy and migration policy.

All children are born with emotional talent. If left untended, those talents can wane during the first five years of life. The text focuses on children's readiness for learning. It addresses the natural joy explicit in children's early conversations and engagement with music and their development through play with both adults and other children.