Everything Is Broken: Childcare and Inequality in the United States

In the United States, childcare is presented in law and policy as a matter of "parental choice." Mothers, however, experience it differently. Instead of empowering families, childcare today often functions as an "invisible system" or a missing market—and one in which mothers find few good options. Yet because most mothers are also employed, they must still find a way to make do.

Based on years of ethnographic and administrative research, sociologist Jennifer Woltil Bouek explores how mother...