“Kentucky Fried Children”: Kindercare, Daycare Chains, and the Caring Reserve Army

This paper explores the expansion of corporate child care chains in the United States between the late 1960s and early 1980s. Taking KinderCare as a case study, I examine how entrepreneurs viewed the growing demand for child care with an eye toward profit, imagining how they could grow and shape a market-based child care infrastructure that relied on a caring reserve army of women workers, whose love of children would propel them into low-wage employment. Though KinderCare grew more aggressively than any of its competitors, several other chains opened and expanded in the late 1960s and 1970s, some operating hundreds of centers across several states. While the chains never managed to capture more than ten percent of the childcare market -- independent operators opened centers just as quickly -- they applied the profit motive to childcare on an unprecedented scale. Since labor is the largest operating cost in childcare, the chains kept wages as low as possible. To do so, they explicitly linked paid childcare with unwaged mother work, presenting childcare (and mothering) as fundamentally unskilled, natural, and essential. As the industry expanded, these entrepreneurs capitalized on a normative mode of social reproduction in the domestic sphere to extract more value from their businesses. In short, KinderCare and its peers made their money off the expectation that mother work should be free.