Topic of the thesis: Families Childcare Choices:  Structural and Cultural Barriers to the Use of Early Childhood Education and Care

Abstract: Our society is still facing several issues of social inequality and new social risks are challenging our countries. Welfare states are trying ways to cope with these challenges by introducing new forms of social investment. A way to start to deal with social inequality consists in tackling it from the beginning, from the first steps of an individual’s life, when opportunities start to develop. This solution consists of early childhood education that has been found to be extremely effective in decreasing inequality among families and children as well as future adults. Early childhood education encourages maternal employment and improves children’s skills and opportunities. The final effect is a decrease in inequality between families and children. Unfortunately, the reality is different and the highest attendance rate of early formal childcare regards children from high social status families, which results in an increase of stimuli and opportunities of those already advantaged from the support of their high-income and high-educated parents in comparison to children of low-income and low-educated families. This research aims to contribute to the study of this social bias, that is hindering the positive effect of early childhood education, through a comparative analysis of the main difficulties that the least-users of the services experience in the access to formal childcare. Particular attention will be paid first to the effect of childcare policies’ features and secondly to the effect of attitudes toward gender roles on the childcare decisions of low-income and low-educated families.

Research interests: Social inequalities; Social policies; Sociology of family; Gender roles; Public opinion.

Graduated from: Università degli Studi di Milano (BA); Università di Trento and Tilburg University (MA - Double degree). 

Degrees obtained: BA in Political Science; MA in Sociology and Social Research. 

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