Multi-Layered Positioning in Care Arrangements - an Ethnographic View on Social Inequality in Day Care

Despite its small size, Luxembourg is a socio-culturally diverse country. Moreover, its day-care system ranges from day-care parents to preschools as to the care of 2- to 4-year-olds (Honig and Haag 2011). Considering that children at this age are not only positioned in different settings, but care arrangements created by their parents´, carers´ and their own daily practices and decisions, they experience different day-care realities. Based on this assumption, my paper argues that social inequality in care arrangements can only be understood from the view of children´s multi-layered positioning in day care: First, parents position their children in more or less complex care arrangements drawing on specific, often class-related, care strategies (Stefansen and Farstad 2010, Vincent et al. 2007). Second, carers position the children in daily routines often based on class-related ideals and norms (Nelson and Schutz 2007). Third, children are positioned and position themselves within their care arrangements in taking part in everyday practices that may be relevant to social inequality, e.g. practices of distinction (Kalthoff 2006). Aiming at showing how the assumption of such a multi-layered positioning of children in day care could contribute to researching social inequality with ethnographic methods (Diehm et al. 2013) my paper presents extracts of two ethnographic case studies which are part of my ongoing PhD-project embedded in the Luxembourgian CHILD-study. Based on interviews and participant observations, these case studies focus on the interaction between parents, carers and children involved in care arrangements and describing children´s unequal positioning in the Luxembourgian day-care system.