[영문]The meaning of childcare services has long been contested. It has been breathtakingly malleable?from a nineteenth?century stigmatized welfare service to twentieth?century workfare, from children’s gardens to centers for “eight?hour orphans” (Kundanis 1996), alternately custodial or educational.1 In recent decades, rationales for childcare have “swung back and forth from life?long learning, school readiness and child development to employability, to women’s equality, balancing work and family, reducing poverty, alleviating at?risk status and social integration” (Friendly, Doherty, and Beach 2006, 4). From the late 1960s onward, childcare was strongly identified with employed mothers and women’s liberation, largely as a result of feminist mobilization for services. Today, in marked contrast, the most potent rationale for childcare in North America is the business case and its association of childcare with prosperity.