Putting Two and Two Together? Early Childhood Education, Mothers' Employment and Care Service Expansion in Chile and Mexico

ABSTRACT In recent years, several middle‐income countries, including Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, have increased the availability of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. These developments have received little scholarly attention so far, resulting in the (surely unintended) impression that Latin American social policy is tied to a familialist track, when in reality national and regional trends are more varied and complex. This article looks at recent efforts to expand ECEC services in Chile and Mexico. In spite of similar concerns over low female labour force participation and child welfare, the approaches of the two countries to service expansion have differed significantly. While the Mexican programme aims to kick‐start and subsidize home‐ and community‐based care provision, with a training component for childminders, the Chilean programme emphasizes the expansion of professional ECEC services provided in public institutions. By comparing the two programmes, this article shows that differences in policy design have important implications in terms of the opportunities the programmes are able to create for women and children from low‐income families, and in terms of the programmes’ impacts on gender and class inequalities. It also ventures some hypotheses about why the two countries may have chosen such different routes.