Infants are born nearly helpless. Ideas and beliefs about how to care for them and educate them have shifted continually over time and place, and according to the wealth or poverty of the households into which they are born. The roles of mothers, fathers, families, relatives, friends, experts and hired help have been continually re-imagined, re-interpreted and reinforced. Assumptions about the caring and education of infants and young children, how they should be looked after and nourished, what they should be learning, and how their care relates to other forms of care keep changing as cultural assumptions shift.

In the UK nowadays – as in most of Europe – we rarely question the assumption that nurseries are a good solution for bringing up young children. But this is a relatively recent development. I have been a mother, an activist, a professional and an academic, and I have been involved in and written about debates regarding nurseries, childcare and early education for many years. ‘Who Needs Nurseries – We Do’, the title of this book, was a slogan for feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. Up until that point, in the UK at least, nurseries were seen as a very bad solution indeed for dependent young children. Childcare nurseries were strongly discouraged in the social services and health legislation. Public and professional opinion was influenced by the renowned child psychiatrist John Bowlby, who argued that young children needed their mothers, and their mothers needed them, and to do otherwise was to risk children turning into delinquents for lack of proper love and care (discussed in Chapter 4). Childcare nurseries barely existed.

As mothers and feminists, we argued the case for creating collective, public solutions as an antidote to isolated, nuclear families and women's dependency within them. Such solutions also seemed to be a good solution for young children, who we viewed as isolated and desperate for social interaction. Indeed, we envisaged nurseries as a local service for local people, within pram-pushing distance, a community enterprise, or (as the vocabulary has shifted) a co-production, accountable to its users and workers, proud of what it offered and keen for everyone involved to scrutinize its actions and achievements.