From women’s care work to the profile of “Tagesmutter”: a proposal for professionalization

Abstract

In ancient times, women took care of domestic work, caring for their family, raising and educating their children (Borruso, 2019). Even today, care work takes up a large part of women's time and is considered as "non-work" (Latousche, 2023) and as an "intangible" dimension (Dato, 2009), since there is no economic recognition. On the other hand, however, there are many women who, especially after motherhood, decide that they are free to choose (Nussbaum, 2014) not to return to work and to dedicate themselves to the care and education of their child. The contribution intends to highlight the figure of the "Tagesmutter", a German term meaning "day mother", or a family educator who works according to her own methods and different from those of a nursery educator or a babysitter. Tagesmutter works in her own home, where she welcomes children from three months to three years old with skills that require learning modus operandi, rules and strategies. The objective is to highlight the construction of this new professional figure starting from the training and the different reasoning regulations that regulate its profile, up to understanding how the service, activities and pedagogical project are set up.