Context Effects on Children's Use of Language

The sweeping changes in Swedish society in the 1990s, with extensive decentralisation, privatisation and cutbacks in the public sector, implied quite new conditions for the realisation of the aim of pre-school and school as a meeting place for children from different backgrounds. This article discusses some of these changes and their implications, through a study of parent's choice of pre-school care facility in the city of Uppsala. The main data source is a survey study among 1584 mothers of children born in 1995. The results show that parents' use of the right to choose pre-school facility is economically, socially and culturally segregated; the patterns of choice are construed in relation to residential areas but are not a simple effect of housing segregation. The choice of pre-school facility in Uppsala is thus a practice that creates specific conditions--socially and culturally homogenous private pre-school facilities--that make it virtually impossible for them to achieve the goal of being meeting places.