From watching a child to sharing the duty of care

After the Infant Care Act was enacted in 1991, Korea’s childcare centers, the children in them, and the staff who worked there all grew quickly in number. A Korean essay calls that quantitative expansion a real achievement of the statute, even where demand still ran ahead of supply. Institutionalizing care, it argues, did more than raise the counts. It helped move a private duty — “the parents alone should manage this” — toward a public recognition that the care of very young children is a task for the society as a whole.

Before the Act, the usual word was tak-a: simply watching a child. Care, as the essay defines it, goes further. It is protection and upbringing that aims at development and at the forming of a person, and it is a social-welfare service that can step into the living problems of the child and the family. Care resembles early-childhood education, but it places more weight on the life around the child, not only on a lesson. The need for it grew as women’s labor was wanted outside the home; more recently, the essay adds, countries have also strengthened care in the face of very low birth rates. Nuclear families, dual-earner couples, single-parent households, and unmarried mothers have made the welfare side of care harder to treat as optional.

A 1991 statute, and a purpose that looks at both child and guardian

The Act governs the care of children from birth until they enter elementary school. Its purpose, as the essay restates it, is two-fold: to protect the young child’s body and mind and to educate that child as a healthy member of society, and, at the same time, to help a guardian’s social and economic life run more smoothly, so that family welfare is advanced as well.

The first text, enacted on 14 January 1991 as Act No. 4328, was aimed at young children whom a guardian could not care for adequately at home because of work, illness, or other circumstances. Protection in a center was the primary function, and the typical child was one whose guardian’s caring role had already weakened. The same statute also said that the state, local governments, and the people as a whole share a responsibility to raise young children soundly. That public claim, the essay suggests, is why care could be pushed as national policy: the next generation’s health is not only a private hope.

The wholesale revision of January 2004

Quantity, the essay says, was no longer the only demand. Quality was being asked for, and the 1991 text was already being judged too slow for the society that had grown around it — even, at times, as an obstacle. In January 2004 the Act was wholly revised, and the essay reads that revision as a chance to take up a backlog of improvements.

Among the provisions it highlights is Article 3: care should be provided with the young child’s interest first, and without discrimination. The essay takes this as a child-welfare model rather than a model aimed only at low-income households or only at women’s labor, and it argues that care should not be left entirely to the market. The revision also set a childcare-policy coordination committee under the Prime Minister, a central committee, and local committees; in June 2004, after a government reorganization, childcare administration moved to the Ministry of Gender Equality, a shift the essay records as history, not as the end of the story. Facility types were sorted more carefully, and parent-cooperative centers — run by a cooperative of guardians — were added to the existing mix of national and public, workplace, corporate, private, and home-based centers. The law, in this account, had already done one large thing: it made care a public question. The unfinished work was to make the service good enough that a child is not simply left, and that quality is not an accident of what the market happens to supply. A fuller Korean telling is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A student account of Korea’s Infant Care Act, from the 1991 statute to the wholesale revision of January 2004.

Last updated 15 November 2026