In Europe, care has historically been a private and local issue. Until the start of industrialization, care was dealt with almost exclusively in the context of the family. A clear sexual division of labor assigned the domestic domain to women. This included the burden of caring for the most vulnerable members of the family (Baker, Baker and Doorne-Huiskes (eds), Women and Public Policy: The Shifting Boundaries between the Public and Private Spheres, Ashgate, Aldershot, 1999): young children, the frail elderly and people with disabilities. Members of elite groups could externalize childcare to servants or childminders. In the case of care for the elderly or people with disabilities, local institutions such as nursing homes, hospices or almshouses run by religious groups eventually took care of disadvantaged or isolated people. Care, as a key human activity, was either a family or a very local matter. In most European countries, a process of institutionalization of care has started, more or less at the end of the modern period. In this chapter, we compare the trajectory of institutionalization of childcare in five European countries. By institutionalization, we refer to the historical process by which an activity becomes an object of public regulation. We focus on the actors that have initiated the process of institutionalization, on the way they have framed childcare as a public issue, and on the scale at which childcare has been regulated.