1 Empowering Children: Disempowering Women Jan Newberry  Abstract: The development of early childhood care, education and development programs in Indonesia suggests unexpected linkages between democratization, empowerment, and neoliberal policy regimes. Despite the shift to grassroots organizing and to empowerment as a goal of development, in Indonesia there is tremendous continuity in the use of women’s work to provide social welfare at the community. Ethnographic research illuminates the impact on women’s work and their own interpretation of programs to empower children. Keywords: early childhood, gender, development, empowerment, neoliberal government, Indonesia Two years after the massive earthquake centred south of Yogyakarta in central Java, Indonesia, I visited a series of activists, educators, and governmental officials to ask about the appearance of early childhood care and development programs and their rapid proliferation in the area. 1 In the Yogya office of PLAN, the international child saving organization, my research colleague Nita Kariani Purwanti and I talked to energetic workers who had been sent from Jakarta to help in the reconstruction efforts. Here for the first time I heard the argument that the earthquake had made  jan.newberry@uleth.ca; Jan Newberry has been a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore and a Research Fellow with KITLV, the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies. She is currently Board of Governors Teaching Chair and Chair of the Anthropology Department at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. Her book Back Door Java: State Formation and the Domestic in Working Class Java was published in 2006 (University of Toronto Press). 1 Ethnographic research in Yogyakarta began with original fieldwork in 1992. Recent research has included interviews with NGO representatives, early childhood care and education workers, local childhood experts, government education officials, and local women working in these programs. My thanks to Nita Kariani Purwanti who served as interviewer, translator, and colleague for much of this work and. Ridzki Samsulhadi who served as translator for some of the interviews. Many thanks to friend and mentor Professor Christine Koggel for her encouragement to continue thinking about empowerment.