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Childcare and Mothers’ Employment: Approaching the Millennium

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2020

Kirstine Hansen ,
Heather Joshi  and
Georgia Verropoulou
Georgia Verropoulou
Affiliation:
Centre for Longitudinal Studies, Institute of Education, University of London
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Abstract

Childcare provision in the UK has evolved alongside the expansion of mothers' employment, transforming the experiences of successive generations. This paper reviews some mixed evidence on child outcomes of maternal employment and offers a detailed examination of the working mothers' use of childcare. In particular, it looks at the differential use of formal and informal childcare provision using the first survey of the Millennium Cohort Study, which is compared, as far as possible, with evidence from the earlier birth cohort studies in 1970 and 1958. The affordability and trustworthiness of formal childcare remains a constraint on its use and indirectly on labour supply for some mothers.

Keywords

childcarematernal employmentproduction boundaryJ13
Type
Articles
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 195 , January 2006 , pp. 84 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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Footnotes

The authors would like to thank colleagues in the ESRC Centre for Longitudinal Studies for help in the preparation of data for this paper, their predecessors on the earlier cohort studies, and the respondents of the three birth cohort studies for contributing their information. We would also like to thank Shirley Dex and Kathy Sylva for useful comments.

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