ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the political debates concerning home care allowance (HCA) with a special emphasis on what implications the scheme may have vis-à-vis women’s rights. From a feminist perspective, the HCA scheme is unavoidably a double-edged sword. In accordance with the traditions of Norwegian women’s law, the starting point of any analysis of care is the real life problems and situations actually encountered by women. The aim of the HCA is to secure families more time to take care of their children themselves, which means reduced working hours to the least. The occupational passivity promoted by the HCA has been claimed to cause parents great problems in terms of career. The HCA debate involves a possibility to choose between different kinds of child-care arrangements and to rank them. Evaluation reports on the HCA as regards its effects on labour supply, occupational participation and the labour market, give evidence of an insignificant readjustment.
