ABSTRACT
Many children living in two parent families have both parents in employment, or seeking employment. Dual earner families have a weekly income estimated to be 45 per cent higher than that in single earner families (Graham, 1993). Few families can afford to live on one income, even if they wished to do so. However, while social policy in most European states is based on the dual earner family as the norm, policy in the UK continues to assume a male breadwinner/female homemaker model (Brannen, Meszaros, Moss and Poland, 1994). For example, there is no statutory entitlement to family leave from work to care for a sick child: this assumes a parent (mother) at home or whose income is non-essential for the family and reflects an ambivalence among policy-makers about mothers of young children working outside the home.
