ABSTRACT
The issue of childcare has received greater attention at the European Union level since the mid-1980s. On the one hand, childcare is crucial to female participation in the labour market, which is increasingly seen as one of the necessary conditions for European economic prosperity. On the other hand, it is hoped that by reducing the trade-off between employment and motherhood, childcare provision may actually help reverse the decline in fertility rates and thus improve future demographic prospects (EspingAndersen 2002). However, progress in the development of comprehensive childcare systems remains uneven across the European Union with strikingly different levels of provision, especially for children aged under three (the focus of this chapter). Conventional wisdom assumes that childcare provision reflects the nature of the gender contract – that is, the extent to which welfare settlements developed along the lines of female paid work or women’s care in the private sphere. Lewis and Ostner (1995) rate modern welfare states according to the degree of women’s independence from a male breadwinner model on a scale of weak, moderate or strong breadwinner models. In a strong breadwinner model, women and children are dependent on the husband’s income while the mother looks after the children. The Netherlands, Germany, Britain and Switzerland are typical strong breadwinner regimes, whereas France and Sweden are weak male breadwinner regimes, where both parents are expected to be wage-earners (see also Naumann 2001).
