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The paper attempts to closely look into childcare regime in South Korea as well as Korean parents' childcare preference and usage across their young's early years. Through ascertaining Korean family needs in childcare while considering their cultural and social context, directions for future childcare policy development are offered. In so doing, it is hoped to inform Korea and other Asian countries going through similar social and economic changes of ways to build upon childcare policy while taking into account their individual context.

A literature review took place using theoretical frameworks of poststructuralism and institutionalized individualization. First, further attention to “problems” on Korean childcare policy is paid while considering the nation's situated cultural and social context. Also, individual families are viewed with autonomy and responsibility in undertaking childcare duties; thus, further individualized childcare service is proposed for the integration of the nation throughout the paper.

It was found there has been a mismatch between the nation's childcare policy regime and culture. The state exclusively provides defamilialistic childcare service provision, while many Korean families uphold familialism in meeting their childcare demands. In order to meet the sociocultural needs of Korean families, therefore, the enactment of complementary childcare service provision and the establishment of generous parental leave policies were proposed.

Many Asian countries work toward resembling egalitarian societies implementing Western policies and values. However, in reality, little change has shown especially in the paradigm of family, family values and family responsibilities in Korea. Therefore, this paper suggests that policymakers should take a careful evaluation of current childcare provisions and strive for gradual improvement rather than radical changes in childcare policy regime.

This article analyses UK Early Years policy in terms of service expansion and service transformation since the Labour Government's election in 1997. Childcare is now a matter of public policy, driven largely by concerns about child poverty and inequalities in children's life chances. The evidence is considered, first, on service expansion, increased take‐up and increased employment by parents with young children, and, second, on service transformation and child outcomes: to what extent have changes benefited disadvantaged children, families and neighbourhoods? The Effective Provision of Preschool Education (EPPE) research shows that pre‐school can boost disadvantaged children's intellectual development in particular, and the article concludes that programmes such as Sure Start and Neighbourhood Nurseries have been successfully targeted at the most disadvantaged areas, although better‐off families and neighbourhoods may have benefited even more, and that problems of cost and sustainability remain. It is too early to judge whether better integrated services now being developed will be successful in transforming the lives of the most disadvantaged children.

We model the conditions under which parents optimally reallocate time to childcare when an outside agent exogenously restricts the number of hours an employer can demand of a working parent. Theoretically, when the restriction binds, a parent's available time increases. We exploit a series of voluntary and mandated labor-market reforms in South Korea that regulated the statutory and maximum work hours of parents. The government implemented the laws in stages by industry and size of firms. This implementation process generates exogenous variation across families where one or both partners worked at jobs that were or were not affected by the reform. We show the reforms affected work hours and use the predicted changes to investigate the total amount they spent on paid childcare and whether or not they changed the relative use of market and parental care. When fathers get more time (work less), parents spend less money on childcare. A change in mother's work time does not affect expenditures. When parents get more time, they are more likely to spend money on paid childcare for school-age children and more likely to use private academies.

This article explores the link between defamilisation studies and studies of the adult worker model and discusses the mixed implications that government strategies for supporting the adult worker model have for defamilisation. The adult worker model emphasises that all adult men and women ought to engage in formal employment; defamilisation studies stress the importance of enhancing women's chances of choosing (not) to perform important family roles such as the receiver of financial support and the care provider.

Two new strategies (“condition building” and “rewarding/penalising”) for promoting the adult worker model are identified based on literature review; their empirical significance is explored through an examination of comparative data concerning early childhood education and care policies (ECEC) and reforms in pension age in 14 countries.

The evidence shows that promoting the adult worker model does not necessarily benefit all women. While the 14 countries provide ECEC to varying extents, the increase in pension age in most countries shows that governments adopt a “rewarding/penalising” strategy for promoting the adult worker model by allocating major welfare based on people's labour force participation. These pension reforms may generate a negative impact on women's chances of attaining financial autonomy.

This study presents two new strategies for promoting the adult worker model and shows the empirical significance of these strategies based on comparative data. It also highlights the importance of searching for alternative concepts, namely economic defamilisation, for guiding pension reforms.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether and how employed single-parents differ from parents in two-parent families in their experience of work-to-family conflict (WFC) and family-to-work conflict (FWC). Looking at job-related as well as family-related demands and resources, this research investigated to what degree these demands and resources contribute to differences in WFC and FWC, how their relevance in predicting conflicts varies between single parents and other parents and the role of compositional differences in work and family demands and resources.

Cross-sectional linear regression analyses were applied to analyze a random sample of employees in large work organizations in Germany. The sample included 3,581 parents with children up to the age of 25, of whom 346 were single parents.

The results indicated that single parents face more FWC, but not more WFC, than other parents. For all parents, job demands such as overtime, supervising responsibilities and availability expectations were associated with higher levels of WFC, whereas job resources such as job autonomy, support from supervisors and flexible working hours were associated with lower levels of WFC. In predicting FWC, family demands and resources played only a minor role. However, results provide only scant evidence of differences between single parents and other parents in terms of the effects of job and family demands and resources.

This study offers interesting insights into the diversity of WFC and FWC experiences in Germany. It provides first evidence of the impact of job and family demands and resources on both directions of work–family conflicts among employed single parents as a specific social group.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how individual and macro-level factors shape the work–life balance of young men and women across European countries.

The paper combines macro-level data from the official statistics with individual-level data from the Work, Family and Wellbeing (2010/2011) module of the European Social Survey. The study uses multilevel modelling to explore the factors which shape the work–life balance of men and women aged 15–34 across 24 European countries.

The findings show both differences and similarities between young men and women in how education shapes work–life balance. Higher education increases the likelihood of considering work–life balance as important in work selection for men, while lower education decreases the odds of considering this balance for women. More education is associated with lower acceptance of the traditional norm, for both men and women, and less time spent on housework. Higher share of family benefits decreases the importance of work–life balance, more so for men than for women. Work–life balance is more important for men living in conservative, Mediterranean and post-socialist welfare regimes compared to those from social-democratic regimes.

The policy implications are to more closely consider education in the transformation of gender-sensitive norms during earlier stages of child socialization and to design more holistic policy measures which address the multitude of barriers individuals from poor families and ethnic/migrant background face.

The study contributes to existing literature by applying the capability approach to the empirical investigation of work–life balance. The analytical model contains three dimensions – norms about paid/unpaid work, considering work–life balance in the choice of employment and time spent on unpaid work. Through this approach, we are able to uncover the agency inequality of young people taking into account individual level characteristics, including gender, education, ethnicity and macro-level factors.

The article reports on research among Dutch employers concerning the arrangements they provide for employees to help them with the reconciliation of work and family life. The research not only answers the question of to what extent different employers offer arrangements like childcare facilities, flexible working hours or leave schemes, but it also tries to explain employers’ policies. The explanatory analysis includes organisational characteristics and employers’ opinions with respect to costs and benefits of different arrangements. The empirical analysis is based on a survey among 871 organisations in the profit sector and the non‐profit sector. One major conclusion is that family‐friendly arrangements have become rather common among organisations; employers are aware of the fact that the reconciliation of work and care has become an issue for an increasing number of workers.

The purpose of this paper is to particularly focus on lone-mother families, comparing the childcare-related challenges experienced by working lone mothers and coupled mothers in three European countries in the context of a 24/7 economy and non-standard working hours (e.g. evening, night and weekend work).

This study utilises survey data from Finnish, Dutch and British working mothers (n=1,106) collected as part of the “Families 24/7” research project. Multivariate regression analysis is used to analyse the associations between childcare-related challenges, maternal non-standard working, lone motherhood and country of residence.

The results indicated similar results across the three countries by showing that working lone mothers experience childcare-related challenges more often compared with coupled mothers. Furthermore, an increase in maternal non-standard working associated positively with increased childcare-related challenges in both lone mother and coupled families but lone motherhood did not moderate this association. The findings suggest that, regardless of family form, families in all three countries struggle with childcare arrangements when the mother works during non-standard hours. This possibly relates to the inadequate provision of state-subsidised and flexible formal childcare during non-standard hours and to the country-specific maternal work hours cultures.

This study responds to the need for comparative research on the reconciliation of maternal non-standard working and childcare with self-collected data from three European welfare states. The importance of the study is further highlighted by the risks posed to the maintenance of maternal employment and family well-being when reconciliation of work and childcare is unsuccessful, especially in lone-mother families.

This chapter discusses the employment of migrant women to work as ‘nannies’ in private homes in the United Kingdom.¹ The term nanny has been used in the United Kingdom to denote a ‘qualified childcare professional’ (Cox, 2006; Gregson & Lowe, 1994). In this chapter, however, I argue that in 2010 it also referred to a form of deprofessionalised unqualified childcare provided in private homes across the United Kingdom. Migrant women have long been over-represented in care and domestic work in a range of advanced and emerging states (Anderson, 2007; Lutz, 2008) and this form of deprofessionalised nanny employment was no exception. This alternative use of the term nanny in the United Kingdom therefore referred with increasing frequency to migrant women who could be tasked with caring for children while also shopping, cooking, cleaning, driving, providing homework assistance etc. The chapter argues further that deprofessionalised nanny employment, occurring as it did in private domestic spaces and in the context of very low levels of state control, was likely to be characterised by high levels of informality (Cyrus, 2008). This meant that an important element of the childcare and associated domestic work sector in the United Kingdom was performed illegally. Deprofessionalisation and informality in the employment of (often migrant) nannies in the United Kingdom is troubling not only because of its association with illegal employment but also because it represented a marked failure to realise the demands for the upgrading of the status of care- and housework that have been key themes of feminist debate since the 1970s (Lutz, 2008).

The European H2020 Families_Share project aims at offering a grass-root approach and a co-designed platform supporting families for sharing time and tasks related to childcare, parenting, after-school and leisure activities and other household tasks. To achieve this objective, the Families_Share project has been built on current practices which are already leveraging on mutual help and support among families, such as Time Banks, Social Streets and self-organizing networks of parents active at the neighbourhood level and seek to harness the potential of ICT networks and mobile technologies to increase the effectiveness of participatory innovation. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss the Families_Share methodology and platform, as well as the results obtained by several partecipating communities in different European countries.

This paper discusses how the Families Share approach (CAPS project, Horizon 2020) is bringing the sharing economy to childcare. Families Share developed a co-caring approach and a co-designed digital welfare platform to support parents with sharing time and tasks related to childcare, after-school and leisure activities. Families Share conducted two iterative pilot experiments and related socio-economic evaluations in six European cities. More than 3,000 citizens were engaged in the co-design process through their local community organizations and more than 1,700 parents and children actively experimented with the approach by organizing collaborative childcare activities. The authors discuss the challenges and solutions of co-designing a socio-technical approach aimed at facilitating socially innovative childcare models, and how the Families Share approach, based on technology-supported co-production of childcare, may provide a new sustainable welfare model for municipalities and companies with respect to life––work balance.

The authors discuss the challenges and solutions of co-designing a technological tool aimed at facilitating socially innovative childcare models, and how the Families Share approach may provide a new sustainable welfare model for municipalities and companies with respect to work–life balance.

As a main difference with state-of-the-art proposals, Families_Share is aimed to provide support to networks of parents in the organization of self-managed activities, this way being orthogonal with respect either to social-network functionalities or to supply and demand services. Furthermore, Families_Share has been based on a participative approach for both the ICT platform and the overall structure.