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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.

The objective of this paper is to understand changes and progress of the Korean childcare regime by examining the evolutional process of childcare initiatives that were developed since the Japanese colonial rule.

This study employed a qualitative-based research design with a particular emphasis on explanatory research. Meanwhile, the data were gathered through the peer-reviewed literature and reports.

The findings indicate that Korea has had three types of childcare regimes: effective-informal, productivist and inclusive-liberal orientation. It also pinpoints that while the care regime development followed the European regime, the egalitarian society, which is a social prerequisite for modern welfare state-building, has not yet been fully established. This paradoxical situation eventually impedes the development of universal childcare aimed at promoting gender equality and a work-life balance.

This article offers a model and characteristics of the Korean childcare regime dating back to the Japanese colonial period up until the Moon Jae-In administration, where it still receives less attention in most of the social policy literature (see Table 1).

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.

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.

By synthesizing case studies on the informal economy throughout the world, I show that women and men specialize in different tasks, work in separate settings, and have differing access to positions of economic power in the informal economy. Moreover, women are more likely than their male counterparts to seek employment in the informal sector. I also explore why gender segregation is such a marked feature of the informal economy by examining characteristics of the informal sector that encourage such gender segregation including the relationship between the informal and formal economies and the social status of informal work.

Looks at the 2000 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference held at the University of Cardiff in Wales on 6/7 September 2000. Spotlights the 76 or so presentations within and shows that these are in many, differing, areas across management research from: retail finance; precarious jobs and decisions; methodological lessons from feminism; call centre experience and disability discrimination. These and all points east and west are covered and laid out in a simple, abstract style, including, where applicable, references, endnotes and bibliography in an easy‐to‐follow manner. Summarizes each paper and also gives conclusions where needed, in a comfortable modern format.

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.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to formulate a conceptually and empirically grounded new understanding of childcare arrangements for cross-national and longitudinal micro-level empirical research by drawing on theoretical discussions about the social, spatial and temporal dimensions of embodied childcare and empirical data in the form of parental narratives from a Romanian qualitative study.

The paper builds on a critique of an extensive body of empirical literature on the micro-level organisation of childcare and the thematic analysis of in-depth interviews with Romanian parents. The paper combines a critical literature review with findings from a qualitative study on childcare.

The paper formulates a new understanding of household-level childcare arrangements that is context-insensitive, yet reflects the social, spatial and temporal concerns that the organisation of embodied childcare often raises. The paper expands on six real-life care arrangements in Romanian households represented as different combinations of care encounters.

As the paper draws on parental narratives from a single country, Romania, the mapping of childcare arrangements in other jurisdictions and/or at different times would strengthen the case for the proposed understanding of care arrangements as a valuable tool to represent, compareand contrast household-level care routines.

The idea that parents (especially mothers) make work-care decisions in the light of what is best for their child has been widely documented. However, taxonomies of care arrangements have failed to reflect this. The proposed conceptualisation of childcare arrangements addresses this issue by articulating a conceptually coherent approach to developing empirically grounded childcare typologies that “travel well” cross-nationally and over time.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the role that grandparents play in family life in Britain today with a particular focus on demographic change and the grandparental caring contribution for both children and older adults.

Drawing upon a wide range of sources the author sets out the context, recent demographic and economic trends and presents a way forward.

The research presented in this paper suggests that grandparents are playing an increasingly important role in family life and their caring contribution makes a material difference to maternal employment rates in particular. It also suggests that those who step in to the parenting role face particular challenges which need to be addressed.

Further research into the significance of the grandparent/grandchild relationship is needed, together with the caring contribution of those who provide intensive support to families in times of crisis both in terms of the impact that has on the grandparents but also the difference it makes to parents and children.

One key practical implication is the need for a formal childcare infrastructure in the UK which does not assume that grandparents will always be there to provide childcare for working parents on the scale they do today.

Grandparents are living longer so more of them will have longer-lasting relationships with their grandchildren. But mothers are also ageing and so gradually over time the age at which we become grandparents will also be pushed back. This may in turn mean that grandparents in 20 years time may be less involved in childcare in any case.

This piece does not present new research but rather provides an overview of existing evidence.