Projects

The challenge

This study focused on the link between childcare of infants and toddlers and their parents’ employment. The use and characteristics of formal and informal childcare, the profiles of different types of users, as well as their employment and the impact of birth on employment, were identified. Furthermore, the incentives and barriers to childcare use and the experienced and expected impact of childcare were described.

The process & results

The research questions were investigated through desk study, exploratory in-depth interviews, an analysis of administrative data (data from the data warehouse of the Agency for Growing Up were linked to the Labour Market and Social Protection data warehouse of the Crossroads Bank for Social Security for this purpose), a large online survey of both users and non-users of childcare and in-depth telephone interviews with (vulnerable) non-users.

We learned that there is an important link between the use of formal childcare and the employment of parents, which shows up, among other things, in the reason for using formal childcare (employment is the priority reason) and emerges from the analysis of the socio-economic position of parents who do and do not use formal childcare. Moreover, the link between childcare use and employment is mainly visible among mothers, more so than among fathers, which means that formal childcare contributes to gender equality on our labour market.

However, a large social gap between users and non-users of formal childcare does show up, demonstrating that bottlenecks in the accessibility of formal childcare remain for some families. Not all parents have employment that allows them to combine it with formal childcare (e.g. flexibility in working hours, no early or late hours or no weekend work, a stable work situation, possibility to work part-time, …) and/or can additionally fall back on informal childcare.

The survey of non-users of formal childcare reveals several thresholds for the use of formal childcare: limited trust in the quality of childcare, too high (perceived) cost price, limited availability of (income-related) childcare places, insufficient flexibility in childcare hours or in the period in which a childcare place needs to be reserved, or insufficiently long opening hours. The study shows that removing these barriers can have a significant impact on the Flemish labour market.