Changes in the regulation of responsibilities towards childcare needs in Italy and the Netherlands: different timing, increasingly different approaches

Abstract

This article comparatively analyses how the responsibilities towards childcare needs have been framed and addressed in Italy and the Netherlands following the increase in women’s labour market participation. According to the authors, the differing developments in these two countries partly disconfirm the thesis according to which facilitating family/work conciliation is at the heart of the new social policy paradigms in all Bismarckian welfare states. This concern has indeed been an explicit driver of social policy changes in the Netherlands, but not in Italy. The authors argue instead that these two countries offer evidence for the thesis that timing matters. Italy has been an ‘early bird’ in changing family law and in putting in place childcare policies, but has not been able to innovate these policies when the economic and social context has changed and, in particular, has not reframed them fully as work-family conciliating policies. The Netherlands, on the other hand, was comparatively late in changing family law and developing parental leaves and childcare policies, the latter being framed largely as work-family conciliation strategies. Following the liberal cultural and political developments of the 1990s, which favoured individualisation and freedom of choice, the changes in the Netherlands systematically introduced an increasing mix of individual, family and market responsibility via both commodification supported by tax expenditure and the underpinning of the one-and-a-half breadwinner model offered by the regulation of protected part-time labour contracts.