Abstract
Motherhood is often cited as one of the main reasons for young women to become NEET (not in employment, education, or training). Given the potential long-term negative implications of NEET status, it is important to understand which types of resources can help young mothers to avoid becoming NEET around childbirth. In this paper we investigate how the chances of young mothers to become and stay NEET around the time of first birth are related to the availability and characteristics of members of their social support network, especially partners and grandparents, to assist in childcare. In addition, we consider the local availability of formal childcare. We use population-wide register data from the Netherlands and estimate discrete-time eventhistory models. Our results show that young mothers who are cohabitating or married are less likely to become NEETs than single mothers. We also show that economic activity and relative wage of both young mothers and their partners decreases the likelihood to become NEET and to exit NEET. With respect to the grandparents, we find that having more grandparents live in the immediate vicinity is associated with a lower likelihood to become NEET and a higher likelihood to exit NEET. Furthermore, we find that young mothers with economically inactive parents are more likely to become and less likely to exit NEET. Lastly, we find evidence for crowding-out of informal and formal childcare. Formal and informal childcare sources interact in such a way that the role of either becomes less important as more of the other is available.
Highlights
In recent decades, women’s labor market participation in Western European countries has dramatically increased
We investigated the role of availability of informal and formal childcare for the economic and educational situation of young mothers in the Netherlands
First and foremost, we found that social support from partners and from grandparents is important to young mothers in the Netherlands and that we can confirm prior evidence from qualitative studies (Sniekers & van den Brink, 2019; Ypeij, 2009)
Summary
Women’s labor market participation in Western European countries has dramatically increased. Young mothers face the additional structural conflict of interest between motherhood and education (Sniekers & van den Brink, 2019) They are more likely ‘not in education, employment, or training’ (NEET) (Statistics Netherlands, 2018; Klug et al, 2019), have achieved less education, less income, and lower employment probability at a later age (Johansen et al, 2020) and a higher welfare dependence at a later age (Gibb et al, 2015). It is important to understand which resources can enable young mothers to complete their education and to (re-)enter the labor force One such resource are social support and kin networks, and especially grandparental childcare, which are of great importance to mothers in general (e.g., Hank & Buber, 2009; Arpino et al, 2014) and to young mothers in particular (Maguire, 2018; Sniekers & van den Brink, 2019; Ypeij, 2009). In this study, we will study the relationship between the availability of social support networks and childcare for young mothers’ school-to-work transitions
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