Childcare

Rising Need for Nonparental Childcare

It has been well documented that the past few decades have seen a fundamental restructuring of modern economies, driven by global economic change. There has been a move toward an information society, where the main sources of innovation, particularly in the most economically advanced nations, are derived increasingly from the production of ideas and not the production of goods. Economically advanced nations have seen a fundamental shift from goods-producing to a service economy, and the growth of professional and technical classes.

With globalization, many manufacturing jobs have been moving to parts of the world where labor is cheaper; a growing proportion of workers in the northern and western hemispheres are employed to work in service-sector jobs. While the knowledge-worker employment has increased in all regions of the world, the bifurcation within the service sector, and a polarization of jobs and earnings, is also well documented. Some of the new jobs are high skilled and knowledge based, but many are low paid, low status, and part-time (often with nontraditional work hours), or what some have colloquially termed “McJobs.” In countries like Canada and the United States, some three-quarters of workers are employed in the service sector, where sales and services was the largest of the top-10 broad occupational categories. As a result of these shifts, family earnings instability and inequality grew throughout the 1990s.

With widespread worker displacement, an increasing proportion of families find themselves relying on individuals holding multiple jobs and/or having multiple incomes per household. While women's increasing labor force participation rates are related to women's rising levels of education and their desire for economic independence, families are increasingly dependent upon women's income to make ends meet. This trend is not new. Women have been entering the labor force in large numbers since the end of World War II, but some things are different today.

While fertility rates remain low across the most economically advanced nations, the proportion of women with young children in the labor force has been increasing steadily. By most recent accounts, more than two-thirds of all women of working age in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries—which are the most economically advanced in the world—are employed outside the home. In Canada, some 80 percent of women 25–54 years of age were in the labor force in 2005, as were about 72 percent of mothers with young children. In sum, one of the most striking changes in women's labor force participation rates across OCED countries has been among women with at least one child under the age of 6.

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