Welfare Regimes in Relation to Paid Work and Care

Ideologies on work, caregiving, family, and gender relations vary across countries and over time. Contemporary perspectives typically stress child well-being; women’s caregiving burden; or gender equality; the tensions among these can be resolved in societies that combine intensive parental time for children with gender-egalitarian divisions of labor. Social and labor market policies that would support such a society are the most developed in the Social Democratic countries, with the Conservative countries of continental Europe and the Liberal English-speaking countries lagging substantially (most markedly, the United States). That policy variation appears to shape cross-country variation in crucial parent and child outcomes.