Public Childcare Provision And Fertility Behavior

The author analyzes the relationship between the availability of public childcare for children under age three and the decision to have a first child. One would expect that providing women with the option of returning to work soon after childbirth would reduce the anticipated negative effects of having a child on a woman’s career. However, existing research results on this relationship are inconsistent.

Offers fresh perspectives on twenty important global questions, challenging traditional capitalist or neoliberal frameworks.

This book is among the first to comprehensively examine the far-reaching impact of China’s new fertility policies on early education and development. Since the beginning of the 21st century, China has entered a period of declining fertility rate and aging population, which poses a serious threat to its sustainable development. To address this crisis, China has radically revised its fertility policy through the state’s guidance for regulating couples’ reproductive choices, abandoning its iconic one-child policy, and adopting the selective two-child (2013), universal two-child (2016), and then the three-child (2021) policy. Drawing on empirical evidence obtained through various research methods, this book offers multidisciplinary perspectives on the far-reaching impact of these policies. Part I summarizes the lessons learned from new fertility policies and identifies important directions for future research. Focusing on two major microsystems, part II presents research assessing families’ fertility desire for an additional child and projecting the demand for preschool education. Part III attends to family dynamics and their relation to early learning and development for both only and non-only children. Part IV addresses the importance of expanding access to affordable and high-quality early childhood education and care for children from birth through age 6. The Impact of New Fertility Policies on Early Education and Development in China contributes to policy development and practical improvement and serves as a catalyst to stimulate future studies on the topic. It will be a valuable resource for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners of early childhood education and care, as well as for families of young children. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Early Education and Development.

The impact of religion on family and reproduction is one of the most fascinating and complex topics open to scholarly research, but the linkage between family and religion has received no systematic comparative study. This book explores relationships between religion and demography the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The book offers a wealth of descriptive information on family life and fertility in different national and religious settings, and rich conceptual insight.

Due to the demand for flexible working hours and employees who are available around the clock, the time patterns of childcare and schooling have increasingly become a political issue. Comparing the development of different “time policies” of half-day and all-day provisions in a variety of Eastern and Western European countries since the end of World War II, this innovative volume brings together internationally known experts from the fields of comparative education, history, and the social and political sciences, and makes a significant contribution to this new interdisciplinary field of comparative study.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the beginning of one of the most interesting natural experiments in recent history. The East German transition from a Communist state to part of the Federal Republic of Germany abruptly created a new social order as old institutions were abolished and new counterparts imported. This unique situation provides an exceptional opportunity to examine the central tenets of life course sociology. The empirical chapters of this book draw a comprehensive picture of life course transformation, demonstrating how the combination of life course dynamics coupled with an extraordinary pace of system change affect individual lives. How much turbulence was created by the transition and how much stability was preserved? How did the qualifications and resources acquired before 1989 influence the fortunes in the restructured economy? How did the privatization and reorganization of firms impact individuals? Did the transformation experiences differ by age/cohort and gender? How stable were social networks at work and in the family? Were personality characteristics important mediators of post-1989 success or failure or were they rather changed by them? How specific were the East German life trajectories in comparison with Poland and West-Germany?

Most advanced democracies are currently experiencing accelerated population ageing, which fundamentally changes not just their demographic composition; it can also be expected to have far-reaching political and policy consequences. This volume brings together an expert set of scholars from Europe and North America to investigate generational politics and public policies within an approach explicitly focusing on comparative political science. This theoretically unified text examines changing electoral policy demands due to demographic ageing, and features analysis of USA, UK, Japan, Germany, Italy and all major EU countries. As the first sustained political science analysis of population ageing, this monograph examines both sides of the debate. It examines the actions of the state against the interests of a growing elderly voting bloc to safeguard fiscal viability, and looks at highly-topical responses such as pension cuts and increasing retirement age. It also examines the rise of ‘grey parties’, and asks what, if anything, makes such pensioner parties persist over time, in the first ever analysis of the emergence of pensioner parties in Europe. Ageing Populations in Post-Industrial Democracies will be of interest to students and scholars of European politics, and to those studying electoral and social policy reform. Official publication date 1st January 2012.

This volume examines ten economically advanced countries in Europe and Asia that have experienced different levels of fertility decline. It offers readers a cross-country perspective on the causes and consequences of low birth rates and the different policy responses to this worrying trend. The countries examined are not only diverse geographically, historically, and culturally, but also have different policies and institutions in place. They include six very-low-fertility countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Spain, and Taiwan) and four that have close to replacement-level fertility (United Kingdom, Norway, Canada, and France). Although fertility has gone down in all these countries over the past 50 years, the chapters examine the institutional, policy, and cultural factors that have led some countries to have much lower fertility rates than others. In addition, the final chapter provides a cross-country comparison of individual perceptions about obs tacles to fertility, based on survey data, and government support for families. This broad overview, along with a general introduction, helps put the specific country papers in context. As birth rates continue to decline, there is increasing concern about the fate of social welfare systems, including healthcare and programs for the elderly. This book will help readers to better understand the root causes of such problems with its insightful discussion on how a country’s institutions, policies, and culture shape fertility trends and levels.