Parental Employment and Family Formation

Abstract

The majority of adults in Britain today enter parenthood with a partner. What are the interactions between their economic and domestic responsibilities as parents? This chapter will address this question by collecting together the information that is now available, from published sources and from our own analyses, about the various choices and constraints that couples face over the period of family formation. In particular we are interested in documenting the influences on couples’ decisions to have children, their number and spacing, on whether the woman should take maternity leave, on whether the man will share responsibility for the children, on the extent to which parents are engaged in paid work through the period of family formation, and the way decisions to return to work are made by those who give up paid work over childbirth. In all cases changes have been occurring, although it is not always clear to what extent. The information available is far more extensive for women and wives than it is for men or husbands, partly because new data have been collected on women’s employment patterns, for example in the Women and Employment Survey.