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Hilary Land

Throughout most of the latter half of the twentieth century, social policies across much of Western Europe were based on a model of family relations that has become known as the male breadwinner model. It varied in form, applicability and strength between countries (Lewis 1992) but broadly speaking, marriage assigned the primary responsibility for the economic support of women and children to men and the responsibility for the care of both younger and older generations to women. The state subsidised this division of family responsibilities through the tax and benefit systems, which gave men as husbands higher allowances. Boys and men were given greater access than girls and women to education, training and work in the formal labour market and they expected higher wages in order to support their families. States subsidised care was less generous, and mainly restricted, especially for older people, to those without families. However, in the second half of the twentieth century girls enjoyed increased educational opportunities and women combined marriage and motherhood with participation in the labor market in growing numbers. Family size fell, marriage became more precarious and the gap between men’s and women’s wages narrowed. By the late 1970s women were beginning to be treated as individuals in their own right rather than as dependants of their husbands in tax and benefit systems. An OECD report on the new social policy agenda, Towards a Caring Society, published in 1999, concluded that “social policies based on the male breadwinner model of family relations have become outmoded.” (OECD 1999: 14f.).

1.Moving Care from the Margins of European Welfare States

Across the EU12, with the exception of France in the case of childcare, until the later decades of the last century, public provision of care both for children and older people was concentrated on those for whom family had failed. Responsibility for these services usually rested with the lowest tier of government, which had considerable discretion over levels of provision and whether or not they were free at the point of use and concentrated on poor families. In the case of elder care, means tests often took account of family or household assets as well as income. Voluntary, philanthropic or religious organizations were often heavily involved in the direct provision of care, particularly residential care. This was in contrast to the development of universal education and health services in the post second world war years for which central governments took substantial responsibility for the funding, development and, often, the delivery of services.

Publicly provided social care services for ‘normal’ families, in which women as wives and daughters could be expected to provide any necessary care, were largely resisted until they were associated with the achievement of other policy objectives. For example, starting in some Northern and Western European countries in the 1970s with the need to increase economic activity rates of mothers with young children, especially lone mothers, formal childcare services were developed. However, it is important to note that mothers entered the labor market in growing numbers before formal childcare provision was improved, relying instead on traditional forms of childcare (Leira 1992). This is the situation today in Spain (Tobio 2004).

Some countries such as Britain, rather than developing extensive childcare and eldercare services, deliberately encouraged the creation of part-time employment so that married women could fulfill their domestic responsibilities alongside paid work more easily. In addition, Britain combined this strategy with the recruitment of immigrant workers to work full-time or ‘un-social’ hours in the expanding health and social services of the post-war welfare state. This strategy has continued and, as a result, a fifth of the English social care workforce in 2007 comprised workers born overseas, including earlier as well as recent waves of immigrants (Cangiano et al. 2009). In Italy, where women are much more likely to work full-time and there are few formal adult care services, many migrant workers are employed as live-in carers (badanti) by recipients of the ‘companion allowance’ the long term care allowance introduced in the 1980s (Knijn/Da Roit 2008). As a recent ILO report on care stated: “The debate about care in the twenty-first century should be linked to changes in the role and level of migration.” (Daly/Standing 2001: 5).

Overall, acceptance of the need for formal eldercare has lagged behind that for childcare. For example, the European Employment Strategy was adopted by the European Council in Lisbon in 2000. It set target employment rates of 70 percent for the population of working age of all member countries. At Barcelona, two years later, the European Council urged member states to provide childcare services for at least 90 percent of children between the ages of three and compulsory school age and for at least 33 percent of all children by the end of 2010. Targets for increased adult care services have yet to be set, despite evidence that countries with high economic activity rates for older women also have the most extensive domiciliary and residential care services for elderly people (OECD 2005). Greater variation between countries in service provision is now found in the case of elder care than childcare and generous development in one can be found alongside more cautious development in the other (Pfau-Effinger/Geissler 2005, Knijn/Komter 2004, Ellingsaerter/Leira 2006).

2.Alternatives to Male Breadwinner Models: The Challenges for Care Policies

Meeting the challenge of how care could or should be shared between families, markets and the state, differently from any male breadwinner model, is becoming both more urgent and complex. This chapter will look at how countries in Europe are responding to this challenge as the tendency that “family policy becomes care policy,” (Daly/Lewis 2000: 293) gets stronger. Already there are some explicit social policies including systems of cash payments paid directly to family and other informal carers as well as to those needing care. Formal childcare and adult care services to replace and/or complement family care have been developed although methods of funding and affordability differ. The extent to which these services are delivered by the market or provided directly by the state, with access to them arising directly from the social rights of citizenship vary greatly between countries (OECD 2006). They also differ in the degree to which the care workforce is integrated into the formal labour market or confined to its margins.

Care above all involves time and recognising and valuing time spent caring, whether this takes place in public or in private. Recognition of this means that the right to time to care has more recently become an issue across Europe. Entitlements to paid and unpaid leaves associated with maternity, paternity and the care of disabled or frail elderly adults as well as rights to work flexibly or to work shorter hours, have become important dimensions of employment as well as of social policies (OECD 2007). The manner in which these policies are designed and implemented reinforce women’s traditional patterns of care in some countries while in others they open up the opportunity to change these patterns, allowing and encouraging more men to care and to care more (Leira 2004, Lewis et al. 2009)

3.Accounting for Family Care

Despite these policy developments it is clear that informal care by family and friends will continue to dwarf that provided by professional carers in the formal labour market not least on the grounds of cost (Lundsgaard 2005, Lloyd-Sherlock 2006). For example, it has been estimated that, on average, across the EU the volume of informal eldercare is five-fold that of formal care provision and even in Sweden, with generous formal provision, it is twice as large (Lundsgaard 2005). With more sophisticated time-use surveys and the development of “Household Satellite Accounts” it is now possible to estimate the monetary value of informal care provided by family and friends. In Britain it has been estimated that the total annual value of unpaid household production in 2000 was over £800 billion. Over a quarter of this was accounted for by childcare and adult care calculated on an equivalent basis in the same year (National Statistics 2002). At this time the annual cost of public social care services for adults was about £10 billion (Department of Health 2005). A study based on 19 OECD countries in 2000 found public expenditure on home care and residential care, as a percentage of GDP, averaged 0.99 percent across 14 of the 19 countries studied, with Sweden at 2.74 percent, Norway at 1.85 percent, Netherlands and Austria at 1.31 percent and the UK at 0.89 percent (OECD 2005).

These data are important because it makes family care more visible. The male breadwinner model, which rendered women’s work invisible in the home, became particularly dominant in British policy-making circles over a hundred years ago. The official definitions of family, household and productive activities developed by the leading neo-classical economist, Alfred Marshall, meant women’s work within the home literally did not count. It is an example of how “what we measure shapes what we collectively strive to pursue … [and] …the way in which our societies looks at themselves and, therefore, on the way in which policies are designed, implemented and assessed.” (Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress 2009: 9).

These definitions still cast a shadow over the pictures of family life described both in economic theories as well as in the official statistics. For example, as recently as 2000 a British Cabinet Office paper on men and women in their fifties reported that a quarter of the women who had retired before the age of 60 years, and were therefore categorized as ‘inactive’, were family carers. One of these ‘inactive’ women was described as follows:

“She has caring responsibilities for her mother for whom she shops, cleans and provides some personal care. She also looks after her grandchildren while her divorced daughter works part-time. She is not looking for paid work.” (Strategy Unit 2000: 20).

Far from recognizing that services that households provide for themselves “constitute an important aspect of economic activity” (Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress 2009: 14), the authors of the report estimated how many £ billions these inactive family carers were costing the public purse in foregone tax revenue and extra benefits (Strategy Unit 2000).

Although the majority in every generation would choose to rely at least in part on family care, as will be discussed below, how and the extent to which this is shared both within families and with the wider society varies between countries. The issue for policy makers is therefore how to sustain and increase informal care without either taking such care for-granted or undermining the incentives of adults of working age to be active in the labor market.

4.Assumptions about Family Care

“Socio-political assumptions on family life and relations between the sexes and the generations may have a stronger impact on financial support and care arrangements for the elderly, taxation and social security than economic developments.” (Knijn/Komter 2005: xiii).

The policy solutions available and chosen in a particular country depend on the assumptions made about what motivates family members to care. Governments convinced that ‘familism’ is being replaced by individualism (Giddens 1992, Beck 1992) are more likely to be fearful of introducing policies that allow family members to choose not to care. This is particularly so if they share the perception that family ties are weakening (Popenoe 1993). Attitude studies conducted in the 1990s found that the majority of the EU15 population agreed with the view that the willingness to care for family members had declined (Jacobs 2003). There are a number of reasons for the prevalence of this view, which in some countries has persisted over a long period of time and despite evidence of family solidarity to the contrary.

5.Evidence of a Decline in Motivations to Care

At first glance the view that families care less than in the past is supported by a number of changes that occurred in the second half of the last century. First, is the growth in the number of older people living on their own and the decline in three generation households. These trends are common across Europe but they have very different base lines so the distribution of household types still varies between countries (Eurostat 1993, Mabry/Giarrusso/Bengtson 2004). In 2001, a third of men and women aged 65 years and over in the EU27 countries lived alone while 26 percent were living with a child or grandchild. There were significant variations between countries with levels of solitary living among older people highest in North-Western Europe (for example 40 percent in Denmark) and lowest (between 10 and 15 percent) in the South and East. Conversely, the proportions of older people living with a child or grandchild are highest in Southern Europe (30 percent in Spain) and lowest in the Nordic countries, Germany and the Netherlands at around six percent.

Second, in some countries formal responsibilities beyond the nuclear family have been reduced because filial obligations to care and maintain have ceased to be underpinned by legal systems to the extent that parental care still is. Obligations to maintain across the generations vary between countries with Southern European countries retaining legal obligations between wider kin and in Germany between adult children and parents and grandparents (Millar/Warman 1996). Countries in Northern Europe have the most narrowly defined family obligations with stronger claims on the state as individual citizens.

Third, some tax and benefit systems in the past have also acknowledged and facilitated the flow of resources between the generations and between wider kin, but as many of these presumed and only benefited a married male tax payer they have disappeared with the introduction of independent taxation in many EU countries over the last 30 years. In the UK until 1990 when independent taxation was introduced, the extended family was very much alive in the tax system. There were, for example, tax reliefs for those maintaining dependent relatives (very broadly defined) or for those providing housing for a widowed mother or mother-in-law. Gifts between grandparents and grandchildren attracted generous reliefs, especially upon marriage.

6.Evidence of the Strength of Family Solidarity

The use of changing household composition as evidence of a decline in a willingness to provide family care is misleading in a number of ways. First, it gives only a partial picture of what is happening within families. ‘Family’, especially in official statistics is too often equated with household and confined to two parents and dependent children. It is much simpler to use the household as the unit of data collection and analysis but it ignores the messy ways in which families spill across household boundaries, thus missing the complexities and richness of family life. The official focus on the “nuclear family” was heavily influenced by American family sociologists, and in particular by Talcott Parsons who argued that the nuclear family form was better suited to a capitalist economy that needed mobile workers unencumbered by extended kin and elderly parents (Parsons 1943). Family relationships and exchanges beyond the household were largely ignored in official surveys until the more recent growth of lone mother households stimulated an interest in absent fathers and the extent of financial support they were giving to their children with whom they did not reside. Less is known about how much, if at all, such fathers share the care of their children.

Second, the reciprocal dimensions of family relationships between older and younger generations do not all require co-residence and will be missed if the focus is restricted to relationships within households. However, older women are much more likely than men to receive from (as well as to give help to) family members living outside the household because they have invested more in family life from an earlier age. Moreover, this investment usually continues beyond marriage or partnership breakdown. For men who lose touch with their children following separation, as in Britain, for example, a third of them do (Bradshaw et al. 1999), the picture may be different in future. “The care of men without a spouse may become an increasingly problematic issue, as the willingness of relatives to provide assistance may decrease.” (Tomassini/Glaser/Askham 2004: 123). There is however some evidence that men who re-marry, not only receive care from their new spouse (or partner), who will probably be younger, but also from the children of the new partnership.

The picture of the lives of older people seen through the lens of the nuclear family can therefore be misinterpreted. Living alone should not necessarily be equated with loneliness, isolation or danger. A study of social exclusion in Britain in 1999 found that single pensioners are more likely than pensioner couples to have daily contact with friends and neighbors as well as more likely to have weekly contacts with family and friends (Patsios 2006). Poverty as well as ill-health and disability, as much as absence of family, were common reasons for not having or maintaining social contacts. Other research has shown that older people living with one of their children are less likely to see their friends often than those living in their own households. They are also more likely to feel lonely. The European Observatory has found that where old people are dependent on their families for care and therefore have the most intensive contact with relatives they are the most likely to be lonely. Thus, elderly people in Southern Europe have more feelings of loneliness than the elderly in Denmark, Germany, the UK and the Netherlands (Knijn 2004). There is little evidence from British studies that older people are lonelier than they were in the past (Victor et al. 2005).

7.Positive Demographic Changes

The increasing longevity of men means that mortality rates of men and women are converging and, together with the higher marriage rates of the 1950s and 1960s, compared with previous and subsequent generations, in those countries without a big imbalance between the numbers of older men and women as a result of the second world war, a higher proportion of older people are living longer as couples. Indeed the most common living arrangement (52 percent in EU15 and 49 percent in the EU27) for older people is a couple-only household. Already, elderly men are more involved in care-giving than their fathers were and on the basis of a recent study of twelve OECD countries it is expected that the role of spouses is likely to increase (Lundsgaard 2005). The decline of three generation households may not result, therefore, in an overall decline in intensive eldercare but rather a shift from filial to spousal care. This will reduce the problem of older workers combining the care of frail elderly parents. However, the support which elderly spouses, especially husbands, may need to give care adequately is rarely discussed. They may need more support than some respite care from time to time, which is all that is suggested for example in the OECD study (Lundsgaard 2005). In addition, the little research that has been done so far on how husbands and wives care for each other shows they care for each other differently (Rose/Bruce 1995, Morgan 2004). The support they require to care well will need to take this into account although it should not be assumed, as those allocating social care services do, that wives necessarily need less support overall.

8.Inter-dependency within Families and between Families and Public Provision

Family relationships vary in their intensity over the life course and, depending on the history of a particular relationship may be positive or negative-sometimes violently so. Ambivalence towards family relationships is not surprising. In general, care is safest when it is freely given and received. This means having the choice not to care. Research on elder abuse shows that enforced co-residence can be dangerous to both givers and receivers of care. Family relationships are also unequal power relationships between young and old as well as between men and women. In circumstances where reciprocity is lacking because old age has limited the ability of an old person to return help and care, accepting familial care may cause unwanted feelings of dependency. Worse, it may be experienced as a form of control (Komter 2004). Having access to alternative sources of support from formal social services, thus reducing but not removing their dependence on their families, is important A recent study of older people in a city in Northern England found that they stressed ‘inter-dependence’ rather than independence.

“… formal help was not just to be resorted to in the absence of supportive family and friends: it might indeed be preferable in order not to be perceived as a ‘burden’ on them…whilst people identified need for practical help, they also sought to sustain social engagement and valued social activities, even when they experienced restrictions on account of a disability.” (Godfrey/Townsend/Denby 2004: 22).

Earlier research on the circumstances of older people conducted in Europe and North America reported a preference for living near rather than with adult children in frail old age (Shanas et al. 1968) The phrase “intimacy but at a distance” (Rosenmayer/Kockeis 1963: 418) captured this sentiment then. That it is a phrase still used by researchers nearly fifty years later is evidence that these feelings are still strong.

Formal services are therefore necessary to avoid unwanted dependence on family. Conversely family and friends who do care are not always willing or able to care without any formal help, not least because either they are in paid employment or they have health problems of their own. Indeed if carers are over-burdened their health suffers and they can no longer care. The wish of many carers not to do it all is thus entirely consistent with the wishes of the majority of those for whom they care. Family carers in Spain and Portugal, where fewer formal services are available, are more likely to feel over relied upon than in those countries, such as Sweden, France and Denmark, which have well developed services (Huber et al. 2009). Esping-Andersen draws a similar conclusion from his analysis of data from the EU SHARE panel survey. Reporting that “in a typical European country, half of all grandparents participate in the care of their grandchildren” (Esping-Andersen 2009: 92), he notes that the frequency of caring is inversely related to its intensity. Thus, 60 percent of grandparents care for grandchildren in Denmark but only care an average of seven hours a week. Similarly, in Denmark, 60 percent of adult children care for their elderly parents but for less than three hours a week. Formal childcare and eldercare services are extensive in Denmark. Conversely 40 percent of grandparents in Spain provide childcare and 12 percent of children look after elderly parents but the care is more intensive-26 and 16 hours/week respectively (Esping-Andersen 2009). These data are consistent with Finch’s (1995) suggestion that family norms are guidelines rather than rules and that how these norms influence behavior may change when circumstances including the availability, cost and quality of home care and institutional services alter (Tomassini et al. 2004). Esping-Andersen also noted that fathers provide more child care when their children are enrolled in formal day care.

A study conducted across Norway, England, Spain, Germany, Italy and Israel in 2000 concluded: “It is increasingly apparent that solidarity, or felt obligations towards children and parents, are alive and well but that their manifestations have changed.” (Daatland/Herlofson 2003: 540). The research showed that the ways in which family responsibilities are acknowledged and put into practice in daily life are changing but expectations of how responsibilities for care should be shared between families and the wider society differ and are not fixed either over time or place. For example, co-residence with adult children is considered more desirable in Italy (42 percent) than in Britain (30 percent). Relatives in Germany and Sweden are more likely to transfer a relative to formal care services if the family carer can no longer manage whereas in Poland and Italy another family carer is likely to take over (Huber et al. 2009). In Sweden, institutional care or, better still, care in the old person’s home is preferable to co-residence (nine percent). This same study found that there were different views about whether it is the family or the welfare state that is primarily responsible for financial support, practical help and personal care, with respondents in Norway most likely to say the state and those in Spain and Germany, the family. However, in all six countries a partnership between the welfare state and families was desired. They also found that when alternatives to family care were available, the young were more inclined towards family care than the older people. The researchers therefore concluded that: "It could be that future changes in the sources of family care will be influenced more by what older parents prefer than by what their children are willing to offer.” (Huber et al. 2009: 551). In this context, the question of who is given the choice about where eldercare takes place and who provides it is not straightforward. The question of who should receive cash for care – the giver or receiver of care – does not have a straightforward answer.

9.Combining paid employment and care

Women of working age are more likely to be active in the formal labor market than their mothers or grandmothers were, although levels and patterns of activity still vary greatly between countries (Anderson et al. 2009). Across the EU27 the Eurostat Labour Force Survey recorded that 73 percent of men and 59 percent of women aged between 15 and 64 were in employment in 2007. Altogether 30 percent of the female workforce worked part-time compared with. Seven percent of the male workforce. In the Netherlands 75 percent of employed women worked part-time compared with about 40 percent in the UK, Norway, Sweden, Austria and Germany and 22 percent in Spain and 27 percent in Italy. Fewer than 10 percent of men worked part-time with the exception of the Netherlands (23 percent), Norway (12 percent) and Sweden (10 percent). “In general, women more often choose to work part-time and men more often work long hours.” (Anderson et al. 2009: 30).

Many are combining paid employment with childcare or eldercare. In 2007, across the EU27 altogether 50 percent of women in paid employment reported spending time on child care and 11 percent on adult care daily or at least several times a week. The proportions of employed men reporting involvement in such care were 42 percent and six percent respectively, but on average they were only spending two-thirds as many hours/week on caring as women were, that is, 18 hours compared with 30 hours in the case of childcare and 8 hours compared with 11 hours in the case of eldercare (Anderson et al. 2009). These figures mask large variations between countries as well as between men and women within countries. There are also important differences in practices between high and low income groups as well as differences associated with different levels of education

Policies to help reconcile family care with paid employment have already been introduced in the form of paid and unpaid leaves. The right to time to care, it is argued, should be seen as a right associated with citizenship (Knijn/Kremer 1997). Time, however, can be thought of as something to be made or given as well as something to be used or spent as a resource (Glucksmann 2000). Rather less attention has so far been paid in the policy debates to time in the former sense, not least because to do so involves consideration of policies and practices that have not traditionally come within the definition of ‘family policy’ or even social policy. For example, many social arrangements still take for granted the flexibility and availability of women’s time (OECD 1999). As Laura Balbo wrote over a quarter of a century ago in her seminal article comparing women’s work with making patchwork quilts:

“Because many goods and services are produced outside the family by other institutions (firms, schools, hospitals and so on) and because access to them requires time and flexibility on the part of ‘clients’, someone has to do the work of dealing with agencies, adapting to their often complex, time-consuming rigid and bureaucratic procedures.” (Balbo 1986: 49).

This aspect of the use of women’s time has gone largely unrecognized not least because it is difficult to measure and in the context of a male breadwinner model was taken for granted. It also arises from thinking about care not just as a set of activities or presence but also what Selma Sevenhuijsen describes as “a moral orientation – as an ethic or set of values that can guide human agency in a variety of social fields” (Sevenhuijsen 2000: 6). Girls learn to put a lower value on their own time than the time of others not only from their mothers. For example, in Britain in the 1960s, girls of average ability and below were taught time management with respect to their future domestic responsibilities. As a report on the future organization and curriculum of secondary education in England and Wales recommended:

“A second element of realism needs to be introduced in claims on the pupils’ time. Real housewives have to take children to and from school, keep appointments, and fit in their cooking, sewing and cleaning and their own recreation with demands which are outside their control.” (Newsom Committee 1963: 137).

Today, full-time housewives are far less common and many more women must fit in with the demands of their workplace as well as their families. Workplaces now require workers to be more ‘flexible’ than in the past when many work regimes were more standardized and predictable. Richard Sennett argues that the flexibility and mobility required of more and more jobs in the global market place are corrosive of family relationships (Sennett 1998). Women across the EU 27 are the majority of those working part-time and in “non-standard” employment. The EU Directives concerning working time, part-time workers and temporary agency workers attempt to make it possible to work “flexibly” in ways which meets workers’ needs as well as employers’ needs. The European Employment Strategy, Guideline 18 of the Employment Guidelines aims to “promote a lifecycle approach to work through [among others] better reconciliation of work and private life” (Council of the EU 2008). These Directives and Guidelines have remained controversial particularly in those countries which believe in “light-touch” regulation, such as the UK, and where the concept of “work-life balance” rather than “reconciliation” is used in the policy debates. The concept of “balance” implies that reconciling work and family life is a zero-sum game. Indeed the male breadwinner was excused from providing family care because he had full-time paid work Trudi Knijn and Barbara Da Roit in their comparison of employed daughters with elderly parents in Italy and the Netherlands noted that, although they went to great lengths to meet their caring responsibilities combining them with the very different care resources available in the two countries, some, nevertheless, used their employment not to avoid caring but to set limits on how much care they provided (Knijn/Da Roit 2008). The more “active citizenship” is equated with paid employment, the greater the risk of diminishing the priority given to caring. “Conciliation” allows for greater recognition of the complexities involved and is possibly less likely to lead to alternatives to the male breadwinner model, which do not, at the same time, increase inequalities between men and women as well as between women.

In the past, in many countries, the public sector has pioneered good employment practices, including those that address women’s needs to positively combine paid employment and motherhood. Indeed, Esping-Andersen argues that women deliberately choose public sector over private sector employment for these reasons, despite lower rates of pay (Esping-Andersen 2009). Ellingsaerter and Leira (2007) also found that the structure of work and relationships between workers in the public sector are more likely to encourage not only women to take advantage of parental leaves but fathers too. In the context of savage cuts, it is hard to see how public sector employment for the near future will continue to be either as positive an environment, enabling women-and men to reconcile paid work and care, or as a standard setter for the private sector. Those who have to synchronize ‘work’ and ‘home’ will have an even more complex task, unless the flexibility and availability of childcare and eldercare services increase. Highly educated and well paid women can afford to pay for full-time help in addition to any formal childcare services. These mothers understand that the longer they ‘choose’ to stay out of the labor market, the greater the detrimental effect motherhood will have on their lifetime earnings. In these circumstances, inequalities between them and their male colleagues and partners will decrease but those between them and the women upon whom they depend as well as women whose earnings do not allow such expenditure, will increase.

The majority of women have to find another solution and many mothers of young children have turned to an older housewife or a grandmother, even when or indeed because they have access to formal childcare services. As discussed above, many grandmothers are still involved in childcare, although the manner in which they are involved varies between countries. In France for example they are invaluable during school holidays (Tobio 2004). In other countries formal childcare does not substitute for informal care in a simple way. In the updated ten-year childcare strategy for England and Wales, the Department for Education and Skills (where the children’s minister was located until the post was abolished in May 2010) wrote:

“Grandparents provide the bulk of informal care. Informal care is often valued for the high levels of trust and the levels of flexibility … Informal care is frequently the ‘glue’ that holds different childcare arrangements together.” (DfES and HM Treasury 2004: 37).

Nevertheless, ‘the glue’ continued be excluded from the childcare tax credit scheme.

More recently, David Willetts, who became the Minister for Education in May 2010, also described the considerable amount of childcare undertaken by grandmothers in the UK and called them – significantly – “the new housewives” (Willetts 2010: 235). Esping-Andersen assumes that as economic activity rates of women in their fifties and sixties increase they will care for grandchildren less. So far this has not happened but the care reserves that grandmothers represent may be reaching their limits. What may affect their capacity to care in future more is the growing gap between the generations (from one of 23 years to 30 years in the case of Britain), as women have their children later. Willetts (2010) suggests that in future more young women may decide to have their children in their twenties, while their own mothers are still young enough to look after them. Meanwhile the government is proposing to introduce a transferable tax allowance for married couples, so if one spouse stays at home full time the other can take advantage of the unused portion of the other’s personal tax allowance. This is justified on the grounds that this would send a positive signal supporting marriage. What it is also doing is attempting to resurrect the full-time housewife, for this scheme is not limited to couples with young children.

Instead of trying to put the clock back to re-create housewives and domestic servants and relying on women’s “compulsory altruism” (Land/Rose 1985), the debates about how to reconcile family and employment need placing in a much broader context. This, Selma Sevenhuijsen argues, means we need to integrate care

“into a wide range of social practices, not only when it concerns the combination of paid labour and informal care in the life plans of individual citizens, but also when it comes to integrating care as a consideration in the social infrastructure and institutions of civil society.” (Sevenhuijsen 1998: 21).

This involves developing policies that recognize that caring not only belongs in the realm of the family and is the responsibility of men as well as women but also to many other social institutions, like health care, education, city planning and the world of work.

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