Both formal and informal types of child care are important sources of support for working parents andespecially women. However, little is known about the way migrant families combine their work andfamily responsibilities in the context of an absent or limited social support network. We explore this issueusing the example of Polish migrant parents living in the Netherlands and compare their practices tothose of their Dutch and Polish counterparts in the Netherlands and Poland. The aim of our research isto investigate whether migrant parents adapt to the new institutional context, draw on the childcarenorms of their home country, or whether they adopt a unique strategy that reflects their specific positionof migrants, formulated as separate hypotheses. We found support for all of the three hypotheses andshowed that the childcare practices of Polish parents living in the Netherlands are highly dependent onthe age of the youngest child. We also found that the extent to which Polish migrants integrate into theDutch society can be an important predictor of their childcare strategies when the children are veryyoung.
Inequality of income distribution in the Netherlands has since 1945 strongly been influenced by government policies. Until the end of the 1970s, governments pursued policies designed to reduce income differentials. The most important results were the construction of a social security system and the attainment of greater equality in the sphere of personal income distribution. In the 1980s, these policies were reversed. The earning discrepancies between groups of gainfully employed and the gap between the employed and unemployed were growing. There were drastic cuts in social security. In this paper, the most important instruments, policy instruments, and objectives, and their results are analyzed.
This article evaluates recent transformations in social policy that reflect the tendency towards individualisation in The Netherlands. Such transformations have taken place in old age pensions, widows' pensions, social assistance and taxation, and in respect of child support following divorce. Interestingly most reforms have not resulted in ‘full individualisation’, but rather have taken into account the fact that people, in particular women, are not or cannot be assumed to be full-time adult workers. Such a ‘moderate individualisation’, however, is not without risks for women's economic independence, especially when the developments of the Dutch ‘life course perspective’ on social security are considered.
Childcare practices of Polish Migrants in the Netherlands: Comparison with the countries of origin and destination
