#Families #increasingly #working #parents
NOS/Beeld Werkt
NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 00:50
Families increasingly have two working parents, according to figures from Statistics Netherlands. In ten years, the number of two-parent families in which only the father works has decreased. In 2013, only the father worked in 19 percent of families with minor children. By 2023 this had decreased to 13 percent.
In more than half of the 1.5 million two-parent families, the father works full-time and the partner works part-time. That has decreased slightly since 2013. A bigger shift is that more and more women and men are taking part-time jobs of 20 to 35 hours per week instead of less than 20 hours per week.
Course
Sociologist Tanja Traag of CBS tells de Volkskrant that the development of women working more is not the result of financial necessity, but that it is because women are increasingly better educated. According to research, highly educated women work on average one day more per week than less educated women. The division of tasks within highly educated couples is also more equal.
About 14 percent of non-working mothers with a partner are not looking for work and are not available at short notice. Of this group, almost half said in the so-called 2022 labor force survey that the reason for this was caring for the family or household.
Disability
5 percent of fathers in a family where a partner is also present do not work (104,000 people). Almost half of this group says that illness or disability is the main reason. 8 percent of non-working fathers say they do not work to provide for the family or household.
Statistics Netherlands notes that in the Netherlands people think more critically about the bond between a child and a working mother than in many other European countries. 28 percent of Dutch people between the ages of 16 and 75 disagree or partly disagree with the statement that a working mother can build just as warm and safe a bond with her children as a mother who does not work. Statistics Netherlands investigated this in 2022. This research was also conducted in other European countries.
Poland
Poland, Finland, Italy, France and Denmark have the most positive views on the bond between a working mother and the child. The Netherlands, Latvia, Malta, Estonia and Luxembourg score the lowest. In general, men in the Netherlands agree with the statement less often than women.
Sociologist Traag tells de Volkskrant that it is sometimes claimed on social media that couples have become more traditional, but that is not true. “On Instagram and TikTok there has been a lot of talk lately about the translators which are said to be on the rise, or women who stay at home to take care of their children, but we see the opposite in the figures. There are actually fewer stay-at-home mothers who now stop working altogether.”
