Uptake of Childcare Arrangements—Grandparental Availability and Availability of Formal Childcare
Department of Sociology, University of Antwerp, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editors: Jonas Wood and Jenny Pearce
Soc. Sci. 2021, 10(2), 50; https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci10020050
Received: 31 December 2020
/
Revised: 22 January 2021
/
Accepted: 25 January 2021
/
Published: 1 February 2021
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Work–Family Arrangements: Variation across and within Countries)
Grandparents constitute an important source of childcare to many parents. Focusing on the Belgian context, this paper improves our understanding of childcare decision-making by investigating how formal childcare availability and availability of grandparents affect childcare arrangements. By means of multinomial regression models we simultaneously model uptake of formal and informal childcare by parents. Combining linked microdata from the Belgian censuses with contextual data on childcare at the level of municipalities, we consider formal childcare availability at a local level, while including a wide array of characteristics which may affect grandparental availability. Results indicate that increasing formal care crowds-out informal care as the sole care arrangement, whereas combined use of formal and informal care becomes more prevalent. Characteristics indicating a lack of grandmaternal availability increase uptake of formal care and inhibit to a lesser extent the uptake of combined formal and informal care. While increasing formal care substitutes informal care use, the lack of availability of informal care by grandparents may be problematic, particularly for those families most prone to use informal care.
View Full-Text
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Biegel, N.; Neels, K.; Van den Berg, L. Uptake of Childcare Arrangements—Grandparental Availability and Availability of Formal Childcare. Soc. Sci. 2021, 10, 50. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci10020050
AMA Style
Biegel N, Neels K, Van den Berg L. Uptake of Childcare Arrangements—Grandparental Availability and Availability of Formal Childcare. Social Sciences. 2021; 10(2):50. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci10020050
Chicago/Turabian StyleBiegel, Naomi, Karel Neels, and Layla Van den Berg. 2021. "Uptake of Childcare Arrangements—Grandparental Availability and Availability of Formal Childcare" Social Sciences 10, no. 2: 50. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci10020050
Find Other Styles
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
