Childcare and Mothers’ Employment: Approaching the Millennium

Childcare provision in the UK has evolved alongside the expansion of mothers’ employment, transforming the experiences of successive generations. This paper reviews some mixed evidence on child outcomes of maternal employment and offers a detailed examination of the working mothers’ use of childcare. In particular, it looks at the differential use of formal and informal childcare provision using the first survey of the Millennium Cohort Study, which is compared, as far as possible, with evidence from the earlier birth cohort studies in 1970 and 1958. The affordability and trustworthiness of formal childcare remains a constraint on its use and indirectly on labour supply for some mothers.