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United Kingdom

Important Topics

and Government Agencies

Reconciling the Work-Family Balance in the U.K.

                                                       mother holding newborn while sitting at desk in classroom

In the United Kingdom, it is often difficult for families to achieve a good work-family balance. The U.K has very few family-friendly policies, which proves to be very problematic for a country where a large percentage of the labor force is comprised of women with children. In the United Kingdom in 2002, it was estimated that nearly 57.2 % of working women had at least one child aged 3 years or younger, and 56.9% of working women had at least one child aged three to five years old. Single parents comprised about 29% of all family types in the U.K. in 2001, and 83% of those single parent families were headed by single mothers. Current family-friendly policies in the United Kingdom include maternity, paternity, and family leaves, the Early Childhood Education and Care Act (ECEC), Child Benefit (CB), Child Tax Credit, and the Working Tax Credit. You can learn more about these policies by accessing the Work-Family Policies page and the Maternity and Paternity Leave page of this website. More information on these topics can also be found at the following website: http://www.childpolicyintl.org/.

Finding a good balance between home and work is an important aspect of life for many families in the United Kingdom. Many families and single mothers often lack the resources to send their children to formal childcare centers during the normal workday, and for many families formal childcare may not even

exist in the town they live in. The limited number of adequate childcare centers, the costs associated with sending children to these centers and providing children with transportation to and from these centers are all major concerns for working parents. In order to deal with these issues, parents in the U. K. have found other ways to deal with childcare and family issues.

      Some ways in which families balance their work lives and home lives include:

  • families often subsidize formal childcare with informal childcare, using family, friends, neighbors, and schools as a means to occupy their children's time

during the normal work day

  • Some dual-earner couples (couples in which both partners work) may share care responsibilities. Some couples put their careers on hold and provide more

care and support to children until they are older, while other couples may chose to let one partner develop his or her career at the expense of the other in order

to have one parent available to care for the family

  • Single mothers often work part-time jobs, barely making enough money to make ends meet, so that they can care for their children during the normal work week
  • Much like married couples, single parents, typically rely on friends, family and neighbors to help them care for children during the normal work week. Grandparents

are a common source of care for the children of single parents

References

Hadlow, Jane and John Baldock. 2001. "WP3 Care arrangements in multi-career families National Report: United

    Kingdom." Soccare, Retrieved October 25, 2006 (http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/sospol/soccare/report3.5.PDF)

Baldock, John and Jane Hadlow. 2001 "WP2 Care arrangements in single parent families National Report:

    United Kingdom." Soccare,Retrieved October 25, 2006 (http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/sospol/soccare/report2.5.PDF)

The Clearinghouse on International Developments in Child, Youth and Family Policies. N.d. "United

    Kingdom."Institute for Child and Family Policy, Retrieved October 25, 2006

    (http://www.childpolicyintl.org/).

The Clearinghouse on International Developments in Child, Youth and Family Policies. N.d. Assorted Statistics from

     charts in sections "Demography and Social Trends", "Employment" and "Social Expenditures." Institute for Child and

     Family Policy, Retrieved October 25, 2006 (http://www.childpolicyintl.org/).

 
image of Tulane University logo Amy Long, Laura Lepre, Rori Miller, & Francesca Brennan
This website was designed in an undergraduate sociology course on work-family issues in the European Union. All of the topics presented on these pages are a compilation of professional research, which we have cited, and thoughts about the work-family situation in the United Kingdom. It was created over the course of one month under the supervision of Professor Brayfield at Tulane University.