Child-Care Choices by Working Mothers: The Case of Italy

Abstract

In spite of relatively generous public subsidies and a reputation for high quality, only a very limited proportion of Italian families use public child-care and a large proportion use informal care. In this paper, we attempt to explore the determinants of the use of child-care among dual workers families. Given the limitations of data available we match two different data sets: the Bank of Italy (SHIW) and ISTAT Multiscopo. We find evidence that the availability of public child-care affects in an important way its demand. We also find that increases in costs of public child-care reduce the use of public as well as private indicating a shift to informal child-care. The presence of a grandmother who lives near and is in good health is an important explanation of the choice especially in presence of very small children. An understanding of the importance of these factors is relevant in the evaluation of child-care policies. This is particularly important in Italy, where the majority of families with children have only one child and children would benefit also from the socialization aspects of the child-care system. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2005working mothers, child-care, J2, C3, D1,

Women´s wages and childbearing decisions: Evidence from Italy

“…Nevertheless, we find evidence of a clear North/South division in the decision to have more than one child. We might argue that this reflects the availability of a good childcare system among Northern and Central working mothers, as described in the empirical analysis of Del Boca, Locatelli, and Vuri (2005) for the Italian setting. As a possible explanation, an additional unit of wage for a Northern woman could increase the risk of experiencing a second and third birth because of the childcare provision.…”

“…The decision to have a second or third birth, even if in presence of higher wage, is therefore not straightforward (see also Diprete et al (2003)). The situation is different in the North, where the large presence of public and private services offers a more reliable child-care system that also facilitates child-care even when children are very young (Del Boca, Locatelli, and Vuri 2005). We could also think there might be a selection effect at work.…”

“…An additional unit of wage for Northern women increases her risk to have a second or third birth. One might argue that this reflects confidence in the child-care system among working mothers living in the North and Centre (see Del Boca, Locatelli, and Vuri (2005) for a complete explanation). In Southern Italy, crêches are not widespread and working mothers tend to prefer informal child care, i.e.…”

Social Cognition in Preschoolers: Effects of Early Experience and Individual Differences

“…Thus, besides different types of care have shown to affect cognitive and social dimension of children’s development, as far as we are aware, to date no studies have examined the relationship between social cognition at preschool age and the type of care received during early childhood. Maternal education predicted centre-based care usage in several countries: Norway (Zachrisson et al, 2013), Finland and West Germany (Krapf, 2014), Belgium (Vandenbroeck et al, 2008), UK (Sylva et al, 2007), Italy (Del Boca et al, 2005) and US (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 1997a, 2006). Moreover, maternal education is the most robust sociodemographic predictor of mother and infant behavior (Bornstein et al, 2003; Mistry et al, 2008).…”

Gender Complementarities in the Labor Market

“…1 Many different solutions have been proposed to achieve such goal, from gender-based taxation (Alesina, Ichino, and Karabarbounis, 2011) to increased provision of childcare facilities (Del Boca, Locatelli, and Vuri, 2005;Del Boca and Vuri, 2007;Arpino, Pronzato, and Tavares, 2010;Brilli, Del Boca, and Pronzato, 2011) and the extension of parental leaves (Pronzato, 2009;Kluve and Tamm, 2013), from gender quotas (Beaman, Chattopadhyay, Duflo, Pande, and Topalova, 2009;De Paola, Scoppa, and Lombardo, 2010) to targeted training programs. These policies are often justified both on equity (the current allocation being deemed "unfair") and on efficiency grounds; according to this last argument, either gender diversity in the workplace would be productivity-enhancing, and/or the specific skills possesed by women are sub-optimally represented in the economy.…”