one - Introduction

Summary

Becoming a parent, especially for the first time, marks a major turning point in most people's lives. In this book we explore and examine conditions related to young working parents’ decisions and experiences in the transition to the life course phase where they become mothers and fathers, and also the contexts and conditions under which they manage their everyday lives as employees in different national and workplace contexts. All this takes place against a backdrop of current concern across much of the Western world about the demographic imbalance characterised by large birth cohorts nearing retirement age and much smaller birth cohorts in the younger age groups, with consequences for social, economic and cultural spheres of societies. In most countries in the Western hemisphere the birth rate is falling and the mean age at first birth is increasing. During the same period as this demographic shift has taken place, women's workforce participation has increased in the same countries. The two-income family is increasingly the norm, replacing the one-income male breadwinner model that was prevalent across Western Europe and beyond during the first two thirds of the 20th century (Lewis, 2001). Although a relatively short phase historically, the unravelling of the male breadwinner model and its impacts on relationships and structures has been slow and uneven across and within European states (Crompton et al, 2007). This, together with massive global changes in the nature and organisation of paid work, gave rise to what has come to be known as issues of ‘work–life balance’.

This book draws on a European Union (EU) research project ‘Gender, Parenthood and the Changing European Workplace’, henceforth referred to by its shorter name, ‘Transitions’. The overall objective of this cross-national study was to examine and compare how young European men and women working in public and private sector workplaces negotiated motherhood, fatherhood and work–family boundaries in the context of different national welfare provisions, family and employer support. The project involved eight countries: Bulgaria, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden and the UK. In all countries apart from France, empirical studies were carried out in two phases. The first phase consisted of organisational case studies in a private and/or a public sector organisation.