Grandparent childcare is important to support parents’ work/care reconciliation. Research has begun to identify relationships between grandparent childcare patterns and policy settings. However, this work is disparate and focused on childcare policy, with little engagement with the broader range of policies that shape grandparent childcare. A holistic approach to understanding the relationship between policies and grandparent childcare is important to capture the intergenerational dynamics of family decisions about childcare and the complementarities (or not) of policies in different domains. This scoping review identifies policies that directly aim to shape grandparents’ involvement in childcare and that indirectly shape configurations of care. Most literature focuses on childcare and parental leave policies’ impact on parental demand for grandparent childcare. But a wider, intergenerational, policy lens reveals that policies (such as retirement income policies) affect parents’ demand for, and grandparents’ supply of childcare, and that policies in different domains are not always aligned.

Former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo left office with Japan's “Womenomics” policy having fallen far short of its 2020 targets, and with its greatest achievement, the increase in female non-regular employment, largely reversed by the COVID-19 recession. Although significant initiatives have been undertaken in the provision of childcare, tax reform, and parental leave policy, elite opinions within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, the government bureaucracy and the corporate sector militate against the mandatory regulations and political and social reforms that are still needed. These reforms are required because of the severity of Japan's demographic and economic challenges, the limited political feasibility of mass immigration, and the deep structural inertia built into Japan's employment system.

Due to the risk of Shiga-toxin producing Escherichia coli (STEC) transmission, current guidance advises excluding young children from childcare settings until microbiologically clear. Children can shed STEC for a prolonged period, and the cost-effectiveness of exclusion has not been evaluated. Our decision tree analysis, including probabilistic sensitivity analysis, estimated comparative health system costs and effects of exclusion until microbiological clearance versus return to childcare setting before this. Due to the risk of secondary cases, return before microbiological clearance resulted in the incremental loss of 0.019 QALYs, but savings of £156. Using the willingness-to-pay threshold of £20000 per QALY, the incremental net monetary benefit of exclusion until microbiological clearance was £215. Exclusion until microbiological clearance remained cost-effective if the total costs for managing the exclusion were below £576. Return before microbiological clearance may, therefore, become cost-effective in cases where the costs of managing exclusion until microbiological clearance are high and/or the risk of secondary cases is very low. Broadening the decision perspective, including the costs of exclusion to the families, may also impact the recommendation. Further research is needed to assess the risk of STEC transmission from children who have clinically recovered and the impact of STEC and exclusion on families of the affected children.

Northern Ireland has been without a Childcare Strategy for more than a decade – the only region in the United Kingdom (UK) that does not have one. As a devolved responsibility, progress in childcare has been significantly limited, and there is currently no government-funded childcare provision available. This is compared to England, Scotland, and Wales, where investment to expand provision has been introduced to help parents meet the cost of childcare by providing funded entitlement. This article examines and discusses policy developments in early education and childcare in Northern Ireland and the other UK nations. It is argued that the lack of progress by the Northern Ireland Executive to develop a Childcare Strategy overlooks it’s economic and social importance and reflects how childcare continues to be underfunded and undervalued.

Early adversity increases risk for child mental health difficulties. Stressors in the home environment (e.g., parental mental illness, household socioeconomic challenges) may be particularly impactful. Attending out-of-home childcare may buffer or magnify negative effects of such exposures. Using a longitudinal observational design, we leveraged data from the NIH Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes Program to test whether number of hours in childcare, defined as 1) any type of nonparental care and 2) center-based care specifically, was associated with child mental health, including via buffering or magnifying associations between early exposure to psychosocial and socioeconomic risks (age 0–3 years) and later internalizing and externalizing symptoms (age 3–5.5 years), in a diverse sample of N = 2,024 parent–child dyads. In linear regression models, childcare participation was not associated with mental health outcomes, nor did we observe an impact of childcare attendance on associations between risk exposures and symptoms. Psychosocial and socioeconomic risks had interactive effects on internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Overall, the findings did not indicate that childcare attendance positively or negatively influenced child mental health and suggested that psychosocial and socioeconomic adversity may need to be considered as separate exposures to understand child mental health risk in early life.

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is among the most important services for children and their parents as it promotes children’s development and enables mothers’ employment. Previous research has shown that there is an educational gradient as children of mothers with a low education level participate less in ECEC services, but less is known about the development of this inequality. This study, using EU-SILC survey data, focuses on the development of inequality in ECEC use of children under 3 years of age during 2004–2019, and on disparities between three categories of education levels among mothers. The results show that, together with increasing ECEC participation rates, overall inequality has increased in Europe. Inequality has increased between low- and other education levels, whereas in a few cases, a decrease has happened between medium- and high-educated mothers. It is important to pay attention to socioeconomic disparities with rising participation rates.

Among vertebrates, allomothering (non-maternal care) is classified as cooperative breeding (help from sexually mature non-breeders, usually close relatives) or communal breeding (shared care between multiple breeders who are not necessarily related). Humans have been described with both labels, most frequently as cooperative breeders. However, few studies have quantified the relative contributions of allomothers according to whether they are (a) sexually mature and reproductively active and (b) related or unrelated. We constructed close-proximity networks of Agta and BaYaka hunter–gatherers. We used portable remote-sensing devices to quantify the proportion of time children under the age of 4 spent in close proximity to different categories of potential allomother. Both related and unrelated, and reproductively active and inactive, campmates had substantial involvement in children's close-proximity networks. Unrelated campmates, siblings and subadults were the most involved in both populations, whereas the involvement of fathers and grandmothers was the most variable between the two populations. Finally, the involvement of sexually mature, reproductively inactive adults was low. Where possible, we compared our findings with studies of other hunter–gatherer societies, and observed numerous consistent trends. Based on our results we discuss why hunter–gatherer allomothering cannot be fully characterised as cooperative or communal breeding.

It has become universal to claim a relationship between social cohesion and quality public childcare. The more we invest in our children, the better the return later in life. We explore how childcare is used to strengthen social life by comparing the state role in civilising childcare as described in policy and educational guidelines. At one level, we find that policy intentions are framed by the idea of using childcare to reduce inequalities between people and social groups, and at another by the idea of civilising children to adapt to existing social structures. The analysis unfolds these two sets of intentions by showing how pedagogical ideas of child development become linked to the ways two very different states – Brazil and Denmark – formulate and organise ECEC policies as well as using childcare to bridge between people and social groups, and to civilising children to adapt to existing social structures.

Employer family policy tends to be conceived as employers’ response to economic pressures, with the relevance of normative factors given comparatively little weight. This study questions this status quo, examining the normative relevance of public childcare and female leadership to employer childcare. Logistic regression analyses are performed on data from the 2016 National Study of Employers (NSE), a representative study of private sector employers in the United States. The findings show that public childcare is relevant for those forms of employer childcare more plausibly explained as the result of employers’ normative as opposed to economic considerations. The findings further suggest that female leaders are highly relevant for employer childcare, but that this significance differs depending on whether the form of employer childcare is more likely of economic versus normative importance to employers. The study provides an empirical contribution in that it is the first to use representative data of the United States to examine the relevance of state-level public childcare and female leadership. Its theoretical contribution is to show that normative explanations for employer childcare provision are likely underestimated in U.S. employer family policy research.

In the COVID-19 pandemic, people’s dwellings suddenly became a predominant site of economic activity. We argue that, predictably, policy-makers and employers took the home for granted as a background support of economic life. Acting as if home is a cost-less resource that is free for appropriation in an emergency, ignoring how home functions as a site of gendered relations of care and labour, and assuming home is a largely harmonious site, all shaped the invisibility of the imposition. Taking employee flexibility for granted and presenting work-from-home as a privilege offered by generous employers assumed rapid adaptation. As Australia emerges from lockdown, ‘building back better’ to meet future shocks entails better supporting adaptive capabilities of workers in the care economy, and of homes that have likewise played an unacknowledged role as buffer and shelter for the economy. Investing in infrastructure capable of providing a more equitable basis for future resilience is urgent to reap the benefits that work-from-home offers. This article points to the need for rethinking public investment and infrastructure priorities for economic recovery and reconstruction in the light of a gender perspective on COVID-19 ‘lockdown’ experience.