An important part of the content of children's early years is their parents’ employment, which influences the time children spend with their parents and the level of income in the family. Hours of employment and the quality of working conditions will also influence the extent to which parents are satisfied, tired, exhausted or stressed when they come home. Over time we have seen changes to family economies in Western societies. Mothers have taken up paid work in greater numbers and the predominant family model is no longer that of the traditional male breadwinner with the father employed full time and the mother staying at home to look after the children. What has replaced this in the UK as the dominant arrangement is the 1.5 earner family where fathers work full time and mothers work part time. Dominant patterns may hide diverse experiences. Families from UK minority ethnic groups show variations from the patterns among white families (Dale et al, 2008).

A raft of new policies, statutory provisions and entitlements have been launched in the UK since 1997 to ameliorate some of the pressures on families, their time and their financial circumstances. Attempts to help no-earner families enter the labour market and low-income families to stay employed led to the introduction of the Working Families’ Tax Credit (WFTC) system in 1999 and its successor in 2003, the Working Tax Credit (WTC) system, accompanied by the Childcare Tax Credits (CCTC) and the 2003 Child Tax Credits (CTC). Attempts to help families with childcare were also adopted through the 1998 National Childcare Strategy and the 1998 Sure Start programme. These initiatives were the backbone of policies aimed at giving parents a financial incentive to be employed in order to prevent their children from growing up in poverty. Lone parents were a particular target group for such measures. There have even been UK government interventions, in the form of a randomised controlled trial, to test whether a package of new measures could help get lone parents into paid work, the Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) initiative (see Dorsett et al, 2007; Riccio et al, 2008).

On the workplace side, there have been initiatives focused on getting more employers to offer more flexible working arrangements by, for example, paying for consultants to help them introduce such arrangements (the 2000 Work–Life Balance Challenge Fund).