Balancing Work and Family Life during the Life Course

This paper discusses how work and family obligations can be better reconciled in EU countries by adopting a life-course perspective. It stresses that longer and deeper involvement in paid employment allows people to exploit their longer life to reconcile the two ambitions of, first, investing in the next generation as a parent and, second, pursuing a fulfilling career in paid work. Greater flexibility of working time over the life course requires more individual responsibility for financing leave. Moreover, rather than shielding older insiders through employment protection, labor-market institutions should enable parents of young children to easily enter and remain in the labor market. Finally, more activating social assistance and in-work benefits should replace passive income support for breadwinners. This paper is a revised draft of a paper prepared for high-level expert conference on the Social Policy Agenda for the European Union on October 28/29 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The author thanks Evert Jan van Asselt, Peter Cuyvers, Henk Don, Bas Jacobs, Ruud de Mooij, Wouter Roorda, Martijn de Wildt and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier drafts, and Peter Cuyvers, Laura Thissen, and Wouter Roorda for research assistance.