Large families less likely to use formal child care

Families with three or more children under 13 years of age use formal childcare provisions less often than smaller families. Twenty-seven percent of large families made use of formal childcare facilities, compared with 36 percent of families with one or two young children. The difference is accounted for by the higher percentage of mothers who don’t work in families with three or more children. However, larger families do make use of paid childminders or playgroups more often than parents with fewer than three children.

Nearly 700 thousand households in the Netherlands with children younger than 13 years used some form of childcare in 2007. Around 35 percent of them used official childcare facilities, relatives babysat free of charge in nearly half of the households, and a small percentage of parents took their children to playgroup or employed a paid childminder.