At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the main pattern of two-parent family employment is to have 1.5 earners. There is usually a father who works full time, and a mother who works part-time. More women with children have entered the workforce. The greatest increase in the last 10 years has been in the number of women with children under five.

The current government has pledged to end child poverty. One of its strategies for doing this is to get more families, especially mothers, into paid employment. To enable this, a large number of ‘family-friendly’ policies have been introduced, including flexible working rights, tax benefits and free or subsidised child care. More attention is also being paid to the role of fathers in parenting and family life.

Questions like ‘Should mothers work outside the home?’ are now not often asked. Mothers’ employment is and always has been important, but for many years mothers were made to feel guilty if they worked outside the home. For many families, a mother's income was, and still is, the only source of income. The discussion has moved on though, to how it’s possible to better combine paid work and family life. Having choices about how they work, when they work and how to get the quality of life they want for themselves and their children have become important questions for parents to consider.

One way of helping this along is for parents to find out what their children think. A number of research studies are now looking more closely at the way parents’ patterns of employment and work affect family life. Many of these studies are summarised in the Joseph Rowntree Foundation publication mentioned at the end. This article features two studies that concentrate on children’s views. One is a UK study, one from the United States of America. Another UK study of mothers’ and fathers’ views of the impact of mothers’ employment on family relationships very much backs up what the children said (Reynolds and colleagues, 2003).