Introduction

For decades lone-parent families have accounted for only 10% of all families with children below the age of 18 years in the Netherlands and this was still the case at the end of the 1990s. From a social policy perspective, however, the Netherlands is a remarkable case. As in the US and the UK, Dutch welfare reforms are attempting to get lone parents into employment. Since the new General Assistance Act came into force in January 1996, mothers of school-age children have had an obligation to seek work. This had not been the case in the past. In this chapter we will conclude that these policies are less effective than was intended by the government at the time that they were introduced. Before we come to that conclusion, we will present demographic data and data on the employment rates of lone parents, and on opinions about welfare reform and orientations to work. We will also compare lone parents on welfare with lone parents not on welfare and analyse employment and care policies oriented to lone parents. This chapter is based on national data and two studies of lone parents in the Netherlands (Knijn and van Wel, 1999; van Wel and Knijn, 2000).

Characteristics of lone parents

The Netherlands has 258,000 lone-parent families, of which 228,000 (88%) were headed by a woman in 1997 (Ministerie van Sociale Zaken en Werkgelegenheid, 1999). Although the percentage of lone-parent families, that is families headed by one adult who lives with at least one child below the age of 18, remained rather stable during the last 20 years, the composition of the group changed dramatically (see Table 6.1). The death of a partner was the main cause of lone-parent families in 1971, but today divorce is the main cause. The share of never-married lone parents seems to have been stable during the last decade. The number of lone-parent families is not expected to rise in the coming years, because divorce rates among parents are declining, while those of childless couples are increasing.

Demographic characteristics of lone mothers are rather similar to those of partnered mothers. They have the same age, educational level and number of children (Hooghiemstra and Knijn, 1997). For decades, the Netherlands has had very few unmarried teenage mothers (six per 1,000 teenage girls).