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Mothers who use state-funded childcare less likely to look after their parents, UK research says

Mothers who benefit from free state-funded childcare are less likely to look after elderly and sick members of their household, including their parents, new research shows.

This was mainly because they used the free childcare to work more hours and so were unavailable to other family members, the study showed.

Zerui Tian, a Ph.D. researcher at the University of Oxford, analyzed survey data on 3,923 mothers and 2,402 fathers of children aged 3 and 4 years in the U.K., and who were entitled to 15 hours of free childcare.

He found that the mothers were 6.4% less likely to say they looked after their elderly parents or sick members of their household, largely because they worked longer hours.

Those mothers who did look after their elderly and sick household members spent 5.2 fewer hours on this if they had free childcare, again because they spent more hours at work.

Zerui Tian told the British Sociological Association's in Manchester today [Thursday 24 April] that his work had revealed "a hidden cost of childcare reforms, suggesting that expanded public childcare may inadvertently reduce the informal care available to other vulnerable family members.

"This decrease of non-child informal care offered by parents to the sick and elderly in the same household as a result of the entitlement to free childcare illustrates weakened affectionate bonds between family members.

"By reducing the time and effort required for caring for young children, parents, particularly women, are able to allocate more time to paid work and prioritize their careers.

"It reveals that while free childcare alleviates immediate childcare burdens, it may also erode caregivers' capacity to support other dependents—a critical insight for aging societies balancing work-family policies."

The entitlement did not have a significant effect on the likelihood of parents caring for the sick or elderly outside their own households, Tian found.

He did not find evidence that the entitlement to 15-hour free childcare made it less likely that fathers spent time looking after elderly or sick members of their household.

The study looked at data from 2011–13, when parents of children aged 3 and 4 were eligible for 15 hours of free childcare. This entitlement has been gradually extended since, and in 2025 it is 30 hours of free childcare for children aged 9 months to 5 years if both parents are working. In his research, Tian adjusted the data to exclude the effects of age, ethnicity and gender.

In the U.K., women are more commonly the caregivers in the family: Based on the 2021 census, in England 10.3% of women provided unpaid care, compared with 7.6% of men.