Ireland should give parents a statutory right to request part-time or flexible working arrangements, according to a US professor of social work who has written extensively on the impact of public policies on family life.
Prof Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University, who is speaking at Trinity College Dublin this evening, said parents needed more flexibility to take time off work to meet family responsibilities, particularly when children are under one year old. She said improving the quality of childcare from infancy through the pre-school years also had to be a priority.
Good quality pre-school care required the same investment as that provided for schoolgoing children, she said.
Speaking this evening on the topic Meeting children's needs when parents work, she will focus on how public policies have not kept pace with changes in family life. "Working parents are being left to fend for themselves in a system where the quality of care is not what it should be," she said.
Prof Waldfogel, whose recent book is entitled What Children Need, said she was surprised when she researched family life in Ireland. "The most striking thing is how much family structure has changed over recent years. I was surprised to see that 60 per cent of children under 15 now have a working mother. I didn't expect it to be so high - it is now comparable to the United States," she said.
She also pointed out that figures from the Central Statistics Office showed that 23 per cent of families with children under the age of 15 are now lone-parent families.
Prof Waldfogel said that while overall provision for working parents in Ireland was not as good as a number of European countries it was "way ahead of the United States".
In particular she praised the extension of paid maternity leave and a number of Government strategy documents such as the national childcare strategy, the national children's strategy and the anti-poverty strategy. "It is important that the Government has made these statements and given commitments to improving childcare and reducing poverty," she said.
Two issues she believed needed to be addressed were the right to paternity leave - Ireland is one of very few states where men have no statutory right to take time off when their child is born - and the right to work flexible hours or part-time.
She pointed out that Britain had given parents a legal right to flexible or part-time work.
"The experience in the UK has been particularly good - the year it was introduced a million people came forward to avail of it," she said.
From a review of childcare arrangements in Ireland she found that provision for four and five-year-olds was very good but that for children up to three years it was "pretty uneven". There was also a need for a national initiative on "out-of-school care" - both before and after school and during school holidays.
On the question of the impact of full-time childcare on young children, she said the crucial issue was the quality of care provided.
When the quality of care was good - and this depended mainly on the education levels of the carers - there were no adverse effects on child behaviour.
After reviewing many studies, she said the only concerns related to children whose parents worked full- time in the first year of life and these findings were based on US studies where many mothers were forced to return to work when the child was younger than 12 weeks old.
Providing high-quality childcare was very costly and "a challenge everywhere", she said. "We know better than ever before what investments make sense. If we truly care about increasing the life chances of the next generation, the time to invest is now," she added.
Prof Waldfogel will deliver the White Social Policy annual public lecture hosted by the TCD school of social work and social policy at 6pm this evening in the Davis lecture theatre in the Arts building.