"child care is extremely expensive... a median full time salary would go wholly& to child care when one has two children... 1200+ euros per month" Minimum wage

"child care is extremely expensive... a median full time salary would go wholly& to child care when one has two children... 1200+ euros per month" Minimum wage for an adult is 1500 euro per month working full time, so even if you're a single breadwinner family earning minimum wage, you're already exaggerating. You also fail to mention that the government pays for nearly all of this if you're making minimum wage. Calculate it here: http://www.belastingdienst.nl/rekenhulpen/toeslagen/ http://www.belastingdienst.nl/rekenhulpen/toeslagen/ I filled in the numbers for a single parent working full time for minimum wage who sends their two kids for the maximum number of hours per month to an expensive daycare which charges 7 euro an hour. The government subsidizes their daycare for €2894 per month. A family making €40,000 in taxable income a year still gets a maximum of €2584 per month reimbursed for 2 kids going to that same daycare. I filled in the numbers for a family making €100,000 in taxable income (about three times the median income) a year, and it looks like they still get about half the costs reimbursed. It actually looks like the fewer hours you work, the lower the percentage covered by subsidies becomes. People keep bringing up the cost of daycare as an excuse not to work more, but I don't think it's a very good excuse. I think the actual reason why the number of part time workers is so high, is that people can afford to do it. Outside the Netherlands, if you're not working full time, you're seen as lazy and unambitious. Unless you're doing it for an ambitious reason, such as studying for a degree, you can forget about a promotion or a raise, if your employer allows it at all. In NL, for some reason, the right to work part time was championed as a women's rights issue. Unless you allowed women to work part time, you were oppressing them. The government also started stimulating part time work to reduce unemployment. Employers were limited in their ability to deny part time employment, to the point that it became very unusual for women to work full time. So unusual, that those working full time are now becoming somewhat socially stigmatized as workaholics or greedy. Some women are also putting pressure on men to start working less to do something about this very unenlightened looking wage gap between full time working men and part time working women.