Search

Our study's premise was that normative care beliefs can inform the current care policy debate. We conducted latent class regression analyses on two waves of Netherlands Kinship Panel Study data (n = 4,163) to distinguish care ideals that captured multiple dimensions of normative care beliefs simultaneously. We also assessed how these care ideals have shifted in the early twenty-first century. We distinguished four care ideals: warm-modern (family and state jointly responsible for caring, egalitarian gender roles), cold-modern (large state responsibility, restricted family responsibility, egalitarian gender roles), traditional (restricted state responsibility, large family responsibility, moderately traditional gender roles), and cold-traditional (large state responsibility, restricted family responsibility, traditional gender roles). Between 2002 and 2011, there has been a shift away from warm-modern care ideals and towards cold-modern care ideals. This is remarkable, because Dutch policy makers have increasingly encouraged family members to take on an active role in caring for dependent relatives.

In this article, we study temporal, regional, and social variation in infant and childhood death clustering in The Netherlands, using data from three provinces. The data relate to children born in 90,000 marriages contracted between the beginning and the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Descriptive indicators show that death clustering was more frequent in the province of Zeeland and more common in the lower classes, and that it increased in two provinces over time. Shared frailty hazard models make it clear that the number of children who died before the birth of an index child had a negative effect on the mortality of index children, whereas earlier stillbirths and the number of children who died when the index child was at a young age had an increasing effect on the mortality of index children.