The Fourth Day: How Istanbul and Amsterdam Handle Parents Who Also Work

🇹🇷 Turkey · 🇳🇱 Netherlands

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

A World Bank survey found that 71% of Turkish women who left paid employment after having children cited childcare responsibilities as the reason — not preference, availability. In the Netherlands, meanwhile, the defining parental institution isn't a leave law at all but a nickname: "Papa dag," the Daddy Day, the informal Wednesday or Friday nearly half the working population — mothers and fathers alike — carves out of a standard five-day week simply because working four days is what a parent here is expected to do. One country loses working mothers to a childcare gap. The other quietly restructured its entire concept of full-time employment around not losing them.

Do's & Don'ts

🇹🇷 Turkey

🇳🇱 Netherlands

Turkey: A Real Reform, Landing on an Unresolved Structural Gap

Turkey's Law No. 7578, taking effect May 1, 2026, represents a genuine legislative leap: maternity leave extends from 16 to 24 weeks, paid at 66.7% of average daily wage through the SGK social security system, while paternity leave doubles from 5 to 10 days. Civil servants gain new rights to part-time work after parental leave — up to half standard hours at 50% pay and benefits — explicitly framed as gender-neutral and aimed at improving female labor force participation, per multiple legal trackers covering the reform.

The reform, however, is arriving on top of a childcare system that hasn't kept pace. TURKSTAT's Work and Family Life Study found 62% of working mothers received no childcare services at all, instead managing care themselves or with a spouse; among those without formal care, 15% relied on grandparents and 12% cited cost as the deciding factor. The World Bank's starker finding — that 71% of women who quit paid employment after childbirth cited childcare responsibilities as the reason — suggests the leave extension addresses the early months well but does little to solve the structural gap that pulls women out of the workforce once leave ends and formal childcare remains scarce or unaffordable. Time-use data compounds the picture: Turkish women report spending roughly 4.5 hours daily on household and family care, against about 50 minutes for men.

Netherlands: Part-Time as the Default, Not the Exception

Dutch parental leave law offers 26 weeks per parent, usable until the child turns eight, with the first 9 weeks paid at 70% of salary (capped around €212.97/day in 2026) and the remaining 17 weeks unpaid — a structure that, per iamexpat.nl, most parents don't take in one block at all, more commonly spreading it thin as a single day off per week for roughly two and a half years. That pattern dovetails with the wider Dutch labor market: nearly half the working population holds a part-time position, a rate high enough that "Papa dag" — a father's fixed weekly day off for childcare — has become an accepted cultural institution rather than a special accommodation.

The system isn't without strain. Uptake remains uneven — 2023 data show only 27% of fathers used their paid parental leave entitlement versus 32% of mothers, despite the policy being gender-neutral on paper. And the childcare sector itself faces a real worker shortage, prompting the Dutch union CNV to propose a full year of parental leave partly as a pressure valve for daycare capacity constraints, according to iamexpat.nl reporting. The Netherlands has built a genuinely parent-friendly labor market by normalizing reduced hours across the entire workforce — but the underlying childcare capacity, like Turkey's, is being asked to stretch further than it comfortably can.

The Reckoning

The core divergence isn't generosity of leave — Turkey's 2026 reform is, on paper, more generous in paid weeks than the Netherlands' unpaid back half. It's what happens after leave ends. The Netherlands solved for the return-to-work problem structurally, by making part-time work a mainstream option for the entire labor force, not just new parents — so a parent doesn't face a binary choice between full-time work and no work. Turkey's reform extends the runway before that choice arrives but hasn't yet restructured the landing: with formal childcare scarce and part-time protections concentrated in civil service roles, many Turkish mothers still face something closer to a full stop.

Hofstede Insights context underlines the gap: Turkey's power distance score of 66 against the Netherlands' 38 reflects two labor markets with very different defaults on how much individual accommodation employees can expect from institutions — the Dutch system distributes flexibility broadly and structurally, while Turkish flexibility, even after reform, remains more dependent on individual employer and family arrangements.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Someone comparing European maternity leave systems noted that the real variable people underestimate isn't the number of weeks but who pays for it — some countries fund leave through social security systems like Turkey's SGK, others through direct employer obligation, and the funding source often determines how willingly employers actually approve the leave in practice.

DutchReview — A guide to Dutch paternity leave described "Papa dag" as so normalized that Dutch colleagues rarely ask why a father is out on a fixed weekday — the assumption is simply that today is the day he has his kids, and the question would be considered slightly odd to even ask.

Quora — A contributor addressing why European parental leave models look so different from the US pointed out that in the Netherlands, part-time work isn't a maternity accommodation bolted onto a full-time-default culture — it's genuinely a parallel norm available to everyone, which is why fathers taking reduced hours doesn't carry a stigma the way it still can elsewhere.

World Bank Blogs — Coverage of Turkey's childcare gap noted that the constraint isn't primarily cultural resistance to mothers working, but a straightforward supply problem: expanding both the availability and affordability of formal childcare was identified as the policy lever most likely to move female labor force participation, more than further extending leave itself.

Quora — Someone asking about maternity leave funding across Europe was told that even generous-sounding leave numbers can mislead, since a leave that's technically six months but only paid for the first six to nine weeks — as in the Dutch system — functions very differently in practice for a family without substantial savings.

Conclusion

If you're relocating to Turkey as a working parent, treat the 2026 leave reform as real progress but plan your childcare independently and early — the legal runway has been extended, but the landing strip hasn't been built out to match. If you're relocating to the Netherlands, expect and request part-time arrangements without hesitation; the stigma that exists in many countries around reduced hours simply doesn't operate the same way here.

Here's the honest version: Turkey is buying parents more time before the hard choice arrives. The Netherlands has mostly eliminated the hard choice. Know which problem you're actually solving before you accept the offer.