Parental leave reform has effectively reduced the duration of the paid leave spell that mothers take and induced many fathers to use paid leave entitlements, often for two months at a time (Chapter 3). At the same time public investment in early childhood education and care (ECEC) increased markedly with public spending as a per cent of GDP and the proportion of children participating coming from behind to overtake the OECD average (Chapter 3). The share of the population in former West Germany that believes a mother should not work at all when they have a pre-school aged child has dropped from 46.6% in 2002 to 21.8% in 2012, and over the same period that proportion halved to below 10% in East Germany (Chapter 2). Furthermore in terms of who should take paid parental leave, fathers or mothers, in 2012 the German population was one of the most egalitarian after Sweden (Figure 1.1).