Family Policies In The Context Of Family Change

This is the first volume in a series intended to report on the evolution of family policies in Western welfare states (and to compare current provisions). The developments are presented in the context of a report on family change for each of the countries, and with a view of the economic, political, and institutional climates in which they occurred. Topics covered in this book include family formation and current structural patterns, families and the division of labor, the income of families (earnings, taxation, transfer programs), and also the political and institutional contexts for family policy. An extensive bibliography is provided.

Family policy holds a particular status in the quest for a more equitable world as it intersects the rights of women, children, and workers. But despite local and global efforts and initiatives, the state of family policy in different areas of the world varies widely. Through a cross-section of countries on six continents, Family Policies Across the Globe offers the current state of the laws concerning family life, structure, and services, providing historical, cultural, and socioeconomic context. Lucidly written chapters analyze key aspects of family definition, marriage, child well-being, work/family balance, and family assistance, reviewing underlying social issues and controversies as they exist in each country. Details of challenges to implementation and methods of evaluating policy outcomes bring practical realities into sharp focus, and each chapter concludes with recommendations for improvement at the research, service, and governmental levels. The result is an important comparative look at how governments support families, and how societies perceive themselves as they evolve. Among the issues covered: Sierra Leone: toward sustainable family policies. Russia: folkways versus state-ways. Japan: policy responses to a declining population. Australia: reform, revolutions, and lingering effects. Canada: a patchwork policy. Colombia: a focus on policies for vulnerable families. Researchers , professors and graduate students in the fields of social policy, child and family studies, psychology, sociology, and social work will find in Family Policies Across the Globe a reference that will grow in importance as world events continue to develop.

This special issue of the Zeitschrift für Familienforschung is based on policy reports for a comparative project that investigated the interaction between changing family forms, changing employment patterns, and family policies in the Nordic Countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, and Norway), The Netherlands, the United Kingdom and G- many. The project was financed by the Nordic Council of Ministers' Welfare Research Programme (2002-2005). Jonathan Bradshaw, Professor of Social Policy, University of York, UK, and Aksel Hatland, Research Director, NOVA, Oslo, Norway, chaired the p- ject. The project team included senior national experts and younger researchers from each country in the study. These were: National experts Peter Abrahamson: Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Ulla Björnberg: Professor of Sociology, Goteborg University, Sweden Dr. Gudny Björk Eydal: Lecturer in Social Work and Sociology, University of Reykjavik, Iceland Katja Forssén: Professor of Social Work, University of Turku, Finland Trudie Knijn: Professor of Social Science, Utrecht University, The Netherlands Stefan Olafsson: Professor of Sociology, University of Reykjavik, Iceland Ilona Ostner: Professor of Social Policy, University of Göttingen, Germany Dr. Anne Skevik: Senior Researcher, NOVA, Oslo, Norway Veli-Matti Ritakallio: Professor of Social Policy, University of Turku, Finland Young researchers Lillemor Dahlgren: Research Assistant, Dept. of Sociology, Goteborg University, Sweden Dr. Naomi Finch: Research Fellow, Social Policy Research Unit, University of York, UK Anne-Mari Jaakola: Doctoral Student, Dept.

countries in this region have been particularly limited (for an exception to this, see Petmesidou & Papatheodorou, 2006). The underlying assumption in this volume is that despite the diversity of welfare states bordering the Mediterranean Sea, some interesting commonalities are shared by these nations. Indeed, in his contribution to this volume Gal has described these nations as belonging to an extended family of welfare states that share some common characteristics and outcomes, one of which is the role of the family. By bringing together case analyses of the welfare states in the Mediterranean which focus on children, gender, and families, we maintain that it is possible to shed light on aspects of social policy that do not necessarily emerge in most discussions of these issues in the literature. The rationale inherent in a volume that focuses on a group of welfare states is of course embedded in the welfare regime typology notion that has dominated much of the comparative social policy literature over the last two decades. The publication of Esping Andersen’s seminal work, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism in 1990 (and his related 1999 book), which distinguished between three welfare regimes, became a landmark for comparative work of social policies in various countries. Esping-Andersen regarded his typology as a useful tool for comparison between welfare states because it allowed “for greater analytical parsimony and help[s] us to see the forest rather than myriad trees” (1999, p. 73).

This book is a comparative study of family change, parental employment and social policy in the five Nordic countries, the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom. In all these countries family forms have been profoundly affected by lower fertility rates, lower marriage rates, increased cohabitation, higher risks of relationship breakdown and episodes of lone parenthood. These changes have also been linked to an increase in the proportion of mothers participating in the labour market.

The Handbook of Family Policy examines how state and workplace policies support parents and their children in developing, earning and caring. With original contributions from 44 leading scholars, this Handbook provides readers with up-to-date knowledge on family policies and family policy research, taking stock of current literature as well as providing analyses of present-day policies, and where they should head in the future.

As welfare states grow up, they begin to think more carefully about their future. Jane Lewis is showing them how best to do so. This stellar collection of articles by top European scholars combines creative thinking about the new social investment state with impressive empirical research on specific forms of public support for family work. Nancy Folbre, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, US The nature of the relationship between children, parents and the state has been central to the growth of the modern welfare state and has long been a problem for western liberal democracies. Welfare states have undergone profound restructuring over the past two decades and families also have changed, in terms of their form and the nature of the contributions that men and women make to them. More attention is being paid to children by policymakers, but often because of their importance as future citizen workers . The book explores the implications of changes to the welfare state for children in a range of countries. Children, Changing Families and Welfare States: examines the implications of social policies for children sets the discussion in the broader context of both family change and welfare state change, exploring the nature of the policy debate that has allowed the welfare of the child to come to the fore tackles policies to do with both the care and financial support of children looks at the household level and how children fare when both adult men and women must seek to combine paid and unpaid work, and what support is offered by welfare states endeavours to provide a comparative perspective on these issues. The contributors have written a book that will be warmly welcomed by scholars and researchers of social policy, social work and sociology and students at both the advanced undergraduate and post-graduate level.