ABSTRACT
Family policies as a specific set of guidelines explicitly aimed at supporting socially desirable behaviours and relationships are relatively recent. An important exception is France, whose pronatalist policies date back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Governments’ intervention in family matters, regulating what constitutes a family and what obligations family members have to each other, however, dates back to the formation of nation states, when these started to compete with kin, churches, local communities, and traditions for the power to regulate this sphere of life and relationships. Social family policies, which constitute the focus of this chapter, are, while certainly important, only a manner of public intervention in family matters. Family policy goals have changed and change over time and across countries (Gauthier, 1996;
Saraceno et al., forthcoming), and so have the instruments. Kaufman (2002) and Bahle (2008) identify a variety of possible motives for family policy. Concern for (‘too low’ or ‘too high’) fertility and demographic reproduction is among the main reasons for states’ intervention. Poverty among families with children has also traditionally been an important policy driver both in Europe and in the US, and it is becoming the main concern of both anti-poverty and family policies in many developing countries. A radical change of goal witnessed in many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries concerns the role of women and more generally of gender relations. While at the origins of the welfare state social policies as well as legal norms directly or indirectly supported the male-breadwinner/family-carer model, in recent years family policies have been argued as a means to support the dual earner and in some cases also the dual-earner/dual-carer model, supporting both mothers’ participation into the labour market and, although to a lesser degree, fathers’ participation in child care. In the following sections, first the concept of (social) family policies itself and the various
dimensions of such policies will be analysed, with particular regard to the distinction between goals and outcomes, between different kinds of instruments and their possible interplay, and to whether it is possible to identify specific family policy patterns that distinguish clear country clusters. Then the main targets and instruments of family policies will be presented and discussed from a comparative perspective. The concluding section will synthesize the main issues discussed in the chapter.
