Conceptualising Contemporary Family Policy

The ‘flowering of family policy’ in the last 20/30 years has acted to extend family policy beyond the traditional ‘core’ of cash benefits for families with children and maternity leave for new mothers to embrace a range of services, leaves, parenting support, measures to reconcile work and family life, and children’s rights. This raises huge conceptual challenges. To critically reflect on policy developments especially from a theoretical perspective, I plan to draw especially upon and synthesise the material that is available from research on aspects of contemporary family life. The underlying rationale is that as well as understanding family policy from an institutionalist perspective, we must move away from a state-centric perspective and place family at the centre of conceptualisations of family policy. The analysis will be comparative and focus on a number of European countries.