Parenting Support as Policy Field: An Analytic Framework
This article develops an analytic framework for parenting support, treating it as both a form of social policy and a measure that intervenes more broadly in politics and society. It is suggested that, as a form of social policy, parenting support can be examined through analytical categories that are classic to social policy, such as: the nature of the offer or ‘good’ to parents, the modality of provision, conditions of access and operation, the policy setting and linkages to other policies, the unfolding of the policy over time and historical roots, philosophical underpinnings and dominant professional influences. In a second layer, the social and political roots and orientations of parenting support have to be investigated. When one does this by, for example, identifying the main actors involved in parenting support and the rationales and claims made for parenting support as a policy response, it becomes obvious that parenting support can be either a benign project of support or part of a more controlling educative or retraining exercise.
Gender Equality in Europe and the Effect of Work-Family Balance Policies on Gender-Role Attitudes
This study starts from the assumption that the context of opportunities for work-family balance affects individual attitudes toward gender roles, a main indicator of support for gender equality. Compared with extant research, the present study adopts a more articulated definition of “opportunity structure” that includes national income level and social norms on gender attitudes, measures of gender-mainstreaming policies implemented at the company level (flextime), and different work-family balance policies in support of the dual-earner/dual-caregiver family model (e.g., parental-leave schemes and childcare provisions). The effects of these factors are estimated by performing a cross-sectional multilevel analysis for the year 2014. Gender-role attitudes and micro-level controls are taken from the Eurobarometer for all 28 European Union (EU) members, while macro-indicators stem from Eurostat, European Quality of Work Survey, and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Our results show that both institutional and workplace arrangements supporting the dual-earner/dual-caregiver family model are associated with more egalitarian gender-role attitudes This is particularly true concerning availability of formal childcare for 0- to 3-year-olds among institutional factors, as well as work-schedule flexibility among workplace factors, probably as they enable a combination of care and paid work for both men and women.
The Redistribution of Responsibility Between State and Parents: Family in the Context of Post-Welfare-State Transformation
The diagnosis of a fundamental malfunction of the welfare-state arrangements in the light of global modernization requirements is often taken to be an unshakable truth in the current sociopolitical discourse (see Maaser 2006). It constitutes the background for a new model of the regulation of state welfare production. The welfare state, formerly active provider of benefits, relocates to a new arrangement of the social, leading to a reassessment of strategies for the activation of a “responsibilization” toward legally granted benefits (on the concept of welfare production, see Oelkers 2011). The social intervention state intervening in the life conduct of the individual, simultaneously being both normative and caring in many aspects, is supposed to be replaced by a postwelfare steering state stressing individual initiative and responsibility, turning individuals into the base of an altered practice of steering the social: a “government from a distance, willing to be the coxswain, but letting others do the rowing” (Lindenberg 2002, p. 78, translated).