1. Mary Daly Queen’s University Belfast
Innovative Ways of Coping with Old and New Challenges: FAMILY POLICY IN FOCUS
Mary Daly
Queen’s University Belfast

2. Objectives
Identify key family-related practices, behaviours, preferences
Identify emerging policy trajectories (policy provision and norms)
Identify criteria for setting out a ‘model template’ e.g., major challenges for policy

3. 1. Family-related Behaviours and Preferences
Fertility
Context of childbearing/rearing
Union formation and dissolution
Children’s living arrangements
Age structure
Women’s employment and work-family tensions/conflict

4. Preferences Preferred fertility Preferred family arrangement
Preferred division of labour at home/pressures around this
Preferred involvement in paid work
Involvement in caring and concerns around this

5. 2. Policy Developments The Policy Field
Changing orientations to social policy (eg social exclusion, activation, social investment)
Changing actors and political constellations
Historical precedents of family policy
Changing constituents/priorities of family policy
- Child care outside home
- Child ‘attainment’
- Child poverty
- Employed motherhood
- ‘Caring’ fathers

6. Family policy moving back stage
To centre stage comes child policy
Normatively, very particular behaviours being encouraged

7. 3. Challenges for Policies
Concrete Challenges
To adapt/respond to changing family behaviours (what do families ‘need’ from policies to be able to be able to function well?)
To reduce gaps/shortcomings in existing policy responses
- fertility, care, over-burdening of women, family’s association with poverty, support of transitions, family roles

8. Developing a Model Template
Possible Criteria
Sustainability:
financial
political
social
policy