In the context of the implementation of the European Care Strategy, professor Mary Daly from the University of Oxford, and joint coordinator of the rEUsilience research project, kicked off the EU policy webinar on February 4th, organised by rEUsilience impact partner, COFACE Families Europe. Mary Daly shared relevant rEUsilience findings on the role of care policies in supporting family resilience and presented ‘policy packages’ deriving from the research which could strengthen family resilience within the framework of the European Care Strategy.
In 2022, the European Commission proposed a Communication on a European Care Strategy alongside two recommendations for Member States: one on the revision of the Barcelona targets on early childhood education and care (‘ECEC’) and another one on access to affordable high-quality long-term care, thereby acknowledging the vital importance of care providers- and receivers in our societies and across the life cycle.
To support the implementation of the European Care Strategy under the new Commission college from 2025-2029, while discussing tools for monitoring and evaluation, COFACE brought together various speakers from EU institutions, researchers, as well as EU and national policymakers. The aim of the webinar was to create a multi-level understanding on tracking the progress of the implementation of the Strategy while advocating for robust monitoring and seeking to boost implementation through adequate funding levers.
Joint coordinator of the rEUsilience project and rEUsilience researcher, Mary Daly from the University of Oxford, presented the main findings of the focus groups regarding Family Resilience, focusing on low-resource families. The findings emphasise that care policies which adequately provide resources are necessary for strengthening families’ resilience. The resources as mentioned in the research are, ideally, a combination of policies including services such as childcare and family support services, adequate income support for care tasks for children and adults as well as adequate paid leaves from employment.
Mary Daly highlighted that a focus on a care perspective is essential in helping families manage different work-family transitions while seeking to avoid the occurrence of a ‘care trilemma’. This care trilemma refers to the trade-offs in key-decisions that (especially) low-resourced families are forced to make when they face an intersection of three types of scarcity namely: paid work that can be accommodated with care, too little money when paid work is not available and, thirdly, time scarcities. This intersection of scarcities pushes families in making decisions which could potentially and partially resolve one dimension but could lead to a scarcity and potential deprivation in another resource, therefore trade-offs can occur for these families occupied with caring tasks.
To conclude her presentation, Mary Daly suggested some specific rEUsilience proposals in the format of ‘policy packages’ for the further implementation and monitoring of the European Care Strategy, such as an adequate and universal system of child-related income support; as well as adequate, flexible and inclusive childcare and parental leave policies; and lastly, universal family support services which can offer general as well as specific family support.
After Mary Daly started the webinar by presenting the rEUsilience findings on the role of care policies in supporting family resilience, Greet Vermeylen, European Commission; Jiri Svojse, European Commission; Maria Calle Garcia, Chair of the indicators sub-group of the Social Protection Committee and Christian Morabito, Member of NESET, all gave an overview of the latest developments in relation to ECEC and long-term care and explained how these will be monitored under the new Commission college from 2025-2029.
COFACE members and a diverse group of participants from several European funding authorities, representatives from NGOs and civil society as well as EU and national policymakers attended the webinar, making the importance of the rEUsilience research findings visible and the ‘policy packages’ recommendations immediately useful for further monitoring the implementation of and developments within the European Care Strategy.
We are pleased to see that rEUsilience research findings related to care and family resilience can reach the relevant stakeholders and thereby tangibly inform the implementation of the European Care Strategy as well as its tools for evaluation and monitoring, placing the resilience of families and an effective care perspective at the heart of the discussion.
More information on the webinar and the presentation of Mary Daly can be found below:
https://coface-eu.org/event/eu-policy-webinar-on-the-implementation-of-the-european-care-strategy/
https://coface-eu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/MD_CareStrategyWebinar.pdf
The specific rEUsilience research publications mentioned in this article can be consulted here and here.