To mark the International Day of Families on the 15th May, we are pleased to share with our community of key stakeholders rich insights into the policy reforms necessary to better promote family resilience across European countries. This includes a set of key policy principles to act as a roadmap for policymakers when striving to better support families and our new video explainer emphasising our core message of putting families at the centre of social policy development. During the three years of the rEUsilience project, social policy experts from Stockholm University, the University of Oxford, KU Leuven, the University of Zagreb, the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the University of Warsaw, and COFACE Families Europe have joined forces to produce a wide range of policy relevant research.
Across the board, the research highlights two issues from the perspective of how these policies view and support families’ needs. The first consists of gaps, rigidity or narrowness regarding how well policy aligns with the general nature of family life. The rEUsilience project has continually emphasised that transitions such as between paid work and care are a normal facet of family life. We reinforce this message visually in our new video explainer which points to the need to place families at the centre of social policy for a resilient Europe. See more here.
A second issue is that policies do not go far enough to recognise the constraints faced by low-resourced families, especially those confronted with situations of low income, illness or disability on the part of a child or children and parenting alone.
We are now pleased to solidify such insights into a set of 15 policy principles for policymakers to take forward in their work. These policy principles orientate themselves to three overarching policy goals, namely: better income support for families with children- with a particular concern for low resourced families, closing the childcare gap, and putting in place comprehensive family support services. The 15 principles address issues of coverage (the need to endorse a universal approach to policy), adequacy (in terms of amount and sufficiency of social benefits, parenting related leaves, etc), inclusion (acknowledging that some families and situations requite additional support), and gaps in and between policies.
We aim to provide evidence-based guidance to countries when re-evaluating what they offer to families, helping to shape upcoming initiatives on the legislative agenda. The rationale behind promoting policy principles as key guidelines is to provide a framework for future action in managing the different aspects of policy that affect families. The 15 policy principles for family resilience set out norms that countries should adopt for better support to families, starting from where they are. The full set of policy principles drawn from the research can be found here.