Conclusion

Abstract

Abstract If the terms ‘family policy ‘ and ‘family-friendly policy ‘ nowadays appear regularly on the political agenda of governments, it is the result of a long development. From very restricted interventions limited to the most necessitous and vulnerable families, governmental support for families has been greatly expanded. While there are obvious inter-country variations in the ways governments have viewed families and their own role as welfare providers, the inter-country similarities in the development of family policy over time are also striking. Yet, in the literature on family policy, the development of family policy has rarely been studied from a comparative perspective. While some studies have compared governmental support for families at one point in time, others have examined the historical development within the framework of single-country analysis. This book therefore aimed at filling this gap by analysing the development of family policy from both a historical and cross-national perspective.