This special issue of the Zeitschrift für Familienforschung is based on policy reports for a comparative project that investigated the interaction between changing family forms, changing employment patterns, and family policies in the Nordic Countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, and Norway), The Netherlands, the United Kingdom and G- many. The project was financed by the Nordic Council of Ministers' Welfare Research Programme (2002-2005). Jonathan Bradshaw, Professor of Social Policy, University of York, UK, and Aksel Hatland, Research Director, NOVA, Oslo, Norway, chaired the p- ject. The project team included senior national experts and younger researchers from each country in the study. These were: National experts Peter Abrahamson: Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Ulla Björnberg: Professor of Sociology, Goteborg University, Sweden Dr. Gudny Björk Eydal: Lecturer in Social Work and Sociology, University of Reykjavik, Iceland Katja Forssén: Professor of Social Work, University of Turku, Finland Trudie Knijn: Professor of Social Science, Utrecht University, The Netherlands Stefan Olafsson: Professor of Sociology, University of Reykjavik, Iceland Ilona Ostner: Professor of Social Policy, University of Göttingen, Germany Dr. Anne Skevik: Senior Researcher, NOVA, Oslo, Norway Veli-Matti Ritakallio: Professor of Social Policy, University of Turku, Finland Young researchers Lillemor Dahlgren: Research Assistant, Dept. of Sociology, Goteborg University, Sweden Dr. Naomi Finch: Research Fellow, Social Policy Research Unit, University of York, UK Anne-Mari Jaakola: Doctoral Student, Dept.

Family policy holds a particular status in the quest for a more equitable world as it intersects the rights of women, children, and workers. But despite local and global efforts and initiatives, the state of family policy in different areas of the world varies widely. Through a cross-section of countries on six continents, Family Policies Across the Globe offers the current state of the laws concerning family life, structure, and services, providing historical, cultural, and socioeconomic context. Lucidly written chapters analyze key aspects of family definition, marriage, child well-being, work/family balance, and family assistance, reviewing underlying social issues and controversies as they exist in each country. Details of challenges to implementation and methods of evaluating policy outcomes bring practical realities into sharp focus, and each chapter concludes with recommendations for improvement at the research, service, and governmental levels. The result is an important comparative look at how governments support families, and how societies perceive themselves as they evolve. Among the issues covered: Sierra Leone: toward sustainable family policies. Russia: folkways versus state-ways. Japan: policy responses to a declining population. Australia: reform, revolutions, and lingering effects. Canada: a patchwork policy. Colombia: a focus on policies for vulnerable families. Researchers , professors and graduate students in the fields of social policy, child and family studies, psychology, sociology, and social work will find in Family Policies Across the Globe a reference that will grow in importance as world events continue to develop.

"This collection of essays explores and explains the differences and similarities in social policies supporting parenthood, including parents' employment, in eight countries."--P. [9]

"This engaging collection gathers theoretical and empirical insights from leading family policy experts. The authors - representing diverse countries, disciplines, and methods - bring to life the volume's innovative conceptual framework, which is organized around policy institutions, both public and private. The volume closes with a call for new lines of research that should inform family policy scholars for years to come."--Janet Gornick, Professor of Political Science and Sociology, and Director of the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA "Featuring exciting contributors from a range of often-siloed scholarly disciplines, countries and cultures, this Handbook offers nuanced insights into how interacting societal inequality factors influence family policy enactment to reinforce or improve inequality outcomes across gender, class, and nations. It is ambitious, broad-reaching, and succeeds in providing a strategic view within and across nations to inspire thoughtful evidence-based policy implications to improve societies in the future."--Ellen Ernst Kossek, Basil S. Turner Professor of Management, Purdue University, USA This open access handbook provides a multilevel view on family policies, combining insights on family policy outcomes at different levels of policymaking: supra-national organizations, national states, sub-national or regional levels, and finally smaller organizations and employers. At each of these levels, a multidisciplinary group of expert scholars assess policies and their implementation, such as child income support, childcare services, parental leave, and leave to provide care to frail and elderly family members. The chapters evaluate their impact in improving children's development and equal opportunities, promoting gender equality, regulating fertility, productivity and economic inequality, and take an intersectional perspective related to gender, class, and family diversity. The editors conclude by presenting a new research agenda based on five major challenges pertaining to the levels of policy implementation (in particular globalization and decentralization), austerity and marketization, inequality, changing family relations, and welfare states adapting to women's empowered roles

This is the first volume in a series intended to report on the evolution of family policies in Western welfare states (and to compare current provisions). The developments are presented in the context of a report on family change for each of the countries, and with a view of the economic, political, and institutional climates in which they occurred. Topics covered in this book include family formation and current structural patterns, families and the division of labor, the income of families (earnings, taxation, transfer programs), and also the political and institutional contexts for family policy. An extensive bibliography is provided.

This book is a comparative study of family change, parental employment and social policy in the five Nordic countries, the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom. In all these countries family forms have been profoundly affected by lower fertility rates, lower marriage rates, increased cohabitation, higher risks of relationship breakdown and episodes of lone parenthood. These changes have also been linked to an increase in the proportion of mothers participating in the labour market.

Over the last forty years, the number of American households with a stay-at-home parent has dwindled as women have increasingly joined the paid workforce and more women raise children alone. Many policy makers feared these changes would come at the expense of time mothers spend with their children. In Changing Rhythms of American Family Life, sociologists Suzanne M. Bianchi, John P. Robinson, and Melissa Milkie analyze the way families spend their time and uncover surprising new findings about how Americans are balancing the demands of work and family. Using time diary data from surveys of American parents over the last four decades, Changing Rhythms of American Family Life finds that—despite increased workloads outside of the home—mothers today spend at least as much time interacting with their children as mothers did decades ago—and perhaps even more. Unexpectedly, the authors find mothers' time at work has not resulted in an overall decline in sleep or leisure time. Rather, mothers have made time for both work and family by sacrificing time spent doing housework and by increased "multitasking." Changing Rhythms of American Family Life finds that the total workload (in and out of the home) for employed parents is high for both sexes, with employed mothers averaging five hours more per week than employed fathers and almost nineteen hours more per week than homemaker mothers. Comparing average workloads of fathers with all mothers—both those in the paid workforce and homemakers—the authors find that there is gender equality in total workloads, as there has been since 1965. Overall, it appears that Americans have adapted to changing circumstances to ensure that they preserve their family time and provide adequately for their children. Changing Rhythms of American Family Life explodes many of the popular misconceptions about how Americans balance work and family. Though the iconic image of the American mother has changed from a docile homemaker to a frenzied, sleepless working mom, this important new volume demonstrates that the time mothers spend with their families has remained steady throughout the decades.