5.   Changing Family Structure in Europe: new challenges for public policy  

2003 pp 75 Ł6.50; also available online with password (click here)

Editors: Marie-Thérčse Letablier and Sophie Pennec

Contributors: Anthony Abela, Olivier Büttner, Ingrid Jönsson, Kati Karelson, Dagmar Kutsar, Valentina Longo, Mária Neményi, Ene-Margit Tiit, Olga Tóth, Jutta Träger

The six papers examine different aspects of family change in eight EU member states and three candidate countries. The first paper provides an overview of changing household and family structures, and related gender issues, indicating how the impact of socio-economic change varies between countries. The authors identify the main challenge for policy as the organization of support for families to help them reconcile work and family life. The second paper analyses family values, the cultural specificity of patterns of value orientations and related options for social policies, highlighting a significant relationship between post-traditionalism, political ideologies and social policy issues. The other four papers focus on specific aspects of socio-economic trends, mainly associated with patterns of fertility. The authors track disparities between demographic change, perceptions and attitudes, and their possible impact on social practices. The third paper compares the impact of public policies on family formation in Estonia, Germany, Italy and Sweden. The authors examine how families perceive incentives and obstacles to family formation decisions and the possible impact of policy measures on family decisions. The fourth paper tracks fertility changes during the twentieth century in Sweden and analyses the resulting challenges for family policies, and also for gender and labour market policies. The fifth paper provides an overview of changing family structure in Estonia, with a focus on unmarried cohabitation and policy responses to it, highlighting the dramatic increase in pre-marital cohabitation and analyzing the value orientations of students. The final paper explores the contradictions between demographic data, attitudes and values concerning families in Hungary. The two authors find that the process of modernization since the 1990s has not led to a fundamental shift. They conclude that values change more slowly than demographic behaviour.