Integrative Approaches to Family Policy and Youth Policy

Summary:

All member countries of the EU as well as many other OECD countries have developed programs for providing support to families. Overall, OECD countries‟ investment in services and financial benefits for families has increased considerably, rising from 1.6% of GDP in 1983 to 2.4% of GDP in 2003. But levels of spending differ widely across countries. The generosity of the Nordic countries, for example, contrasts strongly with the modest spending levels of some southern European countries. Moreover, the key objectives of family policies vary considerably across the OECD area, too. Priority may be an increase in fertility rates, or reconciling work and family life, or combating family/child poverty, or assisting with childcare and education or aiming to achieve a better balance between men and women in the degree to which they perform household duties. Importantly from the perspective of the report, policy approaches for families and children remain for the most part fragmented, and few countries have adopted an explicit and comprehensive family policy.

Instead, most countries have an amalgam of programs, policies and laws that are targeted at families with children. Yet what emerges quite clearly from the preceding overview of future trends affecting young families and young people is that they face a multitude of highly complex, often interrelated pressures and changes over the next two decades which are likely to necessitate an overall redesign of family policies. These differences start already with the age bracket to be addressed by youth policies – while international legal documents use a range of 15-24, countries like the Netherlands and the United Kingdom opt for a range of 0-24/25 years of age. They continue with the fact that in some countries youth policy is centralized and in others decentralized. Furthermore, while some countries prefer to set a broad overarching framework, others choose a more pragmatic, short-term problem-solving perspective. Progress is unlikely to be quick or easy, however. Bringing together such diverse strategies as improving compatibility of family and work; achieving better co-operation between youth welfare services and schools; enhancing social and occupational integration of young people (including of migrant background) in social hotspots; promoting the supply and take-up of possibilities for non-formal and informal learning; modernizing the vocational training system and curricula; and modernizing and Europeanizing higher education will prove enormously challenging, not least because of the still rather fragmented, compartmentalized approaches that currently prevails in the domain of youth policy.

What do you think of these policies that were developed?

Will these policies effect the future of the family?