Addressing old and new family-related risks in Europe

1. Addressing old and new family-related risks in Europe Chiara Saraceno WZB

2. How new are “new social risks”? • Widows, unmarried mothers and orphans,households with many children, together with the elderly are the main figures of the vulnerable across history. For them family events represented always the main “risk” • What is new is • how these “events” come about: divorce rather than death of a spouse/partner; long dependency because of fraility in old age, etc. • How traditional forms of addressing them (e.g. survivor’s pension, lone mother benefits) are being re-conceptualized and reformed or integrated • that they are increasingly seen as social risks, not just as biographical accidents more or less deserving social support In particular, the relationship between care needing and care giving is increasingly conceptualized as a social risk – more in the case of caring for children children, less in the case of the frail elderly But, from what perspective/criteria is having a child or a care dependent person a “risk”? What makes it a risk and with regard to what dimensions? • The ability to participate to paid work and to be financially self sufficient A paradigm shift or a modernization of traditional assumptions?

3. Traditional (Marshall’s)foundations of social rights • the three pillars on which the conception and practice of social rights rested were paid work, family relationships, national boundaries. • These three pillars have long been criticized for the, particularly gender, inequalities they hid or even strengthened, and on the concept of autonomy they included. • But in recent decades they have also weakened their power to found social rights and social citizenship even in their own terms, not only because of globalisation but because of cultural, demographic, behavioural developments: precisely because of aging, of changes in women’s behaviour and in gender relationships, as well as in the functioning of the labour market.

4. The ageing of the population and of kinship networks is changing the demographic and relational context in which intergenerational relationships and obligations are developed at the interpersonal/family and at the societal (welfare state) level. • The increase in life expectancy is a consequence of an improvement in the health conditions. • Yet, these very improvements cause an increase in the risk that a quota of the (usually older) elderly experience short or long periods during which they are very fragile and sometime not fully able to take care of themselves. • Not only populations, also kinships age • The demands of care coming from the elderly are likely to increase within kinship networks, which are on the contrary shrinking in the younger generations. • three-four generational families, and co-presence of multiple generational roles

5. Fig. 1 Multigenerational families in 11 European Countries (Source: Börsch-Supan et al. 2005)

6. The middle generation as “Janus generation”. • In the Share data set, 7 out of 10 countries have a majority of respondents aged 50-59 with at least one parent living. • “co-longevity” • the “Janus generation”: they are “ageing children” of elderly parents and middle-aged parents of young parents. But also the middle-aged grandparents of the new generations • the mediators of exchanges up and down the intergenerational line • Facing caring demands from both sides and, in some social groups (migrants, low income families) also of financial demands from both sides. • Relevance of welfare state arrangements in the way these dual demands may be addressed within families An emerging problem: the childless elderly, particularly men

7. Risks linked to changing family forms • increasing marriage instability and the rise in cohabitation without marriage as a – at least transitional - form of partnering. Although with noticeable cross country differences • These two phenomena weaken in different ways marriage as the means to grant access to (non working, or only partly working) women not only to income, but to social rights such as pensions and health care (especially in the insurance based welfare states). • They also weaken children’s access to income and social protection based on their relationship to a (male) breadwinner. A large part of the phenomenon of the “feminization of poverty” and of the increase of child poverty in many countries is linked to these phenomena But the “old” risk of having “too many children”/of growing up with “too many” siblings has not disappeared and is actually emerging again

8. These processes have been addressed through a varying mixture of individualisation of social rights, support to women’s labour force participation and a degree of equalisation of mutual obligations and of obligations towards children incurred either through marriage or through cohabitation. In particular: • In most European countries ,and in EU official policy targets, mothers are increasingly encouraged to become paid workers and therefore to be de-familialised. • This shift is particularly extreme in the case of lone mothers. In order to be perceived as a good mother a (poor) lone mother now must also be a provider, i.e. a paid worker. • In countries such as, for instance, (West) Germany and The Netherlands, Italy, Spain, but partly also in the UK, this represents a radical overturn not only of policies, but of traditional notions of good motherhood as well as of shared cultural patterns and values • There is a parallel, but not always an equivalent, emphasis on good quality and affordable caring services for young children and to a more limited degree o for the frail elderly, and a move towards an ideal of a “caring father” (see paternity leaves and daddy’s quotas) • Yet, women (even in Scandinavia) still remain the main responsible parent for childcare and more generally for care for dependents. Particularly when children are very young, when an adult family member is disabled, or very frail, women bear the responsibility, and the costs, of balancing caring and income needs. The focus of the European Union and national discourse on “reconciliating” paid work and care also remains mainly on women

9. Stress on mothers as both carers and providers partly adresses the issue of child poverty (disburdening social responsibilities).But in most countries children continue to present higher risks of poverty than the population on a whole. See 2005 data for EU 25

10. Poverty risk for families with two and three children. EU15. 2001

11. Together with mothers’ paid work, an important role is played by transfers(See UNICEF/OECD 2005)

12. Tensions and problems in a still unbalanced conception of working and caring: • the stress, in policy discourses and in actual practices, on participation to paid work as the only, or main, socially worthy activity risks censoring both the need and the value of caring work, unpaid but also paid. • It also risks censoring the individual preferences with regard to how to better care for one’s own children (or frail elderly), and therefore with regard to the preferred specific package of policies, with regard to, for instance, the combination of leaves, working hours, childcare services. • Social inequalities among women and families may increase, because of different resources in balancing working and caring (and in the social and subjective acknowledgement in doing either one) • Generally, caring as a relational and meaningful – identity building – activity risks disappearing. • Particularly caring for the frail elderly is still under-focused on, both as an activity and as a specific (gendered) risk in middle age. • And the underlying model remains the family based on a couple, with a more or less modernized division of labour and responsibilities

13. Tensions and contradictions also in discourse and policies. For instance • Expectation that more people (and particularly more women) are in the labor force and for a longer time  risks further shrinking of the “care reserve” already reduced by low fertility • Individualisation of pension benefits  imodifies the trade-off between family care and participation in the labour market • “payments for care” and “ageing in place” incentivating the “mixed economy of care”  call for persistent and increasing, even if somewhat different , family care giving (as well as recourse to private paid care, cfr. the role of migrant female labour)

14. There are country specificities in dealing with care needing and care receiving, which point to somewhat divergent risks (Orloff 2006, Wall 2007) • In Scandinavia and France, policies that support women both as care-givers and paid workers are relatively successful in dealing with caring needs and in helping women to remain in the labour market. But they are far less successful in avoiding horizontal and vertical segregation in the labour market • In most continental countries, as well as in the UK, the one and a half earner model seems the solution to the “reconciliating “ conundrum: men keep the main breadwinner role, and women with family responsibilities work part time. But this represents a high financial risk for women • In the Mediterranean countries, policies and the market support neither the Scandinavian nor the Continental solution. Together with the former socialist countries, they are also the countries where fertility rates are lowest and where gender arrangements around care are in most tension. • To some degree, somewhat counter-intuitively, these countries show emerging risks similar to those Orloff indicates for the US pattern. In this latter country, the trend towards the de-familialisation of women has gone farthest, supported also by a civil rights approach to equal opportunities. But issues of care have remained un-addressed and left to private solutions, i.e. to the ability to buy care on the market, often (as in the Southern European countries) making use of – more or less legal – cheap migrant female labour. As a consequence, both the risk of a caring deficit and social inequalities in the ability to face caring needs are growing.

15. En-gendering and “en-caring” the flexsecurity debate? • Leaves linked to care obligations have been the first generalized form of introducing flexicurity in the labour contract. Thus, one might expect care needs and obligations to be central in flexicurity debates and design. • Within the different discourses on flexicurity as well as in some of the practices (such as long term time saving accounts implemented by some firms, or the Dutch Life course saving scheme) the underlying assumption is that everybody, irrespective of gender, age, cohort memberhsip, education, cultural and ethnic outlook face the same life course risks and have the same resources for making the most of these schemes. New forms of gender and class unbalance might therefore be developed through an apparently neutral approach to “life course risks”. • Furthermore, in flexicurity discourses and practices , taking time off because of care-giving is mostly assimilated to other very different situations in which people do not hold a paid job, or have to reduce their working time and income: to unemployment, or to time spent in improving one’s own skills. It is, therefore, simply equalised either to be temporarily not working or to be investing in one’s own human capital. • Generally care appears only as a constrain on time available for paid work – precisely as a “risk” - not as a valuable social activity intrinsically worth performing and producing public goods.

16. The “dual earner household” model, implicit in much European discourse and policy, where all adults work full time and full life in the labour market, is untenable, not only because of partnership instability, but because it remains based on an idea of work life and participation very similar to that based on the assumption that “real”, core workers did not have caring responsibilities. • The invisibility of care in employment policies at the national and EU level leaves (mostly women) carers to their own devices, therefore indirectly supporting the prevalent gender division of labour within families, albeit in a “modernized” form (the one and a half worker model). It also risks promoting a kind of forced and negative “de-familialisation”, in so far it renders impossible both to men and women to assume family responsibilities. • Children’s wellbeing has an ambivalent position in this debate (although there are national differences). It emerges as a focus mainly in so far children as well are defined in terms of human capital/future workers. See e.g. the “social investment” discourse.