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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No Project 101060410 and Innovate UK, the UK’s Innovation Agency.

The rEUsilience project is concerned with labour market changes and how these changes affect the ability of families to balance income security and care. We consider families as agents who respond to these challenges to cushion potentially negative impacts. In the project, we try to understand what are the conditions that support family resilience. The specific questions for the rEUsilience project are: What challenges and difficulties are created or exacerbated for families by labour markets in the ‘new world of work’ and how do families try to overcome these? How do social policies contribute to familial resilience especially in terms of the extent to which they are inclusive, flexible and complementary? The concept of resilience is increasingly used in EU and national policy making. Yet, empirical foundation for monitoring social policies and their ability to strengthen family resilience is currently lacking. This deliverable builds a groundwork for development of tools for monitoring family resilience in the context of social policy. The first step we take is a construction of family profiles and analyse them on the distribution of risks, resources, and socio-economic outcomes., This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No Project 101060410 and Innovate UK, the UK’s Innovation Agency.

Traditionally considered to be family policy laggards, continental European countries have witnessed significant changes in parenting leave policies in recent years. In this chapter, we compare the modernisation of parenting leave policies across Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. We analyse the extent to which these three continental European countries shifted away from male breadwinner-focused parenting leave policies between 2005 and 2020 and how these modernisation trajectories frame what is expected of parents in their leave-taking behaviour. Our analysis shows similarities and differences, as well as stasis and change across all three countries. In the final section of the chapter, we consider these developments in light of dominant gender cultures and the expectations of mothers and fathers. We suggest further research is needed on this grouping of countries to sufficiently explain the relationship between these gender attitudes and parenting leave modernisation trajectories.

Previous studies suggest the relative importance of the impact of childcare policies on mental health in parents. There have also been studies showing that welfare states have differing policy packages, consisting of a mixture of familizing and individualizing policy measures. This study builds on and extends this knowledge by carrying out a European comparison of the association between mental well health and family policies. We use Lohmann and Zagel’s familizing and individualizing policy indices to describe family policies. Our main interest is differences in mental health depending on the country, household, and individual-level characteristics. Therefore, we apply a multilevel model to 26 countries included in the 2013 wave of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions survey (N = 141,648). The analysis found that, in general, parents of children under 13 have better mental health than other adults. We found individualizing policy measures to be positively related to mental health in parents, while familizing policies had a negative relationship. No evidence was found for the combined presence of individualizing and familizing policies making a difference to mental health in parents. These results suggest that welfare states could help parents by promoting individualizing policies to make parenthood a less stressful experience.