It is widely recognised that children who experience parental separation during their childhood tend to achieve lower educational outcomes than those who come from intact families. However, the possible differentiation in the way in which such separation effects influence children from different socio-economic backgrounds is much less understood.

Traditionally, Dutch long-term care arrangements were mainly provided by the government. But to limit costs, during the past few decades the Netherlands has been reforming its historically generous, public long-term care services. The reforms aimed to encourage people to be more active in caring for dependent relatives. Researcher Thijs van den Broek and his colleagues now show that despite the new policies to promote family engagement in care, care ideals in the Netherlands have shifted away from, rather than towards, the family having a prominent caring role.

Many Spanish parents work with a split-shift schedule, which consists of a long lunch break, sometimes two hours, that extends working activities until late in the evening. Empirical evidence by researchers Pablo Gracia (European University Institute) and Matthijs Kalmijn (University of Amsterdam) suggests that this schedule has negative consequences on parents’ time in family and child-related activities.   Work Schedules and Family Time: The Case of Spain

Relationships, their typology and meanings have profoundly changed over the past decades in Western societies. These changes constitute an important challenge for welfare states because policies need to take into account new living arrangements in order to support all types of families. Nora Sánchez Gassen and Brienna Perelli-Harris examine the incidence of cohabitation and match it with the associated legal regulation across eleven European countries and Russia in order to quantify the number of couples that fall outside the scope of classical family policies.

Maximising health in later life is one of the most important policy issues for the welfare regimes of ageing societies. At the same time, health outcomes in later life can only be fully understood when also taking into account past experiences. For example, a woman who worked during most of her life might find herself with more economic and social resources later in life than a woman who mostly devoted her time to family responsibilities, and such accumulation of resources can positively influence her general health.