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Family Policy in France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2009

Abstract

To ask about a country's family policy is to ask how state action, government policies, are actually affecting families and the quality of family life – not just poor families, but all families in that country. French family policy is considered under three headings: (1) the political significance of the family in France, (2) the social security services designed to increase the economic viability of the family and to promote family welfare, and (3) the adjustment of French family policy to the changing economic situation and aspirations of ordinary families. Comparisons are drawn with British policies under each heading and the conclusion drawn that compared with Britain France has a more conscious, clearly defined concept of family policy, which finds expression firstly in statutory and voluntary institutions whose primary or even sole purpose is to promote the welfare of the family, and secondly, in a whole range of statutory benefits to which the parents of the nuclear family are entitled as of right.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

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References

1 The Prigent Report was published in the Bulletin des Caisses d'Allocations Familiales, 03 1962, No. 3.Google Scholar

2 Woolf, Myra, Family Intentions, office of Population Censuses and Surveys, Social Research Division, London: HMSO, 1971.Google Scholar

3 The Tax Credit scheme would virtually reassert the universality of children's allowances by increasing the allowance for each child at the same time as it withdraws the child tax allowance.

4 This is borne out by the evidence collected in 1956 for the Political and Economic Planning survey, Family Needs and the Social Services, London: Allen & Unwin, 1961.Google Scholar

5 Les Conditions de Vie des Familles, a study carried out jointly by the National Association of Family Allowance Funds (UNCAF) and the Centre for Research and Information on Consumption (CREDOC), 1967.

6 Ministry of Social Security, Circumstances of Families, London: HMSO, 1967.Google Scholar

7 From French Women in Work, by the French Institute of Public Opinion.

8 Studies carried out by the Survey Research Center, University of Michegan in 1955 and 1966.