The article reviews the relevance and methodological utility of welfare regime typologies for the study of professional sense-making in social work with families. Focus groups were carried out with social workers in European and Latin American countries representing four different policy regimes. A case vignette was used to elicit social workers’ descriptions of how welfare policy may influence how they understand their work task and the notion of family. The research team identified methodological challenges of general relevance in similar policy-practice studies. There were paradoxes in terms of homogeneity on the regime level vs. heterogeneity within and between national services. Pitfalls appeared in the selection of regime-typical cases, language/cultural barriers, and in deciding organisational level. The article shows that welfare typologies have potentialities in that they may provide a helpful analytical basis for theoretical and practical reasoning in which syntheses between policy and practice can be explored, discussed and challenged.

The literature on disability rights intersects with different disciplines such as law, sociology, social policy, political science, and of course disability studies. For this reason, it is highly diverse in its methods and approaches, and the dialogue between these various strands is not always easy.

Growing concerns and hostility towards continuing large-scale flows of immigrants following the two rounds of EU enlargement and high levels of net migration played a major part in the Brexit referendum result for the UK to leave the EU. So too had welfare chauvinism, or the belief that welfare benefits should be restricted to citizens, come to the fore in negative attitudes to EU immigration, reflecting a rejection of EU migrants as fellow citizens. As the article shows, proposals as of summer 2017 for the status of current EU citizens in the UK indicate a desire by the UK government to incorporate current EU citizens within the far more restrictive British immigration rules, thereby curtailing some of their basic free movement rights, especially in relation to future family members. Leaked proposals for future EU citizens post-Brexit are to bring them within a single overall immigration system covering EU and non-EU migrants and applying differential rights of residence to skilled and less skilled, thereby stratifying EU migrants according to educational level and labour market sector. This would represent a return to the status of mobile workers with conditional rights of residence and social entitlements similar to those faced by non-EU migrants.

This article analyses and problematises central assumptions in Sweden's National Strategy for Developing Parenting Support, a document that addresses children's deteriorating psychological health. The analysis was performed with Bacchi's (2009) approach to policy analysis. The results show how parental determinism is expressed; psychological ill health among school-aged children is described as an individualised problem caused by insecure parents, who are represented as the most important persons in a child's life and, therefore, are considered to be risk factors that require continuous support. Evidence-based parenting support programmes in particular are described as a central tool for improving parents’ sense of responsibility and parenting skills. While the strategy aims to offer all Swedish parents support, it underlines ideals that have been related to gendered, middle-class notions of parenting. The issue concerning children's psychological health is problematised and discussed in relation to parental determinism, the risk society, equality, equity and psychological health.

Parent education surfaced as a political question in Sweden in the 1960s and support for parents has since remained on the political agenda. Despite different views on the ideal relationship between the welfare state, the family and children, support for parents has been advocated by parties from all over the political spectrum. By tracing the political debate, this article addresses the question of how the notion of support for parents was adapted to different political ideas, ideologies and ways of defining the relationship between state, family and children from the 1960s until the 2000s in Sweden. We analyse the arguments that different political parties offered and the varying meanings attributed to terms like ‘parent education’ (föräldrautbildning) and ‘parenting support’ (föräldrastöd) during three different phases in the transformation of the Swedish welfare state: the final period of its expansion in the 1960s and 1970s; the economic crisis and retrenchments of welfare services in the 1990s; and the era of individual responsibility in the 2000s. Support for parents has been actualised as a solution to different social and political problems and the notions of parent education and parenting support have proven the capacity to accommodate different political ideas, ideologies and visions.

This article examines the expansion and underlying aims of structured parenting support in Norway. Norway's approach to parenting support differs from that of most other countries (Glavin and Schaffer, 2014), in supposedly being universal and offered to all parents (Eng et al., 2017). However, it is difficult to determine whether parenting support in Norway is actually unique, since little is known about how it is implemented in practice (Bråten and Sønsterudbråten, 2016; Wesseltoft-Rao et al., 2017). This article contributes further knowledge of how parenting support travels from national-level policy-making down to the level of municipal institutions where it is implemented. The analysis draws upon insights from a comprehensive case study in Bergen, Norway's second largest city, that included fieldwork observations and service mapping over a period of two years (2015–2017), a large number of in-depth interviews with various stakeholders, and analysis of relevant documents (advertisements, project applications and project reports, budgets, etc.).