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This article focuses on 'the turn to parenting' in the Netherlands and embeds it in a major reform called 'transition and transformation'. While support for parenting by way of public healthcare and denominational family care and advice has a long tradition in the Netherlands, the field gained new importance in the 1990s under the influence of medical and psychological 'scientification' and the introduction of evidence-based methods. Current reforms are modulated with a critique of specialised forms of parent support and (re-)introduce a community- and family-based approach in which professionals are charged with helping families to help themselves and with guiding and supervising volunteers who actually do the job of parenting support.

AbstractAlmost two decades after the transition to a post‐apartheid regime, South Africa is still high‐ranking in the incidence of chronic diseases like tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, diabetes and hypertension. This article explores the transition from HIV/AIDS related healthcare offered by internationally supported non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) in rural areas to the inclusion of this healthcare into the public healthcare system. This transition is part of a wider process that represents the exact reverse of healthcare reforms in Western industrialized countries. Instead of a transition from public healthcare to privatized or marketized healthcare, the transition in South Africa is from partly private healthcare to a public healthcare system in which the private commercial health sector as well as all services provided by NGOs will be integrated. In that process, many obstacles obscure intended outcomes, such as equal access to healthcare. Some obstacles are evident in the case studies of two internationally supported NGOs in the field of HIV/AIDS healthcare. We will conclude that governance structures of public and private NGO‐based healthcare are often difficult to integrate; implementation timelines and priorities do not always coincide; and the public healthcare system is still too weak to deliver good quality healthcare in rural areas without continued NGO support.

This article comparatively analyses how the responsibilities towards childcare needs have been framed and addressed in Italy and the Netherlands following the increase in women's labour market participation. According to the authors, the differing developments in these two countries partly disconfirm the thesis according to which facilitating family/work conciliation is at the heart of the new social policy paradigms in all Bismarckian welfare states. This concern has indeed been an explicit driver of social policy changes in the Netherlands, but not in Italy. The authors argue instead that these two countries offer evidence for the thesis that timing matters. Italy has been an 'early bird' in changing family law and in putting in place childcare policies, but has not been able to innovate these policies when the economic and social context has changed and, in particular, has not reframed them fully as work-family conciliating policies. The Netherlands, on the other hand, was comparatively late in changing family law and developing parental leaves and childcare policies, the latter being framed largely as work-family conciliation strategies. Following the liberal cultural and political developments of the 1990s, which favoured individualisation and freedom of choice, the changes in the Netherlands systematically introduced an increasing mix of individual, family and market responsibility via both commodification supported by tax expenditure and the underpinning of the one-and-a-half breadwinner model offered by the regulation of protected part-time labour contracts.

In the recent past, policy makers have emphasized the benefits and positive aspects of direct payments for care of frail elderly people. In this article, the authors present the theoretical framework of "struggling logics of home care," by means of which they explore the underlying logics of the introduction of payments for care: market, family, and state. More specifically, the authors show the strengths and weaknesses of a fourth logic—professionalism—and expound how this logic is submitted to marketized and familialized payments for care. The authors conclude that there are indeed some positive aspects of the trend toward payments for care. However, (female) professional home care workers benefit hardly at all. On the long term, this could also erode the quality of care provided to recipients.

Sex education in The Netherlands and in the UK [1] has attracted attention because of the huge differences between the teenage pregnancy rates. There are substantial similarities in the way in which sex education is structured in the two countries, and yet the approach to the subject is very different. We used documentary sources and interviews to explore the political debates; compared both science and PSE texts aimed at 14–15-year-olds; and carried out exploratory field work in three secondary schools in each country. While sex education is controversial in both countries, the British debate is adversarial and the Dutch strive to seek consensus, making use of professional sex educators in the process. The difference in approach is reflected in both the sex education materials and the approach taken in the classroom. We conclude that the Dutch are significantly more successful in addressing the problem of ignorance and of promoting a coherent sex education message.

The 1996 welfare reform that attempted to get lone parents out of social assistance represents a major shift in social policy in the Netherlands. Instead of having the financial right to care for their children, lone mothers are now obliged to earn their living by paid work as soon as their youngest child reaches the age of five. This policy shift is accompanied by additional incentives to support lone mothers in engaging in (part-time) work. Nevertheless, the measure has met considerable resistance among lone mothers as well as the caseworkers and municipalities that have been granted discretionary powers to implement the new law. Several years after its introduction, it can be concluded that the law has not been very successful; only slightly more than one out of ten lone mothers have actually left social assistance. In this article, we explain these meagre results by analysing the assumptions and incentives of the national policies, and by describing the mechanisms of discretion at a local level.

The 1996 welfare reform that attempted to get lone parents out of social assistance represents a major shift in social policy in the Netherlands. Instead of having the financial right to care for their children, lone mothers are now obliged to earn their living by paid work as soon as their youngest child reaches the age of five. This policy shift is accompanied by additional incentives to support lone mothers in engaging in (part-time) work. Nevertheless, the measure has met considerable resistance among lone mothers as well as the caseworkers and municipalities that have been granted discretionary powers to implement the new law. Several years after its introduction, it can be concluded that the law has not been very successful; only slightly more than one out of ten lone mothers have actually left social assistance. In this article, we explain these meagre results by analysing the assumptions and incentives of the national policies, and by describing the mechanisms of discretion at a local level. Résumé La réforme sociale de 1996 dont l'objectif est de sortir le parent isolé de l'assistance sociale constitue un tournant essentiel dans la politique sociale des Pays-Bas. Au lieu de disposer d'un droit à s'occuper de leurs enfants, les mères célibataires sont maintenant obligées de gagner leur vie par un travail rémunéré aussitôt que leur plus jeune enfant atteint l'âge de 5 ans. Ce tournant politique s'accompagne par des mesures financières de soutien pour les mères célibataires qui travaillent (à temps partiel). Cependant, ces dispositions ont rencontré une considérable résistance parmi celles-ci ainsi que parmi les travailleurs sociaux et les municipalités qui avaient reçu des pouvoirs discrétionnaires pour mettre en oeuvre cette nouvelle loi. Plusieurs années après son introduction, nous pouvons conclure que cette loi n'a pas eu le succès escompté, un peu plus d'un dixième des mères célibataires ont quitté l'assistance sociale. Nous expliquons dans cet article ces maigres résultats en analysant les ...