This position paper aims to contribute to the current discussion on introducing and enforcing age restrictions for children and young people accessing social media, as a means of better protecting them from online risks.
COFACE Families Europe and the Odisee Centre for Family Studies in Brussels co-hosted a European conference in Brussels in September 2025. The conference convened 100+ researchers, policymakers, public administrators, and NGOs to advance integrated, place-based...
Climate change is a defining challenge of our time, with urgent ecological, economic, and social implications. Families are at the heart of sustainable development and climate action. They raise the next generation, provide care across life stages, and are crucial...
Principle 18 of the European Pillar of Social Rights stresses: the right to affordable long-term care services of good quality, in particular homecare and community-based services. Since its adoption in 2017, the European Union has been looking more intensively at the topic of Long-Term Care (LTC), most notably with the adoption in 2022 of the European Care Strategy and the Council Recommendation on Long-Term Care. In this important time, COFACE Disability Platform launch this thematic note to spark the debate on the diversity of family carers. While the lion’s share of family carers are currently of working age and need urgent actions to support them.
Families with young children have complex necessities in the period before the start of compulsory schooling. Often, these needs cannot be reduced to educational, healthcare or caregiving demands alone.This comparative report aims to investigate possible responses to multisectoral needs of households by providing an overview of the current alignment and coordination between complementary services and policy areas in four European countries (Finland, Germany, Italy, and Poland) and the Belgian region of Flanders.
The EU and its governments must act swiftly for a families-sensitive approach to energy policy and planning. This includes integrated policy solutions that combine energy and social policies - these are vital in addressing the multifaceted nature of energy poverty....
The European Child Guarantee, established through a Council Recommendation on the 14th of June 2021, is a key step in achieving the European Pillar of Social Rights target to reduce the number of children at risk of poverty and social exclusion. Two years after the historical adoption of this Recommendation and the promise of all EU Member States to act to lift children and their families out of poverty, COFACE Families Europe assessed the plans submitted by April 2023 from the perspective of children with disabilities and their families who experience specific barriers when accessing key services and have a more significant risk of poverty and social exclusion.
COFACE has developed a thematic note to trigger debate and examines a crucial precondition for high-quality ECEC provision: the ratio of children to staff in daycare settings (child-staff ratio). Low child-staff ratios can yield multiple benefits for the children and all the other actors involved.
In March 2023, taking the Italian system as a starting point for discussion with European peers, we brought together organisations of families of persons with disabilities and service providers, education professionals, persons with disabilities and their families and policy-makers from several countries to examine key actions to implement inclusive education.
