All across Europe, COFACE members continuously work to contribute to positive outcomes for diverse types of families in a changing society, including single-parent households. Organisations such as La Ligue des Familles and Single Parents Foundation have both recently and respectively put a spotlight on concrete ways to support and empower single parents in Europe from Belgium to Hungary.
The rEUsilience project under Horizon Europe (with COFACE as an intergral partner), has recently presented its latest findings from focus groups involving over 300 family members across six European countries (Belgium, Croatia, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom). These insights delve into the realities families encounter amidst socio-economic risks like job loss and substantial care responsibilities.
This research report focuses on the capacity of policies to attenuate the link between risks and poor outcomes.
As “resilience” is increasingly used in European policy circles, it is important to acknowledge structural inequalities that are present in the capacity of families to be resilient.
rEUsilience, a Horizon Europe research initiative spanning from 2022 to 2025, is a collaborative effort involving renowned universities such as Oxford, Stockholm, Barcelona, Warsaw, KULeuven, and Zagreb, with COFACE as an integral partner. The first working paper from rEUsilience maps how resilience is being used in the EU policy discourse, noting how there is a lack of a clear conceptualisation of how it applies to families.
As well as collecting data on families via different expert meetings (see the different meeting reports available on the website), COFACE actively builds bridges with research institutions through formal partnerships under Horizon Europe, and by advising different European research projects on work-life balance, the impact of digital transformations on children, early childhood education and care, long-term care and more. COFACE also supports academic institutions to build new research projects on social rights.
