Navigating Entangled Systems: New Ways of Conceptualizing Family Inequalities

The challenges faced by contemporary families are multiple, often making it difficult for families to provide care in valued ways. At the same time, despite key policy advances intended to support families, for example in the reconciliation of work and care, coverage of such support remains comparatively uneven and significant barriers to accessibility remain. A crucial but understudied barrier in adequately supporting families is the multiplicity of policy and system landscapes that families must navigate when providing care. In particular, parents and caregivers who care for someone needing medical and/or social care face increasingly entangled systems. Navigating the maze of work-family policies together with social and health care policies and services designed and implemented at differing levels and across differing policy contexts, creates inequalities that are poorly understood. This paper explores this understudied aspect of family research. It considers the ways in which entangled policy systems create complexities and the extent to which they exacerbate persistent social inequalities around gender, socio-economic status and racialized ethnicities. It also challenges future family research to consider new conceptualizations of family support against a backdrop of growing evidence that suggests individuals and families marginalized by systemic racial and socio-economic disparities may view existing policy supports as a burden rather than a resource. Drawing on interview and survey data across four European countries, this paper provides an initial exploration of how parents and caregivers navigate the complexities of these entangled systems across differing policy and cultural contexts.