Families, Professionals, and Responsibility

Abstract

To focus on the question of responsibility in the context of family policies and youth welfare means to reflect on the political and programmatic framework and its implications for the welfare provisions for families and children. Therefore, this chapter will describe central aspects of social, educational, and family policy in Germany. After discussing unequal opportunities for coping with the educational system, it will present an analytic model of familialization and defamilialization in welfare contexts related to families and discuss its dimensions of responsibilization of parents. Finally, it will reconstruct underlying normative ideas and their implications for professional practice under the conditions of (de-) familializing family policies.