Abstract
In this doctoral research, Dutch policy and regulations on encouraging family care have been mapped out and analyzed in order to identify room for improvement. Family care is the intergenerational non-medical care provided by adult children to their elderly parents who still live independently at home. Children do not provide
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this care professionally. A more popular term for this type of care, is ‘informal care’, which includes caregiving within all social relations. Although the focus of this research is family care, the information and findings are relevant to all forms of informal caregiving. That is because policy and regulations do not usually differentiate between social relations. The starting point of this research, are changes in Dutch healthcare policy. Due to the ageing population, the welfare state is facing financial and personnel challenges. Cost containment has characterized the Dutch healthcare policy for decades. To reach this goal, policy also aims at enabling individuals to live longer at home with extramural care, and at increasing the responsibility of families and the broader social network in caring for loved ones (the refamiliarization of care). However, the increased emphasis on family responsibility, particularly that of adult children, is not without challenges. The availability of children to provide care is under pressure due to changing family structures. Families are smaller, children and parents live further apart more often and there are more composite households. Additionally, shifts in family dynamics, such as the increased labor market participation of women, further contribute to the reduced availability of children for caregiving. Alongside availability issues, family caregiving entails risks, including overburdening (physical and/or mental health issues), financial risks (income loss, reduced availability for the job market, and extra costs), and conflicts within the family. These developments raise a fundamental question that has been underexplored in legal studies and is examined in this dissertation: What do Dutch policy and regulations look like concerning the encouragement of family care, and how can they be improved? The encouragement of family care means: facilitating the availability of children for care and protecting them from the aforementioned risks. The research has three objectives: mapping out how the state addresses family care in policy and regulations (within all areas of law), identifying areas for improvement through a multidimensional analysis of policy, regulations, and practice, and exploring the (possible) role of private law for family care.
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