A growing public and political interest in the contributions of families to the (economical) development of a society could be observed in recent decades. Parenting and parenthood thus has become a focus of political attention as well as public scrutiny. Recent social policy analyses see the advent of ‘politics of parenting’ and identify a ‘politicization of parenthood’. And as a matter of fact, profound changes has taken place in many European welfare states e.g. with regard to parenting support services, family support services, childcare systems or child protection systems. Taken together these changes seem to lead to contradictional developments: At the one hand side, many policies could be understood as a shift from private to public responsibilities in child rearing and education. They pursue the goal to support parents in the upbringing of children, shall allow more gender equality and a better reconciliation of work and family life and finally should create more equal opportunities for children in society without regard for their family backgrounds. On the other hand – and often at the same time – parents are made more and more responsible for the educational and economical success or ‘failure’ of their children, perceive more societal control of their parenting practices and are e.g. targeted by parenting programs. This is likely to be especially relevant for specific groups of parents: mothers, migrant parents as well as parents from lower educational and economical backgrounds.

These ongoing changes in the public understanding and the politics of parenting influences both, gender and generational relations within the family. Among others, social work services are to be found at the core of these policies: Social work institutions and social workers need to deal with the (new) public demands and policies and implement them into local programmes. But the other way around, they also shape current understandings of parenting, generational relations and gender relations e.g. through providing images and ideas of a good family life, good parenting, good motherhood or fatherhood. The discussion of the interaction of new policy frameworks and social work practices in the context of parenting as well as their their implications for gender and generational relations will be the core issue of the symposia.

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Since the implementation of a general state-regulated youth welfare system in the early 20th century as part of the German welfare system there is a very specific interrelation between the family and the youth welfare system. On the one hand there are periods of deep distrust to the moral and educational ability of (especially proletarian) parents for bringing up their children in an appropriate manner. On the other hand, in times of societal crises the family is addressed and pushed as salutatory for society and as the central institution for caring and educating. In this paper different stages of interrelation between the family, social work and the welfare state are reconstructed. First, it will be shown that the family always has been an object of political discussion and regulation and second, that actually there is an interesting mix of distrusting the family as well as addressing the family as most important for the education, care and upbringing of children. A new negotiation of shared duties of parents/the family, the state and its institution – the youth welfare system – can be seen at the moment.

Social workers' interventions in support of children and their families have often proved a minefield of sort, filled up with conflicting demands, expectations and tasks. This paper sets the resulting debate in the context of both social policy orientations and social work cultures. It argues that partnerships between families and practitioners have to be understood as the result of a complex set of factors. Data from a qualitative study of social work professional cultures suggest that among practitioners, policy orientations intertwine with different styles of conceiving social work; accordingly, professional cultures play an important part in connecting, or failing to connect, child protection and family support.

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