Family Policies in Latin American Countries: Re-enforcing Familialism

Abstract

This article explores in comparative terms the different types of family policies promoted in Latin America in the twenty-first century. During the first twelve years of the 2000s, the region as a whole had significant levels of economic growth and simultaneously promoted expansion strategies of its social protection system, essentially, referring to the social assistance component. In this framework, a package of new public policies, family policies, was introduced, which seemed to announce a serious reformulation of Latin American welfare systems, aimed at alleviating families from the socioeconomic burdens of dependent members. However, the family policies became subsidiaries of classical social policies, focused on situations of poverty and reinforced the responsibility for protection of families in these sectors of the population. In the vast majority of the cases, reinforcing both a familiarist model, either explicitly or implicitly due to the absence of the State and the market, and the role of women in unpaid care work.