This edited collection makes a wide-ranging contribution to comparative family policy analysis. Through empirical analysis, policies aimed at families in terms of ‘cash and care’ are examined across many national contexts. The analysis is aimed at highlighting the similarities and differences between welfare states in detail. Through theoretical analysis, the contributors seek to identify the drivers and consequences of policy shifts.

There is a strong empirical and theoretical coherency running through the contributions, with leading social policy analysts critically assessing the argument that Western welfare states are converging towards an adult worker and social investment approach to welfare reform. The book presents mixed responses to this argument, empirically grounding the analysis within national and regional level policy and social change. This brings us to the final focus of the book, which is to ask: in whose interests are these policy shifts? Here there is a critical engagement with issues of generational, ethnic, class and gender inequalities and the way policy discourses and changes reinforce, reconfigure or reduce these inequalities. Again there is a mixed response within the collection. On the positive side, increases in public investment and the development of new social rights within the variants of the social investment and adult worker approach are recognised. However the majority opinion is one where policy responses and the drivers of policy change involve the generation of new risks and can reinforce existing inequalities.

To look at some of the empirical chapters in more detail, Jonathon Bradshaw presents an analysis of policies aimed at assisting parents with the costs of raising children in 15 countries, including four non-European countries – Japan, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Austria comes out as providing the most generous levels of provision; with many of the Nordic countries also remaining among the most generous. Ulla Bjornberg presents an analysis of the gendered implications of cash support for families with children within eight North European countries, arguing that there is substantial evidence of a shift towards providing cash support for men and women as paid workers. Parents' rights, particularly fathers, for paid leave from work in order to care for children have also become more widely recognised. However, there are also continued and widespread assumptions of women's unpaid child-caring roles informing other areas of policy, and the means-testing remains prevalent in some countries (such as the UK, Germany and the Netherlands), reinforcing constructions of ‘the deserving and undeserving’ poor.

Fran Bennett provides an analysis of different national approaches to ‘paying for children’. Bennett acknowledges the way economic support for families has moved up policy agendas. In some cases, such as in the UK, extensions in universal child benefit have emerged due to perceptions of children as the deserving poor. However, Bennett notes a worrying trend (even within some of the Nordic countries) towards attaching conditions to the receipt of welfare support, e.g. where maternity grants are conditional on contact with a health professional, or where welfare benefit/social housing is potentially withdrawn for parents of children deemed anti-social. Such moves increase poverty risk among children and, according to Bennett, erode children's and parental rights.

Other chapters provide an analysis of policy discourses and agendas. Case studies are provided of policy developments and discourses within childcare (Peter Moss; Dianne Perrons), the OECD work/family reconciliation agenda (Rianne Mahon) and working time flexibility in France (Marie-Therese Letablier). All of these chapters present in-depth discussions highlighting the multiple agendas of current policy developments. A further case study drawing on an empirical assessment of children's perspective in relation to work–life balance issues in the German context provides a valuable contribution. Ute Klammer brings sharply into focus children's perceptions of their needs in the context of changes to parental working lives. Ute Klammer identifies a need for policies and employers to recognise children's needs and desires for family time together. Two further chapters consider the relationship between welfare state re-structuring and parental patterns of engagement in care and employment. Birgit Pfau-Effinger takes a broad look at the nature and balance of informal and formal care, arguing for a re-conceptualisation of these forms of care in recognition of the multiple configurations they now take. Barbara Hobson, Ann-Zofie Duvander and Karin Hallden present an analysis illustrating the need to examine the agency of citizens to actively negotiate institutional opportunities and the personal/social resources at hand in order to achieve a better balance between family and working life. However, a critical message also comes across strongly, that institutional contexts can do much to facilitate or constrain parental capabilities, choices and pressures. These theoretically informed comparative studies bring to the fore arguments about the drivers of policy and social change, examining the relative weights of economic, personal, cultural and institutional influences shaping parental behaviour and policy change.

An argument begins to emerge across these chapters. The essence of the argument is initially presented by Jane Lewis as involving recognition that a shift towards an adult worker and social investment approach to social policy making is indeed a widespread phenomena, albeit one that is occurring to differing degrees and with differential national policy drivers/objectives/effects. While analysts such as Jane Jenson and Ruth Lister argue that the social investment state can be orientated to raise levels of cash and care support for families, parents and children, both – along with other authors in this collection – are concerned about the evidence that this support can have economic and political objectives beyond a concern with children's or parental welfare and rights. On a positive note, the many contributions to this collection provide ample food for thought as to the more progressive variations of a social investment approach.