Welfare State

The term welfare state (WS) refers to those states that promote the social protection and welfare of its members by providing material benefits, fringes and services, and rights and entitlements of social citizenship and that actively regulate the consequences of such provisions (called social regulations). The relationship between state, family, and children has been central in the development of the WS. In its origins, around the last quarter of the 19th century, the child was assumed to be as a welfare subject because of the potential role she/he would play as an adult citizen in economic growth, and the reproduction of moral values, including social harmony. In the Western world, anxieties and moral panics over the well-being of the “children of the nation” dominated that ...