| Zusammenfassung: | In recent years Austrian family policy aimed at improving individual work-life balances and increasing the participation of fathers. This included introducing child care benefit months that cannot be transferred between partners, adding a short-term income-dependent option to the original lump-sum child care benefit payments, creating additional child care facilities for under-3-year-olds and extending afternoon care facilities for school children. Nevertheless, monetary benefits are still considerably more prevalent in Austria than in other countries. In combination with other schemes, such as long-term child care benefit options, the substantially lower earnings on average of women in the labour market and, not least, marked popular scepticism of working mothers with small children, the current structure of family benefits tends to support a family model which provides for mothers to undertake most of the care duties and for fathers to pursue the role of main bread-winner.
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