한국 가족정책 방향설정을 위한 성찰

Review on Family Policy Direction : Distinctiveness of Families and Labor Market in Korea

Throughout the rapidly changing and compressed modernization era of 30∼40 years, the polarized labor markets as well as stratified families have been established in Korea. Social ramifications of rapid development have now threatened social sustainability itself. Since the explicit family policies have been planned and implemented in 2006, philosophical swing between defamilialization and refamilialization was tremendously big and unexpected adverse effects are huge such as low quality of socialized care, poor working conditions of care-workers, narrow focusing on typical parenting attitude without working hour consideration as well as societal environment as a whole etc. This paper points out distinctive characteristics of labor markets and family functions of Korea compared to other OECD countries, and critically reviews the problems of uncoordinated policy frames and inadequate consideration of polarization as well as social exclusion in recent 7 years. It is urgently needed to take the complicated impacts of accumulated inequality into consideration; how it influences certain families and how it widens family variations and what it brings about to families. A new placement of family policy as a core element of social policy linked with population, education, and labor market policies is certainly pivotal.