This article analyses informal support networks in Portugal. Using data from a national survey on families with children (1999), it explores the dynamics of support, in terms of the characteristics of, and variations in, families' experience of support. The analysis underlines the importance of social factors, such as the position of families in social and educational structures, and family variables, such as position in the life course, in determining the extent of support received by families. The results show that many families have a low level of support and that extended kinship does not play a significant role in providing support. As in other European countries, assistance flows mainly from parents, from the wife's family and from women rather than men; it is also strongly related to families' position in social structure, with low educational levels and less favourable occupational categories determining lower levels of support over the course of married life. Thus welfare provision stemming from informal relationships reinforces existing social inequalities rather than compensating for them, and the idea of a strong pre- and post-modern welfare society must be challenged.

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This contribution addresses the challenge of reviewing Southern European welfare states by analysing how developments in leave policies are generating common or divergent trends across Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece. These societies offer a mixture of family patterns and family policies. Over the last decade they have developed significant work-family arrangements both in terms of parental leave and early education childcare services. The four countries have been moving in the direction of longer paid leave and the promotion of paternal leave, allowing for family diversity and new gender-equality incentives. Besides these common trends, the four countries also reveal differences enabling them to shift towards alternative leave models, such as the one-year gender-equality-oriented model or the choice-oriented leave model. However, for the time being, taking into account take-up rates and the impact of the economic crisis, the four countries conform to what we have characterised as an 'extensible early return to work' leave model. Leave policies are reviewed in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain mainly between 2004 and 2014, drawing on data from the Annual Reviews of the Leave Policies and Research Network, Eurostat and the OECD Family Database.