ABSTRACT Recent family policy developments may blur conventional family policy typologies. While policies in some European welfare states are shifting away from strong male breadwinner regimes towards work–family reconciliation, the adding of cash for childcare (CFC) benefits in Nordic earner-carer welfare states points in the opposite direction. How can we understand growing family policy hybridisation? Comparison of CFC schemes in the five Nordic countries is the empirical basis of the discussion here – what does the insertion of such a familistic policy measure actually mean? The analysis displays diverse national policy processes and policy outputs and wide variation in parents’ responses to this policy incentive. Reforms have been subject to conflicts and amendments to different degrees, and impact has been shaped by their institution at different times distinguished by mothers’ varying access to childcare services and labour markets. We conclude that conceptualisation of CFC schemes needs to be contextualised in relation to political dynamisms and opportunity structures.

That ‘politics matters’ has become a central assumption in the booming welfare state literature in recent years. Sometimes policies do not matter much, however. A key argument in this paper is that family policies are becoming increasingly complex and diversified, and that the practical implications of policies have to be analysed in relation to the wider social, economic and political context. In the present case study of a cash-for-care reform introduced in Norway in 1998, the relationship between policy reform and mothers’ employment practices is explored. Against expectations, and after a heated and polarised public debate, the reform turns out to have very modest effects. The analysis aims at identifying the constellation of factors that can explain the unexpected outcome, locating them in the interplay of the reform’s intent and content, and divergences between policy assumptions and mothers’ actual context of social action.