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The report shows the necessity of a policy in the area of the labour market, education and social security, which is aligned with the modern life course. It argues that the family phase is under pressure. One can speak of both an income dip as well as a care peak: the raising of children costs time and energy. The earning capacity of families decreases, while the financial costs and the combination-stress increase. Seniors are confronted with other issues. These have to do with their position on the labour market. Often a great deal of time, knowledge and effort has been invested in the jobs that people have, but increasingly skills age very quickly. Many older employees thus leave the labour market. A great deal of human capital is in fact lost in this way (in an already ageing society). The pressure to sustain the social system in a country thus comes to lie too one-sidedly with exactly the generation that is in the family phase. This report is about the christian-democratic perspectives on changes in the life course and their consequences for demography, labour markets and generational relations.

In most Western societies the life course of the average citizen is changing from a three to a five phase model. The traditional stages of childhood, parenthood and old age are more and more ‘separated’ from each other by the two new childless phases. Young couples before family formation and Senior couples after the children left home have been gaining both in numbers and in wealth in the past decades. Inversely the position of families with young children (relatively) deteriorated: they face the double burden of raising children and building up a labour career. As a result especially women either get less children than they want or participate less in the labour market than they want (or even both). In sum, the combination of both a low fertility-rate and underemployment for women is both a threat to their own personal happiness and to the present and future situation of the European labour market. Moreover since also for elderly people the situation of underemployment is a serious issue. It is quit clear that the imbalance in de the life course is a real problem for modern western societies.

The keyword for the modern Christian democratic political programme is responsibility in two ways. In the first place responsibility stands for the basic notion that people need something to live (and even die) for, something that transcends their own existence. Something like an ideal but most of the time responsibility for something very close and concrete such as other people, children etc. In the second place responsibility stands for the acknowledgement of the fact that most people indeed take (their) responsibilities: society is not composed of ‘calculating’ individuals but of individuals as members of their (self-chosen) social groups or institutions. As a corollary of this political concept the role of government builds forth on the initiatives of citizens. Though government may or even must play the role of (final) shield for the weak - though they can play an important and even decisive role in organising a system of social transfers – governments never should ‘take over’ the responsibility of citizens in organising solidarity.