Family and Social Policy in the UK - Essay Example

Running Head: Essay about family and social policy Essay about family and social policy 1Family is implicitto be observed in all West European country logically leads to questions concerning, first, what makes up society's social and political order and, secondly, how the family fits into this system. As it is true for most European countries, separate phases that developed within the framework of it is exemplified the expansion of family policy political, economic and a social framework (Schultheis, 1988). Family policy's primary aim is to give for the 'well-being' of the family. The collision of family policy is diverse. It manipulates the structure and the functions of the family: Dumon (1987) illustrates family policy as a mechanism used by the government to retain, support or change equally the structure of families and family life. He discerns three phases of family policy expansion in Western Europe: First, part of financial support for the family; tagged by a phase of policy intended at the well-being of the family as a whole and at the personal progress of each of its members; and last of all is a phase distinguished by measures that aim at rendering themselves momentarily or partly unnecessary. Eighties were a decade in Britain that saw the most foremost changes in family and household work that have taken place this century. Marriage was delayed as more couples recognized cohabiting unions, and a drift toward the severance of childbearing and marriage became perceptible with trebling in the proportion of babies born outside marriage. Marital break and divorce were other distinctive features of the decade. Divorce rates doubled throughout seventies, following legislation that permitted easier divorce. Throughout eighties, they retained the plateau reached in divorce rates, and more than one-third of the marriages were likely to end in divorce. Focusing on these factors, Gittings (1993) argues that: 'there is no such thing as the family, and that no single form of the family has ever existed'. The impact of these changes has been perceptible for women at both ends of the childbearing years. In both age groups women have become less prone to be living as part of a married couple with children, and more prone to be either a lone parent, living alone, or living as part of a childless couple. There has been a distinct shift for women from the role of spouse to the standing of household head. Social and economic trends that have seen increased economic activity of women have convoyed these demographic developments. Though, socialists also distinguished eighties for the impact of economic recession and the rise of mass unemployment. These developments had a particular collision on families (mainly lone-parent families), and led to a threefold increase in the numbers of children living in poverty (Martin J, and Roberts C. 1984). In the dearth of a clear and wide-ranging model of family policy in Britain, response to demographic and social change has been incremental and sometimes contradictory. The family has increasingly become the center of political and public debate and disagreement. Attempts to persuade at times contrary objectives make any involvement in family policy exceedingly intricate. There remains a lack of sureness as to the desired balance between the worlds of family life and paid employment; linking equity of treatment for individuals on the one hands, and sustain for the customary two-parent family on the other. They might accomplish that many trends apparent in the British family have their own momentum that is driving them onward, rather than because of, premeditated policy intervention (Silva, E.B. and Smart, C 1999). Basically, Families are the key transmitters of cultural values and the foremost models of both adequate and deplorable behaviors. We must not leave families to engage in this work alone but support them in developing fundamental human values around respect, patience, acceptance of diversity, parity, service, dependability for others, truth, decency, honesty and support. 'The family' involves considering central and fundamental issues about the nature of society. Not least are issues of sex and gender, paid work versus unpaid family work, which takes' responsibility for child rearing, the purpose of 'the family', and changes in family life associated with socio-historical events. These, and many more issues, are central to the way social science is undertaken in Western societies. Despite a popular idea that social science is critical, even radical, social science is generally remarkably conservative in relation to family life. This conservatism reflects popular ideas about 'the family' contained in biology, history and morality (Muncie J 1997) To show what might be implicated in developing a 'family perspective', Wicks argues that, 'the development of a "family perspective" within the policy making process is, perhaps, one step that all parties and groups concerned about the family might support' (1991, p. 182). A key vehicles in practicing a family perspective in policymaking, accepted from the United States and planned by the Study Commission on the Family, is that of 'Family Impact Statements'. Such statements are seen as involving assessments of: The impact of the proposed policy on different family units, including one parent and dual worker families, for example. The assumptions made about family life, including male and female roles. The association between the new policy and existing related polices and the likely cumulative impacts of these measures. The rights and responsibilities of families. The intelligibility of the new policy questions of access, complexity and so on. The policy goals in relation to families and how these will be achieved, and procedures for monitoring and evaluation. (Wicks, 1991, pp. 181-2) British governments have not sought to formulate precise and institutionalized family policies. Yet, transversely the continuum of public and social policy range events that influence, and are anticipated to influence, the living circumstances of families and children. These measures tote up to a policy with detailed characteristics and profiles which make it probable and pertinent to recognize 'the British form of family policy', both about current policies and policy drifts over the preceding decades. Governments enact policies in respect to the family while. - they recognize problems in the family, they see either in doing what as family functions in society or with a revere to internal pressures and strains in families; - Pressures for government intrusion are not prevailing by what are measured to be constraints on the range of government action; - They believe it is in their power to intercede effectively with reverence to the problems recognized. (McRae S. 1993) Present family policy in Britain can be distinguished as reluctant. Family problems are distinct as government accountability less than in other European countries. Customary ideology is prone to underline constraints on prospective government action, with budgetary constraints, and considers the scope of effective government action as inadequate. In political rhetoric, the stability between government and family accountability has shifted to a stronger emphasis on the dependability of the family in society and of family members for each other. This contour of family policy, and the shift in ideological stress toward a family job, is completely intentional. It is seen on one side of the political divide as enviable and coherent, and on the other side as rolling back the standards and practices of the welfare state. The prevailing theme of this indication of family policy in Britain from the sixties to the nineties has been the changing role of the state concerning the family. Child care and employment are two instances. In Britain, government concern over population has been noticeably absent from the area of family policy. One rationale might be that fertility in Britain has continued high by European comparison, but a more likely motive is that excepting a specific policy of trying to persuade families in their decisions concerning children would be alien to British family values for governments. Governments in Britain have as well been guarded in family planning. They have taken initiatives on the study of population drifts but have not shown any proclivity toward the formulation of population policies. The outstanding highs rate of teenage childbearing almost four times the Western European average is often taken as proof of a failure in sex education. Public economic support for families in need have a long ritual that instigated in the various poor law establishments and endures to this day. Though, the earliest and most fundamental policy intrusions in family life were in the type of compulsory education, which was forced to prevent some parents from sending their children out to work. More lately, the extent of compulsory schooling has been comprehensive, and enforcement might be more a matter of undertaking the social and family problems that lie behind non-attendance. The education service's traditional social aspect (e.g., school health and meals' services) has been reduced. Throughout the two world wars, and predominantly World War II, governments mediated strongly in the family out of labor market apprehensions. In World War II, nursery places were offered for vast numbers of children to release their mothers for work in manufacturing and other war efforts. Through the end of the war, though, the prerequisite of nursery places was quickly reduced. As then, it has not been government strategy in Britain to support mothers to work outside the family, nor to put off mothers from so doing, though prevailing family values in the population may incline in the direction that as minimum mothers with small children must not work. The foremost form of government in the field of housing, support has usually been through the prerequisite of public housing. Throughout the last fifteen years or so, however, housing policy has undergone a fundamental shift: individual tenants have been optimistic to become owner-occupiers; Local Authority counsel estates have been conveyed to Housing Associations, and subsidized rents in the enduring Local Authority housing have been phased out in favor of supporting poor tenants to convene market rents through means-tested Housing Benefit. Britain like other European countries is practicing great concern over law and order, with juvenile crime and deviance, and the probable decline of family consistency and social control. This is the matter of strong political oratory but not of corresponding political action, perhaps because seeing what forms such action might take is not easy. One customs of British social policy debate, which differentiates it from the continental European or Scandinavian traditions, is the affinity to originate social problems in the language of poverty. Troubles that can be depicted influentially as problems of poverty have had and persist to have substantial power in policy considerations, and 'the politics of poverty' is an arena between Left and Right. Throughout the sixties and seventies, the Left dominated this debate, and it was a period of social strategy expansion in many areas, with income transfers and services for families. More lately, the Right has reigned and partly held the poverty lobby at bay. The logic of poverty, though, remains an authoritative policy influence behind the propensity to curtail on general policies to the family and to encourage specific policies that can be directly linked to poverty or need. Examples are the diminution in the relative value of state benefits through the shift from wages to prices as the base for up-rating state benefits and the raising dependence on means-tested benefits. Common problems in the family might be renowned as facts, but do not comprise adequate reason for policy action. For instance, it might be generally renowned that gender inequality in the division of labor both in the market and in the domestic area is an extensive problem, but there is little agreement that this must be an area of policy accountability by the state. Instead, the strongly widespread view may be that this is a private accountability, either for families themselves or for employees and employers to reform in contract arrangements and negotiations. Through respect to explicit problems that are relatively clearly professed as 'poverty' or 'needs', government distinguishes its dependability and often follows up with powerful policies. A pattern is income-testing of benefits, which is based on the conception of directing support where it is most desired, together with to families and children in poverty. Another instance is the central position of the notion of 'children in need' in the Children Act 1989. Throughout this Act, they usually reinforced the rights of children, and for 'children in need' in particular, rights were decisively recognized and Local Authorities' responsibilities specified. The power of this clause in the Act has been diluted, however, by ambiguity in interpretation and substantial Local Authority discretion. Despite the prominence on policies planned to aim poverty in families and children in need and to raise efficiency in the distribution of benefits, the British experience as the mid seventies is one of the piercingly increasing (income) disparity. Since the seventies, families with children and children particularly, have found themselves on the losing end of a fundamental reorganization of living standards. The privacy of the family is a conventional and firmly traditional value in British culture. There is, as in other countries, divergence concerning the role of public policy with deference to the family, but this divergence is yet contained within some shared discernment of the value of privacy, self-sufficiency, and accountability in the family. Since early nineties, Britain has seen a fundamental change in customary political ideology and policy practice. The shift toward the family taking more accountability itself has its origins more in a diverse theory of the state than in a new theory of the family: it is not simply that the family must do more, but also that the state must do less. This professed constraint on government action is now discernible most evidently in two areas that affect family policy. First, it is presently not government policy in Britain to seek to even out the overall allocation of income, use, or living standards, which has destabilized general policies for the family. For instance, the real value of the Child Benefit has been condensed, and income benefits have modified sharply toward means tested support. Families with children lean to be sited toward the lower end of the overall income distribution and have for this basis suffered excessively in a period of increasing inequality. Presented family support, income-tested or otherwise, has not rewarded for this increased relative deprivation in standards of living for families with children. Second, it is presently government policy in Britain to deregulate employment relations. Not only is government in Britain unwilling itself to offer childcare facilities as part of a policy of helping or encouraging mothers to work outside the family, it is also unwilling to legislate that employers must do so or to use financially or other enticements for this purpose, except in a nominal fashion. This partially explains the particular profile of childcare services in Britain, distinguished by low levels of public provision, high levels of intended and private contribution, and great variety of local childcare provisions a system that might be illustrated either as rich and pluralistic or as fragmentary and inadequate, depending on one's viewpoint. Services for children in Britain have been and remain strong in the field of education children's start school at five and increasingly at four but weak in the field of non-educational child care. There is, though, strong public pressure for enhanced childcare facilities, and for more nursery education. It vestiges to be seen whether the preschool voucher scheme proclaimed by the government in summer 1995 will produce a considerable increase in provision. If so, it is likely to consequence in a further privatization of service. British social policy between the sixties and nineties has seen a reversal in thinking about the role and functions of the state and the stipulation of services. The first half of this period still fell within the postwar compromise of a strong welfare state, with a fair degree of support for redistributive policies and universal provision. The second half of the period, though, has seen a sharp 'rolling-back' of the state 'family accountability, with a residualization of state provision and rapid privatization of many services. Family policy related to early childhood concerns in Britain are more comparable to those in the United States than to those on the continent. The British propensity is to back away from family policy as such no legislation; no government agency carries the "family" label by using definite programs. The historic tendencies of the social security system still not completely overcome to protect male work incentives and the affluent children's research businesses are equally reminiscent of American practices. Equally influential cases can be made for saying that early childhood. Family matters must be and is a major apprehension of British social policy and for saying that British social policy quite appropriately has avoided intervention in early childhood and family matters, concerning them as private relationships. Britain's Conservative government, elected in 1979, innate from its Labor predecessor no family policy issue that will demand official consideration in the close future (Roll J. 1992). Family policy in Britain comparatively established about fertility and mortality, it did witness several most considerable changes in family and household composition on twentieth century. The conspicuous rise in cohabitation, childbearing outside a marriage, marital breakdown and the move toward independent living has had significant consequences for the family situation of women at both the beginning of childbearing and the end of family-rearing. Demographic factors, such as the decline in marriage rates between young adults and the rise in divorce, have played a significant role, but there has been a change, also, in the inclination of people to live in diverse forms of living arrangements (Murphy and Barrington, 1993). It vestiges to be seen to what degree these changes are subjective by economic, social or attitude change, or by diverse permutations of these factors. Change in Family policy is forming a new and more democratic basis for family life in which there is prospective for a better base for familial relationships and friendships (Williams: 2004). 'Family policy' was possibly a more recognizable term at the end of the decade than it was at the beginning. Though, Britain remains a long way from having a clear and wide-ranging set of policies that might be grouped under such a heading. None the less, there have been some significant policy developments that appear to recognize, or at least to take some account important of social and demographic changes affecting the family. However, the role of family policy, Britain is probable to remain in a pattern of slow and incremental policy adjustment which lags behind the rate of change in the demographic, social and economic developments, and does so often to the loss of many individuals and their families. References Gittings D. (1993) The Family in question. Macmillan, London. Muncie J (1997) Understanding the family. 2nd ed. London: Open University & Sage Williams, F. (2004) Rethinking Families, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Silva, E.B. and Smart, C (1999) the new Family, Sage Publications Ltd Schultheis F. ( 1988), Sozialgeschichte der franzsischen Familienpolitik ( Social History of the French Family Policy), Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt/Main and New York. Dumon W. ( 1987), "Politique familiale en Europe occidentale" ( "Family Policy in Western Europe"), L'Anne Sociologique, 37:291-308. Wicks, M. 1991: 'Family matters and public policy'. In M. Loney et al. (eds), The State or the Market. London: Sage, 169-83. McRae S. ( 1993), Cohabiting Mothers: Changing Marriage and Motherhood Policy Studies Institute, London. Murphy M., and Berrington A. ( 1993), "Household Change in the 1980s: a Review", in HMSO, Population Trends, 73:18 - 27. Roll J. ( 1992), Understanding Poverty: a Guide to the Concepts and Measures, Family Policy Studies Centre, London. Martin J., and Roberts C. ( 1984), Women and Employment: a Lifetime Perspective, Department of Employment, HMSO, London. Read More