Examining social change through families provides a fascinating and complex picture of a changing Britain. How policymakers and other institutions understand these changes and respond to family needs will have major consequences for people’s livelihoods and wellbeing as we look to recover from the pandemic. This is particularly true for families struggling to rebuild their lives and, with a smaller economy predicted by 2025 compared to the pre-pandemic scenario, weather the uncertain economic environment around them. Indeed, many of our public services, and economic, social and civic systems depend on strong families to work effectively.
Understanding family change
The nuclear family of the past, consisting of a married couple with dependent children, is gradually being replaced. We are seeing a rise in co-habitation and a much wider array of family forms – blended families, living apart together (LATs), LGBTQ+ families, sandwich families and lone parents. Migration is also contributing to the more diverse landscape.
Gender equality is changing outdated social rules and gender roles, although domestic sharing of labour is still highly skewed towards women irrespective of their economic status. More egalitarian relationships, with a strong focus on children and high-investment parenting, co-exist alongside families on the margin where daily life involves food poverty and worrying about how to provide for children. Childbearing decisions not only come with a pay penalty for women, but will also determine the size of the future population.
There are many indicators of the changing nature of families and family life. One is the proportion of children born outside marriage or civil partnership, a particularly prominent trend in the UK.
Source: The Nonmarital Childbearing Network
Analysis based on Understanding Society and BHPS data, which shows the circumstances of new mothers at the time of childbirth, reveal just how dramatically family forms are changing.
Source: Changes in family structure, Understanding Society Briefing Note
While some social norms have waned as society has become more liberal, this has happened alongside significant new economic and housing pressures that affect family formation and behaviours. At the same time, the issue of income inequality has overshadowed the more complex experiences of different families from the rest of the population.
The increase in having children outside marriage has coincided with educational expansion, and the Second Demographic Transition suggests that new family behaviours are due to an irreversible shift in greater individual freedom and people’s desire for self-fulfilment, particularly among those with higher education. However, the Non-Marital Childbearing Network puts forward an alternative explanation – the ‘Pattern of Disadvantage’. This theory argues that social and structural factors, including globalisation and rising economic uncertainty, are leading to an increasing divergence in family behaviours. For example, non-marital childbirths are more common among those with lower educational qualifications rather than those with higher qualifications.
Family policy
Governments’ attitudes to families have been changing over time – a more activist policy replacing the fear of unwelcome interference in family privacy – but differences remain between left and right about the purpose and ambition of policy. With a focus on disadvantage, Eisenstadt and Oppenheim provide an insight into family policy over the last 20 years in their book Parents, Poverty and the State, and dispel some of the myths about what matters for children’s outcomes.
Family narrative is regularly used by politicians as a catch-all for very different groups of people (not least in budget speeches), and sometimes as a framing device to appeal to particular parts of the electorate. Family policy shouldn’t be about making moral judgements about what a family should look like. Its purpose should be a genuine attempt at rooting economic and social policies in the daily experiences of struggling families. Policies such as the two-child limit for benefits, attempting to change behaviour on childbearing, can end up pushing larger families into poverty rather than having any measurable impact on behaviour.
Of course, family policy is a hodgepodge of issues which range from parental leave, work-life balance, tax and benefits, worklessness, relationship support and parenting, to early years, child maintenance, child poverty, and safeguarding children most at risk of harm. Add education, housing and health and it is clear that family policy cuts across many departments and service areas, and hence is challenging to both understand and co-ordinate.
A more comprehensive approach to family policy, according to Eisenstadt and Oppenheim, should aim to support families through “reducing pressures and increasing capabilities”. Reducing pressures, for example, could include direct income transfers, employment policies, work-life balance and affordable housing policies, while increasing capabilities can cover high quality childcare, parenting and relationship support, health visits, mental health, and skills development. In particular, breaking the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage is vital for social mobility.
The government’s immediate policy focus should be on tackling the pandemic and its economic and social consequences, which will continue to play out over the coming months and years. However, when the opportunity presents itself, the property rights and financial dependency of co-habiting couples needs a review, given the common myth that couples who live together for a long time have the same rights as married or civil partners.
In next week’s blog, in the run-up to our Changing Families conference, I will look at work-life balance, educational disparities, poverty and other aspects of family life in the context of our recovery from the pandemic.
Authors
Raj Patel
Raj Patel is Associate Director, Policy and Partnerships, at Understanding Society
