Politics of the family
by Clive Soley MP
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When politicians dabble in family values, beware. John Major's ill-fated back to basics campaign foundered when various Conservative MPs were found to be engaged in a wide range of relationships not normally associated with traditional family values. This should be a salutary warning to politicians of all political persuasions and is one of the reasons that politicians should resist the temptation to preach or to use their own families in the political process, especially in any attempt to garner votes.
Politicians who preach about traditional family values are just as likely to lapse from time to time as anyone else - perhaps more likely given the link between sex and power. Yet politicians are under pressure to 'do something' about the supposed decline in the family and in standards of behaviour in society.
Whether or not standards really are worse than in previous times is debatable. There can never have been an age when the older generation and their leaders didn't bemoan the lost values of their own past. The fact that we no longer enjoy 'the crispy bacon we had before the war' may have more to do with our aging taste buds than with real change and the same principle applies to other aspects of human behavior.
In reality we cannot know with any certainty whether the family is in greater crisis than in past historical periods. The difficulty of making any reliable historical comparison should not however prevent us from examining the problems facing families today. Above all it should not stop politicians and decision makers from looking for ways in which family functioning can be improved. The reason why politicians should debate the family is because it is such an important institution and crucial to the happiness and effective social functioning of individuals. If families are not functioning well then not only do individuals suffer but also the society in which they live has to pick up the consequences of family breakdown, whether in the form of mental illness, crime or simple failure to maximize the individual's potential in life.
Recognising diversity
The debate cannot be value free but it can start with a recognition that families come in all shapes and sizes. Ask most people what their mental image of a family is and they are likely to conjure up a picture of husband, wife, two children and in all probability a dog and a car! In fact, families are far more varied in their makeup. The adults will frequently not be married or have been married before. The family may be of an adult child living with an elderly parent, two sisters or brothers living together. The variety and complexity of family life is too great for simplistic legislation or prescriptive moralising.
This is not some fine academic point. I saw a constituent recently who had fathered a child and the mother then had two other children by another man with whom all three children lived following her death. Because the deceased mother had felt the second father wan not capable she had asked for the first father to stay involved. He did so and in fact goes to the home several times a week to cook, wash and iron. Where does this family fit in the conventional wisdom of the moralists and who is going to be so bold as to criticise the morality involved?
From time to time governments around the world have attempted to prescribe family structure. Government of both right and left have dabbled in this and it almost invariably ends in tears and sometimes catastrophic failure.
The latest manifestation of this desire to prescribe family form is the growing tendency to associate marriage with family. This latest form of politically correct thinking holds that if we encourage marriage then family functioning will be improved; politicians from both parties have therefore suggested altering the tax system to benefit marriage. But why this should necessarily produce happier or better parents is not immediately obvious. In fact it is the quality of the relationships within the family that is likely to determine its success, not the legal framework or the financial payments made by the state. You cannot buy love and you cannot buy good relationships.
None of this should be taken to mean that marriage is unimportant. It is important precisely because over many centuries and in a wide variety of religions and cultures it has been used as a way in which people publicly express their commitment to each other. The structure of marriage has been through many changes over the ages and between cultures but in modern Britain its importance lies in the desire of two people to have a public ceremony where they express and record their act of commitment to each other and perhaps to any children of the union. Its importance to the couple is why it must be treated with respect and why state and churches should create the circumstances where the marriage ceremony can be a rewarding and enjoyable experience.
We do need to encourage stable and happy family relationship, preferably with both parents present. Single parents have to carry a far greater burden of work and responsibility; when there are two parents, the child has two role models as well as two sources of support and friendship. What we must give greater recognition to is the enormous significance of becoming a parent.
There is a danger that churches will emphasis the importance of marriage because it protects and enhances part of their function, but given the increasing number of childless adults the real emphasis should be on the needs of children. Why do we emphasise and research marriage, yet spend so little effort on studying the father's commitment to parenting and the way society undervalues the paternal role? I suspect that focusing on marriage and the churches' role enable us to duck the far more difficult question of support for parenting, and particularly fathers, across society as a whole.
If family policy were to be restricted to helping and preparing couples for marriage we would be failing to address the problems that beset families except at the margin. So what should family policy be about? It is this question which politicians have failed to address. We know that the social and economic structure of the state affect family functioning but it is such a complex area that it is easier for the political process to ignore its impact on family life and for the politicians and other commentators to focus instead on moralistic statements. But condemning for example single parent families neither explains the growth of such families nor helps parents cope with the problems of rearing children alone. Nor does it address the double standards of some male politicians, editors, religious leaders and other opinion formers who moralise about single parents while leaving the 'wife' at home to bring up the kids while they get on with the 'serious' business of running the country.
A crisis in men's roles
The barely concealed agenda here is that if man can get on with hunting and gathering then woman can get on with running the home. For better or for worse, modern society is no longer like that, and changes in technology and the economy make it an unsustainable system even if it was ever desirable. Many men are facing a crisis of identity because the roles that were ascribed to them in the industrial revolution began to fade away with the collapse of heavy industry and left them uncertain - are they hunter gatherers or parents? Are they the dominant male or the co-operative partner? What if their greater physical strength is devalued and intelligence and dexterity given a higher reward and the woman turns out to be better equipped to survive in this brave new market? If the male is not much use at earning an income because the modern market doesn't value his strength and macho style and if he's not much use round the house or with the kids what is his role? Is he to be valued only as a stud but not wanted on the journey? How do we prepare men for these more complex challenges?
The picture I am conjuring up may be a stereotype but it is an outline of what has happened in many of our regions where heavy industry has gone and the unskilled male is left jobless and without value. Whether in the inner city or in the areas where the old male dominated industries existed the redundant male has yet to find a role and it should come as no surprise that these are the situations where women are more likely to be single parents. And how easy it is for politicians to scapegoat these women! It's so much easier than addressing social change.
It is hard to overstate the importance of the social and economic structure as a determinant of family structure and of family functioning. Shortly after the Meadowell riots of 1991 I visited the area (a housing estate near Newcastle) and met an action committee set up by the local residents to improve the estate. The members of the committee were all women - about 15 of them - and as I recall, none was under 35. When I asked why there were no men I was told they were out fishing or down the pub. Although these women were taking the lead they were not going to allow the men to be criticised; they summarised the situation by the statement "they use to have work in the pits and in the shipyards. They've got nothing now". Estates on the periphery of big cities like Meadowell confront society with the problems in stark terms. Unemployment is high, poverty rife, opportunities for advancement very limited. The riot that took place was conducted primarily by young males. It says a lot about the relative roles of men and women that men commit crimes much more commonly than women but women receive treatment for mental ill health much more commonly than men. Or, to put it in other words, men externalise their problems while women internalise theirs.
So the question of the role for men in a modern market economy is a crucially important one. If they are no longer going to be the metal bashers and the unchallenged leaders of commerce and industry what do we expect of them? Men have begun to answer this more than we might suppose and certainly more than legislation allows for.
In South Wales estimates vary but at the height of the last slump (1988 to 93) about half of the main carers of children at home were men. Meanwhile the women were increasingly employed in the assembly of electronic goods where they enjoyed the advantages of manual dexterity and an absence of any need to assert their dominance as males. More importantly still they were cheaper to employ. Differential pay rates can be a major factor in deciding who stays at home to look after the children. How different from the days when the Welsh economy was dominated by the miner coming home to a hot bath prepared by the wife and with the expectation that he was the final arbiter of punishment of the children. For better of for worse there is no going back!
It is tempting for a politician of the left to assert that the eradication of poverty and the creation of full employment would be the best family policy. Certainly it would make family breakdown less likely. But even in societies where there is significantly less unemployment and poverty, such as the Scandinavian countries, there are still problems about family identity and male/female roles.
What politicians can and cannot do
Politicians need to be realistic about the limits of policy and they need to be clear about attainable objectives. We cannot predict the way technology and the economy will affect the family and work roles in the 21st century. There may be much more home working. But if so will parenting be shared or will it still be primarily a female role? Or will men become more marginalised and have even more difficulty competing with women in certain occupations? Will men still keep women below the glass ceiling?
It is because prediction is so difficult that a better approach to policy formulation is to make no assumptions about different roles between the sexes. What we need to focus on is the viability of family and the effectiveness of parenting and this we can do without moralising and without having to second guess technical and economic change.
The aim of the policy maker should be to create flexible systems that allow the individuals within the family to select their roles and the state and private companies need to ensure that flexibility. The now accepted term of 'family friendly policies’ is the appropriate term in my view. Attempts by the state or by companies to apportion roles will fail not least because families do make their own decisions. Who is to say which parent is to look after the children and during what stage of their lives? Such questions have to be decided within the family.
It is all too often assumed that it is the woman who wants children or that there is some rational choice made about parenting. In fact the choices that are made are extremely complex. The man may want children more than the woman. The relative desire of one parent for children may change after the children arrive. The choice is not always made with equal enthusiasm by both partners and in a way that lasts through the full period of parenting.
So if we are to help parents and families we need policies that allow flexibility. Politicians cannot realistically be asked to create legislation which prescribes some mythical 'best' family or 'best' role for men and women. They can and should however be asked to create legislation and policies that allow parents to determine the roles that best suit them in bringing up their children. They can and should be asked to create the legislation and policies that give the best chance to a child, in whatever family structure, to maximise their potential.
These policies are possible and can be applied in the light of existing social and economic structures and practices. In particular this means nursery education, child care facilities at work and in residential areas, paternity leave to encourage bonding soon after the birth of a child and to give support to the woman after birth. It includes some aspect of relationship education in the school curriculum to allow youngsters to learn more about sex education, child rearing and interpersonal relationships generally. It embraces counselling for families and relationships in difficulty. These are the areas where policy can be particularly helpful.
The failure of the moralistic approach and of the prescriptive roles approach is that is fails to recognise the complexity of the real world of relationships. This is aggravated by systems of Government which departmentalise policy in such a way that it is difficult to devise a coherent family policy.
Co-ordinating policies
Attempts to address this problem have focused on ideas like a Ministry for Women or for the family or for children. I no longer think such approaches work. I would prefer a sub committee of the Cabinet, chaired by a senior Minister, to have responsibility for family policy. It is not ideal but it would enable some coordination to take place. It was the failure of the last government in this respect that led to the main recommendation of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Parenting in their report that the Government should improve co-ordination between Government departments, local authorities and health authorities. Despite the new Government's stated commitment to the family, I see no evidence yet of that wish being translated into action by setting up the necessary co-ordinating machinery.
Until we do get effective co-ordination at Government level we are unlikely to get the leadership necessary to ensure family friendly policies in either the private or public sector. A few companies are leading the way and both local and national governments are beginning to realise the importance of this area of policy, but it is slow at present and limited to important but discreet areas like nursery provision. Nursery provision is vitally important but is anyone asking why we still have housing policies which result in families being in emergency accommodation for years? Or which puts families with young children in high rise flats where children have to stay in all day or play outside unsupervised where they can drift into vandalism and crime? What are we doing with transport policies that make parents fearful of letting their children walk to school or play in the street through fear of accidents? Above all, who is preparing men, especially the less skilled, for family responsibility?
It is these policy areas that governments can influence and in doing so would improve parenting and family functioning. If we simply try to second guess the direction of social and economic change, and if we try and prescribe the form of family structure, then we are likely to fail.
