Friends of the Family?

Civitas, 9 December 2009

Featured prominently in the media this past week have been the views of two influential figures within the world of family policy in recent years.  Their reported views do much to explain the dire state to which that institution has been reduced during this time.

One is Geoff Mulgan, now director of the Young Foundation, but formerly director of policy at 10 Downing Street during Tony Blair’s premiership. The other is Dr Katherine Rake, now chief executive of the Family and Parenting Institute (FPI).

On Monday, the Young Foundation published a massive 294-page report entitled Sinking and Swimming: Understanding Britain’s Unmet Needs of which Mulgan provides a reprise in yesterday’s Times.

Last week, Dr Rake gave well-reported speech at celebrations to mark the tenth anniversary of the FPI about which yesterday’s Times carried a two-page feature.

Mulgan’s report argues that, although material needs of the inhabitants of this country are now mostly well provided for, many equally important more psychological needs are being far less adequately catered for.

Needs said to be going unmet include those for assistance when negotiating critical transitions in life, such as that from school to adulthood or from employment to retirement. They also include both the need for being taught how to be resilient (that is, able to cope with and surmount inevitable adversities and frustrations in life), as well as that for the company of others as well as the means to communicate with them. Mulgan writes:

‘Half a million pensioners spend Christmas alone. Our report shows that a million people literally have no one who appreciates them… Our report shows that Britain is… a generally happy country but with many unhappy people. It’s not broken. But it is brittle, anxious and stressed.’

Mulgan concludes:

‘To the public it is obvious that psychological needs are as important as material ones, that love, care, peace of mind are as vital to a good life as having enough heating or enough clothes to wear. Yet there is an odd gulf between this common knowledge and public policy. Whoever can bridge that gap may win the battle to convince the public that they understand poverty and what to do about it.’

In that newspaper article, Mulgan refuses to acknowledge such deficiencies as exist in the provision of love and care have anything to do with family breakdown. He writes that:

‘after 12 years [of the present Government being] in power… the family remains strong, and much the most important place where most people’s needs are met.’

In the report itself, such optimism about the robustness of the family is not sustained.  There, it is candidly recognised that:

‘The buffers of religion and family that helped people cope with setbacks have weakened… Some of the shock absorbers—from faith to family – that helped us cope in the past have atrophied.’

Here, it is unequivocally admitted that, while family and church used in the past to help people to cope with setbacks, these two institutions have atrophied, to use Mulgan’s own word.

Atrophy is the wasting away of some organ or limb through its imperfect nourishment.

Given that Mulgan had recognised both how well in the past the family served to satisfy various important psychological needs of people and that it has recently suffered emaciation through imperfect nourishment, one might have supposed that he would also have been prepared to propose, as the obvious public policy remedy for meeting those currently unmet needs, a revitalisation of the family through receipt from the state of greater care and extra nourishment.

But rather than proposing fiscal support for the conventional two-parent family, Mulgan resorts in his newspaper article to denying that the family has undergone decline.

Dr Rake is no less implacably opposed than Mulgan to public policy which favours the traditional two parent nuclear family, especially in that form in which the traditional division of labour between the genders has been preserved. Writing as Director of the Fawcett Society in the Guardian in 2006, Dr Rake declared:

‘We… want to transform the most intimate and private relations between women and men… We want to change not just what childcare the state provides, but who changes the nappies at home.’

In yesterday’s Times, she was quoted as having said:

‘We all know that people have committed, stable relationships outside marriage and we all know of marriages that aren’t stable or committed. We know that if parents are in conflict, it’s bad for kids, whether they are married or not… Marriage in and of itself doesn’t give you a quick solution…’

In her talk Lat week, Dr. Rake went so far as to deprecate all attempts by government to strengthen marriage by offering financial incentives such as a married couple’s allowance or transferable tax allowances. She warned:

‘What policymakers must not do is fall into the trap of investing large sums of money trying to reverse the tide of trends by trying to encourage more “traditional families”.’

Likewise, yesterday’s feature in the Times ended by it quoting Dr Rake as stating that:

‘There are some people who simply don’t want to get married. It’s not something that they feel they want to do. And that’s fair enough, isn’t it?’

No, Dr Rake, it isn’t fair, or, at least, it is far from always fair.

First, it is not fair to children who may be born to couples, assuming that the latter benefit from receipt of the love and care of both their parents and that it is known, as indeed it surely is , that couples who have children together stay together longer, when married than if merely cohabiting.

Second, it is not fair for people not to marry, if they have children in circumstances when the costs of the upbringing of those children fall upon the tax-payer. This unfairness applies especially in the case of young unmarried women who have children so as thereby to obtain housing and welfare from the state. It is unfair to those tax-payers who must support those children, as it is to those children to deprive them of the care of their fathers.

But, it would seem that Dr Rake is unwilling to admit such elementary moral truths. Instead, she resorts to the banal observation that some children can be raised more happily by unmarried mothers than are many children growing up in an unhappily married household.

Such facts as Dr Rake cites do not form a sound basis for social policy.

Some women are stronger than most men, as are some taller than most men. Such facts do not refute the assertion that, in general, men are both stronger and taller than women.

Given that what is ultimately at stake is the welfare of children, the fact that, in general, they grow up better when raised jointly by their biological parents, than under any other domestic arrangement, means that, for the state not to support two-parent families is nothing less than for the state to be anti-child. The Young Foundation reports notes that:

‘Children’s dedication and capacity for concentration at the age of 10 has a  much bigger impact on earnings 20 years on than their ability in maths.’

Who can doubt that children who grow up in traditional two-parent families are more likely, as a rule and in consequence, to acquire the requisite capacity for self-discipline and concentration by the age of 10 than those growing up in single-parent homes?

Given this stark fact, social policy has every reason to favour the traditional two-parent family over every other domestic arrangement, as responsible voters have for favouring whichever party is willing to support that form of arrangement in whatever way it reasonably can.