Government ministers find it hard to agree on what sort of family they want to support. Tony Blair has long made it clear that he thinks two parents - preferably married - are better than one.

HOLDING THE BABY

Government ministers find it hard to agree on what sort of family they want to support. Tony Blair has long made it clear that he thinks two parents - preferably married - are better than one. Others feel uneasy with any position that appears to condemn divorce or lone parenthood. Condemnation risks the charge of hypocrisy: as the foreign secretary has recently demonstrated, middle class cabinet ministers are just as likely to want to divorce as unemployed housewives. As for the Tory party, the conservative instinct on family life clashes with the liberal tradition that personal choices should not concern the state.

Yet family breakdown is clearly not a private affair. It affects government policy: on housing, pensions, tax policy and above all welfare, on which about 80% of lone parents rely. So the goal of supporting families tends to become intertwined with that of cutting the cost of the welfare, state, especially in the case of mothers who have never married. They are the fastest-growing group of lone parents, and are the youngest and poorest.

Thanks, perhaps, to the economic recovery, the number of lone parents claiming welfare has begun to fall. But family collapse may impose other, more enduring costs: there is some evidence that children whose parents split up can suffer lasting consequences, both economic and emotional. Children whose parents divorce do worse as adults in terms of educational attainment, earning power and ability to form stable relationships. Some of these effects seem to be the result of poverty rather than divorce itself. But children of divorced parents tend to co-habit, marry and have their own children earlier than their peers. That in turn increases the risk of another generation of broken homes.

It is one thing to highlight the consequences of family breakdown; quite another for politicians to reverse the process. Many -countries have seen rising divorce and more births outside marriage. That suggests the trends are driven mainly by deep-seated forces, such as the changing social attitudes that accompanied the contraceptive pill, and the increased participation of women in the labour force.

But in Britain some of these trends have gone further than elsewhere. Britain's divorce rate is towards the top of Europe's league and Britain also has Western Europe's highest rate of teenage births.

Probably the most government can do is to publicize the potential harm done by family breakdown to children to avoid welfare policies that support lone parents more than couples; and to create financial incentives for lone mothers to stay in touch with the fathers of their children. It is not respect for personal freedom but sheer powerlessness which prevents politicians from rebuilding the family.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-04