The unstable family lies behind so many problems, but Westminster doesn’t care
Compared with those living in 1964, the average British person is far richer, better educated and freer to choose their life path, especially if a woman. They are also more likely to live alone, to suffer from depression, less likely to have children and, if they are a child, much less likely to live in a stable family.
Enormous changes to family life lie behind this double-edged transformation. The changes are also responsible for a seldom-articulated tension between women’s new choices and proper care for the dependent young and old. The challenge we face now is how to reduce that tension, not by returning to the gender roles of the 1960s, but by raising the status and value of the traditionally female realms of care.
Consider it an investment problem: how can we invest enough in the things we say we still want – having and caring for children, and decent care for the disabled and the growing army of the elderly – while honouring choice, including the choice not to care? This is the care dilemma.
Women’s autonomy and financial independence is the biggest step forward in freedom since 1945. But, along with a more general relaxation of constraints on behaviour, it has had unintended consequences for family life and the care economy.
The ever-rising cost of the social state, thanks to smaller, less stable families; the mental-fragility epidemic among young people; and the recruitment crisis in face-to-face care jobs, thanks to the low status of emotional labour, can all be traced to the undervaluing of the domestic realm. Not to mention the recent news of the fall in the fertility rate to 1.44 children per woman, a mounting disaster for our economy.
These negative trends are inseparable from positive ones, such as the greater freedom to leave unhappy relationships and to delay settling down, the mass movement of women into jobs and careers, and the expansion of state and market support for care.
There is no “golden age” of family to restore, but few people welcome the fact that, by their early teens, nearly half of children in the UK, and mainly poorer ones, no longer live with both biological parents. We are the family-breakdown champions of Europe.
Meanwhile, recent family policy focuses on helping both parents to spend more time at work, despite polling consistently showing that young parents would prefer more time at home if they could afford it.
This issue exposes one of the biggest divergences between the priorities of the political class and the rest. In 2023, Jeremy Hunt (with cross-party support) expanded state subsidy for formal childcare to infants as young as nine months, at a cost of £4 billion a year – suggesting women should not “waste their talent” on mothering.
This subsidy is especially valuable to the one-third of families with pre-school children in which both parents work full-time. Yet this arrangement is favoured by less than 10 per cent of the public, finds the British Social Attitudes survey. Moreover, many experts think most infants are better cared for at home before the age of two.
The Treasury model maximises the workforce, GDP and tax income today, but only by making it harder to raise the families of the future. Our lower fertility rate means far fewer workers and less tax income to support the battalions of the retired in 30 years without ever more unpopular immigration or gradually turning the “right to die” into a “duty to die”.
Few want to return to the old breadwinner-homemaker model. Affordable childcare to allow women to escape the pressures of home life into more socially esteemed paid work is a relief for many mothers, and financial autonomy is all too necessary thanks to the decline of stable partnerships.
But growth should not depend on pushing mothers, often reluctantly, into low-productivity jobs; rather, it should come through removing barriers to investment and construction. The UK employment rate of 75 per cent is already high by international standards.
There are no easy, or cheap, answers to the care dilemma, but imagine if we valued reproduction as much as production. We would build a family-friendly, part-time work culture during the reproductive years, in which both parents, with the help of grandparents and the state, could combine childcare with varying levels of paid work, keeping career progression alive.
Yes, men need to step up more, and should be encouraged to with paternity leave of three months, rather than today’s two weeks, and miserly maternity pay needs upgrading, too.
But the best idea for reducing stress in the early years of parenthood, when relationship breakdown is so common, is to make it easier for one parent – mother or father – to stay at home, supported by a home care allowance (HCA) as in Finland. Paying childcare subsidies (total £9 billion a year) direct to families, and concentrating child benefit on the early years, could produce an HCA of almost £10,000 a year, without big extra calls on the taxpayer.
Support for the family and for higher fertility are often seen as conservative ideas, but allowing women to more easily combine motherhood and work, and helping to reduce family instability and child poverty, exacerbated by the UK’s uniquely child-unfriendly policy regime, are surely ideas that liberals and conservatives can unite around.
Isn’t it time that we, and our politicians, had a more honest conversation about the care dilemma?
David Goodhart’s new book ‘The Care Dilemma: Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality’ is published by Forum (£25)