Social policy

• Examples - China's one child policy

  • 1970s - 2015
  • Aimed to discourage births due to overpopulation
  • Those who complied got social benefits like education, housing and healthcare
  • Those who didn't had to pay a fine
  • Increased to 2 kids in 2015 and 3 in 2021
• Examples - Communist Romania

  • 1980s
  • Aimed to increase birth rates after poor living conditions caused a dip
  • Restricted contraception and abortion, and made divorce harder
  • Lowered legal age for marriage to 15
• Examples - Nazi family policy

  • Encouraged the 'racially pure' to create a 'master race'
  • Women restricted from workforce and confined to home
  • Sterilised 375,000 disabled people who were deemed unfit to breed
• Perspectives - functionalism

  • See policies as helping families to perform their functions more effectively and make life better for members
  • Fletcher - Social policies since industrial revolution has led to the development of a welfare state that supports the family, like the NHS
  • Counter - assumes all members of the family benefit equally and assumes there is a 'march of progress', while marxists think policies that cut welfare damage poor families
• Perspectives - policing the family (Donzelot)


  • Sees policy as a form of state power and control over families
  • Social workers, like health visitors and doctors, use their knowledge to control families, calls this 'the policing of families'
  • Condry - inflicting compulsory parenting orders on parents of young offenders through the court
  • Counter - fails to acknowledge who benefits from this
• Perspectives - The New Right (Almond)


  • Laws making divorce easier undermine traditional views of marriage being a long term commitment
  • Civil Partnership Act undermines heterosexual family's superiority
  • Tax laws discriminate against conventional families with a sole breadwinner
• Perspectives - The New Right (Murray)


  • Welfare benefits creates perverse incentives
  • Fathers abandon their families, hoping state will take care of them
  • Providing council houses for teen mothers encourages early unmarried births
  • Lone parents benefits means more boys grow up without a father figure
• Perspectives - The New Right's solution

  • Policy must be changed, with cuts in welfare spending and tighter restrictions on who is eligible for benefits
  • Means taxes could be reduced
  • Gives fathers incentive to work
  • Removes incentives for teen pregnancies
• Perspectives - The New Right criticisms

  • Feminists - assumes traditional patriarchal family structure is natural and tries to justify returning to it
  • Abbott and Wallace - cutting benefits would just make poor families more reliant
  • Ignores policies that help the nuclear family
• Perspectives - TNR and conservative governments 1979-97

  • Thatcher banned promotion of homosexuality by local authorities
  • Emphasised the continued responsibility of parents for their children after divorce
  • Child Support Agency to enforce maintenance payments by absent fathers
  • Counter - also made divorce easier and gave 'illegitimate' children equal right to other kids
• Perspectives - TNR and New Labour governments 1997-2010

  • Supported TNR with Parenting Orders to emphasise importance of socialising kids correctly
  • Silvia and Smart - but NL also encouraged women to work:
  • Longer maternity leave
  • Working families tax credit
  • The New Deal, helping lone parents return to work
• Perspectives - TNR and Conservative government from 2010

  • Hayton's 2 definitions:
  • Modernisers - recognise diversity and reflect this in their polices
  • Traditionalists - favour TNR and see diversity as morally wrong
  • Division means Conservatives have found it hard to maintain consistent policy line
• Perspectives - feminism and policy as self-fulfilling prophecy (Land)


  • Many social policies assume that the ideal family is the patriarchal nuclear family
  • Makes it more difficult for people to live in other family types than the one policymakers assume they live in
• Perspectives - feminism and policies supporting the patriarchal family

  • Tax and benefits - assumptions that women depend on men financially make it harder for women to claim benefits in her own right
  • Childcare - policies governing school timetables and holidays make it harder for women to commit to a full time job
  • Elderly care - assumes family will provide this and places further restrictions on women's freedom
• Perspectives - feminism criticisms

  • Not all policies maintain patriarchy, like equal pay and sex discrimination laws
• Perspectives - feminism and gender regimes (Drew)


  • Familistic gender regimes - where policies are based on a traditional gender division, like Greek women having to rely on others due to no welfare or publicly funded childcare
  • Individualistic gender regimes - where policies are based on the idea that genders are equal, like in Sweden
• Perspectives - feminism and the state v the market (Drew)


  • Gender equal policies like publicly funded childcare are expensive and limit the 'march of progress'
  • 2008 global recession led to government spening cutbacks and meant women were pressured back into household duties due to loss of welfare