New Right & Diversity

• While postmodernists and feminists tend to see family diversity as a positive feature of contemporary society, sociologists from the New Right take a different view.
• Charles Murray argues that welfare payments to lone parents provide perverse incentives to young girls to get pregnant and to boys not to take responsibility for their children, contributing to the creation of an underclass of long-term unemployed and dysfunctional people
• Melanie Phillips argued that the riots and violence that swept London and other Uk cities in 2011 was the fault of lone-parent families and boys who lacked male role models at home
• However, other sociologists point out that people from a range of family backgrounds rioted and that parents staying together does not guarantee a positive male role model