Although the State in every nation has an obligation to promote the well-being of its families, there is a narrow dividing line between promoting family well-being and becoming actively involved in managing families and family life for political, economic or social reasons. The act of supporting families and legislating for their well-being brings the State into a position where its fiscal, welfare and other services can significantly influence trends in child-rearing and marital relationships. Official policies on promoting specific aspects of family life will also inevitably impact on budgetary allocations to government departments.

It can be argued that such support has an entirely beneficial effect on family life, and that the more the investment the more the nation’s families will prosper. This is not necessarily the case, as the spending of billions of pounds on family-oriented services brings with it pressures on parents to conform to the wider goals of national government - a legitimate aim of the State provided that those goals are in harmony with most families’ wishes and insights into their own well-being.

Taking a brief look at the more important areas in which State policy and practice can influence parenting will indicate how significant is that influence.

• Taxation  is by far the biggest contributor to the direction of family life and the parenting role over the past half century. A fiscal system which initially taxed a married couple as a single unit - even if they were both income-earners - and provided family allowances to assist with the rearing of children, has slowly been altered by successive governments. Today most couples are separately taxed and instead of family allowances there are child allowances, usually paid to whichever parent is seen as the chief carer. On the one hand this approach can be interpreted as divisive, encouraging couples to see themselves as separate economic units; on the other hand it can be seen as promoting the equality of women, replacing the old order in which the father was treated as the main wage-earner and the mother the child-carer.
• State benefits  also have a major impact on family life. They have helped families on low incomes (or no income) to survive and have provided a reasonable if modest existence for the families’ children. But in recent years these benefits have been geared to encouraging women to put their children into day care and find work, earning not only an income for their work but also additional State allowances for doing so. On another level single-parent benefits have been raised steeply, so that a single mother with one or more children will receive higher benefits than a married couple with children, often leaving the married couple in more poverty than the single parent. This does of course enable the single mother to survive economically, but perversely has encouraged cohabiting couples to live apart because of the extra benefits for single parents. This is a complicated issue, with conflicting arguments on the financial and social effects of the benefit policies. Added complexity comes from the fact that there are a wide range of housing and other benefits that are available under various headings which include or exclude different groups of people.
• Child care  has come to be seen as a major arm of State benefits. There is considerable pressure on mothers who are benefit recipients to put their infants into child care, either with child-minders or in institutional child care facilities, to free the mothers for employment. This is seen by the State and by employers as a valuable means of adding labour to the economy while also increasing the income of couples, especially as many families today consider that they need the earnings of two people to achieve a reasonable standard of living. This is another area of strong debate. On the one side are those who argue that State pressure on women to take up work as soon as possible is economically justified - the child’s age is not specified, but child care benefits are available from soon after birth - and also liberating for women. On the other side are those who point out that while research shows that children who have been in good quality child care facilities are intellectually advanced, their social behaviours and ability to relate to others are well below the levels of those who have been cared for by their mothers during the early years. Paradoxically, surveys show that the majority of mothers would prefer a situation in which they had part-time work and child care relief for short periods. Some parenting organisations argue that the State should pay the child care allowances directly to the parents and allow the parents to decide whether to do the caring themselves or pay others to do it. But that would conflict with the other aims of this benefit.
• Child rearing  is an area which has gained increasing State involvement in recent decades. This is partly because of concern about the poor quality of child rearing in the most deprived housing areas - due in large measure to the range of problems faced by parents in those areas, including the more fractured family environment, with many more families now headed by single parents. Historically the health visiting profession has been providing parent support to families in poorer areas since the 1830s, although recently NHS cutbacks have led to a drastic reduction in the level of that support.

Over the past decades the State, through its health and other services, has issued a number of policy documents offering a ‘steer’ to health and local authorities about the kinds of services that should be provided for children, parents and communities. In recent years documents such as Every Child Matters, Every Parent Matters, and the latest update of The Child Health Promotion Programme have taken the debate forward as to what can be expected from parents and what they can expect from the State services, particularly from health. These documents show a much greater awareness of the role of the father than has been seen in earlier documents.

From the 1970s onwards a variety of parent support programmes, not only UK-developed but including some major American and Australian initiatives, have been set up, although the impact and size of this support have been small compared to the near universal family support which used to be provided by the health visiting service.

The latest and most significant State move in this field has been the Government’s decision to fund a new multi-million pound support programme in which specially trained nurses, health visitors and midwives will make frequent visits to first-time parents selected because they are seen as potentially failures, starting the visiting during pregnancy and continuing right through to two years of (child) age. Again this is a contentious policy. Its supporters claim that the cost to the State of health, educational and social failure of many of the children born to the selected ‘problem’ parents justified the decision to try out this new American programme, which has been tested and shown to be successful in three major studies in the USA. Critics argue that the identification of those families months before the babies have been born is questionable, that the program will label them in the eyes of their neighbours, and that the highly prescriptive nature of the visiting will rob the parents of the power to devise their own futures, which they could do with a gentler and more empowering form of parent support.

• Child abuse  is an area of understandable State concern, with very large funding allocations for child protection services and the social and police services that identify abuse and help bring it to a stop. The extent of State involvement in this, the most tragic form of failed parenting, has been set out in another article on this website, linked to the page on “The Programme Model and its Process”, entitled Prevention of child abuse: the empowerment of parents.
• Education is a high priority for any State concerned about the future direction of society. While there is general agreement on the importance of State funding of pre-school, primary and secondary education, as the major contributor to the development of a well-educated community and a capable work force, the ideological battle ground becomes more visible the older the secondary school student. To what extent should the education be geared to vocational courses in the widest meaning of the word, and to what extent should there be academic streams where the end product is a university degree? Examples in other major European countries suggest that the UK’s educational focus is too elitist compared with economies that celebrate technical achievement and often reward it more highly than its academic equivalent. While parent involvement and viewpoints are important in the educational field area in the early years, from the start of secondary education the State’s involvement becomes dominant, with political and economic considerations weighing far more heavily than parental wishes - and with the desires of the youngsters themselves gradually taking pride of place.
• Parental rights  are or should be seen to be as important as the State’s right to involve itself in fundamental policy decisions about parenting and the rearing of the citizens of tomorrow’s society. This is a difficult conceptual area and one that does not allow for easy answers. The State has the right to act on behalf of the body politic, in the interests of the wider society. But the concerns and wishes of the millions of individual parents, and their encompassing families and communities, also have a right to be heard, not only through the ballot box but in the day to day lives and child-rearing work of all parents. Thus there will always be contending views on how far State policies can or should intrude on parental rights. In most cases final resolution as to the merits or demerits of those policies will only be reached through research in the short term, the ballot box in the medium term, and historical developments in the long term. The most successful body politic is likely to be one in which the State, community and parents are in constructive and mutually supportive relationships, where the State does not become too dominant, where the parents work to promote not only the ‘cosa nostra’ of their own families but also the interests of their communities, and where communities are not alienating for their residents. Perhaps the UK still has some way to go to reach that middle balance.

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