AS Families Lesson Material 30/01/12 Family and New Right

New Right View                                                                   Evaluation

The New Right criticise many existing government policies for undermining the family. In particular, they argue that governments often weaken the family’s self-reliance by providing generous welfare benefits. These include providing council housing for unmarried teenage mothers and cash payments to support lone-parent families.Charles Murray (1984) argues that these benefits offer ‘perverse incentives’ – that is, they reward irresponsible or anti-social behaviour. For example, the growth of lone-parent families encouraged by generous benefits means more boys grow up without a male role model and authority figure. This lack of paternal authority is responsible for a rising crime rate among young males.

Feminists argue that New Right views are  an attempt to justify a return to the traditional patriarchal family that subordinated women to men and kept them confined to a domestic role.It wrongly assumes that the patriarchal nuclear family is ‘natural’ rather than socially constructed. Cutting benefits would simply drive many poor families into deeper poverty.

Family diversity is a bad thing L

Functionalist and New Right commentators believe that family diversity is not to be encouraged. This is because they see the traditional nuclear family consisting of a married couple with children and a gendered division of labour as being ‘natural’ and ‘normal’. They argue that the division of labour between an ‘instrumental’ male income-earner role, and an ‘expressive’ female housewife role is ‘natural’. This is because it is based on biological differences between men and women which makes them suitable for each role.

New Right theories

Evaluation

The New Right argue that the decline of the traditional nuclear family and the growth of family diversity are the cause of many social problems, such as higher crime rates and educational failure.They see lone-parent families, for example, as ‘unnatural’ and harmful to children because they cannot discipline their children properly and are a burden on the welfare state. These high levels of benefits  undermine the traditional family by discouraging men from working to support their families, and they encourage a ‘dependency culture’ of living off welfare benefits.

However, there is little or no evidence that lone-parent families are part of a ‘dependency culture’, nor that their children are more likely to be delinquent than those brought-up in a two-parent family of the same social class.  Feminists argue that the traditional nuclear family favoured by the New Right is based on the patriarchal oppression of women and is a fundamental cause of gender inequality.  In their view it prevents women working, keeps them financially dependent on men, and denies them an equal say in decision-making.   Rhona and Robert Rapoport see increasing family diversity as a response to people’s different needs and wishes, and not as abnormal or a deviation from the assumed norm of the nuclear family.

Robert Chester

Evaluation

Robert Chester argues that the extent and importance of family diversity has been exaggerated.Like functionalists, Chester sees the nuclear family as being dominant, but he recognises that the traditional nuclear family has changed to what he calls a ‘neo-conventional’ family in which both spouses go out to work and the division of labour is more equal and shared. Chester argues that the so-called ‘family diversity’ is more about the lifecycle than people choosing to live in new family arrangements.  Most people in single-person households are either elderly widows or younger or divorced people who aspire to live in a nuclear family.

However, the Rapoports deny that this is the case and argue that diversity is of central importance in understanding family life today. They believe that we have moved away from the traditional nuclear family as the dominant family type, to a range of different types. Families in Britain have adapted to a society in which cultures and lifestyles are more diverse.