A Comparitive View Of Family Policy

What does social policy refer to?

The plans and actions of state agencies, such as health and social services, the welfare benefits system, schools and other public bodies.

What are policies usually based on?

Laws introduced by government that provide the framework within which these agencies operate.

Do social policies affect families?

Most social policies affect families in some way or other. Some are aimed directly at families, such as laws governing marriage and divorce, abortion and contraception, child protection, adoption and so on.

What can the actions and policies of governments sometimes have profound effects on?

Families and their members.

What can cross-cultural examples from different societies and historical periods show us?

Some of the more extreme ways in which the state’s policies can affect family life. This can help us to see the relationship between families and social policies in a new light.

What is an example of a cross-cultural state policy which impacted family life?

China’s one-child policy.

What was the aim of the one-child policy?

The government’s population control policy aimed to discourage couples from having more than one child.

What is the one-child policy supervised by?

Workplace family planning committees; women must seek their permission to try to become pregnant, and there is often a waiting list and a quota for each factory.

What do couples who comply with the one-child policy get?

Extra benefits, such as free child healthcare and higher tax allowances. An only child will also get priority in education and housing later in life.

What happens to couples who break their agreement to only have one child as part of the one-child policy?

They must repay the allowances and pay a fine. Women face pressure to undergo sterilisation after their first child.

What did the former communist government of Romania in the 1980s introduce?

A series of policies to try to drive up the birth rate, which had been falling as living standards declined.

What did Romania’s policies restrict?

Contraception and abortion, set up infertility treatment centres, made divorce more difficult, lowered the legal age of marriage to 15, and made unmarried adults and childless couples pay an extra 5% income tax.

What was the Nazi family policy?

In Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the state pursued a twofold policy. On the one hand, it encouraged the healthy and supposedly ‘racially pure‘ to breed a ‘master race‘.

What did official Nazi policy seek to do?

Keep women out of the workforce and confine them to ‘children, kitchen and church‘, the better to perform their biological role.

What else did the Nazi state do?

They compulsorily sterilised 375,000 disabled people that it deemed unfit to breed on grounds of ‘physical malformation, mental retardation, epilepsy, imbecility, deafness or blindness‘. Many of these people were later murdered in Nazi concentraton camps.

What do some people argue about democratic societies?

That in democratic societies such as Britain, the family is a private sphere of life in which the government does not intervene, except perhaps when things ‘go wrong‘, for example in cases of child abuse.

However, sociologists argue that in fact, even in democratic societies, the state’s social policies play a very important role in shaping family life.