The Care Dilemma E-Book

David Goodhart

• Herausgeber: Forum
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 522

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

A FINANCIAL TIMES AND THE SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Important' Financial Times 'Serious and thought-provoking' The Critic 'Brave' Richard Reeves Family life has changed dramatically over the past 60 years. Greater choice and autonomy, especially for women, and a more equal domestic sphere have brought great gains for human freedom. However, argues David Goodhart, there have been losses and unintended consequences too – in family instability, children's declining mental health, and the ever-rising demands on the welfare state and social care system. Sharply falling birthrates also present major challenges. For many people, especially in the bottom half of the income spectrum, the costs are now too high. The Care Dilemma argues that we need a new policy settlement that supports gender equality while also recognising the importance of stable families and community life, and that sees having children as a public as well as private good.

Leseprobe

‘Are we exploiting our capacity to care for each other just like we exploit nature, with a short-sighted focus on efficiency and economic growth? The first two books in Goodhart’s trilogy (The Road to Somewhere and Head, Hand, Heart) challenged how we perceive success and the good life. The Care Dilemma is even more astute and intimate, inviting us to rethink love and dependency. The ongoing baby bust calls for a new social contract around care work, both paid and unpaid. Goodhart describes the dismissal of care across the political spectrum and sketches a more sustainable future, and suggests that both sexes need to lean in, as equals – and towards the family’

Anna Rotkirch, Professor in Social Policy and Women’s Studies, University of Helsinki

‘Nobody is addressing our social ills from cradle to grave with the clarity and comprehensiveness of David Goodhart. Drawing together the best thinking and research and adding his own original take, he has produced a masterly overview which must be read and acted upon’

Paul Morland, author of No One Left

‘It is refreshing to read a book on care by a man, a man who writes about its necessity and value and the steep price we pay as a society for overlooking and denying that value … we cannot address our profound care issues until we see them as human issues rather than women’s issues’

Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO, New America and author of Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

‘Essential reading for all British politicians and policy makers as we grapple with the social and economic implications of an aging society. The Care Dilemma brilliantly reveals how cultural shifts towards individualism and personal autonomy have made us materially richer but deprived both young and old of what they most desire; to be cared for by those who love them. Yet again, David Goodhart demonstrates his extraordinary ability to unpack the big issues of our age’

Miriam Cates, former Conservative MP

In memory of my mother, Valerie, 1926–2014

Contents

1 The Road Home Dilemmas of progress The care paradox 2 A Short History of the Post-War Family Smaller Looser More equal 3 The Fallout: Insecure Children and Miserable Mothers Family structure matters The mental fragility epidemic Insecure attachment and modern parenting The motherload 4 Politics of the Family Care egalitarians v care balancers Sex differences How the family became invisible Regrets? We’ve had a few 5 What About Men? Fatherhood and the domestication of men The weaker sex? Adaptation and resentment A new male model? 6 Sleepwalking Into Low Fertility How bad is it? The fertility gap, childlessness and hypergamy The psychological cost The economic cost 7 Bigger, Not Better: Why the Care Economy Is Struggling The flight from care Women’s work? Why emotional labour is undervalued What’s gone wrong with childcare? 8 Bringing It All Back Home Transcending the home v work divide A better deal for parents Reforming childcare Can the fall in fertility be stopped? Is marriage the key? 9 Raising Status and Sharing Responsibility The prevention role: reframing and reskilling social care Building in the family Immigration and technology as saviours? Opening up social care Conclusion: A Better Balance AcknowledgementsNotes

1

The Road Home

Freedom is a great horse to ride, but you have to know your destination.

Matthew Arnold

The domestic realm – the family, the household, our private lives – has undergone dramatic change in the past 60 years. That change has often pitched sex equality and care for the dependent young and old against one another. This book explores ways to reduce that tension not by pushing back against equality but by raising the status and value of the traditionally female realms of care.

To help think about the issue dispassionately, consider it an investment problem: how can we invest enough in the things we say we want (having and caring for children, and the best possible care for chronically ill and disabled people and the growing army of the elderly) while maximising the choices and opportunities open to men and especially women – including, in some cases, the right not to care?

This book touches on many big, often personal themes: the family, parenting, declining fertility, the epidemic of mental fragility, childcare, care of older people, the social care system. What links these themes is that they are all connected to an undervaluing of the domestic realm, and the aptitudes for care and attention associated with it.

Women’s autonomy and financial independence has been the biggest step forward in human freedom in high income countries since 1945. This advance is of course welcome, but along with other more general advances in individual freedom it has had unintended consequences for family life.

There is no ‘golden age’ of family life to return to, but few people welcome the fact that by their early teens nearly half of children in the UK no longer live with both of their biological parents. Moreover, many women, and men, continue to derive great meaning and satisfaction from the domestic realm. They regret the fact that recent family policy has been focused on making it as easy as possible for both parents to spend more time at work.

This is an area of public policy with one of the biggest mismatches between the priorities of the political class and public opinion. As I finished writing this book, the last UK government (with full support from the new one) was unrolling a big expansion of state support for childcare outside the home for children as young as nine months, at a cost of around £4 billion a year – a policy that will be especially valuable to families with two parents working full-time. But two parents working full-time while raising preschool children is the preference of less than 10% of the British public.1

This tendency to undervalue the domestic realm is, to borrow the terminology of my last two books, an ‘Anywhere’ bias. In The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics, my 2017 book on populism, I described an emerging divide in the world view of two ‘ideal types’: highly educated (and often mobile) people who see the world from anywhere, and more rooted (and usually less well-educated) people who see the world from somewhere.

‘Anywheres’ tend to be comfortable with change, autonomy and openness. They find meaning and identity in educational and professional success. Though a minority, Anywheres have dominated British society since the 1990s. ‘Somewheres’, by contrast, have identities shaped more by geographical location and social group. They have been discomforted by many aspects of the Anywhere world view and their resistance has contributed to disruptions in our recent politics, notably Brexit.

In a second book, Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century (2020), I described how the Anywhere focus on one form of human aptitude, analytical intelligence, has made the mainly non-graduate Somewheres, who often earn a living with their practical abilities or emotional intelligence, feel like second-class citizens. My claim is that the merit in meritocracy is too narrowly defined around cognitive contribution. There are other ways to live a successful life than academic higher education followed by professional work in the knowledge economy.

The Care Dilemma is the third book in my Anywhere–Somewhere trilogy. It can be read completely independently of the first two books but, like those earlier ones, it dwells on aspects of modern Britain that tend to be occluded by the public realm and career-orientated Anywhere world view.

To answer the implicit question in the subtitle about how we can care enough in the age of sex equality, I will explore four consequences of our reduced investment in nurture, in both the private and public realm. These are:

1. Less family stability and the consequent rising cost of the social state

2. The mental fragility epidemic among young people

3. The rapidly falling birth rate

4. The recruitment crisis in many face-to-face care jobs.

The first two themes – the less stable family and the mental fragility epidemic – feature strongly in the first five chapters, which focus on the family revolution and the fallout from it, while the other two themes, the falling birth rate and the recruitment crisis in care jobs, are covered in the two middle chapters. The final three chapters draw the threads together and offer some directions of travel.

I have also drawn inspiration from two quotations that have helped to frame my thinking, from, as it happens, two American women academics at different ends of the political spectrum. The first concerns the care versus sex equality tension and is expressed, in the cold language of economics, by conservative academic Amy Wax: ‘Care is today undersupplied because more than most activities it generates “positive externalities” – that is, positive benefits for society – that do not flow to the caregiver. This creates a mismatch between effort and reward that used to be solved by restricting women’s opportunities to do anything else. Having relaxed those restrictions, we do not have an alternative solution, and are today living with the consequences.’2

The second is from Anne-Marie Slaughter, former adviser to Hillary Clinton, who wants us to think about equality in a less public realm-focused way: ‘My generation of feminists was raised to think the competitive work our fathers did was much more important than the caring work our mothers did… Women first had to gain power and independence by emulating men, but as we attain that power we must not automatically accept the traditional man’s view, actually the view of a minority of men, about what matters.’3

I am aware that as a man I have limited direct experience of some of the things I am writing about. When it came to caring for my own four children when they were younger, or for my elderly parents before they died, I played a subordinate role to, respectively, my ex-wife and my female siblings. But these are issues that are central to the future of our society, and men are entitled to views about a better balance between the domestic and public spheres just as much as women are.

While writing this book I had an exchange with a well-known academic who premised her comments about an earlier draft of this introduction by saying: ‘There is a really loud dog whistle that women should go back to hearth and home.’ As a man I am bound to attract such comments. And writing about these themes partly from the outside does, indeed, require me to take careful note of what women, of many different opinions, write and say about them. But to be clear, I do not think women should be returned to ‘hearth and home’. I don’t want anybody to go back anywhere. This is a forward-looking book. And it will be obvious to readers who are familiar with their work that I have been influenced by the unorthodox British feminists Louise Perry and Mary Harrington.

This is not an argument between today and the 1950s. It is an argument between a minority of people like my academic critic, whom I call the care egalitarians, and their main counterparts, the care balancers. Egalitarians believe that men and women are not only equal but fully interchangeable. They believe that family structure is largely irrelevant to people’s life chances, the falling birth rate doesn’t matter, and that the gender division of labour is an anachronism.

Balancers, on the other hand, embrace equality but worry more about the consequences – for women, men and especially children – of unstable family life, regret the diminished domestic sphere and the shrinking family, and want to reform rather than abolish the gender division of labour.

The future that might flow from the logic of our current arrangements is one of maximum individual freedom and minimum obligation to others. Reproduction, if it happens at all, will largely be left to technology, with sex differences dwindling. People will lead increasingly autonomous, screen-based lives, largely unencumbered by emotional connection.

There is a different future that re-embraces the strenuous joys of multiple-child families, better values face-to-face care work in the public economy, rewards nurturing work in the home and allows men and women to balance more fairly their respective contributions in both the private and public realms in a spirit of mutual obligation.

No, I replied to my academic acquaintance, I do not advocate a return to a pre-1960s world. However, I do want society to attach greater value to ‘hearth and home’. This is not a dog whistle – the opinion data tells me that most women and men want this too.

Dilemmas of progress

‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.’ The refrain from ‘Me and Bobby McGee’, the Kris Kristofferson song made famous by Janis Joplin, is an unusually bleak and solipsistic interpretation of the spirit of the late 1960s. Wasn’t it all meant to be about the emancipation from tradition and authority?

To Milan Kundera, the late Czech novelist, freedom is lightness, a realm of space and endless opportunity. He contrasts this with heaviness, which is earthbound and constrained. Yet, as Kundera recognised, lightness makes life whimsical, justifying irresponsibility and the breaking of contracts. Heaviness is grounded; it values duty and obligation.4

Sixty years on, Joplin’s lament, and Kundera’s contrasts, capture an important truth about the ambiguous legacy of the 1960s. Life in Britain today, as in almost any rich country, is lighter than it used to be. We are, on average, significantly richer, much better educated and far freer to choose our life course, especially if we are a woman, than we were back then. But we are also more likely to live alone, to suffer from depression, are less likely to have children and, if we are a child, much less likely to live in a stable family with both our biological parents.5

These are problems of a kind of success. That makes them hard to solve. Negative trends – increases in family breakdown, loss of family support for older people and mutual dependence between couples, unplanned childlessness, children’s mental health stresses, disgruntled men who have lost their provider role but found nothing to replace it – are the unintended consequences of positive ones, such as the much greater freedom to leave broken relationships, the mass movement of women into jobs and careers, and the expansion of state and market support for care.

The successes of freedom have contributed to a care and attention deficit in rich countries. We do, of course, still care. The rhetoric of care has never been more ubiquitous, whether it’s the caring corporation or self-care. Our smaller families are subject to more intense parenting than before: the image of the exhausted working mother, on what Arlie Russell Hochschild called ‘the second shift’,6 looking after children and old people when not at the office, is a modern cliché for a reason.

Yet the nature of care and connection has changed. Far more care is provided by the state or the market and far less by women in the family home. The state spends many times more on health and social welfare than it did 60 years ago, driven by an ageing population and also by the revolution in women’s lives. Motherhood is now generally combined with paid work outside the home, including when children are of preschool age. This gives a new shape to the gender division of labour.

That little word, care, describes a host of different activities across the life course provided by different people in different contexts and with different impacts. Care for young children, especially your own, has greater effects on their life course than care for older people. It is generally experienced as more rewarding, too. But fewer women today are choosing face-to-face care work, whether in a nursery, care home or the home itself. Men have been picking up some of the slack at home, but less so in the public care economy. Care work has positive benefits for society, but is mainly low-wage and low-status. When you can choose any kind of work, why would you choose to do emotionally stressful and poorly paid care work?

Women are having fewer children, later in life. For most of history, society has, in a sense, free-ridden on women. They have borne most of the physical and emotional cost of delivering and raising babies. Today, thanks to reliable contraception and sex equality, having children is a choice in rich countries. Women are increasingly reluctant to pay the price now they have other options. As science writer Ellen Pasternack puts it, ‘Now women are in a stronger bargaining position with their fertility than at any point in history. But the private incentives to have children are in decline. If we want fertility to stay high, we will have to offer better incentives than we currently do.’7

Most young women in the UK today still say they want children. More, in most cases, than they will end up having. They are put off by a host of factors, from housing to lack of a suitable partner. And having enjoyed a high degree of independence as young adults they are wary of the dependence that is usually a condition of motherhood.

Our challenge is this: how, in an era of sex equality, can women and men coordinate their priorities and interests to invest sufficiently in private and public care? And how can we do that when the historic institution for providing and coordinating care – the married family – has become much less reliable, especially in the bottom half of the income spectrum?

Family life in this country is almost unrecognisable compared with 1964: the family has shrunk, loosened and equalised, leaving us both happier and sadder, more relaxed and more stressed. Everyone reading this will have experienced the change. Whether one accentuates the positives or negatives probably depends on your age and your broader political outlook.

The family remains an irreplaceable institution for most of us. But the new reality of less permanent relationships, more mobility, later parenthood and smaller families, and most women as well as men working outside the home – combined with the decline of religion and the idea of a successful life now revolving around professional achievement – has meant a great transfer of energy from the domestic into the public sphere of paid work and public life.

For many (most?) this has been a friendly evolution, enabling women to enjoy a release from the often lonely business of caring for infants or old people at home. Yet what Mary Harrington calls the feminism of freedom, rather than the feminism of interdependence, promotes an obligation-free, individualistic idea of freedom that is incompatible with the experience of motherhood.8 And the domestic sphere is often seen less as a haven and more as a launch pad or a place that women, and men, might ‘step back’ into when having a child before returning to where life really takes place.

These changes have benefited some human types and temperaments more than others. The mobile Anywheres have led the march to finding meaning and purpose in the public sphere. The more rooted Somewheres, on the other hand, are more likely to regret the retreat of the domestic sphere. The extended family still plays a larger role in lower-income, more settled parts of the country (though low-income households are more likely to have non-traditional family arrangements). In the north-east of England 55% of people live within 15 minutes of their mother, compared with 15% in London.

The recent decline of the stable two-parent family (disproportionately in poorer communities), the fall in fertility rates, and an overdependence on the state to provide the support that was once the job of close kin does not seem to be making us happier. We have ended up prioritising paid work and somewhat arbitrary measures of GDP over health and well-being.

Moreover, the movement of women into paid work at all levels over the past 60 years has been the subject of an accounting sleight of hand. It tends to be registered as a simple plus to the workforce, to the income of our economies and families, and to women themselves. But we have not accounted on the other side of the ledger for the loss of work that was being done by women in the family and community in the old breadwinner–homemaker economy. The absence of parents with young children in the streets, parks and playgrounds, looking out for older people and each other, represents a real, but hard to quantify, loss to community life in many places.

The Treasury growth model provides a misleadingly partial picture of real life. Household income has risen, but it is too often accompanied by overstretched lives. Moreover, the steady movement of women into the paid workforce, from around 25% in the late 1950s to over 70% by the late 1990s, combined with the huge increase in the ownership of labour-saving devices in the home, provided a one-off boost to GDP that is not repeatable and exaggerates the growth story of those decades.

Controversial US entrepreneur Peter Thiel argues that much of the economic progress of recent decades has come from repackaging the value bundled up in family life: ‘If you shift an economy from a single-income household with a homemaker to one with two breadwinners and a third person who’s a childcarer, you have three jobs instead of one and therefore you have more GDP, and you will exaggerate the progress that’s happened.’9 And the new arrangements often rest on an old class divide, now with a female face, with the professional mother handing over her child each morning to the minimum-wage nursery worker.

There has been a long-standing interest in replacing GDP with more sensitive measures that better capture real increases in wealth and well-being, as well as real losses to both, and which include non-market wealth-creating activities such as domestic and childcare labour. When a forest is cut down, for example, it counts as a pure plus to GDP, without any recognition of the minuses from the loss of the functions it was performing, such as preventing flooding, sucking in carbon and producing oxygen. Similarly, a parent at home, usually the mother, was not doing nothing before she took up a paid job. A win for the formal GDP economy can be a loss for the informal. We understand this for the environment, so why not for the family? A more accurate metric for measuring social advance is needed.

Few people want to return to the breadwinner–homemaker model, which was, in any case, a historical anomaly. And, as many women argue, men need to do more to fill the care gap left by women both in the home and in the public economy.

Escaping the pressures of home life into more socially esteemed paid work is a relief for many mothers, and financial autonomy has become all too necessary thanks to the decline of marriage as a long-term economic contract in which partners pool and share resources. But the flip side of undervaluing the domestic realm is overvaluing the workplace. There are a lucky few whose jobs are creative and fulfilling but, as the saying goes, hardly anyone on their deathbed regrets not spending more time in the office.

Official surveys repeatedly show that many women feel things have slipped out of kilter. The need to prioritise paid employment outside the home, even for couples with young children, is bending them out of shape. In more than one third of households with preschool children both parents are working full-time, something supported by only 9% of the public according to the 2023 BSA (British Social Attitudes) survey.10

Society, it seems, has not figured out how the unpaid work in the home that used to be done mainly by women fits into the new model of dual-income households. Ellen Pasternack again: ‘Because domestic labour is undervalued, there is a failure to recognise childcare as proper work unless it takes place in a designated workplace, by unrelated individuals who are employed to be there.’11

It is not a surprise that a political class still dominated by public realm-focused men has been eager to support the expansion of childcare provision to allow women to prioritise paid work in the way that men do. Yet the system has been oblivious to the appeals of more family-focused women – and men – who want to be able not to do paid work when children are very young and would be happy to do emotionally demanding hands-on care work in the public economy if the pay was not so poor.

The care paradox

In rich countries we tend to flatter ourselves that we are more caring than ever before, both as individuals and as societies. It is certainly true that we spend much more on health and welfare: in the mid 1950s the UK defence budget represented about 10% of GDP, compared to 3% for health; they have now swapped, with healthcare spending just under 10% and defence just over 2%.12 And the partial feminisation of politics and society has made a difference too. It is surely one factor behind the dramatically contrasting responses to the Spanish flu of 1918–19 and the far less deadly coronavirus.

Yet apparently we do not care enough to sign up for the actual work of hands-on care; there are well-established recruitment crises in many parts of the care economy in almost all rich countries, and fewer women and men are signing up for parenthood. We care in general, but not in particular.

This care paradox is the result of many factors – economic, political and psychological – and the trend is somewhat different in different countries. But hovering over this story are two meta-factors that I touched on earlier.

The first has to do with the conflict between care and equality. As any parent knows, children’s interests are not always the same as theirs, particularly in this age of intensive parenting. Indeed, as Amy Wax argues, the point of traditional sex roles was partly to ensure a consistent level of investment in children.13 But women, like men, are status-seeking animals, and if all of society’s rewards derive from the public realm of paid work, and religious/patriarchal support for female altruism in the domestic realm has lost legitimacy (now relabelled as ‘compulsory altruism’), it is no wonder that many women are on baby strike. A new social contract is required, consistent with both sex equality and sufficient investment in having and caring for babies.

The second meta-factor concerns those dilemmas of freedom. We live surrounded by a political and ideological force field that regards choice, autonomy and freedom as the highest goods: Kundera’s lightness. Our prioritisation of freedom and satisfaction in the present, reinforced by TikTok and Instagram culture, means we tend only in retrospect to value the hard-to-quantify activities that give us satisfaction and create meaning over the longer term, such as watching children grow and mature. Past BSA surveys asked people whether they agreed with the statement ‘Watching children grow is one of life’s greatest joys.’ It was one of few questions to receive 80% support, and this figure didn’t decline over time. Perhaps significantly, it is no longer asked.

There is an undercurrent of regret in rich societies for some of the things we’ve lost on the way to achieving our contemporary freedoms. Some of those things belong to the cluster of sensibilities and priorities that were long considered primarily female. If a patriarchal society is one that undervalues the role and contribution of women, then the patriarchy is alive and well in the meagre pay packets of social care staff, the emptying maternity wards and the child clinging desperately to its parent as it is dropped off for a long day at nursery.

The pandemic is generally blamed for many of our current woes, but it may have also given us a glimpse of a better future. In the early days of lockdown, newspapers were full of stories about rising domestic abuse and women unfairly burdened with too much domestic work. But as the dust settled, the story in the UK was also one of people finding domestic life unexpectedly rewarding. The amount of time fathers spent on childcare increased, and many people reported an improvement, rather than a deterioration, in parent–child relationships. Moreover, the post-pandemic normalisation of working from home and the use of videoconferencing technology makes it easier for parents, men as well as women, to combine care responsibilities and paid work.

The overall retreat of the stable, two-parent family is in part an expression of the freedom to leave dysfunctional relationships, or not to start them in the first place. Yet it is also the result of the greater psychological strain placed on the nuclear family, since (out of both choice and financial necessity) most families now require two, often full-time, incomes.

This does not always benefit children, who generally thrive under conditions of secure attachment to a primary carer and plentiful attention in their early years. The work of John Bowlby, British pioneer of attachment theory, remains largely undisputed. Secure attachments can be created by a variety of primary carers and family forms, including single parents, yet the changes to family life described above have not, in general, been positive for such attachments.

The increasing mental stress felt by many young people has several causes, not least the social media ‘rewiring’ of childhood, according to American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.14 Yet according to many childcare experts, less secure attachments in childhood – with parents often splitting up and care delegated in part to a shifting cast of paid carers – must also take some of the blame. The impact on young children of formal childcare is a contested field and is assessed in Chapter 3.

What is not contested is that unstable families are disproportionately found in the bottom half of the income spectrum, exacerbating inequality and weakening social mobility. The abandonment of marriage and long-term commitment began in the bohemian bedsits of the graduate class in the 1960s and 1970s but is now most practised in lower-income, less well-educated households. The well educated and affluent, those who have thrived in the era of more open, knowledge-based economies, generally get married and stay married. Those who have suffered most economically are also the most likely to abandon marriage.

The aim of this book is to persuade the reader that it is possible to raise the status of both the domestic realm and of public economy care work in an age of sex equality. The backdrop to both will be a concern about shortages: a shortage of babies and a shortage of nursing and care workers.

Policy should support both work-focused and family-focused mothers. Family-focused women are less visible in public life, and their preference for more state support to stay at home when children are young is eclipsed in the debate about family policy by the arguments about improved childcare, flexible working and the interests of those women who want to minimise the impact of motherhood on career progression. As author and podcaster Louise Perry has written, ‘How can we support a woman’s right to reject domesticity, without also devaluing an area of life which, for many people, both male and female, remains a central source of meaning and identity?’15

Although there is more family-friendly flexibility at work than in the recent past, the working day (like the school calendar) is still too often oblivious to family life. Capitalism has been happy to absorb women into the modern economy, but less keen to acknowledge that the end of the old model of male provider/female homemaker means that workers, especially mothers, must balance other priorities. People are expected to muddle through.

Imagine if we valued reproduction as much as we did production. There is an agenda here for any of the big political parties. But in recent years real family policy, addressing the stresses thrown up by developments described above, has been, for different reasons, an empty space for both main parties dominated by Anywhere public realm-orientated people.

The Conservatives, at least in office, have been afraid of saying anything that makes them sound too conservative, while Labour is dominated by an egalitarian reflex that is suspicious of the traditional family, wants as much socialisation of childcare as possible and sees female advancement outside the home as the key measure of family policy success. The more socially conservative family-first priorities of many ‘red wall’ voters seems to have made no impact at all on official Labour thinking, despite the great effort it made to appeal, once again, to such voters at the 2024 election.

That leaves a weak cross-party consensus around expanding subsidised childcare, essentially making it easier for both parents to spend less time in the family, providing care. Neither party seems capable of addressing the issue of how family instability has a huge negative knock-on effect in all areas of social policy, from education to criminal justice.

The bill for family decline, including support for single parents and the cost of state funding for services once performed in the extended family, from childcare to care of older people, grows every year. Smaller and more dispersed families mean fewer grandparents to help with childcare and fewer siblings to help with grandparental and parental care. As we age unhealthily, with lower fertility levels creating more older dependants per worker as each year passes, we are slowly bankrupting the state. We think of Japan as having an efficient, productive economy but thanks to low fertility it has very high national debt: its debt-to-GDP ratio is 225%. The UK is around 100% but heading north.

Nobody wants to go back to the days of large families with mothers trapped in domestic drudgery into their 50s. Nevertheless, a norm of one-child families is a dismaying prospect, with unpredictable consequences for the national psyche. And few people will welcome living in societies that are dominated by the priorities of older people, with all the sclerosis that implies.

In 2022 in the UK there were around 900,000 people who turned 50, and about 670,000 babies were born. Even if AI sweeps up much of the routine work, will there be enough people to do the care work in dementia homes in 30 years’ time?

Politics, it is sometimes said, is downstream of culture. And the broader culture is starting to wake up to the implications of the baby bust. The UK’s actively anti-natalist policy framework, which does not properly recognise family responsibilities in the tax system and now restricts most benefits to two children, is increasingly an outlier among developed countries. But it seems highly unlikely that the Labour government will embrace pronatalism or do more to promote family stability, though a revitalised opposition Conservative party looking for a new direction might consider it.

The undervaluing of public and private care is a historical legacy derived from the fact that it used to be done by women for free in the home, and is now an unintended consequence of a raft of positive social trends, above all women’s economic freedom. The revaluing of care advocated in this book can certainly coexist with these trends, and it can also help repair divisions in our society between those who have benefited most from them (the Anywheres) and those who have often felt left behind by them (the Somewheres). Not everyone has the cognitive ability, desire or opportunity to reach the higher rungs of the professional world. Nor does everyone have the patience, emotional intelligence and empathy to make a good carer or parent. Both types of contribution are necessary to our society, but only one attracts high reward and recognition.

Traditionally, conservatives and liberals have been divided by the topics I discuss in this book. But they also have the potential to be bridging issues, partly because conservative goals often require liberal means. Increasing fertility is best achieved by giving parents more choice via decent, low-cost formal childcare or the option of staying at home when children are preschool, and a fairer sharing of domestic labour. Similarly, promoting more stable families (preferably ones in which parents are married to each other) in the bottom half of the income spectrum is only possible with more good jobs for non-graduates, especially men, and properly targeted support in the tax and welfare system that incentivises partnerships.

Talking more honestly about the downsides of the shrinking family is a start. We are burning through our capital. It is a kind of civilisational short-termism. We maximise workforce, GDP and tax income today, but only by making it harder to create and raise the workers of the future. A fertility rate of below 1.5 today in the UK means fewer workers and less tax income to support the battalions of the retired in 30 years, unless we raise immigration levels even higher – something which is both unpopular and would require us to plunder much lower-income countries for care workers.

A flourishing society needs the right balance between lightness and heaviness. The following chapters provide some evidence about how we’ve lost that balance, why it matters, and suggest a few things that might be done about it.

2

A Short History of the Post-War Family

The 20th-century journey has taken us from the stark choice of having a family or a career to the possibility of having a career and a family. It has also been a journey to greater pay equity and couple equity. It is a complicated and multifaceted progression that is still unfolding.

Claudia Goldin, Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity

My mother married my father in 1950 and became a full-time mother and wife, with, eventually, seven children and a politician husband. She had only basic educational qualifications. My father played almost no role in our upbringings beyond financing them.

My four sisters, like my mother, all got married in their 20s. Unlike my mother, they worked in professional jobs, and three are graduates. They could afford to take long periods out to raise their children (my mother had 21 grandchildren) and in all cases placed family before professional advancement.

My two brothers and I married graduate women with professional careers and were far more involved in childcare and domestic life when our children were young than our father. Still, we played a largely subordinate role to our wives.

My two graduate daughters are in their early 30s and pursuing demanding full-time careers, as are their two younger brothers. All are unmarried and without children.

My family background is freakish in its fertility, and richer than most. It has also been somewhat more stable. Only two of us seven siblings have separated from our spouses. But in other respects that three-generation story is the story of families since 1945 in most rich countries: smaller, looser and more equal.

It is a messy story for both individuals and societies: a great emancipation with advances in choice, education and autonomy, especially for women, but a story, too, of losses and unintended consequences. The world of work has eaten aggressively into the domestic sphere, and the interests of young children have often taken second place to the freedoms and choices of adults. Almost half of children born in the UK at the start of this century have not lived with both biological parents throughout their childhoods (for half of poorer children that is already true when they start primary school). The rising tide of mental fragility of young people cannot be wholly disconnected from that rapid retreat of family stability and secure attachment in early childhood, as I will show in the next chapter.

But if our new domestic realities are producing new miseries, they are easing old ones. My mother, Valerie, was a pre-feminist woman who did not have the education or career that would have enabled her to leave my loving but unfaithful father, though she certainly thought about it. Her final years were marked by depression and heavy drinking. If she had been born a few years later she would, most likely, have had the education, earning potential and agency to make different choices. How many more stories of much greater misery than hers were buried under convention and coercion in the centuries before the reforms of the post-war period?

The changes to family and women’s lives, especially since the 1960s, have been driven by a combination of shifting norms and technology. A rash of legal reforms in the 1960s and 1970s completed the political equality of the 1920s. Women now had legal and economic autonomy from men and from the traditional family – easier divorce, equal pay legislation, more state support for families and single mothers, and individual taxation of husbands and wives. However, it was only in 1975 that women could finally open a bank account without the signature of a husband or father, and marital rape was not outlawed until 1992.

The decline of heavy industry opened the way for mass female paid employment along with the growth of the services sector and the arrival of domestic appliances into ordinary homes. Meanwhile, the arrival of the pill and more accessible abortions led to smaller families and separated sex from marriage and long-term commitments.

The male breadwinner–female homemaker model limited women’s possibilities. This was felt especially harshly by some of the ‘Rosie the Riveter’ generation, who had worked in demanding and responsible jobs during the Second World War and then, after the conflict, were subject to marriage bars, having to resign if they got married.

But the ‘traditional’ family of the breadwinner–homemaker kind was not very traditional. It lasted only a few generations, from the mid 19th century to the 1960s. Prior to industrialisation, most work took place in the home (the word ‘economics’ comes from the Greek oikonomia, meaning household management). Until 150 years ago most education did too. ‘Productive, interdependent, and deeply collaborative, the household was society’s grandest sphere… From a young age, children apprenticed with their mothers and fathers, respectively learning the gendered arts and crafts of the homestead,’ writes American historian Erika Bachiochi, reflecting on the great home–work schism opened by industrialisation.1

The 19th-century women’s movement, argues Bachiochi, sought a just response to most paid labour moving out of the home with men. It wanted proper recognition of the continuing unpaid labour being done in the household via marital and contract rights, as well as joint property ownership in marriage (something not established in the UK until 1888). Women usually worked outside the home for money in the new industries until marriage, and sometimes afterwards in the case of working-class women.2

In pre-industrial and early industrial times, raising children had usually been an extended family task. It also had to be combined with productive labour – hence the common image, still ubiquitous in developing countries, of a woman working in a field with a baby on her back.

As the home was stripped of its role in the money economy, and in the relatively brief period where the breadwinner–homemaker model was the norm, raising children (and caring for her husband) became the focus of the economically dependent wife and mother, not always with happy results.

The interwar women’s movement saw men and women as equal but with different priorities, and pressed for the greater feminisation of society. This echoed the thinking of feminist pioneers like Mary Wollstonecraft, who thought education and independent-mindedness were necessary to be a good mother.

Some of this was also reflected in the first wave of post-war feminism. The 1966 Statement of Purpose of Betty Friedan’s National Organization for Women called on the US to ‘innovate new social institutions which will enable women to enjoy the true equality of opportunity and responsibility in society, without conflict with their responsibilities as mothers and homemakers’. The statement called for a ‘true partnership between the sexes’ and for greater recognition of the ‘economic and social value of homemaking and child-care’, proposing a national network of childcare centres and a GI Bill-type programme for retraining mothers after their caring days were over.3

But as so-called second-wave feminism found its voice in the late 1960s and 1970s, it became actively hostile to the domestic sphere and traditional female priorities, which it saw as suffocating and self-limiting. Women were said to be trapped in suburban palaces of consumption, passive and inert, while all the excitement, freedom and agency was found in the public sphere, the men’s world. Gloria Steinem and other leading second-wave feminists argued that men and women are not only equal but more or less the same, whether in attitudes to sex or prioritising professional ambition.

Equality in the public sphere became the main marker of progress, with equal representation in all walks of life the default goal. Almost all other feminist ‘waves’ have taken an ideal of public sphere equality as their starting point, with raising the status of the domestic sphere coming a distant second.* The domestic sphere was also a place of male violence, one of the big themes of 1970s feminists, and in Chiswick, London in 1971 Erin Pizzey opened the first official women’s refuge.

Ambivalence about the family – reinforced by the intellectual influence of Freudianism, with its stress on repression and neurosis – went hand in hand with the decline of religion, and also with the increasing economisation of public life. As Shirley Burggraf pointed out in The Feminine Economy and Economic Man: Reviving the Role of the Family in the Postindustrial Age (1998),orthodox feminists and orthodox economists overlapped in their view of the family as a place of diminished value. For the economists, this was because it did not contribute directly to GDP, and the feminists saw it as preventing women from contributing their full potential in the only sphere that mattered: the male-dominated public sphere.

Yet those housewives who for much of the 19th and 20th centuries had been raising children and holding together communities – from working-class matriarchs to grand country ladies – would be surprised to learn that they had been doing nothing of value. They were working for others, often expressing traditional ‘female altruism’, one of society’s main adhesives since the beginning of time.

By the 1980s, it was sounding increasingly anachronistic to describe motherhood as a role with status and prestige that could be performed well or badly and something to which a woman of substance might aspire. The gender division of labour that it had been premised on was being swept away by technology and economics, and by a world view that saw the domestic realm as small and claustrophobic.

As Mary Harrington has put it, ‘Feminists have long pointed to the unacknowledged foundation of altruistic care upon which the measurable GDP economy rests, and which that economy also renders second-class and largely invisible. But particularly since the second wave, the dominant feminist consensus has tacitly accepted this marginalisation of care.’4

The equality norm became mainstream in a remarkably short time. Fewer people are locked in failed marriages, women (or men) can bring up children on their own without stigma, and the public sphere now has much greater access to the brains and talents of the female half of the population. Younger women, and women without family responsibilities, are now more or less equal to men in education and workplace rewards. Indeed, highly educated women outperform men in both, except at the summit of business and earning power. (This creates its own problem for pairing and fertility, as we shall see in Chapter 6; most women have, historically, been reluctant to partner with men below them in education and economic status.)

Yet there has been so much emphasis on greater autonomy for individual adults, and the central importance of work outside the home, that we have lost sight of two other important goals. One is how to create new forms of mutually beneficial interdependence between men and women in an era of sex equality. And, given what we know about its benefits to young children, the other is how to preserve the two-parent family, so far as possible, in an era of greater freedom.

The movement from a breadwinner–homemaker partnership to a double-breadwinner partnership is evidently still being digested, both by society as a whole and by the economy, with impacts on young children that are still unclear. A letter writer to an American magazine put it pithily: ‘The workplace is bidding for and acquiring time once pledged to children and the children have no way to make a reasonable counteroffer.’5

It is a story of advances with unintended consequences, captured in my three-part frame for describing the key changes to family life since the 1960s: smaller, looser, more equal. These are all familiar enough changes to anyone who has been paying attention, but the speed and scale of the changes are still worth noting.

Smaller

Human children are biologically and financially expensive, being completely dependent for several years after birth and then, in the developed world, somewhat dependent for at least two decades. So smaller families are generally a sign of progress in modern societies, freeing women up to do other things and allowing a greater concentration of time and resources on each child.

The nuclear family of two parents living with their own children is often seen as a recent development. But it seems to have been the dominant arrangement in England since the 13th century. Historian and anthropologist Alan Macfarlane has argued that one reason for England’s early embrace of a market economy and, subsequently, industrialisation, is because the extended family was abandoned here earlier than elsewhere.6

Children generally left home as young adults to establish their own homes, and some services (such as clothes-making) that were performed inside the extended family in other places were, in England, increasingly bought for money in a public marketplace. This created a bigger social space outside the family – what we would now call civil society – that was governed by law, rather than patronage networks, which were governed by kinship.

According to historian Peter Laslett, the average household size in England and Wales was relatively constant, around five people, from the 16th to the 20th centuries.7

Average family size in the 20th century was more of a roller coaster. In 1900 the average number of children per woman was around 3.5, down from an average of 5 to 6 from the 1770s to the 1870s (when many still didn’t survive childhood). There was then a continuous drop all the way down to a low point of 1.8 in the Depression years of the early 1930s, rising back up to around 2.8 at the end of the baby boom in the late 1960s.

By the mid 1970s fertility had fallen back to below 2 and bounced along between 1.6 and 1.8 between the 1980s and early 2000s, before rising again to almost 2 in 2012 (driven by the higher fertility of foreign-born mothers). It fell back to 1.58 in the pandemic year of 2020 and has since declined further to 1.49, the lowest level ever.

Although the UK, like many other rich countries, has had fertility below the replacement rate for more than 50 years, the rate is surprisingly variable, maybe providing some encouragement to those of us who would like to see a return to the replacement rate of 2.1.

One thing likely to make that a demanding goal is the expected increase in both intentionally and unintentionally childless women, with fertility technology only partly able to mitigate the postponement of childbearing. For much of the last century the proportion of childless women in the UK was relatively high. It hovered around or just below 20% for the first part of the century, but for those women born from the mid 1920s to the mid 1940s – the mothers of the baby boom generation – childlessness fell back to around 10%, before rising again to nearly 20% for women born in the mid 1960s. A woman born in 1965 was twice as likely to be childless as a woman born in 1945. Some surveys now find that one third of Millennial women (those born between 1981 and 1996) say they do not want children, though we will not know if this holds true until they complete their fertile years.

Childlessness used to be partly compensated for by a relatively high number of larger families, but the numbers of larger families have been in headlong decline since the 1960s. My own mother, with her seven children, was, of course, highly unusual. When she was the same age as I am at the time of writing, 67, she already had 12 grandchildren. I have none.†

The typical British household today of 2.4 people has considerably less noise and bustle than it did 50 years ago. This is not just because of fewer babies and smaller families. It’s also thanks to higher rates of divorce and separation, and more people living on their own. Of the UK’s 28 million households around 30% are single-person ones, double the rate in the mid 1960s, and the split is almost even between those over and those under 65. This family fragmentation is another factor behind the pressure on housing supply.8

Of the 8.2 million households with dependent children, the commonest type is now a one-child household (3,575,000), though some of those one-child households will gain a second child in time. Just 1.2 million households have three or more children.‡ For UK women born in 1975, now past childbearing age, easily the most common number of children was two – 37% – with 27% having three or more, 17% having just one child and 18% having none.

Women having either one child or none is now on a sharply rising trajectory, thanks in part to the older age of women both getting married and having their first child. The average age for marriage in 1981 was 23 for a woman and 25 for a man. It is now 36 for a woman and 38 for a man. The average age of a first child for a woman in 1981 was 25; it is now 31.

According to a midwife in a hospital in Kingston, London, the average age of a first-time mother in her hospital last year was 37, with women in their 40s being commonplace and the oldest being 52. That hospital is probably an outlier, but it might be an outlier that speaks to our future. In 2016, births by women over 40 overtook births for those under 20 for the first time since 1947.§

Looser

Marriage is now not just happening later but also much less frequently, and more than half of all children in the UK are born to either cohabiting or single parents (in 1971 there were 570,000 single parent families today there are around 3 million).

For families with dependent children today, 61% are still married, 16% are cohabiters and 24% are single parents. But a majority of children are now born outside marriage. Of the 625,000 births registered in 2021 in England and Wales, 304,000 were to a married couple (or one in a civil partnership) and 321,000 were outside marriage, around 70% to cohabiters and 30% to parents not living together.

The shift in norms that prioritised individual happiness and weakened the social stigma that used to reinforce traditional sex roles and sexual restraint is usually associated with the arrival of the contraceptive pill and the ‘permissive society’ of the 1960s. In fact, the emancipation and experimentation associated with the 1960s was mainly the preserve of a youth culture, while mainstream society remained largely untouched.

But the legal changes of the late 1960s and early 1970s – divorce reform, legal abortion, the decriminalisation of homosexuality and, slightly later, sex equality laws – usually linked with the reforming Labour Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, and driven by changing attitudes among the highly educated, trickled down fast. The 1970s, and even more so the 1980s and 1990s, saw the rapid normalisation of cohabitation, divorce, and births outside marriage.

Those decades are now most associated with the free-market economics of Margaret Thatcher, but we should see the liberalisation of economies and the liberalisation of individual behaviour as part of the same broad move away from a sociocentric to a more individual-centric society. In economics this trend weakened the state and strengthened market actors. In social norms, it weakened tradition and authority and empowered individual rights and desires. The political right was associated with the first and the political left the second. But there was more that connected the two transformations than either side would like to admit.

Birth outside marriage, cohabitation, premarital pregnancy and marriage breakdown had long, semi-hidden histories in Britain prior to the 1960s. Their existence was often tacitly acknowledged and accepted by people and even by the law. But, as historian Pat Thane writes, there was a taboo against open disclosure of such personal details, which were often closely guarded family secrets: ‘Such secrecy was not confined to sexual matters but to other highly personal aspects of life. The death, even of close relatives, was regularly hidden from children… Mental illness was widely treated as a secret family shame… what occurred from the 1960s was the disappearance of much of the secrecy and shame that had for so long surrounded many aspects of personal behaviour.’9

As a somewhat rebellious baby boomer coming of age in the 1970s, I can recall the sense of exhilaration, and embarrassment, as family secrets tumbled out of the closet: my father’s affairs, the great uncle who turned out to have killed himself over a woman rather than his finances, the lesbian aunt. Many readers over 60 will be able to recall how the private realm became more visible and contested as the authority of the old rules, and of parents, was weakened.

Most people writing about this shift in norms tend to see only a surge of freedom, tolerance and openness. But, as with the central theme of this book – sex equality and the underinvestment in care and the domestic realm – positive and negative trends are intertwined. The overall change was a net gain for human freedom, but the other side of the coin was a loss of family obligation, a reduction in commitment between spouses and a loss of stability for many children.

The divorce rate grew rapidly after the change in the law in 1969, which allowed couples to divorce after two years of living apart if both partners agreed and five years if only one was in favour. Divorce petitions rose from about 55,000 a year in 1966–70, rising to 165,000 in 1993 before declining sharply between 2005 and 2018, reflecting the fact that a smaller, more committed, proportion of people were getting married. In the ‘peak divorce’ era of the 1980s and early 1990s wives were almost twice as likely to petition for divorce as husbands, but that has now evened out.

In absolute numbers, about 400,000 people per year got married in the early 1970s compared with about 250,000 in 2015 (despite a rising population).¶ Of those marrying in 1963, less than one quarter were divorced before their 25th anniversary, while of those marrying in 1996 41% were divorced before that landmark.** Harry Benson, of the Marriage Foundation, estimates that 35% of couples marrying today will divorce, down from a peak of 44% in the mid-1980s and back to the rate of 1972.10

It was the normalisation of cohabitation and births outside marriage, however, that delivered the blow to traditional ideas of marriage and family. Before the 1970s, cohabitation was relatively rare, and cohabitee parenthood even more so. In 1960 a mere 2% of couples cohabited before they married, and I am old enough to remember the sense of glamour and disapproval surrounding a female cousin in the early 1970s who was ‘living in sin’ with a photographer. By 1998, three quarters of couples who married had cohabited beforehand, a kind of trial marriage for many.