The 1950s Ladybird vision of the middle-class family in which the father worked and the mother stayed at home to raise the children has long been fading away, but now what remains of it is melting faster than the Greenland icecaps. Research showing that by 2012 half of all babies will be born to unmarried mothers came out last week, hot on the heels of a report that we have a “baby deficit”, which according to the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) will cost us £11 billion to reverse.
The middle-class, middle-income family, that bastion of social stability, hard work and high aspirations, has never been so embattled. While those at the top end of the income bracket can afford large families, like those at the bottom (whose bills are picked up by the state), those in the middle are delaying starting families until it is too late.
Attempts to follow the French, who last year gave middle-class women tax breaks of £675 a month to encourage them to have a third child, arouse accusations of snobbery and social engineering of the most unpleasant sort.
Yet as Jill Kirby, who has published research on this subject for the Centre for Policy Studies, says: “It’s the middle-income families who are clearly under pressure, who need encouraging and supporting. Without this we run the risk of increasing social polarisation. It’s about not just repairing families but building them, as happened in the post-war period, when up until the 1970s tax allowances supported families.”
Encouraging the nuclear family is crucial. Studies show that, irrespective of social class, children from broken homes are twice as likely to have behavioural and mental health problems, to perform less well in school, to become sexually active younger, and turn to drugs, smoking and heavy drinking.
Raising a family is hard, whatever your income. Recent television programmes such as How to Divorce Without Screwing Up Your Children have shown that the strain on adults and children alike is compounded by financial stress. Yet the penalty for starting a family is such that those in the middle cannot even get started.
Katherine Rake, recently back from maternity leave, is a leading economist whose research for the London School of Economics first illustrated the professional cost of childbearing. A 24-year-old medium-skilled woman giving birth would, she found, earn £560,000 less at today’s prices over her lifetime than a childless counterpart. Giving birth at 28 would cost £165,000.
Yet it is not just the loss of present income or future earnings that is making middle-class couples delay having children. “What is putting off my peers from the next stage in adult life, which is marrying and starting a family, is student debt and rising house prices,” says Julia Margo, co-author of the IPPR report on the baby deficit.
“These are things affecting society in a way that wasn’t predicted. It persuades single people in their twenties against starting a family. Yet the age at which women experience a fall in fertility hasn’t changed, with the consequence that people have fewer children than they would wish.”
Gordon Brown’s tax breaks have made matters worse. Kirby has calculated that an “average” two-income couple with a mortgage and two young children pay £7,600 more a year in tax than they receive in benefits. If they break up, the two households can receive £400 more in benefits than they pay in tax.
The married couple’s tax allowance was withdrawn in the 1990s, and there is no acknowledgement that children need a second adult in their life through the granting of higher allowances. If you want to have a nuclear family, you will have to pay for it. It is no surprise to find young couples shying away from a commitment that seems both undervalued and prohibitively expensive.
Statistically, the chances of staying together without marriage are, however, low. Without what the poet Philip Larkin called “bonds and outdated gestures”, partnerships have an unfortunate tendency to fall apart. Within five years of the birth of a child 52% of cohabiting couples split up; among married couples the rate is a mere 8%.
John Ermisch, professor of economics at Essex University, notes that “only 35% of children born into a cohabiting union will live with both parents throughout childhood, compared with 70% within marriage”. This is true, he says, despite the fact that almost one in three marriages eventually ends in divorce.
What worries Patricia Morgan, author of a forthcoming report for Civitas, is the thinning of what sociologists call the middle deciles. “In the 1970s most babies were born into the 3-6th deciles, that is, people you would call the respectable working class or lower-middle class. Now, most babies are being born at the bottom, in the 1-2 deciles, or the very top.
“The biggest fall in babies born to married couples has been in homes of about average income. The basis for marriage for hundreds of years was always whether or not you were able to set up an independent household. If you couldn’t, it wasn’t a good idea to have children. Now you have couples unable to afford a mortgage if the woman drops out of the labour market, so they put off making commitments.”
Successive governments attempting to tackle poverty and wanting to give single parents help to make up for their multiple disadvantages have unintentionally made marriage less attractive for those on marginal incomes. Ferdinand Mount, author of Mind the Gap, a study of the new class divide in Britain, points out that Britain’s policies are quite different from those in the rest of Europe.
“In other European countries they just continued with the old system of assuming marriage was the norm and the tax system had to cater for that. We’ve taken a strongly individualist stance and helped illegitimacy on its way.”
Many mothers are single through no fault or choice of their own and people probably do not make the choice to have a family solely on the basis of whether it will save them a few pounds.
Yet Mount, a respected Conservative thinker and a cousin of David Cameron, is an increasingly vocal champion of fiscal help for marriage, having first studied its history in The Subversive Family 24 years ago. “It’s a question of political nerve,” he says. “This is the way you produce, on average, happier children, but backbench MPs are scared stiff of strengthening the legal and fiscal attractions of marriage in case they look as if they are penalising one-parent families.”
Restoring marriage and the nuclear family to the centre of political policy is crucial. Even one of the icons of the counter-culture movement, DH Lawrence, saw the reason why in his essay Apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover: “It is marriage, perhaps, which had given man the best of his freedom, given him a little kingdom of his own within the big kingdom of the state . . . Do we then want to break marriage? If we do break it, it means that we all fall to a far greater extent under the direct sway of the state.”
