The neoliberal view of the family is the argument that families are private, self-reliant units responsible for the welfare of their own members, so that the state should step back from supporting them and let markets and personal choice organise childcare, care of the elderly and household decisions. It applies the principles of neoliberalism, individual responsibility, competition and a limited state, to domestic life, and it has shaped family policy in Britain and the United States since the late 1970s.
What is the neoliberal view of the family?
Neoliberalism is not a theory of the family in the way that functionalism is, so the neoliberal view of the family is partly a set of assumptions found in policy and partly an academic description of the consequences of those policies. Both start from the idea that the individual is the basic unit of society. The family matters because it is the place where responsibility lies and where self-reliance is learned. Margaret Thatcher expressed the idea in an interview with Woman’s Own in 1987 when she said that there is no such thing as society, only individual men and women and families. The remark was widely quoted and widely criticised, but it sums up the approach: when things go wrong, the first place to look for help is the family and not the state.
Two further points are needed to understand the view. The first is that neoliberal economics is frequently combined with social conservatism, particularly the belief that the stable, married, two-parent family is best for children. This blend is often discussed under the heading of the New Right. The second is that the market is treated as the best way to provide services families need, so childcare, education and care for the elderly are increasingly bought and sold. The result is that the family is expected to be both a moral institution that bears responsibility and a consumer that makes choices.
How do economists treat the family as a market?
The clearest intellectual statement of the economic approach is by the Chicago economist Gary Becker, whose A Treatise on the Family, published in 1981, applied the methods of microeconomics to marriage, divorce, fertility and the care of children. Becker argued that households can be analysed as small enterprises that allocate time and money to maximise their welfare. People marry when the gains from doing so exceed the gains from staying single, and they divorce when the balance changes. Parents decide how many children to have by weighing costs against benefits, and they invest in children’s education as a form of human capital.
This is a clear example of the neoliberal habit of extending market reasoning into areas that were once seen as governed by love, duty or tradition. It also fits the logic of individualism. In Becker’s analysis, no special account of social structure is needed, because families respond to incentives. Critics reply that this cannot explain why unpaid care is done mainly by women or why family decisions are shaped by inequalities of income and power, a point developed below.
How did neoliberal policies change family life?
In Britain, the changes began in the 1980s and continued under governments of both main parties. The shift away from institutional care towards care in the home and the community is one example, discussed in the post on Thatcher’s Care in the Community. The expectation was that relatives, in practice mainly women, would take on work that had been done by hospitals and the state. Public spending on social care has been squeezed since, and families fill many of the gaps.
A second area is welfare. The American political scientist Charles Murray argued in Losing Ground in 1984 that welfare benefits encouraged unmarried motherhood and dependency by making it financially easier to raise children without a partner. His claims influenced debate in both countries, and they were widely contested by researchers who found that other factors, such as changes in work and in social attitudes, were more important. The wider debate is discussed in the posts on the neoliberal view of the welfare state and the welfare state. In Britain, the Child Support Agency, created in 1993, tried to make absent parents pay maintenance, so shifting the cost of lone parenthood from the taxpayer to individuals. More recently, austerity policies after 2010, together with the two child limit on some benefits introduced in 2017, have been criticised by researchers for reducing support for larger and poorer families. The detail of these policies has been changing, so current rules should be checked.
A third area is the commercialisation of care. Childcare in Britain is largely provided by private and voluntary nurseries and childminders, with parents paying fees and the state subsidising them in various ways. This is a market in which families choose and compete for places. The same logic has been described in relation to schools, in the posts on marketisation in education, where parents are treated as consumers.
What is individualisation and how does it affect families?
Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim argued in Individualization, published in 2002, that in late modern societies people are increasingly required to make their own life choices, including about relationships, because traditional roles and guidance have weakened. The family becomes a negotiated arrangement, in which partners must work out for themselves how to organise work, money and care. Anthony Giddens’s idea of the pure relationship, in The Transformation of Intimacy in 1992, similarly described relationships that last only as long as both partners are satisfied. These accounts are not simply descriptions of neoliberalism, but they overlap with it, since they describe a world in which individuals carry the responsibility and the risk. See also the post on individualisation.
Sociologists who take a more critical view argue that the language of choice hides unequal resources. Families with high incomes can buy childcare, housing near good schools and help with elderly parents. Those with low incomes cannot, and are blamed for the results. This argument links to the discussion of inequality and poverty.
What is intensive parenting and how is it linked to neoliberalism?
The sociologist Sharon Hays described in The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, published in 1996, an ideology of intensive mothering in which a good mother is expected to devote large amounts of time, money and emotional energy to her child. Later writers have connected this with neoliberal ideas of responsibility, since parents are held accountable for a child’s educational and moral outcomes in a society where the state does less. Examples include the pressure to choose the right school, to pay for tutoring and to enrich a child’s development through activities. The strain is felt most by mothers, who still do the majority of unpaid care, and by parents who lack the money to compete. The wider idea of family as an economic unit is discussed in the post on the economic functions of families.
How has the commercialisation of care affected families?
Arlie Hochschild, in The Commercialization of Intimate Life, published in 2003, argued that tasks once done within families, such as childcare, elder care and even organising a birthday party, are increasingly bought. She also described global care chains, in which women migrate from poorer countries to care for the children of richer households, often leaving their own children with relatives. This shows how a market in care crosses borders and depends on inequality between countries. Nancy Fraser has argued, in a 2016 article on contradictions of capital and care, that contemporary capitalism relies on the unpaid work of social reproduction while at the same time undermining the conditions for it, because long working hours and cuts to services leave families with less time and support. The resulting pressure is sometimes called a crisis of care.
Examples of the neoliberal view of the family
Several concrete examples can be given. The reliance on parents to fund and support young adults through university, since tuition fees replaced grants, has made the family’s wealth a more important factor in a young person’s life chances, and the phrase bank of mum and dad is now widely used. The expectation that relatives provide unpaid care for sick or disabled family members is another case, as is the use of private nurseries and nannies by families who can afford them. Welfare reforms that tie benefits to work, and the use of Universal Credit to monitor claimants, show the state encouraging self-reliance and enforcing it. Some governments have also promoted marriage through tax and benefits, reflecting the moral side of the New Right.
What are the criticisms of the neoliberal view of the family?
Feminists have been the strongest critics. They argue that when care is returned to the family, it falls on women, who do most of the unpaid domestic and caring work, so that neoliberal policy deepens gender inequality while praising choice and independence. This links to research on the domestic division of labour. Marxists argue that the family is made to serve capitalism by raising future workers and absorbing the costs of unemployment and low wages, and that neoliberalism intensifies this by cutting public support.
A second set of criticisms concerns the evidence. The claim that welfare causes family breakdown has been disputed by researchers who point to rising lone parenthood in countries with very different benefits. Studies of poverty stress structural causes, such as low pay, insecure work and housing costs, in preference to family structure, as in structural causes of poverty. A third objection is that the assumption of the stable two-parent family ignores the diversity of modern households, which is explored in the postmodernist view of the family and the accounts of lone parent families.
Functionalists, whose view of the family stresses its contribution to social stability, would agree with the neoliberals about the importance of the family but disagree about the role of the state, since Talcott Parsons saw the family as specialised for primary socialisation and the stabilisation of adult personalities, with other institutions supporting it. Defenders of neoliberal family policy respond that autonomy and responsibility are valuable, that state support can create dependency, and that market provision gives parents more choice. Whether those claims hold depends on whether families have the resources to exercise choice, which is the main point of contention.
Why does the neoliberal view of the family matter in sociology?
It matters because it shows that family life is shaped by politics and economics and is not simply private. Seeing the family as a unit asked to take on more responsibility helps to explain pressures on parents, the unequal burden on women and the importance of family wealth. Students should be able to explain the neoliberal assumptions, give examples from policy and set them against the feminist, Marxist and functionalist views. A strong answer will also note that neoliberalism is not a single doctrine, that its effects differ between countries, and that the same families are also affected by changes in work, housing and culture that have other causes.
