Family Politics
Critics have accused the NZ government of undertaking massive social engineering and trying to steer society into a direction it doesn’t want to go. To a large portion of New Zealanders the ‘smacking’ debate especially left the impression that politicians are completely out of touch.
Mark Stephenson attended the government-sponsored Social Policy, Research and Evaluation conference for us and came back with an inside look of New Zealand social policy making.
The Ministry of Social Development conference brought to Wellington, and together, politicians, analysts, researchers, academics and many ‘bigwigs’ of the policy world.
They came from as far as the UK, Sweden and Canada, as near as Victoria University or the innards of the Beehive. Subjects to be discussed ranged from social investment to global trends, and from healthy housing to the smacking debate.
From an outsider’s view, however, there seemed to be an underlying tension between New Zealand social policy and the needs of children and their parents.
Key policy elements include:
- Payments or tax credits for parents in paid work
- Subsidised child care
- Focus on institutional early childhood education
The primary goal appears to be earning more money, along with the message that parents are better off going out to work than staying on a benefit or living on a lower income. With that comes more productivity and, of course, more taxation.
If what we learn in the first five years of life does have a profound and lifelong effect, this message raises the question of who we want our pre-school children to spend most of their time with and learn from. And: Does current policy actually support or value parenting?
At present we have a system of targeted benefits and tax credits, e.g. Working For Families and childcare subsidies. One of the main aims is to reduce child poverty so New Zealand moves towards the top of the ranked OECD countries.
In the UK, social policy has similar aims and broadly similar methods. Tony Blair apparently vowed to abolish child poverty in the UK by the year 2020 at a time when his country was near the bottom of the league table. Things have improved there, but it still remains to be seen if this can be sustained.
In Sweden, where child poverty rates are low, they had a slightly different approach.
Their policy includes:
- Universal rather than income-tested benefits, e.g. tax credit for all new parents
- Subsidised child care
- Subsidised education from birth to old age
- Flexibility – of work hours, holidays, and much more generous parental leave
With subsidised childcare and flexibility in employment – plus probably social changes as well – Sweden’s workforce increased significantly, mainly through more women.
With this came a large increase in tax revenue, which helps pay for the government’s social outlays. The system is geared so people can work and actively parent because of the flexibility of work hours and standard parental leave. There is no barrier to education or re-training in the event of redundancy, or returning to work after the early childhood years or one’s children.
Reducing child poverty was not a stated aim of Swedish social policy but they now have one of the lowest rates in Europe.
Such comparison with other countries can be instructive when considering our own social policy.
Social policy is driven to a large degree by social research. A part of the conference concerned the methods of social research and its evaluation. One of the inherent problems with researching the outcomes of social policy is that there is no control group. You cannot launch ‘Working for Families’ for half the population and ‘Working in The Salt Mines’ for the other half, just to compare results.
Then there are problems with defining what ‘better off’ means and how to measure it. One must exclude confounding variables such as economic growth and immigration, and what about Quality of Life indicators and well-being indices? Maybe people are happier working in the salt mines with their children. Results are always open to interpretation.
Supporting families with first babies, longitudinal studies of children, and the smacking debate were of particular interest to fathers at the conference.
MSD funded researcher Irene de Haan, in an interview based study of 27 new mothers and their partners, set out to find what support was needed for first time parents.
According to her what helps most is family, family, family. Otherwise, trusted friends, informal support such as coffee groups, financial security, working part-time if family support, and Working for Families all got a mention.
What would help, according to the respondents, included: flexible leave and working hours, and more parental leave for Dads.
Also mentioned by first time parents was a ‘stay-at-home’ benefit for new parents. Interestingly, this was not just to ease the financial burden, but also to ‘raise the status of child rearing’. One of the biggest issues was that parenting was not valued. It was felt that social policy should reflect and be underpinned by this value.
On the smacking (Section 59) debate, the ‘politically correct’ view was taken throughout and no dissenting voice was raised. This must have been disappointing for the press who had turned out expecting a bun-fight, but also raises fresh questions about whether policy-makers and academics are on the same wavelength as the rest of the population.
One presentation was an analysis of the submissions on the new bill to repeal section 59, and incidentally ban smacking. Most submissions were against the bill (i.e. for retaining the right to smack). People whose submissions opposed the law change were more likely to be from people living in rural areas and/or living as a couple. Men were less likely to support the bill than women.
Researchers Sophie Debski and Marie Russell of Victoria University’s Health Services Research Centre, with Sonya Hogan of Save the Children NZ, defined two ways of viewing children. They can be seen as developing adults, not fully formed and needing correction, or they can be envisaged as ‘active social agents’ who are ‘fully human’ in their own right. They then took a sample of responses and analysed them to find these views of children among the supporters and opposers of the new bill.
It seemed that pro-smackers were more likely to view a child as a developing person, ‘not fully human’. Anti-smackers saw children as fully formed people. However, with this analysis the researchers set up a polarity they had themselves created, and then looked for it. Also, comments were presented which demonized those who opposed the bill (the ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ religious crowd can be their own worst enemies).
They saw some dangers in the attention to the smacking debate, including a tendency to see loving parents who smack as ‘bad’. Smacking should be seen as a tiny part of the spectrum of discipline. More important perhaps are things like consistency, communication, consequences, respect and love.
Big questions remained over the implementation of the bill. How will the law deal with transgressors? Will there be common sense or leniency, and how will the Family Court or Child Youth and Family deal with accusations or convictions for ‘smacking’ in its decisions?
Overall, the research presented on smacking was not very robust. Its method and findings are easy to criticize. However, it is useful for encouraging debate and challenging our beliefs about children and the role of parents. What sort of person is a child? And what rights do children have? These are important questions to consider before we decide how we should behave and how the law should protect them.
Smacking aside, questions remain on social policy in general. There is tension between the promotion of early education and toddler’s needs to be nurtured by their parents.
There is tension between the economy’s need for workers/ taxpayers, and parents’ desire to raise their children, hands on(!)
How will the present strategy support parents as parents while promoting work, not welfare? The terms ‘productivity’ and ‘parenting’ still seem to sit in opposite camps.
Perhaps it comes back to values. Children and parents will do best when they are valued, not just by each other but by society as a whole. Policy needs to reflect that.
Next: Finding Helen
