Changing Ideologies, Demographics and Attitudes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter provides the context in which public policy on poverty, the family and parenting has evolved over the last 20 years. It examines changes in ideology in relation to the family, key socio-economic trends and shifts in public attitudes over the period, and why they are significant for family policy. The socio-economic trends we focus on include changes in economic growth, family type, the employment patterns of parents, housing tenure and costs, and the diversity of the population of Britain. These areas were chosen because they represent major changes, particularly in the lives of low-income families. They also provide the context for understanding the rationale for policy action. Finally, the chapter explores how this context has influenced parents’ roles and the emergence of parenting as a concept in its own right. Changing ideologies Family policy has evolved over centuries, responding to as well as attempting to influence the behaviours of mothers and fathers. The state has concerned itself with matters such as marriage, divorce, the birth rate and parental responsibility. However, historically, the state has been reluctant to intervene directly in behaviours within the family, except where there was significant danger to children. The year 1997 marks the beginning of a significant change in the role of public policy in family life. The Beveridge post-war welfare state was concerned with both the economics of the family and the birth rate. It created a social insurance system, underpinned by a National Health Service (NHS), tax-funded allowances for children and a commitment to full employment. It was also designed to prevent destitution and ensure a safety net for families. Beveridge's vision enshrined a traditional view of women's role, assuming that after the very active part women played during the Second World War, married women would and should return to the home as housewives. Alongside this was a concern about a falling birth rate; in Beveridge's words, mothers had ‘vital work to do in ensuring the adequate continuance of the British race’ (Cmd 6404, 1942). He proposed incentives for marriage and childbirth, and while his proposed marriage grant was not implemented, a maternity grant and benefit were introduced alongside widows’ benefits and family allowance, becoming foundations for our current welfare state (Timmins, 1996).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".