Family change, wellbeing and social policy

This project will explore how family living arrangements have changed over recent decades, how this affects adults’ and children’s access to resources, and the implications for policy.

Why this project is important

Children have increasingly complex family living arrangements. In the UK, more than 2-in-5 children born in 2000 were not living with both biological parents by age 11. While some of these children lived with a single parent, others had stepparents or split their time between households because they shared care.  

Increased family complexity has coincided with a greater emphasis on ‘family’ income in the welfare system, as means testing has expanded. Welfare policy is particularly likely to affect complex families but, in these families, the responsibilities of adults to one another, and to children, are often poorly defined. Despite these changes, the UK’s social security and child maintenance systems continue to view family life in binary terms, assuming children live in single-parent or two-parent homes, poorly reflecting family lives today. As a consequence, in some households, children and adults may not be receiving the financial support they need.

What it will involve

To achieve the goal of understanding how families in the UK have changed over recent decades and how this affects their access to resources, the research team has formulated five research objectives:

1. Describe family change: produce new descriptive evidence on family composition and family dynamics, and their relationship to income and welfare receipt.
2. Analyse the links between family structure, sources of family income, and spending: assess the implications of changing family structures for adult and child wellbeing by (a) examining how family change affects household income and its composition, parents’ access to their own, individual income, and the management of household finances, and (b) analysing how family structure and income composition affect spending on children.
3. Draw together international lessons for policy: review international policy developments in the treatment of different family types in social security and child maintenance systems to provide lessons for UK policy.
4. Model alternative policies: assess how policy change would affect individual and family income among those in vulnerable households.
5. Inform policy: inform policy debates on the appropriateness of current definitions of the ‘benefit unit’ for delivering means-tested support; the treatment of ‘shared care’ in social-security and child-maintenance systems; and enhance understanding of how the two-child limit affects complex families.

The project will draw together evidence from six existing cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys to provide a comprehensive overview of family change, family dynamics, and their access to resources. The team will draw together international policy developments through a literature review.

How it will make a difference

The research’s key stakeholders are government departments, the Children’s Commissioner, NGOs, academics/thinktanks, and parliamentarians. Gingerbread will spearhead the dissemination of the findings through a series of briefing papers and a final report.