social laws and policies

Exam social laws and policies that influence family and household.

In recent years,governments have cared more about families which leads to a lot of policies that influence family and household.
The major point is about the nuclear family that the New right comes down firmly on this nuclear family side and it is considered as the best type of family.Therefore,some policies aim at encouraging nuclear families and discouraging family diversity. As Saunder said,"explicitly favour married parenthood over all other choices for raising children" and married couples should have special legal
rights and safeguards.Then,we can see some policies about encouraging nuclear families,which can be classified as Conservative policy and Labour policy.In the first place,the Green Paper 1998"supporting families" suggests that marriage is the best.In addition, Divorce laws require counselling cooling-off period in order to encourage couples to save their marriage.When it comes to Labour policy,it is
milder than those of Conservatives that its attempt is to support both marriage and nuclear family and provide help for other forms of families. For example,there are two programmes about it-Labour's New Deal schemes and the Sure Start programme.The former one is designed to help people find paid employment,especially to those lone mothers while the latter is to provide health and support services for low
income families with young children.However,some policies don't in favour of normal families.As we all know,nowadays some countries allow the same sex to get married and lower age of consent for homosexual relationship that change the type of family obviously.
As for some policies for children,they will affect the size and components of family.There is a division between countries that in some
countries,governments set prohibitation to prevent people having so many children and advocate free contraception while on the other hand,
some governments have the legislation of abortion,give subsidy to those who give birth to more children and provide IVF programmes supported
by NHS.
In a conclusion,government policies and laws aim at catering all people and adjusting situations. Although it is very difficult to implement
and decide,such policies and laws should not only cover tranditional family but also diversity of family.