Assess Sociological Views of the Impact of Government Policies on Family Life

Social policies are defined as actions taken by governing bodies such as schools or welfare systems that create action in society and cause implications for its members, they’re usually based off of laws from the government. Sociologists greatly clash in their respective perspectives on the view of social policies which ultimately makes it hard to understand the true extent of what they do to our society. Therefore, I will be examining just how worthy these views about social policies and their effects of the family are.
As item 2B states, feminists argue that social policies assume that the ideal family is   a patriarchal one, where they are created in order to continue the trend of a man in control of the family, in a nuclear family which involves a married heterosexual couple as well as children, own or adopted.   This is shown in ways such as; giving women custody over children in courts by assuming that they are caregivers and making it harder for women to claim social benefits as they are seen to be dependent on men. One main example of the way in which feminists argue that social policies continue this trend of patriarchy was presented by Lamb. Lamb stated that many things such as maternity leave assumed that women are the caregivers for children in society. This was shown by stating that maternity leave is much longer than paternity leave, resulting in the women having to spend more time socialising children while the father goes back to work. Therefore, feminists argue that even where social policies seem to be having a good effect on family life for women, such as giving them better benefits, they’re actually keeping patriarchy going. However, this is a major class with the functionalist perspective on social policy. As functionalists take a consensus approach, where they see society working together, they argue that social policies benefit the whole of society, whereas we can see feminists argue it just benefits men. Looking at this example of maternity...