Prosperity is a family affair

Female fertility rates are down, the number of single mothers up. Perhaps this is the ultimate sign of female emancipation. Educated women opting for careers are no longer bound to have children. Independent women opting to have children are no longer bound to have a spouse. But scratch below the surface and it is clear that lack of choice, not wider choice, fuels these trends.

The government's tax, benefit and work policies leave women juggling work and motherhood, unfulfilled by either. Perversely, attempts to free women from the shackles of convention have narrowed opportunity. Labour has always refused to 'dictate' family structure, which effectively means rejecting policies that favour two parents. So, even though the root of our social problems appears to be family breakdown, it can't support the nuclear family because that's a Tory line.

Labour's family policy is distorting notions of diversity into inequality. Accommodating personal choice, the principle behind rejecting pro-family policy, is no longer expanding but limiting the freedoms of families.

Many professional women are choosing to have children later or, increasingly, not at all. Many factors are responsible, from living longer to marrying later, but financial and professional restrictions are the principle reasons.

A key constraint is the loss of one partner's earnings in a dual-income household. Maternity often means that standards of living will drop at the moment that expenses rocket. Career-wise, having a child can be suicide. Guarantees of returning to the same point in the hierarchy are limited and career 'momentum' is often irretrievably lost. Consequently, many women are waiting until they have peaked in their career, and their partners are earning enough for two.

Yet despite these sacrifices, policy failure to provide for childcare leads many mothers into part-time work. Particularly for those coming from inflexible professions, this is frequently lower-skilled work where earnings are often entirely consumed by childcare expenses.

For lone mothers in the UK, the scenario is different. The outcome, though, is just as unsatisfactory. Labour's chief aim in family-related policy is to alleviate child poverty. Lone parents provide a neat target group as the majority of single-parent families live in deprivation.

However, the government is adamant this strategy should focus on the lives of the children, not their mothers. This is partly to pacify the taxpayer - they are funding helpless innocents. But this focus doesn't attempt to bring mothers out of low socio-economic status. It simply aims to enable the mother to raise a child from their existing position.

Lone-parent benefit perpetuates dependency rather than acting as a bridge to self-sufficiency. Such benefits are not designed to be short term and, because they are means-tested, a lone mother is better off working part-time rather than full-time. This system also asserts the mother as the primary carer, as paternal responsibility is more or less written off. Little effort goes into chasing up non-resident fathers. But for rich and poor women alike, government policy narrows women's working chances and undermines the family.

The plentiful availability of part-time work for women is the root of all evil for many mothers. It lets the government off the hook on childcare provision and it lowers women's labour status.

The problem is that a part-time labour pool is crucial for the booming service industry. Would the government ever be willing to jeopardise it? After all, part-time work is largely responsible for our enviable unemployment figures. An argument appealing to the government's sense of gender equality, still in its fledgling stage, is unlikely to carry much clout.

But if the government is reluctant to act on behalf of women and families, maybe it should look at the impact on the public purse. The current situation for both sets of mothers is incurring high public costs. The birth rate is way below the long-term replacement level, which means no pensions for the old of tomorrow. Fewer and fewer separated fathers are contributing to child upkeep, which means increased lone-mother dependency on the state.

A new agenda where parenting is a real socio-economic priority is vital. The equal responsibility of both mother and father needs to carry much greater legal weight. Employers must be made to recognise the economic and social necessity of maternity and paternity. Income tax should account for the number of carers and dependents in a family, assisting with the costs of childcare. Universal childcare after infancy needs to be heavily invested in. These strategies would convey the social value of childcare, encourage stable co-parenting, raise the birth rate and give mothers a fairer deal.

France has set a better example. The French government's aim to raise the birth rate has meant more parenting-friendly welfare and work policies. Its pro-family policy means that tax and benefit calculations acknowledge the expenses of childcare both in actual cost and in the loss of one partner's income.

Income-tax calculations takes into account the number of dependents in the family, childcare salaries are available for the caring parent and the state provides universal childcare for over-three year-olds.

Within the labour market, maternity leave is also more favourable, with far greater legal guarantees of returning to previous employment. The effects seem to be that the care of infants is regarded as valuable, mothers are soon able to work full time and family stability is high.

If personal freedom is the basis of bending over backwards to not favour two-parent families, the government needs to reconsider the impact this freedom is having on life chances, particularly those of women and children. It continues to see anything resembling pro-family policy as the territory of the Tories. Yet there is huge distinction between reactionary tradition and encouraging people who have children to raise them in a stable partnership. There is a big difference between morally condemning lone parenthood and striving to keep families together.

The United States appears to be conquering this polarity. Under Bill Clinton, the US witnessed a political breakthrough; the left embraced strategies that had always been more associated with the right in order to tackle a left concern - poverty. Last Thursday, Ron Haskins, the token Republican at the left-leaning Brookings Institution in Washington, gave a roaring account of the Democrat/Republican meltdown over welfare reform. The 1996 Welfare Reform Bill passed by Clinton was a historical victory for pragmatism over politics. Persistently gross levels of poverty showed the welfare system to be failing. Year-on-year increases in benefit were not narrowing inequality.

So the Democrats did the unthinkable and agreed with the Republicans to cut benefits in an attempt to end dependency. The results have been dramatic, with a significant decline in the number of families living in poverty.

What British politics can learn from the political unity over the Welfare Reform Bill is the necessity of dropping rigid political divisions in favour of viable solutions. In its bid for liberalism, the government is undermining both gender and social equality. By providing disincentives to two-parent families, policy is effectively disadvantaging the very people it aims to protect.

· Anastasia de Waal is a research fellow at thinktank Civitas. Mary Riddell is away