ePolitix.com Stakeholders comment on the family policies outlined in Gordon Brown's 2007 Budget.

Stakeholder Response: 4Children

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Anne Longfield, chief executive at 4Children, said: "The chancellor’s final Budget is the culmination of a decade of investment in children and does not disappoint.

"The chancellor was the first to invest in multi-million pound package on childcare in 1997, which has been extended each year since.

"Measures to lift 200,000 children out of poverty, and extra support for education and children’s centres sends a very clear message about the priority he places on improving the life chances of children in the UK.

"Today’s Budget represents a welcome step forward in meeting the child poverty target.  We are particularly pleased with the extra support for getting lone parents back into work.

"With childcare costs reaching as much as £250 a week, 18 per cent of lone parents have not been able to afford this. The extra support announced in today’s budget will help ease the path back to work potentially for hundreds of thousands of lone parents through extra help in child benefits and the child tax credit. This will lift children out of poverty and increase their life chances.

"But there still a decade of serious reform which will need to happen to deliver the targets for children for 2010. This is a challenge that transcends party politics and sets out a clear challenge for any party which hopes to govern after the next general election."

Stakeholder Response: Institute of Education

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IoE said: "Children whose parents experience a lot of stress are significantly less satisfied with their lives than children whose parents take life easily, finds a study by the Institute of Education.

"Parents’ suffering has a long-term impact on a child’s emotional well-being, and fathers’ distress levels are particularly crucial in determining a child’s satisfaction with life.
 
"Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, the study investigated the extent to which parental stress and distress are transmitted to children.

"The researchers analysed data on 2,300 British young people to test whether mothers’ and fathers’ psychological distress in the previous year had a significant effect on children’s own well-being at present.

"The research also explored the extent to which this distress effect differed between boys and girls.
 
"Results showed that while parental distress affects both boys and girls in the long run, boys do not appear to be significantly affected by their mothers’ misery.

"It is largely the father’s degree of distress in the previous year that has a significant effect on the child’s own assessment of life satisfaction. 

"Even taking into account how happy the child was in the previous year, dad’s distress has a significant and negative impact on the child’s well-being one year later.
 
"The findings tie in with the recent UNICEF report that concluded that children in the UK are less happy than children in many other countries, such as the Netherlands, Spain or Greece."
 
Researcher Anna Vignoles explains: "If parents in the UK are more stressed for whatever reason, perhaps due to the longer working hours that UK citizens work, then this is transmitted to their children, potentially explaining why children in the UK are less happy than their counterparts in other countries.
 
"The research evidence points to the need for policies designed to reduce parental stress which might have knock on beneficial effects on children’s emotional well-being."
 
Researcher Nattavudh Powdthavee comments: "There is growing recognition among policymakers that we should be concerned not only with how well children do at school, but also with their emotional well-being.
 
"However, recognising the importance of children’s emotional well-being does not necessarily indicate how policy-makers might be able to influence it, if at all."