Certain critics of welfare policy have argued that welfare programmes provide perverse incentives and increase marital dissolution. As Nancy Folbre (1991) points out, economic development and fertility decline have historically been accompanied by increases in the percentage of female-headed households and by institutional changes that redistribute some of the costs of social reproduction from families to society as a whole. Welfare programmes then are the result of these changes and not the cause of them, and there is no evidence to suggest that providing benefits to families increases marital instability. Critics sometimes argue that welfare programmes are a form of unproductive spending, but this is rarely more than a way of arguing that the cost of welfare provision is too high. It is evident, however, that women’s ability to support their families, whether they are married or not, would be greatly enhanced by improving their position in the labour market and instituting education and training programmes. Such an initiative would also have benefits for child health, nutrition and education. Family programmes should really be treated as employment programmes in the widest sense.
It is an irony of the fact that women do shoulder a disproportionate share of the costs of child care and human capital reproduction that debates about female-headed households inevitably focus on why women end up in this situation. The implication is that the women themselves are responsible for an increase in marital instability and that this may be connected to growing numbers of women in waged work and/or to changes in role expectations and attitudes. Relatively little attention, as mentioned above, is given to fathers and to the role of men in changes in family structures and gender role expectations, even though quite a lot of research has been done in this area.