LEADER:Putting parents on the payroll

It's the dilemma of our time. Ask any parent and you'll get the same story. On the one hand, there's work and on the other hand there's the need to put time into bringing up the kids. What kind of balance should be struck?

Today's report from the Institute for Public Policy Research by two eminences grises of British social policy, Michael Young and AH Halsey, is the latest example of a growing trend of thinking on family policy on both the left and the right. They argue that the longer hours many people spend at work, the rising numbers of two-income households, the tax and benefit disincentives to marriage or staying together, and the fact that more women in general and mothers in particular work are creating a "parenting deficit".

Their solution is to put parents on the state payroll, paying a "wage" to those who choose to stay at home. In fact, their "wage" looks very like a slightly more generous form of Income Support for parents.

What would that mean? Young and Halsey say: "If there were fewer women on the labour market while their children were still infants, there would be more jobs for men and this would have nothing but favourable effects on the position of men in the family." This is an odd logic. Policies to push women out of jobs don't create jobs for men: the chances are that different jobs would get created or else move to other countries. The idea that men must be the breadwinners is beyond resurrection. Turning back to a society in which fewer mothers work isn't an option, even if it were true (which it isn't) that children of full-time mothers enjoy a better upbringing than those whose mothers work.

Changing the culture of child-rearing requires a vision of what modern parenting could be, not a nostalgic myth about what it was. Those who believe in the "parenting deficit" have so far singularly failed to rise to that challenge.

There is, moreover, little reason to believe that Young and Halsey's favoured solution would work. They think that people make decisions to work or to stay at home on the the balance of cash benefit. But would incentives such as a parenting wage - modest for many parents but cripplingly expensive for the taxpayer - have much effect? Such schemes are fashionable, but the experience of the incentives for council house sales shows how large cash prizes have to be if they are to be of use in social engineering. In a society where work defines who we are, what we aspire to and provides much of our social life, offering cash to opt out is not enough to make millions turn to full-time parenting.