The sins of the parents: conceptualizing adult-oriented reforms to family benefits

Financial transfers to families with children form a core element of welfare state provision. Variation in the design, generosity and implementation of this provision is significant, reflecting underlying perspectives towards children and families and the state’s role in supporting them. Daly developed a new typology of social policy for children, differentiating between ‘childhood-oriented’, ‘child-oriented’ and ‘family-oriented’ policies. In this article, we propose an extension to this typology with financial transfers in mind. We divide the family-oriented category into two distinct types of policy – ‘needs-oriented’ and ‘adult-behaviour-oriented’, with the latter encapsulating support that is child-contingent but conditional on the behaviour of adults in the household. We argue that this new distinction is needed to make sense of recent significant changes to social security support for children in the UK, in particular the two-child limit and the benefit cap. We go on to analyse child benefits across Europe through the lens of this extended framework. Significantly, we find the UK’s approach to be unusual but not exceptional, with other examples of children being rendered invisible or semi-visible within social security systems. Across diverse national contexts, support for children is being withdrawn (or is simply absent) because of the behaviours and circumstances of the adults in their household.