My View: Stephanie Smith

IT’S being described as “the collapse of family life”, as almost half of all babies are now born outside marriage and half of all children witness their parents’ separation before they are 16.

Alarming? Depressing? Perhaps.

New figures from the Government think-tank, the Centre for Social Justice, have revealed that births outside marriage stand at 46 per cent, their highest level for two centuries. Back in the Fifties, only five per cent of babies were born to unmarried mothers, pretty much the same rate since way back to the 1750s. Then came the permissive 1960s. By the late Seventies, 10 per cent of babies were born to outside wedlock; by 1991, it was 30 per cent.

Now just look where we are. Parents don’t stay together any more, maybe because they never married in the first place. And by the time they are 16, 48 per cent of all children can expect to see their mum and dad split up; 10 years ago, it was 40 per cent.

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The bald figures suggest much cause for concern, especially as yet more figures indicate that children from one-parent families are more likely to fail at school, become drug and drink addicts, and be unemployed as adults. Children from stable, two-parent families do seem to do better than ones from separated families, but do the statistics tell the whole story?

From where I’m standing, today’s children don’t seem to be any less happy or successful than we were back in the Seventies and Eighties, nor, from what I can gather, than children were back in any decade of the last century.

When I look around at my own children and at their friends, many of whom live in one-parent and separated families, I see (on the whole) youngsters whose parents listen to them, spend time with them, help them with their homework and tend to their welfare far more ably and attentively than our parents did, back in the days when children were expected to keep well out of the way, get on with their problems, not question and not expect too much.

Why don’t we ever hear about how much better life is now for families, especially children, than it was back in the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies and Eighties?

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It might be worth noting that many of those born in the Sixties and Seventies have not wanted to emulate their parents’ marital example, for whatever reason. Perhaps if you grew up in a household where your parents stayed together but spent most of their time either ignoring each other or screaming at each other, or worse, it’s understandable that you may not want to repeat the pattern yourself.

Statistics don’t always tell the whole story. Those who want to go back to a society where marriages lasted no matter what, where women put up and shut up, where children were barely seen, seldom heard and certainly not respected, could perhaps move to those parts of the world where such rules and attitudes remain intact.

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