Will Heaven

The traditional family is on the way out, the head of the Family and Parenting Institute said this week. No one can argue with that. For years, divorce has been seen as normal (if not quite the norm), and the decline of the nuclear family continues.

As a consequence, Dr Katherine Rake said, children are no longer brought up by Mum and Dad, but by the family as a whole – grandparents, uncles and aunts, and whoever else is around to lend a hand. She calls it “communal parenting”.

But here’s where I disagree with Dr Rake. She says it’s wrong for governments to try to preserve the traditional family through state initiatives: “What policy-makers must not do is fall into the trap of investing large sums of money trying to reverse the tide of trends by trying to encourage more traditional families.” Traditional family life is over, in other words, and we should accept that there’s no turning the clock back.

Why should this have to be the case? All my instincts tell me that it is right to encourage families and traditional family life. My experience as one of four children in a happy marriage supports the idea, too. Why shouldn’t the state and the Catholic Church do everything they can to promote the family?

Since Dr Rake’s report is scientific, though, I’ll have to do better than that. So let’s take a quick look at figures which contradict her. According to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), for instance, young people are five times more likely to have experienced physical abuse and emotional maltreatment if they grew up in a lone parent family, compared with children in “two-birthparent” families.

The think-tank Civitas has published research which says that single mothers are twice as likely to live in poverty, that divorced women are more likely to suffer psychological distress, that divorced fathers are more likely to drink and turn to drug abuse.

Their research also suggests: that single parent families are also more likely to live in poverty; that their children are more likely than others to end up dependent on state welfare; that their children are more likely to commit crimes; that they will struggle to make friends at school; that they will have low self-esteem and be unhappier than children from traditional families. Civitas concludes that fatherless families suffer from poverty, emotional heartache, ill health, lost opportunities and a lack of stability.

So don’t tell me that it’s wrong to “reverse the tide of trends” towards this. The traditional family is best for mothers, best for fathers and, most of all, best for children. And the Government is right to encourage it – tax breaks for married couples, and social welfare programmes which don’t force mothers to dodge marriage in favour of benefits.

Since my last Notebook on the fun of Halloween, there has been yet another sense of humour failure from a senior Church official. Mgr Perazzolo condemned The Twilight Saga: New Moon as “an explosive mix” of good-looking young actors involved in supernatural activities and said that the film’s occult imagery demonstrated a “moral void more dangerous than any deviant message”. It is, in case you haven’t seen it, a teen vampire romantic film.

Again, I’m sure the monsignor had the right intentions, but he fails to see that his message is potentially far more damaging than the film. Children are not going to turn to vampirism after watching it. But, after hearing his verdict, would you blame them for thinking the Church silly and out of touch?

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