London puts the focus on families

Item from the Smart Marriages Archive, reproduced in the Divorce Statistics Collectio n

November 10, 1998

London Times - 11/8/98

Straw aims to put focus on the family

BY RICHARD FORD
HOME CORRESPONDENT

JACK STRAW yesterday unveiled proposals, including toddler training
groups, to shore up families and to help people to be better parents in
the first family policy paper.

The Home Secretary made clear that the Government believed that marriage
was the best unit in which to bring up children but immediately said
that lone parents and unmarried couples were successfully rearing
families.

Mr Straw insisted that the Government was not telling people how to lead
their lives. Aware of the pitfalls of being seen to interfere in private
matters, he declared that it was not the business of government to
hector people about private adult relationships. "I have been divorced
and come from a single-parent family. I am not lecturing anybody about
how they conduct their own adult relationships. While bringing up
children is a private matter, it has public consequences of all kinds."

While the past 30 years had seen people become much more explicit about
discussing sexual matters, the consequences of sexual relations had
remained off limits.

Mr Straw, the father of two teenage children, William and Charlotte,
said that there was a great deal of evidence that parents wanted and
needed better support and training in bringing up children, but did not
know where to get it.

He admitted that politicians were "tip-toeing" into an area which people
traditionally regarded as a minefield for politicians. The consultation
paper Supporting Families proposes measures to help parents, provide
greater family stability and hopefully lessen marriage breakdown. It
aims to address changes in society including the rise in register office
weddings and the decline in baptisms.

A National Family and Parenting Institute, based on similar
organisations in Australia, Austria and Canada, is to be created with £2
million to provide advice to future governments on family policy,
parenting and relationships. It will also help to develop programmes for
organisations helping mothers and fathers, raise public awareness of
the importance of parenting and run a helpline, 365 days a year between
8am-10pm.

HEALTH VISITORS: the role of Britain's 10,000 health visitors would be
vastly extended. Families would be helped until the teenage years,
rather than concentrating on the early weeks, months and years of a
child's life.
At present much of their work involves offering health guidance but the
Government wants them to be involved in preventing a wider range of
problems. A sum of £1 million has been allocated to look at ways in
which their role could be enhanced.

Health visitors would continue to be involved in antenatal classes and
first-time parents would be offered a weekly visit until the child was
six weeks old, rather than the existing daily visit for the ten days
after birth. In the pre-school years, parents would be offered a
six-week course on toddler training, early relationships including
handling rivalry between children, speech development and learning
social skills.

Other groups would include courses on discipline and control after the
child is at school and courses for parents with teenagers which would
deal with drug and alcohol misuse.

GRANDPARENTS: ministers want them to play a greater role in family life
including in schools and providing children with help in reading and
music. Social service departments are to be encouraged to consider
placing children currently in care in the home of a grandparent and
housing authorities are to be urged to give higher priority to housing
grandparents, uncles and aunts closer to each other.

STRENGTHENING MARRIAGE: parental responsibility to be granted
automatically to unmarried parents who jointly register their child's
birth. Churches and other faiths plus register offices would give a
pre-marriage package including a statement of rights and
responsibilities to a couple just before they marry. "Marriage is a
serious business, and it is important that people who plan to marry have
a clear idea of the rights and responsibilities they are taking on," the
consultation paper says. It would include advice on property, the tax
and benefit system, and the rights and responsibilities towards their
children.

Pre-nuptial written agreements on the distribution of money and property
in the event of a break-up would become legally binding.

REGISTRARS' ROLE: the Government wants registrars to offer more support
and advice to couples. Both partners would be expected to attend the
register office to given notice of marriage. Registrars to have
statutory power to demand documents to verify identity and marital
status.

Couples would be required to give a minimum 15 days notice of their
intention to marry rather than present 24 hours and registrars are to be
encouraged to allow couples to have music and readings at a civil
marriage ceremony.

SAVING MARRIAGES: ministers are considering requiring couples to attend
a meeting at least three months before divorce or separation proceedings
starts. Couples would be asked to consider whether the marriage was
finally over and to look at the impact of divorce on the family.

BABY NAMING: registrars could provide a service in which parents would
show publicly their long-term commitment to their children. For
unmarried parents, it would be an opportunity to make a joint
responsibility agreement.

SEX EDUCATION: parenting skills to be included in sex education courses
in schools and contraceptive advice services to target youths.

Supporting Families: A Consultation Document (Home Office; £5)

Marriage going out of fashion
There were 268,300 marriages in 1995 - the lowest figure since full
statistics began in 1966 - and 147,500 divorces in the same year. Some
58 per cent of marriages are civil ceremonies. The average age at
marriage is 26.8 for women and 29.3 for men. Just over 40 per cent of
British marriages will end in divorce and 55 per cent of divorces
involve children under 16. The average age at divorce is 39 for men and
nearly 37 for women. The number of children baptised into the Church of
England has dropped from 365,000 in 1940 to 150,000 in 1995. Births have
fallen from 805,000 in 1961 to 605,000 last year; births outside
marriage rose from 64,200 to 222,900 in the same period.

Architects of the ideal home

THE main architects of Jack Straw's Green Paper on the family include
two divorcees and two thirtysomething policymakers with no children.

His team included: Norman Warner, 57: divorced in 1981. He has three
children from that marriage, and has since remarried. A Labour life
peer. Until recently he was a senior policy adviser to Mr Straw and is
now chairman of the Youth Justice Board. He was social services director
for Kent for six years, from 1985, has been a health authority chairman
and member of the Local Government Commission, and has conducted
inquiries into children's homes.

Geoff Mulgan, 36: unmarried but has a girlfriend. He used to live with
Helen Wilkinson, a researcher with the think-tank Demos, who later
accused him of helping to create a masculine culture at the heart of new
Labour.

Katherine Bramwell, 36: married, no children. An English teacher for
seven years and head of English in a comprehensive school, Ms Bramwell
joined the Home Office in 1991 and is now a private secretary in Jack
Straw's office. She has previously worked on race relations and
probation policy.

Myth and reality of happy families

BY MARK HENDERSON

JACK STRAW'S admission yesterday that there was never a "golden age of
the family" to which Britain should hark back shows an understanding of
social history that is lost on most other politicians.

The populist notion that the nuclear family is in decline after
centuries at the heart of British society has been comprehensively
discredited by historians and sociologists, even though they accept that
divorce and broken homes have increased dramatically since the 1950s.

Observers such as Lawrence Stone, Dyson Professor of History at
Princeton University and the doyen of family history, argue that the
family as we understand it is a very recent phenomenon, and that the
traditional British home is in fact a mercenary, loveless, unsentimental
place that few of us today would recognise.

Marriage began to assume its current significance only in the late 19th
century, Stone finds. Before that, it was a hotch-potch of contradictory
laws that treated women as chattels, based more on economics and
dynasticism than love and commitment. He argues that families did not
grieve for dead spouses or children in the same way as today because
death was so common a phenomenon, and that romantic love emerged as a
basis for marriage only in the 18th century and did not become the norm
until the 20th. Divorce rates have risen since the war, he says, because
people are living longer.

The Victorian era, when divorce became fully legal but socially
unacceptable and hard to obtain, was the heyday of spouse poisoning as
well as the heyday of the old-fashioned family. Women did not win equal
rights to divorce on grounds of adultery until 1923.

Christina Hardyment, a historian of the family, said the idea of the
family where father worked and mother stayed at home was only a reality
after the Second World War: "The conditions were right for a couple of
decades, post-Beveridge and before the property boom . Before and since,
mothers have had to work as an economic necessity."

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