Dr Rake has done us at least one service. She has revealed very clearly that a significant body of Left-wing thought now has no special regard for the worth of traditional families. As a result, she has brought the issue into the public eye, stirring up voluble protests - at least in the Daily Telegraph, where I think here ideas were first reported - and the Daily Mail.

This is the report from yesterday:

The traditional nuclear family has irretrievably broken down and it will soon become normal for children to be raised by relations other than their parents, the head of a Government-funded parenting group has predicted. Nuclear family collapse will see aunts, uncles and grandparents step in, predicts policy chief The collapse of the nuclear family collapse will see aunts, uncles and grandparents take on more parenting roles, it is predicted

Aunts, uncles, grandparents and even siblings will take on increasing childcare responsibilities in a form of “communal parenting” to cope with the effects of marital breakdown and growing pressures in the workplace, according to the Family and Parenting Institute.

Rising divorce rates, fewer marriages and the growth of civil partnerships mean that the traditional family model is no longer “the norm” and Government efforts to rescue it are futile, according to Dr Katherine Rake, the organisation’s new chief executive.

Dr Rake will use her first major speech in the post to warn against the “trap” of attempting to preserve traditional family structures through Government initiatives.

She will also forecast a dramatic change in the role of parents in the next decade.

With mothers beginning to play a less dominant role in children’s lives because of greater work commitments, fathers will experience a change comparable in scale to that seen by women since the 1950s, she predicts.

An estimated two million families in Britain already rely the older generation for help with childcare while about 200,000 grandparents are now sole carers.

But the trend is set to rise with the “whole family” set to take on greater responsibility for children, Dr Rake said.

Her remarks on the decline of the nuclear family are likely to attract criticism in some quarters from those who say that there is no substitute for children being brought up by a mother and a father.

...

A major report on the state of British families being published today by the FPI to coincide with Dr Rake’s speech highlights how one in four children now live in a single-parent family, compared to only one in 14 in the early 1970s.

Almost half of children are now born outside marriage, against only one in 10 a generation ago.

Meanwhile the report highlights forecasts that 70 per cent of mothers will be working by next year, with an almost 40 per cent rise in the number of single mothers also in employment since the early 1990s.

It estimates that about 90 per cent of grandparents now provide some form of financial support for their grandchildren.

But rather than fragment, families will evolve to cope with the changes, according to Dr Rake.

She predicted that there will be no such thing as a “typical family” in the next 10 to 20 years.

“People are constantly redefining what it means to be a family,” she said.

“What we are seeing is that family shape is changing all the time, the notion of a traditional nuclear family …. certainly isn’t the norm now.”

She went on: “Because people are having children later and because there is more divorce and separation, what is happening is that people draw on resources from right across the family and their families can be more involved.”

....

In her speech, Dr Rake will add: “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’.

“Nor should parents allow them to fall back on old assumptions, which has meant mothers carrying the burden of changing families and parenting demands.”

The essential flaw in her reasoning and recommendations is simple: mothers and fathers have powerful instinctive urges to look after their own children. The same urges can be seen in many animal species, especially ones which are closely related to ours. This powerful urge to help and protect is not normally felt to the same degree, by any other adults be they siblings, uncles, aunts or even, perhaps, grandparents. It is certainly not felt by unrelated government employees.

So a child is most safe and most likely to receive love and support, even in difficult circumstances, from its mother and father. If that child has the benefit of both its natural parents being around, it is still more safe - as the statistics on child abuse dramatically prove. The idea that other people are just as good as the natural parents is demonstrably untrue.

Despite this, I do not think governments should emphasise giving special privileges to married people. Taken too far, that is interfering with the freedom of people to live their own lives as they wish. But what the government should do first and foremost is remove the subsidies that take away the natural reasons for marriage - particularly the special benefits for single parents that sometimes make it more financially rewarding for a couple at benefit level to split up than to stay together. The government at present, far from favouring marriage, favours broken families. This should be stopped.

On the tax side, I would like to see tax allowances for those parents who look after their children. Adults have tax allowances because they are understood to have basic costs to bear. The same applies to children and the parents who bear those basic costs should have the use of the child's tax allowance. It also would be reasonable for a couple to have transferable tax allowances so that one can work and the other can look after the children. In this way, the child is more likely to have a parent looking after him or her for more of the time.

Other countries do indeed have a wide variety of different rules on the subject. Edward Heatcoat Amory in the Daily Mail today has had a stab at finding out about some of them.

He offers one remarkable statistic:

single earner married couples with children on an average wage – pays 44 per cent more tax in Britain than the OECD average.

That figure, if it can be sourced and stands up, could go some way to explain why Britain is the lone parenting capital of the advanced world.

His full article is here, under one by Steve Doughty on Katharine Rake.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting

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