The family ... then and now

Was there ever a golden time for the family? Perhaps in our mind’s eye we like to hold onto a picture of the stability and strength of the Victorian family, a time when ‘father knew best’ and everyone was aware of their place. Well, just possibly this was an era when, for some, there was the security of a large family - where the unmarried aunts, for example, were taken in and lived with their married brethren. However, we also know that it was a time when the majority struggled against poverty, illness, and squalor. And countless people did not have the safety net of a family, and found themselves out in the cold because of an illegitimate child, or some other reason, and were unable to care for themselves in old age.

We do know that after World War Two there were great upheavals in family life when the troops came home. Children and fathers were trying to get to know each other after a long absence, or even seeing each other for the first time. In the UK children were returning home from being evacuated and mothers, who had coped alone during those years, had to learn to be part of a family or a couple again. Very many marriages did not survive, and the divorce rate escalated. I believe the disruption of those years had a great knock-on effect on future generations, when twenty or so years later the children of that period, who had been deprived of a settled home with two parents, went on to become parents themselves.

Perhaps we think of the fifties and sixties as a time when a mother, father, two children and a dog frolicked through life. But was that picture any more real? The divorce rates and the number of broken families were soaring, and although we knew that there were - and always have been - mothers and fathers on their own, ‘single-parent family’ was not yet part of our vocabulary.

What will people in years to come think about life in the early years of the twenty-first century? The media has been very willing to come up with evidence to show the ‘death of the family’, and to illustrate this by telling us about the abuse of the elderly, the trauma for children of broken marriages, and the rise in the number of teenage pregnancies. Every day we read of distraught fathers forbidden to see their children after a family breakup, and at the same time read, too, of fathers who will not pay child-support and who do not see the benefit of keeping in touch with their children. We are told that Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Western Europe. We are shocked by the revelations of child prostitution, young people sleeping rough, and are urged to help put a full-stop to child cruelty and abuse.

Yet if we consider the high viewing figures for nightly ‘soaps’ it suggests that there is a great interest in family life, even if it is only representative of dysfunctional television families. There is a fascination about the way relationships unfold on our screens. The irony is that the families eating fast food in front of the television, watching the family dramas unfold, often neglect their own households. Family life needs constant maintenance and care.

Families today have a variety of different labels, but whether ‘traditional’, ‘step’, ‘blended’, ‘child-free’, ‘gay’ or ‘one-parent’ what is important is the interaction between members of the family: how they look after each other and whether there are people to turn to, to huddle with, if the outside world is cold.

Are you aware that the definition of a family in the UK today still includes more than one generation? Remember, too, that there are couples married for almost a lifetime and whose relationships do not make headline news. The chemistry of each family is different and each family must find its own way of creating strong links between its members, while also allowing each of them to preserve an individual identity.

The family may not be as recognizable as it once was, but it is still alive and thrives in a variety of ways. As well as the old, there are new patterns, and we must learn to make room for them and to value them.

Perhaps there never has been a golden age of the family: we can only try to do the best we can in bringing up our own children, watching out for other family members, caring for the sick and our elderly, and hope that by doing so we are laying the seeds for a caring, loving community in the future. Is that really too much to ask?

© Jill Curtis 2004