David QuinnThe ‘Family Rhythms’ report gives cause for thought, writes David Quinn
It’s a strange old thing how many people seem to have difficulty distinguishing between circumstance and design. This was a feature of last year’s marriage referendum. A key argument of opponents of the referendum was that, on average, it is best for a child to be raised by his or her own mother and father.
Straight away we were told about the widowed parent or the divorced parent as if this somehow disproved our argument. But who wants to be left alone to raise a child? Being widowed is a matter of circumstance. Being divorced can also be a matter of circumstance.
In what way do either of these circumstances counter the argument that children are best with their own mother and father, assuming they are fit parents?
What we did in last year’s referendum was to permit, with the full blessing of the law, the bringing into being of either deliberately motherless or deliberately fatherless children. Two men who buy an egg and then rent another woman’s womb for nine months, intending to raise the resulting child without a mother is a very, very different thing than a child losing a mother or a father through circumstance.
This deliberate intent to deprive a child of either a mother or a father is what we gave our blessing to last year, whether we intended to or not.
Difference
Similar thoughts about the difference between circumstance and design came to mind when reading about a new report called ‘Family Rhythms: The changing textures of family life in Ireland’, produced by academics from Trinity College Dublin and Maynooth University.
The authors drew on 240 interviews with families from a range of backgrounds and found that families today are “smaller, more diverse, with more involved fathers and a greater reliance on grandparent support”, compared with families in the past. Some of this will be by design, and others through circumstances, including economic circumstances.
The authors acknowledge that the traditional family of mother, father and child is still the dominant one, but that it is not as dominant as in the past.
We should pause for a moment to consider what the word ‘traditional’ means here. A ‘tradition’ is an inherited way of doing something that has evolved through time.
But to describe the family of mother, father and child as merely ‘traditional’ diminishes its importance and makes it sound as if it is the result of social custom only. The ‘traditional’ family is, however, rooted in nature like no other social structure. The ‘traditional’ family is what arises when a man and a woman join together in conjugal union and have a child. The ‘traditional’ family is, therefore, the natural family.
This is not to say other families are ‘unnatural’. That would be a ridiculous thing to say. However, every other type of family derives from the natural family. A single parent family still results from the conjugal union of male and female. Someone who uses IVF to have a child must still use a male gamete and a female gamete.
This is why the family of mother, father and child is also described as “fundamental” and “primary” and as the “basic unit of society”. If men and women did not form conjugal unions, human society would soon cease to exist. It is that primary.
And because the natural family is so fundamental, we want men and women to commit to each other before and after they have children, which is why every single major culture ever has invented the institution of marriage.
Change
‘Family Rhythms’ looks at how the family continues to change. In the recent past, families were intergenerational in the sense that several generations lived under the same roof or close by each other. This provided an excellent support network.
The family was situated mainly in rural areas and the farm required plenty of children. Women have either worked or stayed at home, depending on economic circumstances. It is only in recent times (within the last century) that families had a large enough income to enable one parent to stay at home. That ‘luxury’ is disappearing again.
The rise of the single parent home is by far and away the biggest family change we have seen in the West, and in Ireland in a very long time.
More than a third of births now take place outside marriage. ‘Family Rhythms’ says that fathers are increasingly involved in the lives of their children but this is only partly true. It’s true insofar as it means fathers like to be more hands-on in the upbringing of their children than in the past.
However, it is not true in that a growing number of fathers have little or no contact with their children. A report called ‘Watch them Grow’, which uses data from ‘Growing Up in Ireland’, a major longitudinal study of children in Ireland at different stages in their lives, looks at involvement by non-resident fathers (NRF) in the lives of their children.
It finds that by the time the children in the ‘Growing Up in Ireland’ study reached age three, a third of solo parents had no contact with the non-resident father. It also found that 54% of non-resident fathers made no financial contribution by this stage.
The more children are born outside marriage, the more will we find this.
The added involvement of grandparents in the lives of their grandchildren arises from two things, namely the growth in single parent families and the growth in double-income families.
The changes in the Irish family tracked by ‘Family Rhythms’ are the result of economic changes and changes in social attitudes. Some of these changes are good, and some are bad. But what cannot be doubted is that the ‘traditional’ or ‘natural’ family remains of immense importance and it is a very strange society that loses sights of this most basic of facts.