This new series of studies will look at issues facing families in Australia today. Each one will include up to date statistics, insights from sociology, the Institute of Family Studies research, Biblical insights, and positive suggestions for families seeking to improve their family life.
Study 1: The good news about Australian families
First, we lay down some foundational assumptions. Studies in all areas of human endeavour, whether they be in economics, early childhood education, family studies, sociology, criminology, etc all point to the cost effectiveness and multiple social goods that accrue to society and to individuals from having stable homes and families, and to the inestimable damage done when marriages fail.
Marriage was designed by the Creator for our good; it is the template for the most fulfilling lives for men and women.
Many academic studies have recently reported that married people are happier, healthier, show increased longevity, and have more economic resources than single and divorced people. Children with married parents have better physical heath and do better in their schoolwork. Being raised in a home with both parents is the best environment for children to reach their potential.
Broken families frequently lead to broken people – children who are never able to reach their full potential, men and women who are never fulfilled in their emotional lives; boys growing up without fathers to guide them and model successful male adulthood fill the jails, domestic violence rife with terrible fall-out psychologically to the spouse injured and the children who witnessed such parental violence scarred for life.
Even the animal shelters know that domestic violence often includes hurting or killing the family pets: broken relationships lead to the terrible destruction of persons, and multiplied across a country thousands of times in an era of widespread divorce you find you have a sick society as a result. The pattern of marriage breakdown is very costly to everyone.
Divorce and unwed childbearing costs our nation millions of dollars yearly in direct financial support and professional support services, and yet the message held up to us in the media is that being single is the most exciting, rewarding life offering intimacy with beautiful new strangers all the time, doing whatever you like with whomever, without any responsibility towards their well-being.
It is an unutterably selfish, self-serving, and futile way to perceive life, and yet the message is being bought in its entirely by our youth. But the truth is that promiscuity undermines self-esteem, mental health and exposes one to a range of infections, hurts one’s feelings, and makes one harden one’s heart against using other people or being used casually by them. The fantasy of sexual freedom is a lie.
Strong stable relationships are a wonderful foundation for a secure society. Because of the importance of marriage I believe that preparation of young people for marriage is the key and marriage enrichment programs can bring improvement even to already happy marriages.
Our churches and those who support family values are already supporting theses efforts in a good way, but these programs should be more widely adopted throughout society for the wonderful benefits that accrue. The general population is made up of many individuals who have no experience of seeing a happy marriage, and they do not personally have any of the skills needed to make a marriage work. This is a profound crisis our society does not even acknowledge.
We need to support the re-education of people in the character development and learning of the basic skills for entering into successful marriages, because that is the key to successful lives and societies. Many people get caught up in the idea that the traditional family as we know it is fast dying. We acknowledge that is partially true, but we must not allow several distressing developments to blind us to the fact that the traditional family in Australia is alive and well.
During this last Parliament, I took part in a debate on a Bill (planned to making every social change include a study on how it would impact family life) in which I said in my speech:
“The traditional family, whether possessing one or two parents is under increasing pressure these days. Some press reporters who do not know the statistics or the trends, write about the demise of the family as if it were a fact. The fact is there are more than four million families in Australia, of which 85% are couple families and a further 13% are sole parent families. 65% have dependent children. These are families.
Certainly, distressing issues concerning divorce, family poverty, family violence, conflict in blended families, children’s fears of parental separation, the number of de facto relationships, and so on, encourage the media to sensationalise the issue of family life. Is there any good news about family life? The facts about family life are as follows.
If 40% of marriages end in divorce, 60% of all marriages will last a lifetime. And 60% of remarriages last ‘until death do us part.’
Ninety percent of unmarried people say they ‘expect to marry’. Only 4% of unmarried people say they ‘never’ want to have children. Two thirds of all children say they are happy with the interest their parents show in them. Only 11 per cent of stepfamilies could be characterised as ‘high conflict’ families. Only 5% of one-parent families found ‘high conflict’ whereas 7% of intact families experienced conflict. In only a quarter of the one-parent families did the child ‘never’ see the absent parent. The intact family unit is still the most important one for children in Australian society.
This view of the state of Australia’s families is healthier than many imagine. This is not to deny that many marriages come to an end, many families live in poverty, resulting in many children suffering trauma. But it is saying that marriage and family life in Australia are in good heart and resilient.
This reminds us that ‘the family’ is the most radical of all social units successfully resisting through the ages the attacks of powerful ideologies. It resisted the Church’s attempt to promote celibacy and virginity ahead of the family. It resisted the onslaughts of Marxist-Leninism, which demanded the state’s interests take precedence. It resists the criticisms of radical feminist ideologies, which see the family as the major source of oppression for women. The family survives!
Families are a powerful force, which cannot be denied. They are “the most vital crucible of both competence and change, in which ordinary human beings work out their own goals and responses to changing social conditions. We must avoid over-stating the amount of turmoil, real as it is, in family life.”
All families change over time, and people have the right to define who is and is not part of their family. But the use of the term “family” for any group of people linked neither by blood or law is misusing the term.
The Catholic bishops recently affirmed that the traditional two-parent family based on the relationships of a mother and father exclusively committed to each other in love provide the best environment in which to nurture children. They also recognise that blended families, stepfamilies and sole parents are to be valued and cared for as much as “traditional” families.
The gay and lesbian communities desire to have homosexual and lesbian families recognised as legitimate social units and therefore acceptable for all social and welfare benefits. The press has supported these homosexual claims to be regarded as family.
Legally, a family consists of parents, or a parent, with children or a child, linked by ties of blood and law. There are many other forms of human relationships including groupings of people of the same sex, of the same interests (such as a commune), or even of a community but these are not legally defined as “a family”.
Adults who choose to live in homosexual relationships, or who form a pigeon-breeding club, or who just live together, have neither the legal or moral right to call themselves a family.
Part of the reason for the high incidence of family breakdown is that people do not have the courage to assert that an intact family is preferable to a broken family. This misplaced compassion actually aggravates the problem of family breakdown by giving those who abandon their responsibilities to spouse and children an easy way out.
A family is about blood and kin relationships, the result of a marriage commitment before the eyes of God and the law, not about self-defined friendships that come and go.
At a NSW Premier’s Forum on Ageing, “the family” was described as no longer limited by blood or kin relationships. Family is “what we choose it to be, how we define it ourselves. This can include friends living together, unrelated couples, a single person with a budgie, a homosexual or lesbian couple who think they are married, or just a set of people who regard one another as family.”
People who uphold family values people need to stand up for the family and resist those who would break it. Without children, there is no family continuity or cultural transmission. Without children we cannot use the concept of family in any meaningful way. Although adults can choose their own company of any kind, children have no choice over family relationships. Their family is not chosen, it is predetermined for them, defined by their parents.
Likewise the extended family, aunts, uncles, grandparents and other relatives contribute to the sense of family continuity and cultural transmission.
The Bible teaches that children and adults have reciprocal rights and obligations, not just social relationships. The family requires commitment.
Paul writes: (Eph. 6:1-4) “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honour your father and mother”—which is the first commandment with a promise— “that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.” Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” A family is a bonding of physical, emotional and spiritual relationships, and never a mere social convenience.
The parent-child relationship is only one element in the complex web of family relationships, but it is the central one. The contribution and roles of the mother and father change with social ebbs and flows but the contribution of both are vital, and if either is not available skilful work is required to replace them.
Today, the reconstruction of marital relationships affects the contribution of parenthood. Not only are contemporary men and women seeking more equal and satisfying marriage partnership, they are also seeking shared responsibility for parenting. It is not just the changes wrought by women’s greater freedoms these past decades but compensatory shifts in the male psyche, as well, that is transforming family life now.
Modern men are much more responsible in relation to contraception, the decision whether to have children or not, in supporting their wives’ career aspirations, and in caring for their children. Men today want to be hands-on fathers, not just breadwinners as in earlier generations.
Today parenting is not just childcare, pre-school or schooling. It includes getting one’s offspring off to their own adult life or of parenting mature adults under the same roof. As well, support for their ageing parents in elder care. We will address all of these dilemmas of modern parenthood head on, taking one each week.
Now we note six themes in relation to children, parents and family life as suggested by Don Edgar in his December 1993 article for Family Matters, “Parents at the Core of Family Life” :
1. Children need stable family arrangements
Those doing well in adolescence have received family care that has been consistent, regular and reassuring. Broken marriages must work hard to provide stability. The need for the familiar and for stability is why kids like to read the same stories over and over, and why they must always end in the same way.
If the family stability is fractured by one parent dying, or leaving, or changing partners, the child’s whole world is shaken. Fortunately the rate of divorcing has slowly decreased, falling from 2.7 per 1,000 residents in 2003, to 2.3 per 1000 residents in 2007 (the last year for which such statistics are known so far). The decline may be modest, but it is going in the right direction. That is good news for Australian families!
2. Children need security, a sense of being safe
Fear of kidnap, strangers, abuse and that their parents may divorce is real and children need reassurance that everyday conflict is ‘normal’ and won’t lead to family disruption, or that once separated they can still maintain a stable relationship with both parents. That is why access in most cases is essential. Three quarters of children of divorced parents have regular access and feel they possess both natural parents.
3. Children need time together with parents and family
The TV set and computer can undermine family life, especially at meal times. Work demands already use most of the parents’ time. A child aged nine who is told to look after herself for three hours a day establishes psychological independence which cannot be undone later if parents suddenly want her to be closer. Every family must commit to spend quality time together and work to establish firmly entrenched family bonds.
4. Children need a set of values and beliefs
Children need to feel part of something bigger than themselves. The Christian faith imbues children with stable values and high purposes. Neglecting our value system does untold damage to children.
5. Children need access to basic resources
Poverty is detrimental for everyone but a decent home is central to all children’s sense of wellbeing. Unemployment is a central family issue. With the unemployment rate tipped to jump to 8.5% by the end of 2010, and more than one million Australians jobless according to new Access Economics data, it can be estimated that 50 % of them would otherwise have been the family breadwinners. This represents a substantial depletion of income and opportunities, loss of self-esteem, confidence and social participation for the entire family.
Thousands of Australian families with children are being nurtured in an environment where neither parent works and this is of great concern. The number of Australians who live in poverty after they have paid for housing is deplorable. This includes a large proportion of single-parent families, many renters and far too many young people. There is no good news here yet.
6. Children need example and action
Cultural and moral values are taught, modelled, expressed and learned in the home. The family is responsible for the instilling and promotion of character in members of the next generation. If we are profligate with the earth’s resources (fuel, utilities, plastic bags and wasteful packaging), model materialism and set greed as an example, demonstrate self-interest as our driving motive, express or tolerate racist attitudes, act as if sexual promiscuity in the media and amongst our acquaintances is acceptable, then what hope is there for our children who are watching and learning from all we do? We need to be very careful not to underestimate the primacy of parents and the importance of children to our quality of life now and in the future.
Because families are the foundation of our society, we will look anew each week at issues such as unemployment, how work and family interact, the recognition of unpaid work in the home, family violence, the effect of the media on children, the teaching of family values, care for children, family members with disabilities and family members who are aged and infirm or who have no children of their own.
We will provide intelligent and needed ideas for young people prior to marriage and seek to help couples form lasting relationships and aid reasonable marriages to become good marriages.
Family First will lead the way using moral authority in calling for justice and fairness for all families and commitment to support families in all their roles.
No better foundation for any family can be found then in the commitment of Joshua (24:15) “But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”
You may also find help in the professional articles on such issues at “Marriage Works”, published by Dr and Mrs Moyes and available on http://www.mwmagazine.com.au/
Rev the Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes AC MLC
Each week in this series of studies on Improving Family Life, we will consider issues and how they may be confronted.
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