ABSTRACT
It is not possible to read British newspapers or watch television without being confronted by anxieties about the state of the family and family life; nor is this mere scaremongering. Shocking tragedies, involving terrible child abuse and an apparent institutional inability to react, provide the headlines; but behind this gut-wrenching misery are hard facts about ‘broken Britain’. 1 Several recent important studies have documented the extent to which we as the current generation of adults are failing to provide our children with a childhood and prepare them for the responsibilities and commitments of their own adulthood (Layard and Dunn 2009, Bradshaw and Richardson 2009). At the core of this failure is the breakdown of the family. One in four children in the UK now comes from a fatherless family; 90 per cent of single parents in Britain are female; and 35–50 per cent of fathers lose contact with their children after separation or divorce. The connections between fatherlessness and emotional and psychological problems, drug use, poor educational outcomes, alcohol abuse, teenage parenthood, and crime and domestic violence are well established (Social Justice Policy Group 2007). A conservative reading of these links might be that the welfare state has undermined the family and therefore that the withdrawal of the state is needed to resuscitate family life and kin ties. Alternatively, it can be argued that families and particularly children can be mended by more determined interventions and/or the involvement of other adults in parenting, but such responses are expensive or difficult to replicate in all circumstances. In their absence, poverty incubates the adverse outcomes. Forty-eight per cent of children in lone-parent families are poor, and fatherlessness comprises the largest source of child poverty. In many poor and socially isolated families, lines of responsibility are reversed. For example, modern Britain boasts 175,000 child and young carers who act as nurses for physically and mentally ill parents, with a large proportion of such families dependent on the state for economic support (Bennett 2009). Even in those families where both parents remain committed to supporting their children, economic demands squeeze the time available for parenting. Recent commentary has focused on mothers’ alleged selfishness in returning to work soon after having babies, but fathers too are distracted and preoccupied. 2 One-third of British fathers currently work in excess of a 48-hour week. It remains to be seen how the current recession will compound this vicious cycle of poverty and deprivation, but we cannot be optimistic about the prognosis.
