Labour’s Families in Britain paper admits married parents are best for children

Steve Doughty
Daily Mail
19th December 2008

(My emphasis in bold; my comments in italics):

Labour has finally admitted that married parents are better for children than parents in live-in partnerships, and that they stick together more than twice as long.

Broken families and missing parents are bad for children and for the country, ministers said, in a Government paper on the state of family life that marks a U-turn on previous party thinking.

The document accepts that ‘some family forms face greater challenges than others‘.

This is because the only natural family is, er, a natural one, not any old arrangement, defined as family, by any pressure group that demands recognition and preferential treatment.

Seven out of ten young criminals come from single parent homes that make up only a quarter of all families, it says, adding that stepfamilies can also be difficult for children. But the report still falls short of declaring that marriage is a good thing.

I guess there would be far too many self-appointed ‘experts’ jumping up and down if the Government were to admit the realisation, finally, that, political correctness really has “gone mad”.

The ‘evidence paper’ – produced by Children’s Secretary Ed Balls and Cabinet Office minister Liam Byrne – rejects the idea of any state support for marriage and married couples.

What, support the majority? Do the right thing? Use their own evidence of the problems caused by marriage breakdown and change policies to improve society?

Instead it says the answer to family crisis at the heart of what critics call ‘broken Britain’ is more money for the poor and more counselling to encourage ‘quality relationships’.

I thought they just rejected supporting married couples, so what is this supposed to mean? What is a “quality relationship” in Ed Balls’ world?

What does this mean in plain English? It means they will keep on promoting all types of relationship and stuff marriage as a special and very valuable way of life.

I wonder what form the ‘counselling’ will take, when schoolchildren are increasingly being led to believe that any relationship is acceptable.

Don’t governments just love to break things and then offer ‘solutions’?

The admission that stepfamilies are often troubled and that two parents are good for children reverses the official thinking that all kinds of families are equally good. The paper was published as Mr Balls met a group of media agony aunts at a ‘relationship summit’ to discuss help for families that are breaking up.

He said: ‘We know how important stable family relationships are to the well-being of both adults and children.’

The Families in Britain paper was the first major Government statement on family life since 1998.

It accepted a mountain of evidence that single parent families and step-families are not as good for children and the rest of society as families headed by married parents.

It said that seven out of ten young criminals come from single parent families, that children of single parents do worse at school, that two thirds of such families are poor, and a third of single mothers are depressed.

‘An absent parent can be associated with adverse material and emotional outcomes,’ the paper found.

Step-families, it found, produce outcomes for children ‘similar to those growing up in lone parent families’. Their children ‘show more psychological and behavioural problems than children in biological two-parent families’.

Married couples are happier and richer, and their children are better behaved and do better at school, the paper said.

Marriages last on average more than 11 years, it admitted, while only a fifth of cohabitations last as long as five.

The paper conceded that all studies have shown that the beneficial effects of marriage are greater than can be explained by the greater wealth or better education of married couples. But nevertheless it found the evidence ‘ambiguous’.

Ambiguous? Does the evidence look ambiguous to you? The social engineers really have a problem accepting reality, don’t they?

It concluded: ‘The quality of relationships matters most regardless of the legal form.’

This is a cracker! So after all that, they still ignore their own evidence and will continue to betray children, the country and common sense and decency.

Tory families spokesman Maria Miller called for state support for marriage and said the tax and benefits system is biased against two-parent families.

P.S. I have respect and admiration for single people who do the best they can for their children, but a society that promotes any other form of relationship than marriage between a man and woman does the children a great disservice.

It is that simple. It is also very important for the whole of society, as is evidenced by the prison figures and the massive numbers of other dysfunctions exacerbated by the dumbing down and general re-engineering of civilisation as we used to know it.

Labour – do the RIGHT thing for once and promote and support marriage!