Leading Article: Don't panic, `family life' is quietly thriving

Family is one of those words it is almost impossible to use in a non-evaluative way. Like community, home, perhaps even market, it has come to connote something positive. Even the statisticians have capitulated. Instead of their chilly and non-evaluative term "household" they are now prepared to "focus on families". That, at least, is the title of a new compilation from the Office for National Statistics.

As usual, it is an immaculate conception, clear and comprehensible, a must-read for those tempted to opine about the decline and fall of this most central of social institutions.

The risk the statisticians run is that the right-wing social panickers will ask why haven't they been even more evaluative, as they bemoan the indices of deterioration in the sacred family in their newspaper columns this morning. The reply is twofold.

A first response says, contrary to social wisdom as peddled by the Daily Mail, "family" life is alive and remarkably well. We all continue, men and women, to bond with one another, live together, have children, look after them reasonably well and when they in their turn have children while we may not all live together we keep in contact, on the phone, getting together for high days and holidays.

Let it be shouted from the rooftops that the majority of children grow up in a family with two parents, that four of every five dependent children live in a "family", with a mum and a dad.

The second answer says that priests may mount their pulpits and secretaries of state may pull their legislative levers but at the end of the day "micro" social behaviour appears to be immune to the urgings of moralisers and ministers.

The way we couple, procreate, evaluate our own lives and our choices belongs to a realm ungoverned by and perhaps ungovernable by those who claim to possess social authority. We fall in and out of love, we cherish our offspring unofficially, and that is a fact worth celebrating.

Our society is not the first to find it hard to register social change except as deterioration. A few counterintuitive facts help. According to Social Focus on Families, the phenomenon of "latchkey kids" is less prevalent now than a generation ago; that is to say, fewer children return after school to empty homes. When they return (to their mothers, generally speaking) families now do much less eating together than they once did. We all graze or snack more and there are fewer family meals.

Yet only those who are certain the past was better can judge that ill. How many forty-somethings recollect mealtimes that were strained and stilted, conversation limited to grunts, monosyllables and hysterical outbursts by both parents and children?

Meanwhile the notion that all the curves are heading in the same direction is dispelled by these data. Marriage is an institution in motion, to be sure - ask Mrs Robin Cook, not to mention the partner of ex-premier John Major's son, let alone the lovers of princes and paupers, husbands, wives and mistresses high and low.

But lo and behold the divorce rate among late twenty-somethings (a key age for marriage bust-up) seems to have levelled. Yes, two in five marriages contracted now look like ending in divorce, but the 60 odd per cent that don't look pretty solid. Could it be that certain marriages are destined to last, that a certain fraction of the marrying population is fortunate enough, strong-willed enough or complacent enough to keep things together through thick and thin ?

This new collection reminds us of the fact of marital renewal, as a large slice of the divorced population remarries. It's true that "once bitten twice shy" holds less for men than for women but the idea that marriage is going out of fashion is simply not true.

What is incontrovertible is that we cannot sustain our general standards of living without women's input into both the formal economy and households. The tables in this report should be required reading for all those writers who wring their hands and mop their brows over the fate of modern men. The brute fact is that women work outside the home and they work within it. Social change has not yet done much for the domestic division of labour. More children may be snacking rather than eating formal meals but guess which parent buys the biscuits?

The Office for National Statistics has been pregnant with this collection for some time. Given the salience of family matters in public policy and the wealth of material available both through official surveys and the work paid for by the Economic and Social Research Council - notably the British Household Panel Survey - it wasn't absence of data that was the problem. Would Tim Holt, the Registrar General, have brought this out while the Tories still ruled?

Withal, we should be grateful, while noticing the lacunae. What actually happens behind the family front, let alone the bedroom doors, is not on display here. The implicit contracts men and women enter into with each other, the way some mothers and daughters cement a relationship that lasts till death parts them, turning grandparents into invaluable assistants in child-rearing, the reason why certain family units "work" despite material handicap or the absence of significant adults ... That is the empire of love, of affection that springs up autonomously, exceedingly difficult to measure, impossible to rule. It does not appear in imminent danger.