The Family
Platform is an EU body with a brief to review and research the situation of the
family across the EU and recommend policy. The other day, it issued a major new
report called ‘Foresight Report: Facts and Precondition of Wellbeing of
Families’. As might be expected, the document is shot through with politically
correct presuppositions about the family.

For
example, it acknowledges that divorce and out-of-wedlock births are widespread across
Europe but it studiously avoids saying this might be a problem, especially for
children. Obviously it wishes to avoid being ‘judgemental’ even though it’s
perfectly possible to regret a high rate of divorce, or the number of children
growing up without a father without making any value judgement as such.

However, on
other matters it has less hesitation being judgemental. For example, it draws
attention to the pay gap between men and women without telling us that the main
reason it exists is because so many women do part-time work.

Similarly,
it draws attention to the supposedly uneven division of work between men and
women even though research by Dr Catherine Hakim and others shows that when
measured across the entire week from Monday to Sunday, men and women do roughly
equal amounts of work. We are not told this.

Overall,
the document leans very heavily towards the family diversity view of the family
and appears to see no reason at all to give special support to marriage. What
matters to it is supporting whatever choices adults make, and then helping
children once those choices are made.

With regard
to family form, there is no question of encouraging one choice over another,
even though the EU has no problem with encouraging other choices, for example,
that women should opt for paid employment over house work and accordingly place
their children in day-care.  About this,
the EU isn’t neutral.

The
document outlines all sorts of different types of families. One that caught the
eye was the so-called ‘patchwork family’. It gives a fictional example of such
a family consisting of two adults and five children living in several
households.

Maria is
living with her partner Erik. They have a child together, Simon. But Maria has
two other children from a previous relationship. They still live with their
father because they didn’t want to move away from their neighbourhood. So as to
keep in contact with them, Maria spends one week living with her kids from her
previous relationship, and the next week living with her new partner and their
child. She is a ‘ping pong mother’.

Erik also
has two children from a previous relationship and when Maria is with her ex-partner,
his ex-partner comes to live with him along with their two children. And so it
goes. Presumably those children are ‘ping pong kids’.

It has to
be said, these adults and children are leading very…complicated lives. But
again, the Family Platform doesn’t seem to regard this as in the least
problematic. There is no real stability here unless you count circulating between
different households and living arrangements as stability.

Frankly, a
refusal to recognise that the decline of the traditional family of mother,
father and child is a problem, is itself a very big problem. The Family
Platform engages in precisely this sort of denial.