241 Pizza

What the experts say

Speak to psychologists and therapists, and you’ll find there is no longer a stigma attached to what Kahr terms “alternative family arrangements”. In fact, anything goes. “There is an increasingly postmodernist conception of family life,” he says. “What we have seen over the past 30 years is a de-idealisation of the nuclear family. People no longer feel the same pull to re-create the traditional family structures in which we all grew up.” So old families are out, and new ones are in? Apparently so.

“One of the main factors behind all these changes is a whole sociocultural shift,” says Caroline Falkus, a partner in the family law firm Bross Bennett. “It’s the removal of stigma from divorce, separation and single- and same-sex parenthood. Add to that the anti-discrimination legislation and the Civil Partnerships Act, and what we have now is the opportunity to be a much more individual package in society.”

It’s an opportunity welcomed by many. Rebecca Abrams, a writer and faculty member at the School of Life, grew up in a wife-swap situation — “my parents got divorced and then the two people who had been left got together” — and sees the changes as an agent for good. “People are far less judgmental now, and it is so much easier to make families how you want or need to, and that is fantastic. I think there are a lot of people who grew up in traditional family units that were miserable. And I know quite a lot of children growing up in non-nuclear setups who are doing just fine. Even here, in conventional north Oxford, it is happening. The couple down the road have divorced but have carried on living together, my friend nearby has separated from her husband and is realising that life for her might be better like this, and of my daughter’s eight friends, six have divorced parents.”

It is easy to dismiss these new setups as symptoms of our obsession with individual needs, with what Abrams calls our “pick and mix culture — the almost messianic idea that we can create the ideal life for ourselves”. But these new approaches are not only about breakdown. “The flipside of traditional family life was traditional divorce,” says the writer Alain de Botton. “Which meant you’d try to find your soul mate, and if that didn’t work then you’d blow up the marriage and the family. But now we’re seeing a reinvention of divorce as much as a reinvention of the family. So you get people still sharing a house, parents staying in touch, going on holiday together with new spouses and partners — all for the sake of the children. The concept has matured. We don’t expect to live happily ever after. We realise we might not. And rather than petulantly walk away, the thought now is: ‘What of this can this be salvaged?’ ”

It’s an idea backed up by recent research by the Oxford Centre for Family Law and Policy, commissioned by the Ministry of Justice, and by the law. “One of the things that has significantly changed in the courts has been the recognition of the importance of a father’s role,” says Falkus. “Six or seven years ago, I would say to fathers: ‘You can probably get half the school holidays and alternate weekends.’ And now I’m saying: ‘How involved do you want to be?’ And beyond that, you have psychological parents, of whom you ask: do you want to be involved in this child’s life? Are you significant in this child’s life? Those are the important things. You might be the step-parent, but you can still have parental responsibility.”

Family is about what happens in practice, not theory. Girlhood dreams may turn out to be futile in the face of real-life relationships and the challenges they bring. “We’re coming to the end of an age of extreme romanticism, based on the belief that you could somehow magically fuse love and marriage together,” says de Botton. “Once you abandon that idea, then you’re into a much more flexible system. We may be getting back to a more pragmatic sense of what the family is about — things like property and children — rather than an absolute soul mate. After all, that’s a tremendously demanding idea, an idea that probably only worked for 2% of the population, who, strangely, managed to persuade the other 98% to buy into it.”

Times recommends

• How I lost the gift of joy for a while
• How to get Coleen Rooney's post-baby body
• The A-Z of winter style rules