Carolyn Moynihan: Radical methods needed to fix poor parenthood

COMMENT

The wailing of the state welfare ambulance on another trip to the bottom of the cliff has exasperated Michael Bassett, as well it might. Who really believes that another $120 million for the Child Youth and Family Service, or any amount of money, will fix the multiplying problems of irresponsible parenthood and family breakdown?

The official response to the terrible lives and deaths of Saliel Aplin and Olympia Jetson has the hollow ring of an establishment that clings to an impossible task because anything else would require a basic change of direction in family policy.

But Dr Bassett is an intellectual, politically experienced, and what is more he belongs to a generation that took family values as axiomatic, so I read with keen interest his solution to the epidemic of family dysfunction and child abuse that has developed over the past 30 years. I must say I was disappointed.

Responsible parenthood is certainly the key issue, but is stuffing the underclass with contraceptive pills and sending them for abortions the way we are going to get it?

If anyone thinks that is a silly question, ponder the fact that the pandemic of irresponsibility we are talking about has developed precisely during the decades of subsidised or free contraception, easy access to abortion, and sex education in schools. Throwing millions more dollars in this direction is just as futile as revamping CYFS, unless the state decides to abolish reproductive choice for welfare recipients.

Since a full-blown eugenics programme is unlikely to find political acceptance, we must find an alternative though equally radical approach. This lies in the area of values specifically, the family values Dr Bassett reminds us about and that anyone over 50 had the benefit of while growing up because they were embodied in laws and customs, if not in every family.

The understanding that sex belonged within marriage, that marriage was a firm commitment for better or for worse, that you would sacrifice yourself for your children were values that formed the bedrock of family stability and individual well-being.

It is true they were being undermined in the post-war period, leading to an increasing number of shotgun weddings as the 1950s rolled over into the 1960s. Then came the contraceptive pill and the whole ideology of sexual liberation that led to abortion on request, the loosening of divorce laws and the domestic purposes benefit itself, which Dr Bassett helped to inaugurate and which he now sees as a mistake.

Good on him for saying so, but it is not the only mistake waiting to be acknowledged or even the main one affecting family life and the well-being of today's children. The big mistake of the baby-boomer generation (to which I belong) and its precursors was to trash the values around sex and then try to make up their own - sex as self-expression, as recreation, as your choice.

So how can we now complain that people have discovered the value of sex as a means to a welfare benefit and place their kids a poor second to keeping their latest partner happy? Tell them to take a pill and don't pay them when they have more children, threaten to take away their benefit. But if they can't see the value of living differently it will only make life worse for the children.

Even if, with the addition of contraception and jobs, the welfare mums and bludging dads could be assimilated to the responsible class, the children's problems would not be over. The middle class does not kill its children in the crude way of the undeserving poor, but by refusing to pass on its moral patrimony exposes its children to spiritual death and a growing number of cases to self-harm and even suicide.

Side by side with the great liberalisation of everything since World War II there has developed, according to recent Australian research, a trend which today sees one in four young people affected by depression before they reach 18, and a similar proportion of those aged 18 to 24 with one or more mental disorders.

A researcher at the University of Queensland says relationship problems play a significant role in youth depression. A large study of high school students in the United States found girls who had sexual intercourse were three times more likely to be depressed than girls who had not. A New Zealand survey of 900 21-year-olds found that nearly a third of the women started having sex when they were 15 or younger and 70 per cent of them regretted it.

Premature sexual experience was helping to turn unhappy young women into a health time bomb, an adolescent psychologist wrote in the Medical Journal of Australia this year. And he was not talking about one socio-economic class.

In our country the architects of this wretched legacy press on with the sexual revolution through the Government they dominate, redefining marriage and family life to the point of meaninglessness. What a waste of time. What a betrayal of the children who will continue to be born, despite every birth control campaign, to people who lack any understanding of their role and the personal resources to carry it out.

The understanding and the resources still exist, of course. It is up to the younger generations, seeing how completely today's sexual ideology fails to meet their real needs, to begin their own search for the truth of the matter. When they discover family values, watch out.

* Carolyn Moynihan is editor of the email newsletter Family Edge.