"Every Family Matters wants to actively force men and women, who have been drifting gratefully away from the ball-and-chain-and-live-with-it moral mentality for generations, back into the heteronormative marriage model. If Tory plans are initiated, they will institute a compulsory ‘cooling off’ period of three months before divorce proceedings, offer tax breaks and benefits bribes for married couples, and demolish Labour plans to offer the same recognition to unmarried couples and civil partners, as well as boring us all with a whole pile of ‘Pro-Family’ rhetoric." Penny Red

Penny Red and the FWord have both this week highlighted how fundamentally out of touch and fucked up Tory policy/thinking is on 'family' is. Personally I think we need a serious revision of what constitutes a 'family'. I am part of what is (leadingly, painfully) termed a 'broken' family. My parents are divorced, and do you know what? I wouldn't change that for the world. I love my mum and dad, and part of that is wanting to see them as happy as they could be. They are better, wholler people how they are now, than they were for years when together.

Science tells us women should have children young, women say they would quite like careers and an education, and society says that the 'best' environment for children is two married, hetrosexual people, one of whom stays at home, or should feel mighty guilty for not doing so.

So how about we change this, how about reissuing the word 'family' to mean anyone who loves you, how about we consider childcare as something which is done by women, men, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Open source parenting, sharing of knowledge, expereince. So many new mothers feel so alone, they rarely speak to adults, their work and social lives have been removed, and they are somehow considered to have a 'natural' parenting ability - as opposed the truth of learning by doing. So many role models would be available to a child, even if a 'father' wasn't available. Let's not talk about the 'break down' of family, if divorce only concerned the slumber of one type of love between two people, and wasn't (still) a social taboo it would hurt a lot less. If women could study, or work, as well as care a child with the help of a social network (family) there would be no 'ticking clock' to service, and far less discrimination against women of child-bearing age in the workplace.

Fuck the Tories. We don't need 'cooling off' periods on divorces. We don't need to blame 'single parent families' for all society's ills, we need to update how we idealise family to reflect how we actually live it.

Think that's not a credible model for a society? Try Iceland:

"Highest birth rate in Europe + highest divorce rate + highest percentage of women working outside the home = the best country in the world in which to live. There has to be something wrong with this equation. Put those three factors together - loads of children, broken homes, absent mothers - and what you have, surely, is a recipe for misery and social chaos. But no. Iceland, the block of sub-Arctic lava to which these statistics apply, tops the latest table of the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Human Development Index rankings, meaning that as a society and as an economy - in terms of wealth, health and education - they are champions of the world." Read more