Now in all shapes and sizes

The new urban family

At Jane Stephenson's house this Christmas, all will not be as it seems. While her house will be filled with a multi-generational, family-style group, the ties that bind will be those of mutual support, rather than shared genes. Stephenson and her friends are representative of the new urban family of the 21st century, when more and more "families" will be collections of unrelated people bound by common interests and values.

Jane, the divorced mother of Patrick (11) and Emma (9), lives in a close community in Bray, Co Wicklow, with a variety of neighbours, such as parents (married, separated and divorced) and "solos", who are unmarried with no attachments. They join together in family-style gatherings, while Jane also remains in a co-operative relationship with her ex-husband, her children's father, who lives in England. After Christmas, both parents will go on a ski-ing holiday with Patrick and Emma. "I think this will become much more common, that parents will be living separately but co-parenting, says Jane.

Jane, who grew up in Monkstown, Co Dublin, emigrated and travelled the world before returning to live in the Republic in 1995, when she found it hard to break in to Dublin's cliquey social milieu. "The social network was very much people who were married and born and bred in Ireland. They had already consolidated their networks and were happy within them and there was no room for anybody else. For those of us who fall outside that, it can be very isolating," says Jane.

As old social structures break down in the Republic and people become more socially mobile, they need gatherings at which to meet. Dating agencies abound, but Jane wanted a forum with no sexual agendas and no criteria for occupation or age. "Candace Bushell said that `maybe giving up on relationships is good for relationships', and I think that she may be right," says Jane. So earlier this year, Jane set up the Friendship Network. It is a means of helping people with common interests get together to share activities - from horse-riding, to theatre evenings, to family days out. At the first event - a cocktail party in the Shelbourne Hotel - nearly 300 people showed up. It confirmed Jane's instinct that in a changing Ireland, we need new ways to belong.

"This is not about self-pity; it's not about lonely-hearts. It's much more positive than that. It's about people taking a positive step to meet other people and broaden their horizons," says Jane.

"Everyone longs for intimacy and dreams of a nest of belonging in which one is embraced, seen and loved," writes John O'Donoghue, author of Eternal Echoes: Exploring our Hunger to Belong. At the core of this nest is the family. "Family provides the original and essential belonging in the world. It is the cradle where identity unfolds and firms," he writes.

The challenge in the next century will be to rear healthy children in families where the configurations of parents, grandparents and siblings may change a number of times in their lives. At the beginning of the 20th century, families generally consisted of two married parents and their biological children living under one roof. Today, biological parentage is sometimes replaced by egg and sperm donation. One-third of children are born outside marriage, and one-parent families are common. The United Nations now defines a family as "any combination of two or more persons who are bound together by ties of mutual consent, birth and/or adoption or placement and who, together assume responsibility for, inter alia, the care and maintenance of group members, the addition of new members through procreation or adoption, the socialisation of children, and the control of members".

In Denmark, the family is seen as "a community of persons who live a) in the same household and co-operate with each other, b) are bound together by emotional, social and cultural values and everyday contacts, c) share common interests, d) establish a mutual caring and provision system for other members. Not only are one-gender couples accepted within the definition, but they may also adopt children.

Psychologist Miriam Moore welcomes this diversity, and sees it as part of a trend towards a higher spiritual awareness. "In the past, the ideal was a mother, a father and 15 children, and you didn't disrupt that for anything in the world. The father could be a wife-beating drunk and the mother could have post-traumatic stress disorder, and yet they stayed together. When our ideal was at a peak and we were all good Catholics, we had one of the highest rates of schizophrenia in the Western World, along with depression and heavy drinking.

"Today we are more open, less judgmental and more accepting of a society made up of differences, and this can be very good. Just because people are `the third sex' - lesbians or homosexuals - does not mean that they are not families. If they want to have a child, they should be able to. On the other hand, if we think of family as being primarily there for children, we should be putting thought into having children before we have them - whether we are in the ideal marriage or a single parent family, or lesbians or homosexuals or having children in our 50s."

Children are often expected to bind people together, especially at Christmas, and in patchwork families various parents and grandparents may compete for children's time. This can place pressures on children, warns Teresa Heeney of Cherish, an organisation for single parents. "Mothers having families of children with different fathers is no longer unusual, and that means that there are then three families involved at least, and three or four different sets of grandparents. "I think people try very hard at Christmas to make things appear to be something that they aren't. It can all be very strange and very confusing for children. We need to build relationships based on the needs of children and not the adults, and that requires consistency and honesty all year round. Children cannot be the salve to the relationship problems of the adults, and yet I think that there is an expectation that they will be."

The challenge for the next century will be to embrace diversity while pursuing the kind of family life that is psychologically healthy for children - and adults. As Jane Stephenson has found, the yearning to belong never ends.