‘Older people grew up with unhealthy attitudes towards sex’

Values have been shaped by adult children with many now embracing diversity

The common ground shared by young and old in relation to family values in the Irish Times/Ipsos MRBI poll comes as little surprise to many whose work involves reaching out to different generations.

“I think many older people grew up in a different era where we had to deal with distorted and unhealthy attitudes towards sex,” says Anne Dempsey of the Third Age Foundation, a voluntary group which promotes active ageing.

“But we’ve been shaped by our own adult children. Nowadays, many of us are happy not just to accept differences and diversity, but to embrace it as the way we live now.”

This idea of shared values straddling the generational divide is something Dr Jane Grey, a senior lecturer in sociology at Maynooth University, has found in her research.

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Many of the changes in Irish family life – cohabitation, getting married later in life and delayed childbirth – aren’t necessarily disrupting the ways of old.

Instead, many are simply postponing this more traditional form of family until later in life.

Marriage, for example, is still very important to younger generations. Most cohabiting couples with children tend to go on to marry. And the incidence of divorce is very small by international standards.

Overall, Irish family diversity remains fairly limited compared with other western countries, she says, with married families accounting for about 70 per cent of all family units.

The lack of consensus across the generations on whether marriage is more stable than co-habiting suggests a growing recognition that many factors are at play is making relationships or families work.

A recent study by academics at the University of Limerick found that many of the benefits attributed to marriage were not related to legal status per se but to the socio-economic background or educational attainment of parents.

“What we are reasonably clear about is in a situation where you have two parents but they are not married, getting them to marry will make no difference at all,” UL sociology lecturer Dr Brendan Halpin concluded, in a study with Dr Carmel Hannan.

Similarly, it found an overestimation of the negative effects of lone parenthood on its own, which did not take into account these background factors.

For Karen Kiernan of One Family, the lone parent support group, the poll findings are a welcome sign that society seems to be moving away from taking a moralistic view of single parent families.

“In the past, if someone was separated or deserted, it had a horrendous effect because society judged them,” she says. “Now we can see that once you account for socio-economic factors, children in single parent families do just as well.”