Concern for today's family raised

EU: The family and people's readiness to form families can no longer be taken for granted, a conference on "Families, Change and Social Policy in Europe" was told yesterday.

Prof Mary Daly of the School of Sociology who has written extensively on family policy, was speaking at the EU conference in Dublin.

She also said one had to question whether State policies were responsible for "an increasing disjuncture between partnership and parenting".

She said the strong trends in Europe were towards living alone, falling fertility, a downward trend in marriage and an increase in extra-marital births. One result of this is that we have "a shrinking family sector".

The average young couple, she said, faced three issues before committing to parenthood: co-ordinating the long-term perspectives of both partners; whether they can afford children and the problem of reconciling work and private life.

"Double income has become the wealth norm" and increasingly the "task" of procreation was being left to couples on lower incomes and immigrants - both groups which tended to have bigger families.

She said the long-term concern would be for the "production of welfare" and care as the fall in fertility and increasing life expectancy had led to the "dejuvenation and ageing of the population".

Referring to the "over burdening of women", Prof Daly said there had been an incomplete modernisation of gender roles, where women were increasingly expected to take on paid employment while men were less likely to take on traditional home duties.

"Women are finding it increasingly difficult to combine their two worlds."

She said ambivalence was the lot of many mothers who consistently expressed the view that they must have more choice about whether they took up paid employment or not, and when if they did.

It was a key challenge for family policy-makers to reconcile the modernisation of family relations with the economic, social and demographic needs of the country. Policies tended to encourage both parents to go out to work.

"The State subjects more of social life to the logic of the market, of calculation, of rationality, thereby diminishing . . . traditional norms," she said.

"Fertility may have to be foregrounded by States," she added, including policies to encourage women to have more children.

Opening the conference, the Minister for Social and family Affairs, Ms Coughlan, said her overall interest was in "examining how families and family life as a major resource of our society can be better supported and strengthened in making their key contribution to society at this time of great change".