2. The problem with family.

Essay 2 of 12…to solve anything, we first have to understand the problem.

My 12 Christmas thought pieces – NOT definitive guides or authoritative wisdom – attempt to highlight the complexity and deep-rooted nature of most of the problems we are trying to solve with, or in, education.

1. Society 2. Family 3. Education 4. School 5. Curriculum 6. Assessment 7. English 8. Maths 9. Science 10. Teaching 11. Learning 12. Research

In political, economic and social terms, family has become the base unit of society. It was a simple leap of rhetoric from David Cameron when the ‘Big Society’ mutated into the equally meaningless, ‘hard-working families.’ The family is a hot topic in politics, and an even hotter one in economics. You only have to re-watch all the supermarket, high street chemists and department store adverts for Christmas to realise quite how deeply engrained the family has become as an easily manipulated, marketed at, and probably – if we’re really honest – slightly contrived entity.

It would be churlish of me to suggest that family is just another imagined reality; that it doesn’t exist. Clearly, it exists. And it matters too. In my first Christmas essay, I suggested that society is a politically expedient myth. In my second reflection here – on concepts or matters which are embroiled with the challenge, purpose and function of education – on family, I’m going to suggest that the nuclear, modern family is perhaps an invention of recent date.

This may be a bitter pill to swallow after a merry little Christmas with your nearest and dearest. I hope your Christmas was happy and that your immediate family were happy too. I am rather dependent upon family at the moment, as I am separated and my twenty-one year marriage rumbles to its climatic legal close. My adolescent kids are great, my little – forty-seven year old – sister and her family have just given me the most wonderful Christmas. Mum was there, in body, in anger, in torment and confusion too. We shared some snatched moments of joy; where she hummed Beatles songs: giggling and indecipherable. My elder half-siblings have been there for me this year too, our deep family ties curated as adults beyond the estrangements of yesteryear. I need my family more than they need me right now. Family is the rope which tethers us to the Earth.

Yet, it fucks us up too. Larkin called it. Man hands on misery to man. There is no such thing as a normal family, some are more normal than others, but humans are flawed and parenting is hard and the pressures to be the perfect, happy family unit are huge. We make mistakes, our parents made mistakes and their parents did too.

From the outside, other families; perhaps the families of our childhood friends, seem more normal, more fun, more loving, more chaotic, more broken, more perfect than ours but we only really scratch the surface of their lives. We are entrenched in our nurtured genealogy. All humans are between 96 and 99% identical genetically but the differences in our DNA are even smaller between siblings, offspring and our direct ancestral lineage. This is something most of us care little about in our youth but as we age and our short-term memory fades our family histories and the places associated with them deepen.

While our genealogy fascinates and is collected and shared via photographs and stories, it is our inherited nurture which embeds our psychological profiles and our emotional intelligence, hang ups and future life successes or failures. We are our own selves but the love, the neglect, the disparagement, the encouragement, the acceptance, the criticism, the competition, the cultural enrichment, the indulgence and the mollycoddling which occurs shapes us deeply. We know the criticality of our parents or carers to our future mental health, yet we so rarely discuss it and – as parents – we are left, often with little tangible support and guidance, to work out how best to do it on the hoof. There are too many conflicting self-help guides; too many do-gooding and close but not immediate relatives quick with a patronising soundbite but the fact that we – as a ‘society’ are still learning this most fundamental role on the job is almost as daft as development chemists and engineers re-discovering the laws of thermodynamics each generation.

I will elaborate upon the disproportionate emphasis upon getting good grades, getting a good job, earning money, becoming successful, being good at Maths, or English, or both as opposed to fathoming our emotions, developing manners, confidence, empathy, tolerance in my next thought piece on education but the societal pressure to churn out competent, competitive children into the workplace seems rather unhealthy to me.

This is the fundamental problem with family in my opinion. There is too much (sometimes self-imposed) pressure on parents to be absolutely brilliant. Pressure not only to not screw up their kids but to – somehow – make them better than they were and to groom them for success in an economically driven society, rather than grooming them for success and happiness in a fulfilment and purpose driven world.

This is a problem of recent date. The family didn’t really exist as single entity in pre-history. In our communities or tribes of approximately 150 people, we’d have had parents and siblings but family groups would have been much more interdependent and intermingled. If a young mother was struggling with tiredness a slightly older mother, or elder daughter would be on hand to help. The village or tribal elders would have seen it all before and be on hand to offer their sage like wisdom. Fifteen year olds having experienced something just once, and then declaring themselves world experts on this topic wouldn’t have been a thing 10,000 years ago. Probably not even a thing much more than 100 years ago. Wisdom, knowledge and support would have flowed through those communities like water.

With the exception of the aristocracy, the landed gentry and the affluent upper middle classes, people in Victorian times and up to the 1950s (before the invention of the contraceptive pill and the commonplace application of modern medicine, most notably antibiotics) families would have been larger and lived in smaller houses with a great many people sleeping in one room. Elder siblings would have helped out more, lightening the parenting load and local communities were more closely networked via local churches or community groups.

From the 1920s and particularly 1950s onwards the number of people per household started to decrease. The insularity of the household and evolution of the nuclear family unit, with 2.4 children developed further through the 1980s and 1990s as we transitioned towards a more equal, but also a more consumerist and materialist society.

By the late 1990s house prices necessitated a dual income; we became a more secular society; positive changes in society encouraged greater co-parenting and consumerism, and therefore envy – the ‘keep up with the Jones’ mentality – increased. While we have more labour saving devices and appliances than our parents and grandparents did, the pressures on the nuclear family have undoubtedly increased, frequently juxtaposed with a significant reduction in the availability of or involvement with a local support network.

The insularity, isolation and pressures on modern families (exacerbated by the relentless marketing and advertising to this demographic; also the tiresome political rhetoric of ‘hard working families’) may have increased freedom from irritating, old-fashioned, judgemental and bigoted relatives but it has made us less tolerant and less connected – on a local level.

While the freedom to move and work and live all over the country, continent or world has greatly increased, this means that our friends and wider families – the people who could support us when life gets tough as it inevitably does from time to time – are inaccessible to us. Couple this to our increased secularity and lack of involvement in local community groups means that we are lonelier and more cut off than we’ve ever been before.

While it is great that we can find our tribe and find our friends, they all lead busy lives – like you and me and however lovely they are, they cannot always be relied upon outside the good times. This modern unit of immediate family accidentally drives families apart too, reduces our tolerance and acceptance of in laws leading to intolerance, impatience, resentment and conflict. The unspoken tension when families came together at Christmas will have been unbearable for many – as brilliantly brought to life in @joon_of fictional 12 days of Christmas.

I fully realise that I am a hypocritical romantic. I appreciate being free of the shackles of family politics both geographically and culturally much of the time, but I have an inkling that we were happier when our lives were simpler and less global; when we lived and worked and socialised and familied and worshipped and communitied all within a ten or fifteen mile radius. Yes, our lives may have been less exotic back then, but they’d have been more real and – arguably – had more meaning. And in that romantic, lost world our immediate families would have mattered but they wouldn’t have been the be all and end all social, political and economic group they have become.

So, the problem of the modern family unit is its insularity, its quest for perfection, its envy and endless comparison with others and its lack of available (local community) support system.

This very modern problem has a knock effect on to education, which will be the feature of my next thought piece. Put simply, there are probably too many families who don’t care enough about their children’s education – let’s say 25%; maybe a relatively balanced central section of about 50% and then a further 25% who care too much: the over-protective (helicopter parents), the pushy (tiger parents) and the academically or socially elitist – those who ‘want the best for their kids’ and to hell with everyone else.