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My friend's email said she had "some surprising news". She did indeed. The news was a four-week-old adopted baby. My friend has just turned 50.
The standard way of having babies is to marry in your twenties, breed in your thirties and raise the children as a couple. Most of my friends have failed to do that. Some were disinclined to settle down with a member of the opposite sex. Others neglected to do so at the right time. Others still were let down by their reproductive systems.
Until recently, most of them would have remained childless. That, traditionalists argue, is the way it should be. Society messes with the standard two-up, two-down family at its peril.
But society is indeed messing with the structure of families in all manner of different ways. Doctors provide people with children through IVF, sperm banks, surrogacy and egg implantation. Books and websites offer home insemination products and handy hints. The latest target for traditionalist fury is a new rule, which comes into force next month, allowing lesbian couples adopting children to put anybody - even a woman - down on the child's birth certificate as its father.
Where a baby can't be spawned, it can be acquired. Geopolitics is on the side of those judged too old by British social services: thanks to the opening up of China and the collapse of the Soviet Union, babies are widely available for sale there and in Latin America.
My friends have used most of these means. One bought some sperm from a bank. A lesbian couple were given some by a friend. I know people who have done IVF and others who have got babies from China, Russia and Bolivia. And then there are the conventional unconventional families: the steps, the halves, the single parents and the friend who, after a long court battle, has got custody of her drug-addicted brother's four children.
The modern world's increasingly accommodating attitude to unorthodox families doesn't meet with everybody's approval. "The present Government seems not to care a damn about families," says Iain Duncan Smith, former Tory leader, of the rule-change on fathers. Catholics thunder against gay adoption. The implication is that the standard family is the one that God or nature intended, and condemning children to any other set-up is cruel and unnatural.
But this is to take a myopic view of the human race's history. The brief period in the rich world - maybe the past half-century - during which the two-up, two-down family has prevailed, is an aberration. Before the middle of the 20th century life was more precarious. Parents were taken off by war, famine, disease or childbirth. Being brought up by one parent, by grandparents, by any friend or relation ready to take on the task was the norm, as it remains in most of the world today.
Throughout most of history, mankind has made do with whatever parents it could get. It's not their age, their blood-relationship or their number that matters, but the love and devotion with which they do the job.
I know Albert and this isn't him
Queen Victoria plastered London with so many memorials to her beloved Albert that Charles Dickens wondered whether there might be an “inaccessible cave” in which he could hide to escape them. As a resident of one of the city's surplus of Albert Squares, I am the victim of this: after 12 years, the jokes about my probable occupation as landlady of the Queen Vic have worn a little thin. Nevertheless, I have a soft spot for Prince Albert, and am therefore saddened to see his memory traduced by Rupert Friend in Young Victoria.
Mr Friend is a fine actor. That's not the problem. The problem is that he is far too glamorous. Prince Albert was a swot, a nerd and a geek, and rather plain with it. No movie star can hope to do justice to his admirable dullness.
Vent your anger – it's all the rage
When I yell at my children, they complain, so I'm delighted to reveal that Harvard University has come to my defence. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has been running since 1965, has found that people who express anger have more successful professional and personal lives than those who repress it. So much for all the anger-management classes and the happy pills designed to calm people down.
My children, unfortunately, have drawn the wrong conclusion from this work. Instead of quietly accepting that it is important for my wellbeing to shout at them, they insist that it is crucial to their development to shout back.
Reader views (4)
I agree that what a child needs most is a loving home environment. As such I have no problem with lesbian couples, gay couples, older people, etc, adopting as long as they are committed to providing one. However, I am disturbed by the ruling that anyone - including a lesbian partner - can be out down as the father.
This is patently absurd. The person who should be put down as father SHOULD BE the actual biological father unless this is unknown. There are a variety of reasons for this - the most basic of which are that only by correct identification can issues such as inherited characteristics and possible medical conditions be dealt with effectively. Apart from this I believe it is natural justice to allow a child to know who their own parents are.
It's fair enough to keep such knowledge from the outside world, but I fear that a snmug assertion of "mind your own business" or "my lesbian lover is your father, so just accept it", really isn't going to cut it with an upset or angry young adult demanding answers.
Any caring parent should have the common sense to try and anticipate such an obvious question and be ready to supply an honest and detailed answer. Failure to do so, reveals a level of selfishness inapropriate in a parent.
Adoption shoidl be about the neeeds of the child, not the personal preferneces of the parent.
- Andrew, Edinburgh, 09/03/2009 14:10
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Thank you Emma, nice to see something sensible, and positive about alternatives to the nuclear family model, which is not an automatic guarantee for a happy childhood.
- Daniel, London, 03/03/2009 17:05
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Delighted to see a positive comment on the structure of families today "It's not their age, their blood-relationship or their number that matters, but the love and devotion with which they do the job". How wonderful to hear that.
As a single parent that gave me enormous encouragement instead of the modern day statistic label we get....and I can shout at him too...fantastic.
- Vanessa Bell, Midhurst, UK, 03/03/2009 15:33
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The difficult art of anger, as any actor will tell you, is not to repress it, but to express it and fully release it without obstruction. This is always appreciated, even by the unfortunate target. It is obstructed anger which inspires ridicule and fear of further grotesque expression.
- Bloke, London, 03/03/2009 13:10
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