Gitanjali Prasad
Press Fellow (India)
Easter Term (April-July1999)
Supervisor: Dr Martin Richards
The Centre for Family Research, Cambridge University
A Study of the British Family and the British Print Media
The project I had chosen for my Fellowship programme was to see how the media could intervene to support the family. I was interested in the British family and the British media because on one level, there seemed to be a great deal of commonality between the changes that the British family had undergone and, and the changes the urban middle class Indian family was experiencing. The industrial revolution and the advent of capitalism had seen job-induced mobility and a consequent weakening of the extended family, traditional norms were weakening, and marriages no longer had the longevity they were once thought to have. Materialism and individualism were becoming increasingly important, and the dual career family with its attendant opportunities and problems had created new and disturbing complications with regard to childcare, as also care of the elderly. I made the assumption that if I saw where the British family was in 1999; I would perhaps be able to anticipate where the Indian family would be in 25 years time. In addition, as the English language press is largely modelled on the British press, I thought studying the scene in Britain, would help me see what could be done more effectively in India.
However, in the beginning my project faced many difficulties. The first problem I experienced was that as far as the project was concerned, the scene was dramatically different from what I had expected it to be. The first objection, which was not entirely unexpected, was that the project already had a bias, in that it wanted support for the family, instead of first studying the issue and determining whether in fact, the family should be supported.
A journalist’s role it could be argued is to observe and analyse rather than take a stand, which obviously hampers objectivity. However, as I was a journalist who had spent more than a decade within the home, I felt I had already studied the issue, and in the limited time available, I would rather work on my area of interest which was to see if media attention for the family was possible, or indeed desirable, rather than go back to the beginning and explore whether this was something that should be done as I would then have to leave at the point at which I wanted to begin.
The second problem I faced was that in Britain at this point of time, there is considerable ambivalence about the family. Many actually argue that the family is a patriarchal and exploitative institution that is detrimental to women and children, Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics gave a talk, broadcast live over the radio and received much media attention, which makes the point that, "What most defenders in Western countries call the traditional family was in fact a transitional phase in family development in the Fifties." He goes on to say, "Marriage and the family have become shell institutions." While this talk did receive much negative criticism, there are many that would argue that marriage has indeed become obsolete, and the family certainly needs to be re-defined, "is it the single parent family, or the same sex family…"
Attitudes to the Family
It was a revelation to me how very sharply drawn attitudes to the family were. And how to a large extent, opinions were divided along political lines. There is the conservative viewpoint which is seen to be pro-nuclear family and therefore anti-gay (a small but highly vocal minority), anti-poor, anti-single mother and so on. Then there is the liberal viewpoint, which would be deeply suspicious of anyone who espoused the cause of marriage, and on most issues takes a stand diametrically opposite to that of the conservatives. The newspapers by and large have taken well-defined positions with the Telegraph being seen as extreme right while the Guardian is regarded as liberal. The Times is "conservative with a small c", says John Harlow, its Social Affairs editor. Articles on the family tend to follow a predictable pattern. It’s hardly surprising then, that you need only ask a Briton his daily newspaper to be able to predict his views on many matters regarding the family very accurately. And depending on his political affiliations, the person’s opinion on the record of the Conservative Party and the current labour government on the support they have offered to the family would also differ.
However, to come back to the state of the family, it was certainly a shock to see how very different the attitudes are from those prevalent in India, and from what I had anticipated. Co-habitation is common in contemporary Britain, and to many people, the institution of marriage appears to be an anachronism. The Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries, confided that the children of many bishops actually chose co-habitation over marriage. One was struck with the extreme timidity with which even men of the Church chose to soft-pedal potentially contentious issues such as the government supplying contraceptives to under-age teenage girls without informing their parents. There is a great wariness in passing judgement on any kind of living arrangement people may choose to enter into. Even as religious traditionalists decry the "secularisation" of present day life and mourn the loss of faith among an increasing number of people, they are very worried about seeming to appear to moralise or sermonise.
Ceridwen Roberts, Director of the Family Studies Centre, says that though this government recognises the need to support the family, it does wish to seem to support the institution of marriage, ignoring all research on the subject which is unequivocal about the fact that the needs of men, women and children are best protected in a stable marriage. Penny Mansfield of One plus One, The Marriage and Partnership Research Charity agreed with this view. Both also stated that most people have a very distorted picture of the contemporary British family because journalists, academics and researchers tend to be interested in the atypical rather than the average family.
Traditional values are clearly under siege in contemporary Britain. And yet, interest in the family is very great indeed. There was a major government initiative on "Supporting Families," at which a key speaker was Jack Straw, the home secretary. There is considerable interest in how the government can intervene to support the family. Interestingly, though this paper has generally been well received, the liberal lobby is displeased that the government paper, comes out in favour of nuclear families, using statistics to illustrate that this is not only what most people desire, but also the system that has proved to most beneficial for children. The conservative lobby on the other hand sees increased support for single parent families as further weakening the case for marriage.
How long Working Hours Affect Fathers
Since my subject area was too vast and too vague to be successfully covered in twelve weeks, it was narrowed down to how long working hours affect fathers. I was interested in this area, because in urban middle class India this has the potential to be a major cause for family stress and break down. Of course, to use a catch phrase of our times, we too have a work rich and a work poor division within our populace. I intended to study the small minority of upper income professionals because for one, they are the target audience of A1 (or upper income bracket readership our magazines cater to), and also because, this seemed to be the direction much of the service and communication industries, which we are led to believe are the growth areas of the future are likely to follow.
In India, American multinational companies which pay the best salaries and offer the greatest opportunities for growth, make executives work very punishing hours. And well-established British companies have given up the very family friendly work culture they were respected for to do exactly the same. Was this to be an irreversible world-wide trend, I wondered, and why was it proving to be so popular, when the long term effects were clearly likely to be very negative for the employee, the family, and society as a whole. For this part of the study, I prepared a questionnaire, which I used on international students and a faculty member of Stanford University at INSEAD, France, and on Dr Findlay of the school of Business Studies, Edinburgh University. I also e-mailed the questionnaire to other business schools but I got no reply
On the surface the situation for high flyers in Britain was very similar to what the situation was like for their counterparts in India. Some weeks after I embarked on my project, there was an article in the London Times, which stated that "Men give 15 minutes a day to children" and this attracted considerable media attention. However, at INSEAD, I discovered, that even as the long work hours and more competitive work culture of American companies were followed by some British companies, the trend in Europe was exactly the opposite. "I expect to work far fewer hours than my father did", a young management school student from Germany confided, and statistics certainly bore him out.
The Scandinavian countries are introducing not only shorter hours but also concepts like a month’s paternity leave in addition to emergency leave, which may be used for the family. I learnt that John Major’s government had lost a court battle with the European Commission in 1996 to cut excessively long working hours. Apparently, evidence was just beginning to come in that this had actually boosted employment in Britain, with more employees working fewer hours. This government seems to be sincere in its efforts to usher in a more enlightened work culture. The" Supporting Families" document, released by the government, has a whole chapter on balancing work and family commitments, which shows that the government is aware of the price very long hours of work extract on the family front. And though it would have been more encouraging if it had come from her husband, the Prime Minister’s wife Cherie Blair has made a strong statement in favour of a month’s paid paternity leave! There is considerable awareness that Britons work the longest hours in Europe and that Britain’s family support systems are the weakest in Europe. The desire to provide more family friendly policies seems to be balanced by a realisation that this will put an even greater strain on employers, which perhaps Britain cannot afford to do at the present time. Economics is likely to decide policy rather than the other way around, unless the groups that are working on family policies, which are fairly vocal, are able to gain more muscle.
The Impact of Technology
One development that may have a profound influence on the question of work culture and working hours is the impact of information technology. As the Internet and innovations like e-mail become even more commonplace, men and women may find themselves acquiring a new control over their lives. If it was the industrial revolution that led to job induced mobility which led to the break up of the extended family, and the traditional bonds of the local community, one could argue that with new the new technology, the need to physically go to a workplace, or re-locate to new cities for the sake of a job, may be considerably reduced. It should be possible then, to regain a sense of being rooted, of belonging to a community, it may become easier to nurture relationships and have more stable families. There is of course the danger that an over reliance of technology may further erode the ability to form human relationships and connect with other people, but if the human species is intelligent and can show the survival and evolutionary skills it has demonstrated in the past, then there is indeed a great opportunity for the future of the family.
The Family Futures document brought out by Barclays suggests that in the future, we may see a return to a multigenerational family living under one roof, with work and living areas demarcated by an upstairs and downstairs division, and with domestic help to take care of the cooking and cleaning!
Some Interesting Findings
The interviews I conducted at INSEAD, the discussion with Dr Findlay and with Dr Charlie Lewis plus other research data all pointed to some interesting facets of male behaviour regarding long working hours.
Firstly, most men or so it appears to their wives or partners over-estimate the extent of their contribution to childcare and the home. Also, they are still very traditional with regard to their attitudes towards work. They see themselves primarily as breadwinners, and according to Dr. Lewis’ study may actually respond to an event like the birth of a new baby by working even longer hours, because that is how they think they are being good fathers! Research by Barclays also shows that 98% of fathers currently see themselves as breadwinners. It also shows that though 2/3 of fathers express their desire to spend more time with their children, only one in 20 has actually cut the number of hours worked.
Secondly, though the employer certainly exerts some pressure, which contributes to men working longer hours, some of the pressure is self-generated. And in a competitive environment, what one man does, his peers may not do at their own peril!My own query, could it be that today as we are a more egalitarian society, and we no longer identify and slot a man by the family he belongs to, the job, the designation, the pay and the perks have become a powerful identifier of "who I am". This could be one reason why the work culture in the USA which has less of a class based society than most other countries, has been more ruthless than in other parts of the world?
Where is the British Family now?
Statistics are complicated at the best of times but especially so if they relate to an area like the family. There are so many variables when you are examining human beings, that you can discount whatever does not suit the viewpoint you wish to propagate. In addition, people find fault with the techniques, as well as the conclusions reached by various research bodies. If you wish to make the case that the institution of marriage is dead in contemporary Britain you could say that less than 1% of British brides are virgins when they marry. Marriage rates have fallen sharply and in 1995, the rate was actually half the rate in 1970(statistics Family Policies Study Centre) if you wish to take the opposite view you can say that marriage is still popular in Britain. Over 300,000 marriages take place every year and 80% of young people plan to marry according to government statistics available in the document, "Supporting Families." Also, over 60%of married couples actually remain married to the same partner all their lives. However, if one looks at trends, it is clear that even as the marriage rates have fallen amongst the young, divorce rates have risen. So the institution of marriage is certainly in decline though it is far from being obsolete at the present time.
The Single Parent Family
As stated earlier, the single parent is becoming increasingly common. Family Futures states that "by the mid 1990s 22% of families with dependant children were headed by a lone parent, three times the proportion at the start of the 1970s. The sharp rise was attributable to a sharp rise of single mothers…Up until the mid 1980s the growth in single mothers was mainly as a result of married women with children divorcing. Over the past ten years the growth has been of never married mothers." While feminists aver that this should not be a matter for concern and that every effort should be made to support the single parent family as an alternative form of family, and indeed that this is the family that is more compatible with financially independent women who demand equality, the extreme right believes that women who do not marry, effectively marry the state and believe that some women actually become pregnant only to avail of state benefits.
To determine whether the single parent family should be viewed as an evolutionary form of the nuclear family or whether it is a development that has less than happy consequences for men, women and especially children, one can examine the data that is available on this phenomenon which shows that that children of single parent homes are considerably disadvantaged. For the lone mother tends to be poorer, is often not able to work full time and is dependent on state support. She is under considerable pressure trying to bring up a young child or children single-handed. Though the situation has improved in recent years, such children see much less of their father than the children of a couple relationships and this adversely affects their development. According to research by David Riley and Margaret Shaw, "Delinquency in boys and girls was associated with a lack of close feelings with the young offenders and their fathers."
From the data currently available there is little doubt that at the present time this arrangement is less than satisfactory. It is of course perfectly possible to raise a child very well through such an arrangement but there are clear and obvious disadvantages that have to be overcome.
Co-Habitation
For 70% of young people today, the first relationship is a co-habitational one. For the most part, co-habitation is still regarded as a transitional phase in a relationship. People who co-habit are likely to either marry or break up says Ceridwen Roberts, Director of the Family Policy Studies Centre. Preliminary analyses of the British Household Panel Survey quoted in High Divorce Rates: The state of the Evidence on Reasons and Remedies brought out by One plus One shows that cohabiting couples are between three times more likely to split up than their married counterparts. Similar findings have come in from France, Sweden and the US.In Norway; co-habiting couples have a two or three times higher risk of breakdown even after controlling for many background characteristics.
Should Marriage be supported?
This is perhaps the most contentious topic with regard to the family contemporary Britain. . John Haskey, (Families: their historical context and recent trends I the factors influencing their formulation and dissolution, IEA1998) quoted in Family Futures states that changing patterns of fertility, marriage, divorce, co-habitation, mean no more than that family structures have become more diverse." Kathleen Kiernan (Family Change-Issues and Implications, IEA1998 (also quoted in Family Futures, "The increased diversity and turn over in family life… makes policy built on marriage increasingly problematic and suggests that parenthood rather than marriage should underpin family relations."
On one level, this is stating the obvious. Policy obviously has to be based on reality as it exists on the ground rather than on wishful thinking. The government document Supporting Families is careful to that "the government is not about pressuring people into one type of relationship or forcing them to stay together" On the next page we read that " The divorce rate has risen sharply. There are more children being brought up in single parent households, and there is more child poverty, often as a direct consequence of family break down. Rising crime and drug abuse are indirect symptoms of problems in the family." In other studies we read that the incidence of child abuse is also higher for children in broken or re-constituted homes.
In the chapter "Good Relations" from the book The Good Life, Penny Mansfield of One plus One says "On average, married people have better health, longer life, more and better sex, greater wealth and better outcomes for their children. Married people engage in less risky behaviour (they smoke less, drink less, have less unsafe sex." Using as reference studies such as " Marriage and Co-habitation in contemporary society", Eekelaar and Katz, Marriage, Divorce and Re-marriage, Cherlin, she points out the essential difference between marriage and co-habitation. "Co-habitation is a declaration of an existing state of affairs with no implications for future conduct, whereas marriage assumes permanence. That presumption encourages…the building of assets both emotional and economic."
Penny Mansfield would like to see more support for marriage and points out that its interesting that in the 70s feminists were loud in decrying marriage and supporting gays and lesbians who were not at that time thinking of marriage. Today feminists and liberals are vocal in demanding marriage for gays and lesbians!
Mansfield states that in the 70s it was believed that marriage was good for men but not as good for women, but the latest research shows that marriage is equally good for women. "Both married men and married women seem to be more contented than unmarried people who cohabit." from Good Relations, Penny Mansfield, on the basis of data from the General Social Survey, Washington DC a cross sectional survey of about 1500 adults done almost every year between 1972 and 1996. If one looks at all the data, and not the opinion, on the subject, there is no reason not to support marriage.
How typical are traditional attitudes to the family today?
In Family Futures brought out by Barclays, they say that "Families are changing but the majority of people still aspire to traditional family norms." Research undertaken by the Henley Centre Planning for social change, 1997 on what people aspired to as the ideal family unit for a couple with an under 5 child.
The responses showed that
This demonstrates that even in 1997, 68% of the people had very traditional attitudes regarding men, women and work.This view is supported by Dr Charlie Lewis whose latest research saw 82% of men saying that they worked because of financial necessity while 45% of women said that they worked because it gave them a feeling of financial independence.80% of young people would like to get married according to the government document Supporting Families.
A Personal Viewpoint
"You are witnessing the most important revolution of our time, said Polly Toynbee of the Guardian about the changing British family. This is more important than the Russian revolution or any battle that has ever been fought because it is a revolution about people’s lives." This columnist's quote captures the frenzy that surrounds the contemporary family in Britain.
In such a surcharged atmosphere, I found it difficult to dispel assumptions people made about my attitude to marriage and the family. Yes, I support marriage but I do not wish to return to the "Good old days" when marriages were stable because women had no options. I am not for traditional gender divisions and would like to see an increasing use of flexitime so that roles can be enlarged. I have no quarrel with a stable single partner co-habitation arrangement but fail to see how such an arrangement is different from marriage in real terms. I support a liberal divorce law and benefits for single and divorced mothers. A marriage is beneficial only when it is a happy marriage.
It is strange, really the way the outside world and the inside world contrast in the UK. Here everything is orderly on the outside. It’s a beautiful country and it works most efficiently. And what a law abiding and patient people waiting endlessly in queues without a sigh or a shove. And in any financial transaction, you can see the trust that is implicit. Take a garment back to a store and it is taken back without a murmur. Pay for something and you may be sure that it will arrive, and on time. How is it that a people that is so superior with regard to the externals so muddled, so wary and confused on the inside? Why does a Briton honour a car mortgage but not a promise to a spouse? Why can he be relied upon to abide by a dinner engagement but not a commitment to his/her child?
To me, it appeared that people are desperately frightened of appearing "judgmental", I found parents unable to guide there because they did not want to sound authoritatian. Across the dinner table, one evening, a mother-confided tome that her daughter was going around with a drug dealer but she did not condemn it because it was after all, her daughter’s life! There were many such instances. Also there seems to be some sort of romantic commitment to the idea of a perfect relationship rather than to a spouse and children. I realise anecdotal evidence is not helpful in research but it does appear to me this is a people that needs to use the intelligence, the ethics and commitment that they have in their professional lives on the personal front too.
Is there hope? Yes there is. Dr Richards tells me that the divorce statistics currently show a slight dip in the divorce statistic and a comment made by one young Welsh student makes me see the possible beginning of a turnaround. "How exciting!" he exclaimed when I told him that I had been married for 20 years, marvelling at how people must change and evolve in so many years, and how it interesting it must be to be part of it. And what about him, I asked. Oh, my life is boring, he said, have so many relationships and the are all the same. You tell the girl the same things about yourself, you hear the same things, you make the same moves. Everything is the same except the face!That was a new take on relationships and that is the one I shall take home with me. If this acute sensitivity is present in the young I certainly am optimistic!
The Media Perspective:
The first thing that strikes one about the print media is frankly that there is so much of it. Each newspaper has about 32 pages, and there are several special supplements, on education, science, the media and also on parenting and the family If one is examining reportage of the family, there is a fair amount of it and so it may appear that the coverage is substantial, but it is of course, one of many subjects covered.
Is social affairs, the section that deals with topics like the family, a sought after position?" No,"says Alex Frean, media correspondent of The Times. She says that though this is not in her opinion, the most coveted position within the paper, it is certainly a section, which gets a lot of reader feed back. The columnists, who write on the family, are the ones who get the most mail. Frean says that except at times when issues are topical because of governmental initiatives on connected issues, it is not easy to get space in the paper. However reader interest in subjects such as the problems of the elderly, marriage and divorce, parental discipline is immense.
In addition to the newspapers, the family also receives substantial coverage in both specialist and general interest women’s magazines. There are about a dozen magazines such as MY Baby, Junior, Practical Parenting… which specialise in subjects related to pregnancy, childbirth and parenting. These are focussed on the needs of their target audience and provide useful information and advice.
Women’s magazines may be divided into two groups. The more upmarket magazines such as Vogue, Elle, Cosmopolitan, and Marie Claire deal with relationships, but the emphasis is on beauty and fashion, while magazines like Vanity Fair and Tatler are more celebrity oriented. There are very large numbers of lifestyle magazines, such as Good Housekeeping, better Homes and Gardens, House Beautiful are as the titles suggest, home-oriented magazines, which are now losing circulation. In my opinion, this is unfortunate, as these magazines helped focus attention on the home, and enhanced the self-esteem of the full time housewife. It was interesting that in reviewing the entries of the short story competition for readers organised by the magazine for it’s readers, it found most entries focussed on relationships and the family. However, the highest circulated women’s magazine in the UK, according to figures given in the 19999 edition of The Writer’s Handbook, is Woman’s Own, with a circulation of close to 703,000 against a figure of only 202,000 for a magazine like Vogue.
The coverage of the family in the Woman’s Own tends to be personality oriented and somewhat sensational, but it is not unhelpful as the advice given in the agony columns is generally sound and the articles are suitable for their target audience. It appears that the articles do not follow any very clear editorial policy, thus while one issue makes the case that more women than men file for divorce these days, generally after the children have left home, the next issue may carry a story in which women describe the pain and humiliation of being dumped by their husbands when they reach the age of fifty!
The Main Complaints Against the Media
The first which is common to media reportage of all subjects is that reporters do not fully understand the subject, and tend to focus on the sensational and the atypical, creating a very distorted idea of the family in people’s minds. Academics and researchers working in the area were especially critical of The Mail and The Telegraph amongst newspapers. Personally, I thought that while the Telegraph came through as a conservative paper, the Mail often had very warped articles. Though this study was focussed on the Print Media, there were several complaints against the BBC programme "Panorama", by all researchers working in the field, and Ceridwen Roberts, Director of The Family Policy Studies Centre, was very critical of the personal biases radio journalists brought to their work. Reacting to the criticism against covering the odd and the unusual, Niall Dickson of the BBC says, "Planes take off and land safely at Heathrow several times a day, but we will obviously only react to a plane crash because that’s a story". He did concede that if the media are reporting to an unusual occurrence they must state that this is so. I have to admit that I heard several people say that many poor women became pregnant just because it entitled them to Council Housing because they had heard it reported in Panorama, a fact which the experts working in the field hotly deny.
Another criticism levelled against the media is that when they are covering the family they allow their own experience of the family which tends to be quite different from the experience of "Mr &Mrs Average,"to colour their reportage. Ceridwen Roberts of the Family Studies Policy Centre recounts that once when they had done a story on the growth of childlessness amongst women, the "Story received coverage out of all proportion to it’s importance, especially from 30 something journalists who identified with the problem, and admitted that they were so interested in the story because it rang bells for them personally."
Since everyone belongs to a family, the personal experience always seems to be more real and true than any clinical data on the subject There is a tendency to seek out reports which validate one’s own life experiences and choices. This is true of journalists as well, and may to some extent explain the difference in the reportage of the British as reflected in the media and as it actually is when one studies the data.
The coverage of the family in the magazines tends to be more ad hoc and less political, but the coverage in the newspapers is, as mentioned earlier, completely political. However, while the split seems to be in the region of 70% liberal and 30% conservative in the media (or at least in the broadsheet newspapers), it is probably the opposite on the ground.
This could be one reason why a magazine like the Reader’s Digest which has very traditional pro-family stories and is dismissed as an old fashioned, middle brow, magazine by journalists, is even with a slight dip in circulation in recent years, the best circulated magazine in the world. Journalists and intellectuals, in Britain and elsewhere, tend to be liberals; the majority of the people tend to be more conservative in their attitudes and lifestyles. This explains the dichotomy between actual family life and family life reported in the media.
In the beginning of this report, I mention an article in the London Times on how fathers give less than 15 minutes a day to their children. I went and met the reporter who did this story, and also sent him a congratulatory e-mail. He had in fact received many messages complimenting him on the story. I then went to Edinburgh to meet the researcher, Lynn Jamieson. She was deeply upset by the story and asked me to read her book, Intimacy, to confirm that she had not in fact made any such statements. This is really why though is much coverage of the family; it is not really very helpful. Journalists are under great pressure to come up with a new story every day, but to succumb and create a story where none exists is both unethical and damaging.
Should the Media Intervene to Support the Family?
I think it may be simpler to first state what the media should not do. It should not take it upon itself to present only one idealised picture of the family and constantly editorialise on the benefits of marriage and a particular form of family. That is what Soviet Russia tried to do with its doctrine of Socialist Realism. Since Socialism was the best system for human beings, the argument went, every article had to support it. Literature and art had also to portray only happy and content individuals, for in a Socialist state, how could people be otherwise? The fall out was obvious there was a total lack of credibility. The Reader’s Digest, for instance does a very good job in supporting the family. It researches inspirational true-life stories supporting family values and it has become a phenomenal success. But as a journalist, I realise that we cannot have only Reader’s Digest type articles in the media. There are many problems within families and these need to be highlighted. Families have to evolve, and the media must reflect this change.
There is a need for open discussion and debate on this issue as on any other. But equally there is a need for responsibility, perhaps greater responsibility than when one is dealing with many other subjects. It often appears that the reverse is true. For reasons stated earlier, many journalists appear to have a vested interest in validating their own version of family life, which is quite different from the facts on the ground. And when it comes to the family, even more than in other areas there has to be a code of ethics. None seems to exist at the moment.
When the media report about the government decision to give contraceptives to underage teenage mothers was announced, The Guardian carried an interview with a young teenage girl who approved of the decision, as she claimed that she had been having sex for four years and so had her friends. The piece was published with a rather glamorous photograph of an attractive young girl, and the issue had no other article with any other viewpoint. In addition, many issues such as breast-feeding, which are now known to have a very important role in fulfilling a child's nutritional and emotional needs are trivialised. "If a woman is happy to live as little more than a cow, she is free to do so. But she should not attempt to entrap her more modern sisters in her musty web. …To subdue and control women for men was wicked; to do so on behalf of babies is almost as bad. Nipple police, back off!" This from The Guardian of May, 12 1999.
When I began this project I had sought to explore how the media could intervene to support the family. And in the beginning the entire debate was whether the family should be supported and if the family were to be supported, then what form of family was to be supported. On those issues my views have not had to undergo much change. At this point of time, most researchers working in the field as also the government believe that both the family and marriage need to be supported. However, when I come to the first part of my proposition, and think about how the media should intervene to support the family, I must admit that I wonder if they should do so at all.
If the media can step forward to support the judiciary or other threatened institutions and freedoms I argued, why not the family, which is to use a cliché, the very bedrock of civilised society. And the answer is that perhaps one can launch a campaign and take on a crusade for a short term cause, but if one were to continue to do this for something like the family, one runs the danger of being locked in an ideological position, and would cease to be a journalist.
Conclusion: Supporting the Family
The Media Perspective
Even as I state that it would be unwise for the media to intervene to support the family, I believe that the media should be made aware of the numerous ways in which at the present, they effectively intervene to damage the family. The desperate need to reach ever-higher circulation figures to attract advertising means that sex and hedonism are uninhibitedly advocated. This is not helpful in the long term. Journalists should also be better educated with regard to the facts when they report on the family. This is of course, advisable for any kind of journalism, but is especially important when one is dealing with an area that involves every man, woman and child in such a vital way. Since it is important to put one’s money where one’s mouth is, in our times, it may not be a bad idea, to ensure that journalists who were in the Social Affairs department were better paid and educated. This would then be a sought after area that attracted the best people in the industry. They could then be better educated and made aware of the their subject area. Also, it would help if journalists who reported on the family were more representative of the average family than is now the case. Requisite experience is sought in any field of work; certainly, not every body can become a financial journalist, why should it be possible for just about anyone to become a journalist who writes on the family?
To go back to the Beginning.
Will the Indian family in 2025 be where the British family is today?
Probably not. Even though capitalism, industrialisation, and the increasing entry of women into the work force have created many similarities between our societies, there are very fundamental differences. Though I always thought that Westerners who talked of India being a spiritual country were naïve, after three months in the UK, I believe they are right. The value system is still very different and though the young in India are more individualistic than ever before, the change has been very slight indeed. It is unlikely that 25 years will see the country swing so far from it’s very strong cultural moorings.
In addition, the new information technology, which I anticipate, has the potential to transform working mores in the UK is already available in India. There is no reason, why India cannot introduce concepts like flexitime for the small group of highly qualified professionals we were talking about, at exactly the same time as Britain does. This may influence working mores in other fields too.
Advised by my supervisor that books on the subject were already out of date, I concentrated on meeting people and reading British newspapers and magazines.
People interviewed:
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