Looking at the headlines last week you might have thought the nuclear family had had its day. The Family and Parenting Institute published a report claiming that because of rising divorce rates and cohabitation, the traditional family is no longer the “norm” in Britain.

What we are seeing, apparently, is the emergence of a new kind of extended family, one in which parents, step-parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents will play an ever bigger role in the care of children in so-called “communal parenting”.

That change is unstoppable, the institute thinks, and Katherine Rake, its new head, gave a speech warning politicians against the “trap” of attempting to preserve traditional family structures through government initiatives.

This seems to me completely to misunderstand the structure of the family and the role it plays in our civic life. It’s tempting to think we once lived in large extended families, like something out of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and that the tight little nuclear family is a historical blip, a 19th-century phenomenon that emerged as people left the countryside for the cities and lived in smaller units.

I certainly assumed that was the case until I started researching my latest book. I was surprised to find that small families seem to have begun in our particular corner of northwestern Europe long before the industrial revolution. When it comes to families, England was the first nuclear power. And that family structure has shaped what is distinctive about us.

Take the English language. Unlike Arabic, say, our tongue does not recognise  … >> Continue Reading