What is the Swedish family being replaced by?

If you want to be a self-defining, autonomous individual then you won't like the set character of the traditional family. It will be thought of as restrictive, as not offering enough choice. So the trend in liberal societies is to leave the family undefined.

It's the same old story - whatever is predetermined is thought to be oppressive and in need of deconstructing.

I was reminded of this by an article in the Herald Sun on the way family has been taught here in Victoria. As long ago as the 1980s it was decided that it was better to leave the family only vaguely defined:

"What I've found is that in the 1970s and early-'80s, the curriculum authors tried to hang on to that very traditional notion of the nuclear family," Ms Farrelly said.

"By the time they got to the '80s, they conceded this wasn't going to wash, and they got quite anxious."

Instead of then exploring different types of family units, Ms Farrelly said the educators came up with really quite weird definitions such as "groups of people who share things".

"Then family just disappeared. The course (now) focuses very much on the individual," she said.

So there's another liberal definition of the family to add to the list: "groups of people who share things".

That's a bit like a recent definition of the family by the director of Family Relationship Services Australia who said,

The definition I like now is whoever you share your toothpaste with, that’s your family.

So is this vaguely defined family really going to catch on? Are we going to see all sorts of permutations and combinations of people choosing to share things together?

The indications right now are that that's not what's happening. If we take a look at Sweden, which has pioneered the changes to family life, something else is emerging:

What you can see is that 47% of Swedish households are comprised of only one person. That's such a striking statistic. Next highest is Norway on 40% and then Germany on 39%. The UK is 34% and the US is 27% (low compared to the Europeans, but in 1950 the figure for America was only 9%).

So liberalism is moving us not so much toward the new undefined family as toward solo living.

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Timing matters

I first wrote about Bibi Lynch a couple of years ago. She was then 44 and still single and childless:

I am staring down the barrel of a lonely future without a man, let alone children.

And how do I find myself in this perilous position? One reason is undoubtedly that men like young women. Yes, I was young once and all that. In my 20s and 30s I wasn't exactly a supermodel, but I was constantly surrounded by men. The trouble is I wasn't necessarily looking to settle down back then...

She has now had to accept that she is too old to have children of her own. And it has made her desolate:

I can't tell you how painful not having a child is...It physically hurts me. Right where a baby would grow.

It is overwhelming to know that my legacy begins and ends with me. So no "family gathering" photographs of me and mine with my siblings and theirs; no proudly watching my kid grow up; no natural place in life's cycle. You, mums, have created the next generation. A new wonderful lineage – of children and probably grandchildren – who are yours and you are theirs.

If you think these are the bitter rantings of a woman who f... up her own life and is just jealous … you'd be 100% right. It kills me that you have the baby and I don't. Why didn't it happen for me? I always wanted children, assumed I would have children and didn't have children because I was only ever in one relationship that was serious enough...

At 40, still on my own, I found out I was too old for NHS IVF, had no money and so put my head in the "I'm always reading about women who have babies in their 40s!" sand.

Then my dad died. Grief reassessed my life for me. (People want to create when someone dies. A book, a painting, a child.) I got brave and had fertility tests, which told me, at 46, that my chances of having a baby are pretty much zero.

Then it hit me just how much I wanted a baby and that nothing I have now means anything because that love is the love and I don't have it and won't have it, and therefore have nothing.

That love is the key, isn't it? The reason I'm so upset – and the reason mums should be so grateful. We're told the love between mother and child is the most beautiful, fulfilling emotion in the world – the feeling that finally makes sense of our existence. I don't know because I haven't experienced it – but if the agony of knowing I won't have it is any yardstick, then I would change every decision I ever made that led me to this horrible place.

I've had people I love die in front of me, but even that horror doesn't compare. This rips you (and your future) apart because, as my friend who has been through this said, as I wept over her once again: "You won't heal – because this is deep in you. What you're supposed to do. What's inside us to do. What we're born to do. And you didn't do it."

I will never be pregnant, never be protected by the father of my child, never be loved as the mother of his child, never love like you love, and never be loved as you're loved. I will never mean as much to anyone as you do.

That's one of the problems with delayed family formation. Middle-class women get only a small window of opportunity (30 to 35) in which they are supposed to get serious about finding a husband and then having children before their fertility begins to run down. It's inevitable that significant numbers of women will miss out unnecessarily, particularly those who drift through the critical small window of opportunity.

In the United States now 25% of university educated women aged 40 to 44 are childless. That compares to a general rate of childlessness in the post-War boom of about 10%.

At the moment 30 is thought to be the crunch time for middle-class women, but it would be wiser if this were brought back a few years, to give a more realistic period of time for meeting someone, going out, getting engaged, getting married and then having children.

That makes more sense than a last minute rush, when women (and men) have perhaps become habituated to a singles lifestyle, when 30-something women will be competing with a younger cohort of women, and when men have not been given a clear signal to prepare for the roles of husband and father.

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Hawke sells off the farm to China

Former Australian PM Bob Hawke is making a living selling Australian farmland to companies linked to the Chinese Government.

It's not a great surprise. Hawke once defined an Australian as someone who "chooses to live here, obey the law and pays taxes". So the term "Australian" doesn't mean much to him - it doesn't define a particular people with a particular identity and tradition of their own. Instead, it just refers to individuals who happen to live in a particular place.

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Wendy Tuohy: the gift of children

An interesting reflection on motherhood by Melbourne writer Wendy Tuohy:

Quite often, you hear a mother say "I can't imagine life without my kids", and I'm well and truly in that camp. I can't imagine not having their blessed, sun-shiny presence, minute to minute, day by day.

As Mother's Day rolls around again and women around the country prepare for their tea and toast in bed, and get ready to beam when they open that candle, purple notebook or hand cream from the school stall, I find myself thinking about how motherhood has changed me - almost down to the DNA.

It has certainly made me a better person. And it has made me want to keep striving to be even "better" for myself, the kids and other people.

I don't want to sound too evangelical about motherhood, the social significance and status of which has been endlessly raked over in the past year or so, but in my experience it is transformational.

That's not to say that you can't transform through other experiences. It's just that in my life the single biggest thing to have shifted my perspective, priorities and self-image has been becoming a mum.

It's a cliche that motherhood makes you selfless - and not quite correct either, because most people see in their children some faint glimmer of themselves.

But I would like to think all that limitless loving has made me more humble. I am certainly a less selfish, more reliable, open, and thankfully even more confident person since the gift of kids.

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Two Canadians hit a nerve with London Girl

There is in Australia and elsewhere a big city culture in which young women think of their 20s as a time to engage in a single girl lifestyle of travel and careers and uncommitted relationships.

Take, for instance, London Girl. She was completely thrown when a couple of Canadians queried her single status at age 27:

The two Canadians had joined myself and a friend at our table after the football. They'd shuffled over as the big screens rolled up, bought a round of drinks; we imparted our London knowledge and now the conversation had moved on. Somehow, the subject of age came up. I told one of them mine, and was completely thrown by what came next.

"Isn't 27 a little old to be single?"
"Pardon? Too old?"
"Yeah, like if you want to have kids and stuff - isn't 27 a bit old to still be single?"

Once I'd picked my jaw up off the floor and provided a response which didn't include nearly as many swear words as I'd have liked in retrospect, it wasn't long before I was wishing them a good night, and making my excuses to go home.

The next morning, his question was the first thing to come to mind.

Too old?

The Canadians were kind of right. 27 isn't too old, but if a woman is serious about having children, then by that age she ought to be strongly focused on family formation. After all, if you want the option of having 3 children then you ideally need 6 or 7 years to get there, which brings a woman now in her late 20s up to her mid-30s - the time that her fertility becomes less certain.

But London Girl is caught in the headlights. On the one hand she thinks she might be trailblazing a new path of a single girl lifestyle:

We're a generation living in rented accommodation, with friends instead of other halves, or even still at home with parents. We're working hard at our careers and relationships come second, we travel the world after university instead of beginning the hunt for a job, often not finding a permanent one until well into our mid twenties. Even in our careers we're feeling our way: the jobs we've got now didn't exist when we started uni.

Marriage will happen - at some point - but not now, not yet, not while there's fun to be had. And kids? As a 27 year old girl who spends her nights surrounded by mostly single friends, and mornings in bed with a hangover and the vague but cheering memories from the night before, the idea of being responsible for a child is nothing short of terrifying.

But she's not so sure if it's all going to work out well:

There's an edge to it; a desperation creeping in, a scrabble to locate the nearest hot man in any given vicinity.

If you squint and look around the pub at 11pm on a Saturday night, over at the group of girls laughing, dancing, hugging, chatting and doing shots, you can sometimes see and hear the point at which the old generation, the one that told us we'd be settled by 30, is meeting this new one; where you can have it all - but later, and detect a bit of panic. It's in our conversations and the back of our minds; the way we search the people at the bar.

This doing it later stuff, it's a nice idea in our heads, and we're doing it with gusto. But our hearts haven't quite caught up yet.

So, are we too old? No, we're not too old. We don't look it, we don't feel it, we don't realise it.

But if by some stretch of the imagination it turns out we are, then we'll surely be the first generation to know about it.

But they're not the first generation. There have been several generations of middle-class English women since the 1880s which have failed to launch. Generation X women are the most recent to miss out: a report last year showed that 43% of university educated Generation X women are childless.

Is this London Girl's fault? Not really - it seems, in fact, that a boy she really liked was the one to break up with her. But she is representative of a certain kind of woman who is hesitant about family formation where they should be decisive.

Timing does matter when it comes to family. It doesn't work out well if women encourage their male peers to think that they are not required as husbands or fathers until some very late and very vague time in their lives. It doesn't work out well if women wait until the last dwindling years of their fertility to try to have children. It doesn't work out well if men and women become too habituated to a solo lifestyle.

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President Obama proves how different the leftist mindset is

President Obama has written an op-ed for Newsweek magazine celebrating Title IX, a law which reads:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance...

As I understand it, the law has been used to force American universities to cut male sports teams in order to have equal numbers of women participating in sports. There has been no allowance made for men having a greater interest in sports or for male sports teams having a greater following.

But that's not what's so signicant about Obama's op-ed. Since Title IX was introduced women have come to dominate graduate numbers at American universities. The situation is now as follows:

According to the Census Bureau, 685,000 men and 916,000 women graduated from college in 2009 (the latest year for which statistics have been published). That means 25 percent fewer men received college degrees than women.

So women are now vastly overrepresented at American universities. And what is President Obama's attitude to this? He thinks it's just great:

In fact, more women as a whole now graduate from college than men. This is a great accomplishment—not just for one sport or one college or even just for women but for America. And this is what Title IX is all about.

Having more women than men graduate from college is what Title IX is all about, he writes. We're supposed to believe it's bad - it's discriminatory - if there are more men than women playing sports on campus, but that it's a "great accomplishment" for America if there are 25% more women than men who actually graduate.

And Obama goes on to write:

I’ve said that women will shape the destiny of this country, and I mean it.

And this:

We have come so far. But there’s so much farther we can go. There are always more barriers we can break and more progress we can make.

It's at moments like this that you are forced to recognise just how differently the leftist mind perceives reality. Obama's religious feelings are centred on a secular drama in which society must always find the next barrier to break, so that a woman's sex does not limit her power in society. This is the measure of the progress and greatness of a society, and the issue on which a nation's destiny hangs.

The word "equality" is used more as a symbol within this little drama - it refers to the progress of women's power in society rather than to finding a counterpoise between men and women.

There is not a lot of consideration given within such a mindset to how a society might successfully order itself in the long term. There is a great blank, for instance, in considering what role men might have within such an ideologically driven society, or, for that matter, what role the average non-professional, family-oriented woman might have.

I suspect that the longer the mindset endures, the more tensions it will generate. At what point, for instance, do you have to recognise that women are actually advantaged in education rather than disadvantaged? At what point do you have to recognise that Western countries are declining relative to other nations rather than progressing? At what point do you have to recognise that "permanent revolution" doesn't make for a great religion, or that there is more to life than career ambition?

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The reality of women in combat

There is a campaign underway to open up infantry combat positions to women in the American armed services. The campaign has encountered an interesting opponent - a woman by the name of Katie Petronio who has five years' experience as a combat engineer in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why does Katie Petronio think female combat infantry to be a bad idea? Because despite all her training, her body wasn't able to stand the rigours of combat as much as her male peers:

I was a star ice hockey player at Bowdoin College, a small elite college in Maine, with a major in government and law. At 5 feet 3 inches I was squatting 200 pounds and benching 145 pounds when I graduated in 2007. I completed Officer Candidates School (OCS) ranked 4 of 52 candidates, graduated 48 of 261 from TBS, and finished second at MOS school. I also repeatedly scored far above average in all female-based physical fitness tests (for example, earning a 292 out of 300 on the Marine physical fitness test). Five years later, I am physically not the woman I once was...

I was a motivated, resilient second lieutenant when I deployed to Iraq for 10 months, traveling across the Marine area of operations (AO) and participating in numerous combat operations. Yet, due to the excessive amount of time I spent in full combat load, I was diagnosed with a severe case of restless leg syndrome. My spine had compressed on nerves in my lower back causing neuropathy which compounded the symptoms of restless leg syndrome.

While this injury has certainly not been enjoyable, Iraq was a pleasant experience compared to the experiences I endured during my deployment to Afghanistan...By the fifth month into the deployment, I had muscle atrophy in my thighs that was causing me to constantly trip and my legs to buckle with the slightest grade change. My agility during firefights and mobility on and off vehicles and perimeter walls was seriously hindering my response time and overall capability. It was evident that stress and muscular deterioration was affecting everyone regardless of gender; however, the rate of my deterioration was noticeably faster than that of male Marines and further compounded by gender-specific medical conditions. At the end of the 7-month deployment, and the construction of 18 PBs later, I had lost 17 pounds and was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome (which personally resulted in infertility, but is not a genetic trend in my family), which was brought on by the chemical and physical changes endured during deployment.

She didn't even deploy as often as her male peers and yet her body packed it in. That's not surprising given that the female body is not there for combat purposes.

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