When did parents become the problem?
When did parents become the enemy? Not bad parents. Not neglectful parents. Just ordinary mothers and fathers doing their best. Across the Western world, governments that once supported families have started treating them as problems to be solved – and parents as suspects to be monitored.
Dr Ashley Frawley is a sociologist and visiting researcher at the University of Kent’s Centre for Parenting Culture Studies. I sat down with her recently to explore what her research reveals about this growing hostility – and why it should concern everyone who believes in the family. You can watch our full conversation here:
Parents today spend more time with their children than at any point in the past seventy years – yet they are constantly told it is not enough. You are supposed “to work as though I have no children and parent as though I don’t have to work”, Frawley says. When they inevitably fall short of these impossible standards, they are attacked – by the left for perpetuating inequality, by the right for failing to take responsibility. “I am continuously shocked at the degree to which parents are scapegoats,” she tells me, “and this is just completely uncontested.”
The result, she warns, is predictable: fewer and fewer people want to become parents at all. Her report for MCC Brussels, “Families in Fragments”, documents the same pattern across European policy: the word ‘mother’ now appears only as an obstacle to economic productivity, and marriage is treated with suspicion.
We can see one outworking of this attitude in Wales right now. In 2022, the Welsh Government removed the defence of reasonable chastisement, effectively banning all physical discipline of children. Three years on, its own review shows no evidence that children are safer – but 365 parents have been referred to mandatory State re-education programmes, and social services referrals where smacking was the sole factor have risen sharply.
This is not really about whether you smack your children or not. The principle at stake is that the State has decided that parents cannot be trusted to make judgments about their own families. The State knows best. The same assumption drove the redefinition of marriage and now drives the redefinition of parenthood.
Coalition for Marriage exists to challenge that assumption. The family founded on the lifelong union of one man and one woman has been the bedrock of every flourishing society in history. It does not need to be redesigned by politicians.