browseUnclear Family: Solo Show
Richard Grassick (Photographer)
The documentary photography project European Identities was established in 1993 as a result of a collaboration between photographers and photography galleries in four regions of Europe - the North East of England (Side Gallery, Newcastle); Cheb County, Czech Republic (Galerie 4); The Somme, France (Veronique Lesperat-Hequet and Lucioles) and the Ruhr Valley (Stefan Dolfen and RuhrlandMuseum). This exhibition brings together Richard Grassick's contribution.
From the original Side Gallery exhibition text, 1997:
The family is the basic community. It is the place where the deepest feelings of love, trust, self-acceptance and growth in intimacy can take place. Parents are the first and principal educators of their children, and it is in the family that moral values are inculcated and practised, where right and wrong are learnt and where respect for life and love become instilled. Cardinal Hume, Archbishop of Westminster, The Independent, March 8th 1993
Idealised images of parenting abound. That which is evoked above, by the leader of the Roman Catholic Church of England, is no exception. It presents an image of parenting which is firmly located within ‘the family’: a temporally stable, heterosexual and co-resident unit. However, there are many forms of social arrangements which may be defined as ‘family’ and many variations have existed in the history of humankind; and continue to exist.
In 1993, a group of photographers embarked on an examination of the state of the family in the four regions of Europe from which most of them came - Northern England, Picardy in France, West Bohemia in what was then Czechoslovakia, and the Ruhr Valley in Germany. One of them, Richard Grassick, brought the work from his four studies together to produce this visual exploration of growing up in diverse family structures.
Note: This body of work represents Richard Grassick’s solo show, developed from his engagement with the wider Unclear Family international photography workshops that took place in Crook, Co. Durham, UK (1993), Luby, West Bohemia, Czechoslovakia (1994), Amiens, Picardy, France (1995) and Borbeck, Ruhr Valley, Germany.
Full original Side Gallery exhibition text by Pete McCarthy, 1994:
The family is the basic community. It is the place where the deepest feelings of love, trust, self-acceptance and growth in intimacy can take place. Parents are the first and principal educators of their children, and it is in the family that moral values are inculcated and practised, where right and wrong are learnt and where respect for life and love become instilled. Cardinal Hume, Archbishop of Westminster, The Independent, March 8th 1993
Idealised images of parenting abound. That which is evoked above, by the leader of the Roman Catholic Church of England, is no exception. It presents an image of parenting which is firmly located within ‘the family’: a temporally stable, heterosexual and co-resident unit. However, there are many forms of social arrangements which may be defined as ‘family’ and many variations have existed in the history of humankind; and continue to exist. Moreover, the way that some people experience family life may be radically different from that portrayed. For instance, there are currently nearly 50,000 children on the Child Protection Registers kept by local authorities. There are also more than 60,000 children living apart from their families in state care.
The British state also exhorts an ‘ideal’ model of family: the ‘nuclear family’, as it is often dubbed, containing a married couple living with their dependent child(ren) with the husband acting as breadwinner and dependent wife having primary responsibility for homemaking and childcare. Despite the fact that this essentially patriarchal model of family life derived from the need for labour mobility in an industrial society, and is consequently a relatively recent innovation, it has become identified within western culture as not only normal but natural. By definition, any other forms of family life - single parents, unmarried parents, same sex couples, etc - are regarded at best as partial and at worse as abnormal or deviant. The aim of social and fiscal policies which evolve from this ideology is at once to support the ‘nuclear’ family and to discourage deviations. It is assumptions such as these which inform the ‘back to basics’ rhetoric of Government ministers, which threatens sanctions against unmarried mothers: such as reduced income support and removal of rights to state housing. But the reality in Britain, as with most of the western world, is one of increased diversity of household and child-care arrangements.
South West Durham, where the photography project was carried out, is similar to the rest of Britain in that just one in three households consist of the so-called ‘normal’ family arrangement. Nevertheless, the majority of households with children living in them do contain two parents. In Wear Valley district, 73 per cent of households with children present are headed by a married couple; 8 per cent by a co-habiting couple and 19 per cent by a single parent.
The proportion of births to mothers who are unmarried has more than doubled in Britain during the last decade. At present three in every ten births are to women who are not married to the father of the child: this rate is at its highest in the Northern Region where 35 per cent of births are to unmarried mothers. Nevertheless, the majority of unwed mothers would appear to be in stable relationships with the father of their child. Three quarters of births outside marriage are registered by both parents, and a half by parents who live at the same address.
The family may be changing, but it would appear that the nuclear family is still a long way from being displaced, even though couples who have children are less likely to formalise their union through a wedding ceremony.
Lone Parent Families
In Britain, the proportion of children living in lone parent families increased from 8 per cent in 1972 to 18 per cent in 1991: in most cases (90 per cent) the lone parent who they live with is their mother.
Compared with the rest of Europe, Britain has a high rate of births to women who are in their teens especially those from the most socio-economically disadvantaged groups. The increase in lone parenthood and relatively high rates of teenage births has fuelled a moral panic and led to Government rhetoric which accuses women of giving birth in order to obtain ‘state handouts’; but around three-quarters of lone parents households are the result of the breakdown of relationships between married parents. The divorce rate in Britain is currently the highest in the European Union: it is reckoned that 37 per cent of marriages currently entered into will eventually end in divorce. Nevertheless, just as many families broke down a century ago through the death of one or other parent as do now through divorce.
Lone-parent families are found at all levels of society but the majority have incomes below the official poverty line. They are more dependent on state housing than other families and as a consequence tend to be concentrated in the poorest areas. In the Wear Valley, in social rented housing compared with 49 per cent of co-habiting couple families and 20 per cent of married couple families. Lone parent families are also less mobile: three quarters of them do not have access to a family car compared with just one in eight married couple families. Thus, lone parent families in the Wear Valley are disadvantaged in that they tend to be congregated on social rented housing estates and their access to services depends on public transport which becomes less reliable as better-off families increase usage of ‘the family car’.
Marriage, Divorce and Re-Marriage
A third of marriages currently involve at least one person who has been married before. Contrary to expectations, previous experience does not increase chances of making lasting partnerships. Second marriages tend to be even less successful than first marriages and one in two eventually end in divorce.
Divorce, re-marriage and family reconstruction have led to a huge increase of households where children reside with at least one parent who is not their natural parent. It has been estimated that by the year 2000 there are likely to be more than 2.5 million children - or one in four British children - living in step-families. Parenting in these circumstances can be an extremely complex affair. If separated parents re-marry, children are faced with the possibility of four parents, eight grandparents, extra siblings and complex networks of extended kin. Consequently, many families today are based on ‘unclear’ relationships and circumstances in which there are no clear rules as to how parenting responsibilities ought to be allocated between natural parents and non-natural parents who may or may not live with their children. Although research evidence suggests that such arrangements can be psychologically harmful for children, many families are able to overcome the difficulties and formulate workable arrangements. It would seem that if these new forms of family networks are built around positive relationships between adults they have the potential to provide enriched experiences for children which go beyond those available in nuclear family units.
Fathers
The parental role of men is in a process of change albeit in most cases a slow one. One effect of marital breakdown is that large numbers of fathers totally lose contact with children. Nevertheless, it would seem that there has been some increase in the amount of time men spend looking after children although this usually falls a long way short of sharing child-care responsibilities equally with their partners.
There are several reasons why men have become more involved in child-care. Whilst the influence of feminism and development of the ‘new’ (or ‘newish’) man have been important, economic factors are likely to have been at least as significant. High levels of unemployment in Wear Valley - one in five men of working age are unemployed - have forced families into transforming the way they function.
Women and Employment
Twenty one per cent of mothers in the Wear Valley are in full-time employment, while 4 per cent are self-employed and 30 per cent have part-time jobs. Thus, more than half have jobs which, in most cases, mean they spend a significant amount of time away from the home. Working women also continue to bear major responsibilities for child-care but many would be unable to continue work without help from partners. The absence of a partner with whom to share responsibilities is one reason why lone mothers are less likely to be in employment. In the Wear Valley 10 per cent of lone mothers work full-time and 15 per cent work part-time.
Substantial increases in female employment have coincided with declining state provision for child-care. For instance, only 4 per cent of under-fives receiving day care are in places provided by the state. The rest are in receipt of day-care provided by the private sector where fees charged are usually beyond the reach of parents on low incomes. The combination of expensive child care and low wages in traditional female employment leads to many women who would prefer to work being unable to do so. Lone mothers, in particular, tend to be caught up in a poverty trap where they are financially worse off in work than they would be unemployed and existing on state benefits.
Ageing and Family Life
An increasingly ageing population has implications for family life. One effect is that more children (and adults) have grandparents. Moreover, there are increasing numbers of three and four generation families, while the rise of step-family introduces radical changes to the nature of grandparent - grandchild relationships.
Increased life expectancy means that people can contribute to family life for much longer periods than in the past. Grandparents make a significant contribution to child-care: they often enable mothers to take up employment outside the home. However, increasing numbers of elderly people are also likely to become dependent on others for care as a result of failing health. And the greater part of such care is provided now, as in the past, within the family by women, that is by daughters, daughters-in-law, grand-daughters, etc.
The Changing Family and Public Policy
There is no question that the family is changing and these changes have significant policy implications. The reaction of policy makers will inevitably depend on whether the changes taking place are viewed in a positive or negative light. The British state, which is locked into commitment to the centrality of the nuclear family in moral, political and economic terms, sees alternative forms as a threat to social order. It therefore appears to be committed to policies, which stem the tide of change. Such policies are ultimately based on the Poor Law notion of ‘less eligibility’ and aim to discourage women from choosing single parenthood by removing their rights to state housing and reducing welfare provision. However, withdrawal of support from families who are already impoverished is contentious strategy.
If it were indeed dependency which were the problem, an alternative approach would introduce policies which enabled lone parents to become less dependent by taking up employment. Such a strategy would necessarily require investment in child-care, employment training and job creation.
The changes taking place in the western family have tended to be portrayed in a negative light. It may be that they are simply part of a transformation in social structure and human relationships leading towards the renaissance of society rather than its collapse. This view has been recently expounded by the American writer Shere Hite who has suggested that: ‘The current “crisis” in the family is really a sign of transformation, not a collapse of “civilisation as we know it”. This transformation is the democratisation of an institution that was never democratised, even though we have believed in equality in the political sphere for two centuries. This revolution in the infrastructure of society is for the better, and can make for a new, more advanced form of political democracy, one less aggressive-defensive in its impulses, and thus more suited to the twenty-first-century multi-racial global community.’ The Hite Report on the Family: Growing Up Under Patriarchy (London: Bloomsbury, 1994, p. 350).
At some point in the future, historians may well identify the present time as a peculiar interlude in which arrangements for the care and socialisation of children began to go wrong. They would see a society in which the responsibility for child-care was invested in two people whose qualification for the role was based upon sex and a very particular notion of love. These two people would very often have had no previous experience to bring into the role as they were usually encountering children and familial arrangements for the first time. This family form will be seen to have emerged out of broader communal pattern of child-care and shared responsibility for children which typifies human society. Whether such patterns are in the process of returning, or we are moving towards smaller more isolated family units and the break-up of society as we know it, is one of the most significant and perplexing questions of out time.