In the relentless public conversation about what is wrong with how we live now, the family is high on the list of culprits. So it was inevitable that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's project to define present-day social evils should hear about the family. But, as we confront the social pessimism about the family, it is worth remembering how very much reality is at the mercy of the stories we tell ourselves about the way things are.

Unhappy families?

Comment on the family is irredeemably negative; the tone apocalyptic, with words like 'breakdown' and 'collapse' in constant use. Regular rants abound about selfish mothers who 'want it all', feral children making people's lives a misery, and fathers either denied their rights by malevolent mothers or 'deadbeat' fathers who take no responsibility – always exaggeration.

'The UK is the worst place in the world to bring up children', said a charity spokesperson on the Today programme recently: not quite what she would have meant to say, but revealing of how we think. Meanwhile, most UK children and families do well, living in circumstances the envy of much of the world, with Britain a destination of choice for those fleeing poverty and oppression.

Historians of the family point to regular outbreaks of anxiety such as this at moments of transition: when change is rapid or when a serious social problem is exposed. Unsurprising, then, that the turbulence of globalisation and the technological revolution produce anxiety; and 24/7 media makes its transfer virally swift – a feature of modernity that puts reality further adrift from experience.

In FPI's recent YouGov survey, we asked over 3,000 adults about their views on family and their experiences of family life. Just over half (54%) signed up to the proposition that family life is in crisis. But the picture portrayed of their own family was quite different and overwhelmingly positive: families ate together, played together and visited each other; only 5% were unhappy with family life. This perception gap is repeated again and again across surveys. If there is no crisis, we are doing our best to invent one.

Families in flux?

So is family life going to the dogs or is it much the same on the inside, though the outside looks somewhat different? Undoubtedly families are changing, but it is difficult to establish exactly what these changes mean for families and family life.

We have fewer marriages and more divorce, separation, cohabitation, and childbirth outside marriage; with a pattern of partnering and parenting similar to Nordic countries; children stay at home longer; marriage and child-bearing happen on average later; families now run to four and five generations; and, happily, more people live longer. Economic circumstances, differing attitudes to sexual morality, and new approaches to infertility, all stretch our definition of family from the recently dominant, heterosexual nuclear family form.
The context to family life has also changed.

Alongside mass relative poverty in the context of 'in your face' affluence, we have the growth of two-earner households, with the middle-classes becoming wage slaves too because of rising living costs, university fees, elder care, and extended youth dependency. Consumption is enjoyed by more, encouraged by ubiquitous marketing and a culture of acquisition, but also the desire for reasonable, modest pleasures, like nice clothes, holidays or mobile 'phones.

Family time is lived differently. Time is seen more and more as a commodity, often associated with leisure; the phrase 'time poor' in modern parlance calls up the memory of hours of domestic labour, before appliances transformed the home, and 10-hour days and six-day weeks. 'Go out and play!' is less of an option for parents, so that playing with and occupying children becomes a parenting task.

Family life is both more privatised, as adults retreat from collective responsibility for children and young people and families live more indoors, and yet more open to influence from the presence of the outside in families: TV, mobiles, the internet conveying cultural and marketing messages that affect how we live, our values and aspirations.

Family pressure points

Women, particularly mothers, are experiencing strain managing work and care. Happily, men are now more involved in caring and sharing the domestic load, but women still undertake the lion's share of caring for children, the disabled, and elderly parents.

Poverty and disadvantage continue to have the biggest negative effect on children's futures. The relationship between poverty and family dysfunction is complicated; effects go both ways: it is harder to care on an empty stomach; and poverty in caring creates poverty of aspiration, health and choice, and the behaviours of despair.

There are far too many families, not all poor, with the most severe and destructive problems: domestic violence, mental health problems, alcohol and drug misuse. While it is comforting that the majority of children and young people are doing well, some important children and families are not; and they have a disproportionate effect on others; so we need to get better at caring for them.

Flexible families

All political parties believe that the relationships we have with each other at home are not only private but have a profound public impact, that families not only raise children but build neighbourliness and the kinds of communities that we want to live. It is the quality of family relationships that makes the difference. And when challenged to find solutions, the public are very uncertain about what might be efficacious that does not impinge badly on the majority or on children. If we are in the middle of a revolution in families perhaps it is more in the collective mind than the daily bread of family life; important, then, not to panic into policy.

While it is difficult to discover 'truth' from contested narratives about modernity, and there is strain and difficulty within 21st-century families, these strains are not any more virulent than past challenges, and they are accompanied by freedoms from some past miseries and a multitude of new, rich opportunities.

Families care for each other still. The massive interest in genealogy shows how our families and family history inhabits us; families that include with the living, the dead, the people families have lost, and the 'might have been', the imagined. The definition of family stretches and shrinks to accommodate changing times. But families remain hugely meaningful and important to us in defining who we are, setting us on a life course and accompanying us through, for better or worse. Thankfully, the family is a very resilient institution; something to rely on as we face the consequences of this recession.

For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
(Shakespeare, Hamlet.)

Mary MacLeod OBE is Chief Executive of the Family and Parenting Institute. She has worked for many years in children and families services as social worker, manager, academic, researcher, writer and policy analyst. She is non-executive director of Great Ormond Street Hospital and a trustee of the NCB and Cafcass.