Real Families with Steve Evans

It was better then. The traditional family.

People stayed together. One husband, one wife who knew her

place. A man and a woman.

Children who knew their place. The way it was.

Families sticking together. And today?

All gone. Fractured.

Gay marriage. Divorce.

Living in sin. Children in care.

Broken families ? not happy families.

Or is it? Myth or reality?

Happy families, who can doubt it? Mum, dad, a few kids together, but

how typical? I'm Steve Evans and I'm going to search for the myths and

the reality of family life in Wales today.

You may feel you know the Phillips family from Cardiff.

You've seen them somewhere. Their television good looks mean

companies pay them to star in adverts

for holidays or cars or coffee. They are perfect family.

The average family describe that image and describe reality. I think

clients and people like to see this image of 2.4 children, a perfect

family, smiles, happy which in reality most days we are, but there

are, you know, as most parents know, there are days where it is tough and

it is hard and you have got children and you know, you have got to

entertain them or try and do things and take them places. They choose us

a lot because we've got a couple of children to choose from, but they

tend to only choose two. Today, it is 2014, they still want traditional

values for they want what is perceived as traditional values as

2.4 children. I get the impression that families mix and match now.

There is former partners. Mixes of children. Grandparents getting

involved. It's complex in a good way. I think it is only recently

that it has become accepted that, you know, like even us, my wife,

we've got three children together, but I've got an older child from a

different relationship and he's 15. He comes in and out of family easy.

It is quite normal, but I don't know if that's a good thing for him or a

bad thing and I won't know that until we're older. We're modern as a

family. In today's age, we see same-sex families in the boys

school. Like you say, you want the best for your children, but the

initial thing you want is for them to be happy. We do seem to be happy.

Perhaps surprisingly happy. A poll commissioned for BBC Wales found

that 79% of those questioned are happy with family life.

What do he we mean by a family? The statisticians have a tight

definition. They mean people living together in a close relationship. It

could be a couple, married or unmarried, with or without children.

Same-sex or different sex or it could be a single person with

children either their own children or even their grandchildren. Student

homes don't count as family. People in close relationships, living

together, do. There are nearly 900,000 families in

Wales. The numbers living together are increasing, but there is still

more than 500,000 married couples. The norm for children growing up in

Wales is to live with both their birth parents. They may not be as

likely to be married as they were before, but they often are or they

often get married at some point, but that's still the overriding norm.

What we have seen is a change in the trajectory of families so how they

changed, how they expect their lifetime to be. There is much more

tolerance of people living together without being married, cohabiting.

They may get married or they may not. We see more tolerance towards

gay and lesbian people in our society and couples who are gay and

lesbian. Alan and Rick are in a relationship.

They have adopted a children. Their new two-year-old son. This is a new

type of family, but not even 1% of families are same-sex couples. When

you adopted, what was the discussion you had? What were the thoughts and

the issues that you had to thrash out between you? There weren't

really. We always knew pretty early on that we wanted to adopt. I don't

remember any kind of having to thrash anything out really. It was

pretty normal, I guess. We have both grown up wanting children and the

options are artificial insemination with a donor or whatever or

adoption. We both knew that this was what we wanted to do.

For thousands of years more than thousands of years, kids have been

brought up by a man and a woman. Evolution, it is the way we do it.

It is the way biology works and OK, we mess around and we change things,

that's what human beings do. It is called development and advancement,

but that's the way we've done it and now you're messing around with it.

It is an experiment and we just don't know how it's going to work

out. But if the human race didn't change anything, we would still all

be living in caves. Times do change. If you're saying we're not sure how

it's going to work, there were recent studies, there was a study by

a university in Australia saying how they measure happiness. Children

with same-sex parents are 80% more happier because the gender rules

aren't there so instead of me saying, "I'm doing this. You're

doing this." I'm actually doing what I'm best at and you're doing what

you're best at. We've grown up in divorced families. Lots of divorces

in the family. We are used to different shapes and sizes of

families. We have got half-siblings. It is another family type and people

come to terms with that pretty quickly because that's what they've

done over the years. These people are growing up in a generation where

being gay is normal. Parents might have an issue and who cares let's be

honest? As long as he is fine, we don't care.

Alan and Rick live in a city where patterns change rapidly. It is more

flexible a varied in the way people live, but in the country,

traditional family life remains albeit under threat as agriculture

shrinks as a proportion of our economy. This is a family farm in

Carmarthenshire. Generation after generation, farming and living

together in the same place. This is traditional family life at its

tightest, at its closest. For centuries, farming fathers have

passed the business on to elder sons, not usually a family business

for daughters or younger sons. Gareth Thomas is the third

generation of his family to farm this land in Carmarthenshire. The

business is the family, the family is the business. When Gareth married

Heather and took over the farm, his parents, moved out of the family

home. Hard for you to move out of your own home? Well, not really, no.

When I married Brian 45 years ago, my parents-in-law moved out and I

was allowed to make a new home for myself and my husband and bring up

my family here. It was a pattern that I was familiar with. My own

parents had done that. It was natural einvolvement of family life.

I love cities. I like the idea that my family is a bit of a distance

away in truth. Is there a down side of living in each other's pockets?

Yes, there are at times when we have disagreements, but and I say this in

all sincerity, we have disagreements, but they are finished

within 30 seconds. They are not carried on for five minutes let

alone five days. That's because you two get on? Not necessarily always!

By and large you like each other? Oh yes. Of course, we do. Of course, we

like each other, he is my father and I'm fortunate that he's retiring and

I stand to inherit a wonderful place to live in the country. But it's,

I'm lucky in the fact that I've got active parents that are prepared to

come and help and the wonderful thing about their retirement ethos

is they can turn up and they can do what they want and they can go home.

One of the biggest assets is the fact this we are here every day, we

see the grandchildren every day. No matter how wealthy people are,

our wealth are these three youngsters running around. We see

them daily. They give us pleasure daily and I can tell you a lot about

the little one. He keeps us laughing, not in what he says, but

in what he does and no matter what you say, that's our wealth.

Throughout Wales, farms have passed from father to elder son, it's the

way of centuries. It does make you wonder about younger sons who don't

get the farm. They usually move away. By and large, only divorce and

debt breaks farms up. Is there then change? How is the role of the woman

on the farm? The mother on the farm, the centre of the farm changed

between the two of you, your generation? Well, my mother-in-law

taught part-time, she had a part-time job and I do as well. We

have a fairly similar role, do you think? Yes, I think so. We both help

out on the farm and we both have our own job as well. There was a time

way before your time when the daughter did not inherit the farm

and run the farm, become a farmer. Is that still so? No, I think times

have changed. If the daughter wants to farm these days, I think she has

an opportunity to do so. What's the pluses and minuses of living in each

other's pockets? The pluses are that there is always somebody to help.

You've always got support. There is always fun to be hadful we're

always, there is never a dull moment really. My minuses, perhaps it would

be night to have quality time with the immediate family. We have lots

of fun. More good than bad. We all know the family picture on

the mantelpiece. Those we love around us now, or relatives long

gone. The family's shining lights and the plaque sheep. Rachel --

black sheep. Rachel studied the significance of those family photos.

People want family and how they make that in a way is made on the

mantelpiece. So for example, I have spoken to people who have

photographs or those lovely tinted photographs or even scans of old

photographs on the mantelpiece of long dead, great, great uncles they

have never met, but it doesn't matter because that is part of their

story at a time of great change for the family. Why then? Why do we need

to know about great-uncle Jack who was way before you were born and has

no relevance to our lives now except he clearly does? I suppose it's that

feeling of having roots. You know, that people talk about an

individualised society that communities breaking down and these

things, you know, it could be the most horrid vase or ornament from

great, great granny. Again, we've never met, but what those things do,

they tie you down and give you that sense of belonging when a lot of

life is so uncertain. Cardiff was built as a port city. A

very transient population, people coming in and people leaving and

even today, that's the way it is. A very mobile population, but Wales is

very diverse. Different degrees of mobility in different areas the the

Valleys for example at the other extreme. In some parts of the

Valleys, 90% of the people basically live near where they were born.

Gwenda has witnessed the changes in family life in the Valleys for

three-quarters of a century. Tell me about your family and who looked

after who with sisters and all that stuff?

Well, I was one of five. My brother who was the oldest, was lost during

the war, but he was brought up with my grandmother which was the thing

to do in those days. I knew he was my brother. I knew he lived with my

grandmother. It didn't make any difference to us. I thought he was

chocolate, my hero. And Christmas was always spent in my grandmother's

house. Her sister had eight childrenment her other sister had

five children and the house would be, the walls would be expanded, you

know. The big change in her time has been in the role of women. Out from

the kitchen, into the workplace for wages. Gwenda was a teacher, but

that's not what married women did before the First World War. Married

teachers weren't employed, that was it. You couldn't keep a job. You

couldn't teach if you were married. You lost your job. I can't remember

any mother of my generation working. All stayed at home. If they wanted

money, they might have a little shop in their front room, you know,

downstairs, but they wouldn't go out to work. You wouldn't see them. Not

until the war and then, of course, they were wanted in the factories.

War often changes the relationship between the sexes and so it was in

World War II, men went off to fight, women went out to work. Today, two

in every three women has a job. One very big change we have seen is lots

more women working and that has lots more implications for family life

and how families order their every day life. Like? It means that

families have to think about childcare a lot more. How they're

going to look after their children if both parents in work. It is

always painted as a women's issue, childcare, but for both parents, it

is quite a concern is how to look after their children while they are

in work. It means that income is different. The income patterns are

different and it means that men are a bit more involved in family life

in terms of every day tasks like domestic work or childcare, but the

women still do more than men. Here is a modern family. Hannah and Rhys

are expecting their second child and they plan to get married. 30 years

ago, one in ten children was born out of wedlock, now it is six in

every ten who are born to unmarried parents. Rhys and Hannah work, but a

chunk of their pay gets eaten up with the cost of childcare for their

son. How do you juggle family and work given that your parents are a

good way away? Quite difficult. We've managed although I have been

back in work a year. Rhys takes our son to nursery. I pick him up, but

if he is ill, I have to take time off work, but if I really need to go

to work, I rely on friends or if I'm in desperate need, I ask my parents.

Compare the way you were brought up in a family with the way your son is

being brought up. Compare how it has changed? . He is not able to see his

grandparents much. I Skype every Sunday with my grandmother so he has

a continuity to see them, but it's not the same as being just down the

road. Over the years people from North

Wales have come down to South Wales or Cardiff, not saying everyone, but

lots of people have. It is a good life down here, but you have to

sacrifice certain things as in family life. It is great to have

your family close to you. It is nice to have them far away sometimes as

well. The role of a woman has changed and the importance of

working as a woman and the pressure after having children, you have to

return back to work. I felt the pressure, not from you, but from

work asking so when are you going to come back? There is a difference

between our mother's generation, there wasn't that pressure to go

back to work. It was just the norm was for the mother to stay at home

and for the man to work. How did the way your bringing up your son,

differ from the way your dad brought you up? Back then people worked

hard. The father worked very hard. He worked Saturdays as well so the

mother would be home all day long. Say if I went to play football,

sport on a Saturday, my mum would do everything with me and hence my dad

would work until I don't know, 2pm, 3pm, 4pm, so we wouldn't see him

until then. I spend more time with him than my dad did with me. You

have got to juggle everything with each other. You rely on each other

pretty well? It is the nice things of going out in the evening without

any children, we have to look for a baby-sitter. Just going to the

cinema is difficult. We have to get baby-sitters and by the time you pay

for a baby-sitter at ?8 or ?10 an hour, going to the cinema is

expensive. It is like ?50 before you turn around. Say our nursery fees is

?600 a month. It is like having a second mortgage. He only goes three

days a week. Imagine if you had a kid going five days a week or two

kids going five days, you know, it is a lot of money to pay out. Why is

it such a big deal to have a family? Why do you want to have a family? It

brings us closer. It is nice to see the next generation grow up. I just

feel it is nice. I have been brought up in a big family and I love having

brothers and sisters. It would be nice to think it is all

about love and of course, it is, but economics is also a big shaper of

family life. The collapse of heavy industry in Wales altered the

family. Economic uncertainty means we hold off from marrying until

we're older. Kids are now living at home longer because of the high cost

of housing. 27% of young adults in Wales live with their parents.

It is a soap opera. The drama of family life, divorce, rows,

break-ups, families falling apart. Families getting back together. But

you know what, it's not reality. Happy families do not a good soap

opera make or do happy families sell tabloid newspapers. Read the

newspapers or watch the soaps and you would think it is family hell,

but it's not. On the latest figures there are 170,000 sickle parent

families in Wales. That's one in five of the total number of families

in this country of ours. 26,000 of those one-parent families, it is the

dad who brings up the kids, but mostly, it's the mum. Neat Meet

Nicola and Matthew. In our BBC Wales poll, three out of

ten people think children raised by single-parents do worse in school.

But Nicola is striving to make sure Matthew turns out well. It is an

unconventional family built on love. Tell me how you bring up Matthew as

a single-parent. What do you have to do and what arrangements do you have

to make and how do you have to switch things around and make

everything work? I have been really lucky. I have had my parents and my

brother and sister have been a really good support to me over the

years. I have had to work. I work pretty much 9am to 4pm so Matthew is

in school. His school bus stops by my parent's house. My dad would pick

him up, now he is old enough he can walk up to my parent's house. Where

does his dad figure in? His dad has never been around. Would it be

better if he was? I don't know. I don't know any different now. I just

did it all on my own. Possibly. Possibly. I don't know. But he is

not? He has never been there. He has never been around from the

beginning. He said he didn't want to be involved and I respected his

wishes. He doesn't live anywhere close so... He has gone? Gone, yeah.

Do you feel any stigma about it? How do you feel it has changed in your

life? Attitudes to single mums bringing up kids heroically. When

people thinking of single mothers, they think of women on benefits,

having money from the State. I've worked all the way through from when

I had Matthew I continued to work. It's difficult, you know, I think

it's difficult to be a single parent whether you are a male or a female.

There is a lot of pressure. There is peer pressure on the children today

to have things and we can't always deliver the goods. Are you proud of

her? Why? Because she raised me well. Go on. She wants me to have a

good life. A happy life. Because you haven't got a father who is present,

who is here, do you want to turn out right for your mum? Yeah. How do you

mean? Spell it out for me. She taught me right from wrong. How has

she done that, making up, if you like, for the fact that there's no

dad here? What has she done? She has done everything a mum can do and a

dad. Both. And a dad? Like... She does all the things. She helps me

with my homework, she does things out of her time for me. She has made

you what you are? I know he is a really good kid and I'm really proud

of him, you know. He doesn't cause any hassle. Everybody tells me how

well-behaved he is and that makes me really proud as a mother. There is a

kind of picture in the tabloids of single mums and that is girls who

get pregnant casually because the State is going to help them out,

because the Government is going to help them out and then they get

pregnant casually again. How far from the truth is that or maybe it

is the truth? I don't know. What do you think of that image? I don't

think it is a true image of single-parents. I mean, first of

all, I was 28 when I got pregnant with Matthew. I was working. I had

my own flat. You know, it happened, you know. There is a lot of parents,

I know a lot of single-parents out there who work really hard. Maybe

with some support from the other parent. Yeah, there's, you know, you

do see the single mothers walking around pushing prams. Youngsters,

perhaps they don't know any different, but I don't think it's a

true picture of being a single parent.

Nicola and Matthew are clearly a strong family. There is a lot of

love and caring for each other here. Which makes you wonder if families

are in as such trouble as you might think.

We read a lot about the family being in decline, rising divorce,

single-parents, gay parents, traditional family being swept away.

Should I be worried? It depends what paper you read. That idea of family

being fractured and falling apart is a particular point of view that once

there was something solid that is now being fractured through rising

divorce rates, women going to work, single families and children in

families on welfare, third generation. The problem is if that

point of view persists, all those different new kinds of families

still have that shame and that stigma attached to them which really

they shouldn't have. If we change our point of view and see that that

old idea of family, that iconic view was in itself a falsehood and what

they're doing is freeing up people to make the families that they want.

For gay couples to adopt of the for single women to have children. And

for people to split up from their partners if the relationship really

isn't happy. By continuing to attach that shame and stigma to the single

family, we allow the terrible problem of childhood poverty to

persist and I think we just need to start looking at family differently

and accepting what it really is than what we think it should be. Wales is

a country of migration. Industry sucked in people. Catholic eye

taetians and Irish in the 30s, people from Asia in our own day, all

with different ideas of the family. As the shape of Wales has changed so

has the shape of the Welsh family. Different groups come in and bring

in their own ideas. Sometimes very different. Sometimes very

traditional. This woman moved with her parents

from Bangladesh. She is a student in Cardiff studying for a sociology

degree. She believes strongly in the importance of family. Being an

Asian, I was brought up to sacrifice for my family. Do things that would

make my family happy. Such as higher education. Everything depends on how

my family feels. You're 20. What kind of family do you want? I want a

husband. I want a small family. Small, but intellect family, yes. Do

you want to work? Yes. I want to be working, yes. You spent your first

years in Bangladesh, but you are a Welsh woman now. You are a Welsh

woman now. How has Wales changed your attitudes? I have become more

independent as in like the way I think and what I want to do with my

life because before it was just grow up, get married, have kids and

settle down, but me, yes, I want to have family. I want to have a job.

People come to improve their lives. For this woman, selling the Big

Issue is a better life than she had in Romania. She has just got married

and Big Issue readers rallied around to give her a wedding dress. Tell me

about your wedding dress. I can't believe now. I had nothing. Nothing.

No dress. No ring. No nothing. No flowers. Nothing. Nothing. And stuff

in the office Big Issue. Put on Twitter and on Facebook. So what

happened? I got a beautiful dress for free. This dress is free for me.

It's new. Wow. You looked very beautiful. Both of you are really,

really beautiful. A big day. Absolutely, a big day. They migrated

for economic reasons. They wanted a better life for their six-year-old

son. Lavina is learning English and dreams of a cleaning job. Wales

offers better family prospects. Why is Wales good for your family? Why

is Wales good for family? Because the Welsh help many families. I have

one house. I have clothes. I have food. I have a school for my son

which is free. I have a job, the Big Issue is OK. What's the secret of a

good marriage? Big love. This is the secret, big love. Big hearts. Big

love inside here. Big love. Yes. How big now? My heart is something like

this and my love is like this. Big love makes better families. Can

can doubt it -- who can doubt it? We have a greater variety of family

structures now than we did decades ago, but for most of us, families

remain the same. Contrary to what you think might, divorce is actually

falling because we live longer together before getting married,

those who do get married seem to be happier in those marriages. Divorce

did rise steeply in the 70s, but maybe that was unhappy people

freeing themselves from bad marriages when the law made divorce

easier. But now, divorce is falling. All the same, even with that fall,

two in every five marriages break-up and who can doubt that divorce means

pain for adults and for children. Let me tell you, weekend dads are a

bad thing. Divorced dads who keep in touch by their kids by taking them

out on a Saturday, forget it, it's a bad thing. Kids that don't sit

together with their parents around a table, it's a bad thing. Don't give

me all this newfangled nonsense. What we know by talking to children

about how happy they feel and how satisfied with their lives, it is

the quality of relationships they have with the people around them

rather than the structure of their family. Statistically, it doesn't

matter whether they are living with one parent, with both parents, and

whether their parents are of the same-sex or of different sex. What

matters is the quality of relationships and the love and care

that those old-fashioned concepts of love and care are still enormously

important. Is that you saying that or is there proper evidence? We know

from surveys carried out with children about how happy they are,

what we call their well-being, that it is quality of relationships

that's most important. Children are generally quite conventional

creatures and they quite like living with two parents at home and of

course, children are often very unhappy when their parents split up,

but managed well children can still be happy and have successful lives

living in an unconventional family set-up.

There is a view that the family is falling apart, that everything is

disintegrating, broken families, single-parents, that it is all going

to the dogs. But the figures don't bear that out. Things have changed.

There is more variety in the type of family these days, but we shouldn't

make too much of that. The way of the Welsh remains that the bulk of

us remain in families which are a man and a woman and usually children

and usually married and usually pretty happy with it. We are a

nation of happy families.