Family breakdown and the devaluation of marriage produce a generation of children with no concept of right and wrong, the Shadow Home Secretary has warned.
Chris Grayling, the Conservative MP for Epsom and Ewell and the Shadow Home Secretary, said that the lack of a family-focused upbringing and the fact that young children have no-one to tell them right from wrong mean that they are growing up as the ‘antithesis of model citizens’.
‘Family breakdown has reached a scale where many young people grow up with no vestige of stability in their lives, and no concept of a family-focused upbringing.
‘Sometimes children do not even have a proper home — being pushed around from relative to relative week by week,’ he added.
In his speech in Westminster, Mr Grayling said a ‘perverse sense of political correctness’ has devalued marriage and stable relationships, which has left us effectively paying couples to ‘break up, not stay together’.
(Click here to read the full speech)
Earlier this year, Archbishop of Birmingham, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, said that young people need ‘clear moral principles’ and that parents should lead the way in setting an example of ‘faithful unswerving love’.
The Archbishop said:
' ... youngsters need the example of parents who can show them, in daily living and from an early age, both the beauty and the cost of faithful, unswerving love.'
(See the Daily Telegraph report)
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A recent report by the Centre for Social Justice called Every Family Matters dealt with the issue of how family breakdown is deeply detrimental to children’s life chances and to the wellbeing of adults. The report made several recommendations to reform the law so as to strengthen the family and called on the Government to resist asserting legal equivalence between cohabitants and married couples.
An earlier report on the Centre, Family Law Review: Faster Divorce and Foreign Law, condemns the attitude that marriage is little more than a 'lifestyle choice' and say that there is overwhelming evidence that marriage is good for couples, children, the extended family and society as a whole. The authors of the report warn that the annual economic cost to the taxpayer of the average family breakdown is up to £820 or £24 billion for the country as a whole.
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