FAO Mr Justice Coleridge: Our family isn't broken and we do not wish to live in a stable...

"...two-parent household."

We tried that, and it wasn't stable. It wasn't even a stable.

This news article



reports that

A senior family court judge is to attack the government over what he says is an "epidemic" of family failure.

In a speech, Mr Justice Coleridge, 58, a Family Division judge for England and Wales, will say "wholesale collapse" is pushing children into drugs and crime.

He will say urban family life is "in meltdown" and the government is doing too little to address the problem.

Apparently a family without a father is 'broken' and therefore pretty much doomed to failure (however they define 'failure')..

"What is certain is that almost all of society's social ills can be traced directly to the collapse of the family life," he will say.

However, Mr Justice Coleridge, who heads family courts in the south west of England, will not criticise single parents directly.

"I am not saying every broken family produces dysfunctional children but I am saying that almost every dysfunctional child is the product of a broken family.

I would like to suggest to Mr Justice Coleridge the possibility that many of the children and families he sees in the course of his 'work' would be functioning just fine if it wasn't for society itself being broken and dysfunctional.

I don't think our children are suffering from the lack of male authority figures, much as Mr Justice Coleridge's ego might tell him otherwise. Good behaviour does not result from the forceful administration of sticks and carrots, though a certain degree of obedience and compliance might be obtained by those measures. But hardly enough to be worth the expenditure of energy. Self-directing peaceful co-operation comes from treating children with respect and consideration. Not trying to force them, sausage-like, through an increasingly obsolete system throughout their lives.

Our nation's children seem to be finally combining to resist the systematic battering of their individual natural shapes to make them fit the round hole requirements of the existing economic structure. Good. All power to them. My own children, not compelled to undergo such treatment, behave perfectly well as would most others in the same situation - with or without an omnipresent father.