The “bushfire” threatening Australia: fragile families
Sad. The disease is spreading.
Australia is known as the Lucky Country but a report on child welfare published this week suggests that its luck is running out. Like Britain and the USA, it has an increasing number of fragile families where children are at risk of abuse and neglect, thanks to marriage breakdown, single parenthood and cohabiting relationships which have a high risk of breaking up.
Professor Patrick Parkinson of Sydney University, author of the “For Kids’ Sake” report, says that, for Australia’s most troubled children, “the situation is deteriorating at an extraordinarily rapid pace.” The number of children who have to live in out-of-home care because their own homes are not safe doubled between 1997 and 2009. A substantial proportion of these are indigenous (Aboriginal) children.
More broadly, there has been a decline in the psychological wellbeing of young people, thousands of whom are on anti-depressants. More than a quarter of young people aged 16 to 24 have a mental disorder. There has been a huge increase in self-harming behaviour amongst adolescents, especially amongst girls aged 15 to 17, and binge drinking resulting in hospitalisation has soared amongst females aged 15 to 24. These trends reflect the situation in Europe and North America, the report notes, and “cannot be explained away merely by changes in awareness, or in diagnostic tests.”
Prof Parkinson, a family law specialist who helped shape family policy under the Howard government, warns that these problems are not just “spot fires” but signs of a “major bush fire” burning in the background. And that raging bushfire is family breakdown:
While it would be simplistic to posit just one or two explanations, if there is one major demographic change in western societies that can be linked to a large range of adverse consequences for many children and young people, it is the growth in the numbers of children who experience life in a family other than living with their two biological parents, at some point before the age of 15. Family conflict and parental separation have a range of adverse impacts on children and young people.
He highlights the “rapid rise in the numbers of children born into de facto relationships, which subsequently break down.” These together with births to single women accounted for 35 per cent of all children born in Australia in 2009.
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And if Australia were to get homosexual marriage all of the above problems will be worse.