Family breakdown: Let's concentrate on the data

This month, BBC2's Victoria Derbyshire show focused on the effects of breakdown on children. Our own Sir Paul Coleridge was invited to interview several families - parents and children - who had experienced  family breakdown. 

The programme is a great watch, not least because of Paul's gentle interview manner but also because of the way, again and again, he brings us back to the data. 

Watch it here - it's the first and last fifteen minutes of the programme.

Family breakdown is such an emotive topic because, as Paul says, 'everybody has a view on it because everybody nowadays has experience of family breakdown'.

The result tends to be that people express their concern about family breakdown but then shrug their shoulders as if it is inevitable and nothing can be done. 

Two of the contributors to the programme say of their respective divorces 'I'm glad it happened' and 'we just decided we needed to be kind to each other' so that the children wouldn't suffer. In other words, it wasn't good but everybody is better off now. 

On the flip side, one of the divorced couples also acknowledge that their daughters 'were used on both sides'. Their daughter then reluctantly admits that 'I still do have a little wish' that her parents were still together. Other contributors talk of still having 'nightmares after my parents divorce' years later and how a stand-off with an ex-partner now means 'I dread my children's future weddings'. 

So, who to believe in this emotive subject? 

'Anecdotes are fascinating,' says Paul. 'But let's concentrate on the data. Family breakdown has a devastating effect on children." 

We have to be compassionate about this subject. But when the data shows that half of our teenagers have experienced family breakdown, that picking up the pieces costs the taxpayer £48 billion and rising, and when children's life chances then become stacked against, we need to treat this subject as a serious public health issue. 

Here are just a few examples of how lone parents and their children are disadvantaged compared to equivalent couple parent families, based on data from the UK Families and Children's Survey (pdf download):

• 7 times as likely to be in the lowest fifth income group (47% vs 7%)
• 7 times as likely to be on housing benefit (42% vs 6%)
• twice as likely to have children whose health is not good (4% vs 2%)
• twice as likely to have their own health problems (13% vs 7%)
• twice as likely to have children with behaviour problems (16% vs 8%)

Families will always want to downplay their own experience of family breakdown. And in some cases, that will be justified. But when it affects half of our children, how can that possibly be the case for all, or even most? 

We need to keep concentrating on the data. 

I hope our work encourages you. Don't forget our Key Facts pages are there to help. 

May your own marriage and those around you flourish!

Harry Benson, Marriage Foundation