‘I am what I am – a family man. Mother, father, brother.’ Fleetwood Mac, 1987.

Are we allowed to say that anymore? What would happen if I included that song in a music set when performing in a public venue? Would I risk being dragged before some commissioner somewhere? Might I be charged expenses for needing to be protected if I named my whole set after this song, and advertised it as such?

Such questions would seem absurd in 1987, but not today in Australia. Indeed, since the removal of fault in divorce, the loss of recognition of the worth of a parent staying at home in our tax system, redefining the scope of what ‘marriage’ means, and what ‘male and female’ mean, the traditional family is nowadays not only seen as optional, but in some ways, unhelpful and even unnecessary.

I don’t peg the ‘no-fault divorce’ as a starting point as a breakdown of the traditional family because of some theory – there are other claims to this as well e.g. the sexualisation of identity and the weaponising of emotions within relationships. I peg it in my mind because of what I was hearing in the counselling sessions I was having with teenage boys (the biological kind) back in the late 20th century.

These youth, who were working to understand what manhood was about, were angry. Normally, it was their absent fathers with whom they were angry. Those dads had not had the hard conversations with their sons about why they had left their wives and children. And if they did, they could not explain why they were not at fault for leaving. Emotivist phrases like ‘the time had come’, or ‘I found someone else’, or ‘I felt I had to go’ simply did not cut it with these lads. Nor should it.

I remember one thoughtful abandoned son, whose dad was successful in business, asking a profound question that I could not answer reasonably. Here it is: ‘How come Dad would have to pay up big if he breaks one of his business contracts, but nothing happens because he broke up with Mum?’ The law said there was no-fault, but this teenager knew better.

Katy Faust and Stacy Manning (Them Before Us) have collected data and testimonies that reminds us that the best risk mitigation children can have for all kinds of difficulties is a mother and father who are in a stable (married) relationship. They call their movement ‘Them Before Us’. Their basic message is a challenge – when will we adults accept that our desires should not overrun the needs of children? Faust and Manning accept that people outside this ‘old fashioned’ structure can do well – but on averages, not as well.

And what adults are feeling has become the dominant arbiter of moral justification (which is not the kind of liberty that JS Mill was on about, by the way). As Faust and Manning note, for adults in our world of smorgasbord family combinations, ‘… the motivation is solely the feelings of the adults involved … masquerading as adult rights, which often results in serious damage to children’s actual rights.’

Karol Markowicz and Bethany Mandel (in Stolen Youth) have outlined the areas of life where our children are under threat because of this shift in emphasis in how we approach this basic foundation of our civil society. As they note, ‘The Woke see children as child soldiers in their cultural revolutions, isolating them from their parents and radicalising them.’

Closer to home, it was moving and refreshing to read in Warren Mundine’s autobiography about the role of family here in Australia. He describes so clearly and with great heart, but without superfluous sentiment, the impact of his family on his life. Perhaps part of my interest is that I discovered we grew up in neighbouring suburbs during the same time – he was an Auburn lad, me a ‘Rego’ (Regents Park) lad. I remember the excitement of going to his main shopping centre, which had so much more than our little one…

But I digress. Mundine is a keen observer of life and society. His concerns about attacks on the family here in Australia are worth repeating:

Family is the foundation stone of all societies. … If you want to destroy or control a society, then the first place to attack is the family … the push to erase the concept of family … is about substituting the values laid down by families with values laid down by governments and bureaucrats.

He astutely notes that the so-called welfare programs in many of our schools are in fact ‘really about governments, via the school system, stepping into the role of parent’. And all this is under the perverse explanation that ‘it is because we care’. Care is not the issue. Control is the issue.

Give me the Fleetwood Mac song any day, instead of some bureaucrat who wants to take all authority with no personal commitment. They are just like those parents who claimed they were not at fault for deserting their families, just because their feelings were so strong…

Interestingly, the song Family Man was remastered in 2017, and when I last looked, it had 1.3 million views. Maybe there is more hope out there than what is often suggested by the Woke media!