All in the Family . . . Or Not

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For a startling glimpse at the extent of that diversity — and fragility — look no further than the Norwegian royal family, which late last month welcomed into its fold 28-year-old Mette-Marit Tjessem Høiby, the unwed mother of a four-year-old son. Her days as a prominent figure on the Oslo club scene, the fact that her boy's father is a man convicted of drug offenses, and a peripatetic job history that includes a stint as a waitress raised some concern among the Norwegian people about whether she was a proper consort for Crown Prince Haakon. "It's not that she's a commoner, but just that she is a very common commoner," one Oslo resident told a local paper. But her status as a single mother barely caused a raised eyebrow. During the Aug. 25 ceremony the presiding bishop went out of his way to praise her for how she was bringing up her son, saying, "As a single mother you have shown the way forward for others." Young Marius played a prominent role in both the ceremony and the post-wedding photo ops on the balcony of the royal palace. (For a look at how much Europe's royal families mirror the societal changes occurring among their subjects, see the accompanying graphic illustrating the various marital configurations of three royal houses.)

These changing attitudes haven't gone unnoticed by European governments. In 1998, when the current coalition government came to power in Germany, one of its first moves was to redefine the family as any "relations that involved children," thus stretching that concept to cover everything from unwed mothers to homosexual partnerships with children. "The family can be lived in manifold ways," says Gabriele Conen, head of the Family department at the Ministry for Family, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. "There is no ideological discussion any longer about what a family is. We don't put up a model, but orientate our policies toward what exists."

Other countries are also taking steps to ensure that de facto relationships have some legal recognition. About two years ago the French National Assembly passed the pactes civils de solidarité, which legally recognized and gave certain rights to couples living together. The French are now also considering proposals that would grant full parental rights to both parents of children who were born out of wedlock. Registered unmarried fathers would be able to put their children on their social security card, receive school notices, claim aid for lodging to accommodate their offspring, even if they don't have full custody, and qualify for family transportation discounts and tax deductions. The government is also pushing unwed parents to mark the birth of their child with a formal ceremony. "More than half of all first-born children today are born out of wedlock," says Ségolène Royal, the French Minister for Family and Childhood. "We must solemnize this event."

The Netherlands, too, allows couples who are not married, but who meet certain criteria, such as living together and making a commitment to mutual financial support, to register as a domestic partnership. New legislation means that such couples now have the rights of inheritance, pension and continued possession of an owner-occupied home. One offshoot of such laws is that they not only allow heterosexuals to formalize their partnerships; in many cases, these provisions also act as a vehicle through which homosexual couples can affirm their bonds — granting such partnerships official recognition for the first time.

Further to the East, the Czech government is also drafting a registered partnership bill that obliges both partners to provide for their children and share their upbringing, although not everyone is impressed — critics claim, for example, that the proposal doesn't permit partners to adopt children in such a union. "The State should take a realistic approach and stop thinking of a family as being just a marriage of two people for life and their children," says Vera Haberlova, chief analyst with the Prague-based Center for Empirical Research (stem). "Such an attitude will help fewer and fewer people. I don't think the state can do much to reverse the trend, nor does it have any business acting as a kind of priest who tells people how to live together."

But for many cohabiting couples such laws fall short, if they even exist. While they may provide proof that a relationship exists, they often do not carry full legal authority or grant unmarried partners the same tax breaks or entitlements that married couples enjoy, such as access to the partner's pension.

And there is equal dissatisfaction with such laws on the part of such organizations as the Catholic Church, which, in July 2000, issued a document by the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family reminding the faithful of the importance of the traditional family structure. Soon after the Berlusconi government came to power in Italy earlier this year, Pope John Paul II said the first item on the new administration's agenda should be to safeguard "the rights of the family based on matrimony, without confusing it with other forms of cohabitation." Some sociologists are in general agreement with the Vatican that marriage is an institution that should be encouraged. Mai Heide Ottosen, senior researcher at the Danish National Institute of Social Research, asserts there are data showing that "children of cohabiting parents have a risk of their family being dissolved that is twice as high as in traditional families," with the attendant pressures on children, while other researchers point to statistics that suggest cohabiting families are less well off financially than traditional ones.

But for good or ill, the structure of European family life is changing drastically, particularly when it comes to the role women play both inside and outside the home. Roughly 42% of European women now have a full or part-time job. For some, this means the financial freedom to raise a family on their own. But for the less well-paid, it means a need for adequate, affordable childcare. Governments, employers, churches and family members themselves will have to adapt to the new realities. Here are a few of them . . .



In 1997, when James Bateman, a 43-year-old building estimator from Surrey, England, and his wife split up after a 14-year marriage, the couple decided that Bateman would take custody of their four sons, then aged eight, 10, 12 and 14. Though the two older boys, Ben and Matthew, eventually ended up moving in with their mother, Bateman has spent much of the past four years learning how to adjust to the role of a single-parent as he watches Sam and Gareth grow up under his roof. And Bateman is far from alone. Over the last two decades the number of children living in single-parent households has nearly tripled across Europe. The limited information available shows that in 1983 3.7% of children in the E.U. lived in single parent households and by 2000 this figure had increased to 9.7%. That pattern has been most dramatic in the U.K., where figures jumped from 6.4% in 1983 to 19.8% by 2000. Most single parents are women, but Bateman is one of the few — though growing — number of single fathers in Europe who have taken on the major responsibility of raising their children. "I don't care what anyone says," says Bateman, "it was a shock to start with."

He has made do with a succession of au pairs, help from neighborhood families and now the boys themselves as they approach ages at which they can look after themselves until Bateman gets home from work. "I think they have grown up a lot quicker, and they probably do more things around the house, more than most boys normally do, but that's a necessity rather than anything else," says Bateman.

But there have been nagging problems. Bateman is convinced that Britain's Child Support Agency (CSA), the government body responsible for collecting and paying child support maintenance, treats single fathers differently than they do single mothers, particularly in how the agency calculates the amount a working ex-husband must contribute to a non-working ex-wife, as opposed to the reverse scenario. And there are many who share not only Bateman's distrust of the CSA, but also his sense that society in general fails to recognize and understand the needs of working fathers. "The whole system is completely wrong," he complains. "Most bosses don't expect a man to be looking after his children. But at the end of the day I have tried my best to get on and make the best of the situation."

Too bad Bateman doesn't live in Germany. Since January of this year, the government has decreed that both the father and mother of a child are eligible for paternity/maternity leave until their child is three years old and that in all companies with more than 15 employees, both the father and the mother have the right to work a 30-hour-a-week part-time job — though at a reduced salary. In France, legislation effective in January 2002 will increase paid paternity leave from three days to two weeks. (Maternity leave is 16 weeks in total for the first two children: for the third child onward it is increased to 26 weeks.)