Marriage Not 'Best For Relationship'

By Staff

Monday, February 2, 2009, 10:48

A new survey conducted in Britain revealed that the younger generation does not consider marriage to be best of relationships nor did they feel that women are solely responsible for household.

The survey was conducted by annual British Social Attitudes, showed that ewer than 40 per cent adults, aged between 18 and 34, believed marriage to be the best kind of relationship, compared with more than 80 per cent pensioners.

As compared to the adults over 65 years, more number of younger adults did not believe that mothers should get a full-time job as soon as their children start school, even fewer thought that it is the mothers who the children preferred.

The report that surveyed 4000 people followed the report by Government statisticians that revealed that the married couples are soon to be a minority by the next year as mostly the youngsters preferred living out of the wedlock.

The changing social trends highlighted by the National Centre for Social Research also included that most people believed that homosexual couples were as good as parents as the regular man and woman.

"Since the middle of the last century, attitudes in Britain towards parents and parenthood have changed a great deal," the Telegraph quoted Geoff Dench, a Visiting Fellow at Greenwich University and one of the authors of the British Social Attitudes study, as saying.
"Parents used to be regarded as central to society. Becoming a good citizen was seen as assisted by parenthood and by the experience of taking responsibility for others that this entailed. But it is different now," he added.

Dench also said that there was a time when division of labor based on gender existed in Britain, the men earned the bread while the women were required to take care of household and child upbringing. This bought about a domestic stability in marriage life.

"Parenthood gave people a valued place in society which may not exist today," he said.

He also went on to state that such an attitude developed in the youth today as a result of the 'Labour's social reforms' since the 1960s. The reform promoted individual freedom and and liberated people from traditional family norms.

This finally resulted in abolishing the welfare payments that rewarded traditional families, the generation of the 1980's were exposed to "relatively few wholly traditional families in Britain," and developed a sense that the traditional family pattern was a thing of the past. AGENCIES

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