Archbishop of Sydney

Population Problems

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
9 October 2005

By the time they are 15 only 1 out 2 American teenagers have both their natural parents living with them.  In Spain the proportion is 90 per cent, while in France, Germany and Sweden it is two-thirds.

In Australia the figures are much better than they are in the US, and slightly better than most European figures.  70 per cent of children in the 15-17 year-old age group live with both their natural parents. 

But the Australian trends, although changing slowly over time, seem to be heading in the wrong direction.  In 1997 76 per cent of all children under the age of 17 lived with both their natural parents.  In 2003 this figure had fallen to a little under 72 per cent.

Indicators about the strength or weakness of family life are important to watch because serious personal and social consequences follow when the family is radically eroded.

40 years ago Daniel Patrick Moynihan published a report which highlighted the collapse of the family as a cause of multi-generational poverty among blacks in the United States. 

Moynihan was ferociously attacked for making this claim and then ignored.  But over the late-1980s and 1990s so much supporting evidence piled up that it was no longer possible to ignore it.

70 per cent of black American births are born to single-mothers compared to 28 per cent of all American children.  One quarter of all American children and over half of all black children are being raised in single-parent familles. 

In Australia, about 20 per cent of children are in single-parent families, up from 15 per cent in 1992.

In America social scientists calculate that half of the problems children have in single-parent families of all races arise from poverty, and the other half arise from the absence of a father. 

Father-absence is particularly important.  In the US, boys from fatherless familles are twice as likely to end up in jail, and girls are twice as likely to have an out of wedlock birth.

The trends in the Canadian French-speaking province of Quebec also stand out in an alarming way. The majority of births there – 55 per cent – occur outside marriage. 

This compares to 28 per cent of all births in Canada, 34 per cent of all births in the US, and 32 per cent in Australia.

8 out of 10 Aboriginal births are outside marriage.   In the Northern Territory the figure is 96 per cent.  This factor needs to be considered when the problems facing black communities in Australia — and how to overcome them — are discussed.

Parenting is not an easy job to do well, and it is even harder when you have to do it by yourself and without the support of marriage.  For the well being of parents, children and society, we need to do more to make successful and happy family life easier to achieve.