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- The secret of a successful marriage is to treat it as
a business partnership and not a romance, the woman who is to head the
new parenthood institute said last night.
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- Mary MacLeod said that to make a marriage work couples
needed to make cool-headed deals about the practicalities of running a
home and bringing up a family, and not rely on passion alone.
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- "Marriage is an enterprise," she said. "You
could say it was like a partnership or a business. There are so many myths
about marriage. One is that marriage is about romantic passion." It
was time to start "deconstructing some of the myths around marriage".
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- Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, is to launch the independent
National Family and Parenting Institute next week. It will be run by Ms
MacLeod, 51, who was formerly director of policy and planning at Childline.
She has two teenage children and has been married for 20 years to Dennis
Walder, a professor with the Open University.
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- She said she believed that the idea of a golden age of
marriage, during which all families stayed happily together, was a myth.
"A lot of people are saying that the family is in crisis. But I think
we need to be very careful about making that assumption." Telling
parents that the family was in crisis would only demoralise them.
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- Ms MacLeod said she was sceptical about the value of
"good parenting" guides and classes. The best way for parents
to learn tips about bringing up children was to give them greater opportunities
to talk to each other about their experiences. "I don't like the finger-wagging
approach. I want to get away from the idea that parenting is something
you have to learn from professionals."
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- Her comments, which surprised some family organisations,
are likely to provoke a wider debate about how best to provide support
for families at a time of great public anxiety about family life and a
divorce rate running at four in ten.
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- Julia Cole, a counsellor, therapist and consultant to
the marriage guidance organisation Relate, said she thought that love and
romance should be the cornerstones of marriage. "When people talk
about families these days, it is almost as if the word 'love' had become
a dirty word. They talk about relationships and parenting, but not love.
You don't need hard-headed business relationships with marriage; what you
need first and foremost is love."
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- Ms Cole said she thought that romance was vital in keeping
a marriage going. "People need to be made to feel special and all
those clichéd things like cuddles, special pet names and candle-lit
dinners are very important."
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- There were tremendous advantages in bringing up children
in a marriage or a stable relationship, but that there was also a place
for other types of families. Although she expected the rate of relationship
breakdown to slow slightly, she doubted that any organisation could have
a significant impact on the divorce rate.
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- "I don't think that could be achieved very quickly,
if at all. That is why it is so important to reduce the impact on the children
to ensure that parents and children talk to each other more and to make
it widely accepted that children continue to see both parents," Ms
Cole said.
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- Her main aim was to encourage couples to seek help immediately
their relationship ran into trouble and not to leave it until it was too
late to patch things up.
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- The Pope has condemned violence against women and has
called for anything which offends their "liberty and femininity"
to be vigorously opposed. Just because the Bible describes women as the
"helpmeet" of man, this did not mean men could treat women as
their servants, he said.
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