Families with a difference: the reality behind the hype

Families come in many guises. Some parents are same-sex; others are single by choice. Growing numbers of children are conceived through assistive reproductive technology. What do these developments mean for the parents and children involved?  Professor Susan Golombok's book, Modern Families, examines 'new family forms' within a context of four decades of empirical research. It's stigmatisation outside the family, rather than relationships within it, that creates difficulties for children in new family forms. Susan Golombok Over the past 40 years the family has altered in ways that few people imagined back in the days of the Janet and John reading books in which mummy baked and daddy mowed the lawn. In the 1970s, the 'nuclear' family (heterosexual married couple with genetically related children) was in a clear majority.