England’s Courtney Lawes: “Marriage is the answer to family instability”
from C4M:
In a career as a rugby lock forward, Courtney Lawes will have had more than his fair share of hard knocks. But he may have been a little surprised at the ferocity of the backlash he received in June when he suggested being “preferably married before having kids” would help with child poverty.
Unfazed, the England international is now tackling Government ministers over their reluctance to highlight the benefits of marriage.
In an article for The Sunday Telegraph the 31-year-old insists that even in 2020, a stable family “still means a family where the parents are married”.
Lawes was writing in response to a recent report by the Centre for Social Justice. Family Structure Still Matters calls on the Government to “stop pretending” that cohabitation is just as good as marriage, when it provides worse outcomes “for children as well as parents”. We’ll write in more detail on this report in the coming days.
Lawes, who is married with four children, draws on his own experience. His father “was always there”. But this was not the case for Lawes’ half-brother, who has the same dad from an earlier relationship. He became involved in “drugs and criminality that eventually ended in prison”.
He says: “I’m very thankful that he is out now and doing great for himself and raising a son of his own, but I’m forced to ask the question of how his life might have been different if he had grown up in a stable home”.
This was ‘not exceptional’, he adds, in a community where “almost one in five Afro-Caribbean fathers do not raise their children”.
But the England star offers a solution.
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