HAUNTED BY THE GHOST OF FAMILY PAST Just in time for Christmas, family values are back in the news. But were the good old days really that much better?

Last Monday, Tory leader David Cameron got his mitts on a report by the Conservatives' Social Justice Policy Group, headed by Iain Duncan Smith. Snappily titled Breakdown Britain, it presents a jaw-dropping list of social ills which seem mostly to stem from the breakdown of the family and from the parlous state in which the institution of marriage finds itself.

Among its findings comes the news that 70per cent of young offenders are from lone-parent families; nearly half of cohabiting couples break up before their child is five compared with one in 12 married couples; 15-yearolds living with a parent and a step-parent are far more likely to take drugs than those living with both biological parents; and girls from fatherless homes dominate the statistics for teenage pregnancies. "Real evidence of the trajectory of tragedy present in contemporary Britain, " wrote The Times in a leader headlined The Father Factor.

For Cameron, then, the family is the most important institution in the UK and the causes of poverty and social breakdown can only be solved by tackling familial breakdown. In other words, he wants to wind back the clock and return family life to what it used to be.

"Families, to me, are not just the basic unit of society, they're the best. They are the ultimate source of our society's strength or weakness, " he said last week.

"Families matter because almost every social problem that we face comes down to family stability - If marriage rates went up, if divorce rates came down, if more couples stayed together for longer, would our society be better off? My answer is yes."

So is all this just a return to John Major's back-to-basics drive, the ill-fated campaign launched at the Conservative Party Conference in 1993 and aimed at returning phrases like "moral probity" to the arena of public discourse? Not quite. New Labour may be spinning it that way but the Tories are keen to stress one crucial difference from back then: there is no moralising in this new report.

Of course, that doesn't please everyone on Cameron's side of the dispatch box. In an interview earlier this month, Dominic Grieve, shadow attorney general, called for a return to the sort of Victorian family values which placed morality at the heart of public life.

"You can argue that our Victorian forebears succeeded in achieving something very unusual between the 1850s and 1900 in changing public attitudes by - dare one use the word - instilling moral codes, " he said. "I don't want to suggest this was an ideal society, but it was one where a sense of moral values and of the responsibility people owed to each other did seem to be pervasive. There was a much greater sense of shame in respect of transgressions."

Either way, there is nothing new about looking into the past to find a cure for present ills, whether it's to the Victorians, Edwardians or New Elizabethans of the 1950s. In his 1999 Reith lecture, sociologist Anthony Giddens addressed the changing nature of the family and made exactly that point.

"The family is a site for the struggles between tradition and modernity, but also a metaphor for them, " he said. "There is perhaps more nostalgia surrounding the lost haven of the family than for any other institution with its roots in the past.

Politicians and activists routinely diagnose the breakdown of family life and call for a return to the traditional family."

The nostalgia surrounding this "lost haven" is felt most keenly at Christmas. As our family structures fracture, so do our Christmas traditions and we could be forgiven for dwelling on what we assume were the halcyon days of the family Christmas: mum, dad, a grandparent or two, the Queen's speech on the wireless and the kids upstairs reading The Broons. Or, delving further back, rosy-cheeked Victorian children in pageboy outfits singing Oh Tannenbaum round a tree lit with candles.

In fact there never was any such thing as a traditional family Christmas; nor was there a traditional family. There are pictures on Christmas cards but that isn't the same thing, and if you ask an anthropologist for a definition of family they'll cite any number of models, each with its own strengths and weaknesses and each evolving constantly.

Some families are matrofical, they'll tell you, others are consanguineous or conjugal (the terms refer to the place of mother, father and others within the household). Some practise polygamy (having more than one wife), others polyandry (having more than one husband). They are all traditional in a sense.

In the West, however, we do tend to talk about the bourgeois family, a domestic unit centred on a man and woman who are married. This is essentially a conjugal or nuclear family and the roles of men and women within it are well defined. For Frederick Engels, writing in his Origins Of The Family, Private Property And The State in 1891, this strictly patriarchal family was a throwback to biblical times: delve into the five books of Moses and you will find it there, he noted, and it hasn't changed much since.

This is essentially how we see the Victorian family, the domestic unit of which Grieve is so enamoured. But how true is our picture?

Did the Victorian family not suffer from stresses and pressures or was it really the happy template it is often made out to be?

For a start, the roles of both mothers and fathers changed markedly. In 1850, most men still worked from home and were the final arbiters of morality within the family.

But as the 19th century wore on, men disappeared during the day to work in factories or offices. This took the father out of the house for longer periods of time and put the onus for child-rearing on the women who were left behind. Private life came to have a female face, just as public life came to have a male one.

FURTHERMORE, as houses grew in size (at least for the middle classes), women also had to deal with servants. Even a successful tradesman earning GBP150 a year could afford to employ at least one servant and anybody earning above GBP300 a year could employ several and was counted among the leisure classes.

And so the home became a distaff concern as detailed in volumes such as Mrs Beeton's Book Of Household Management. For some women, it also became a prison.

As for those Victorian family values, they may have turned on a strict moral code, as Grieve believes, but remember that Queen Victoria was long dead before the mothers and wives that made up those families were even allowed to vote. As for divorce, forget it.

Children, meanwhile, were viewed as subjects rather than individuals in their own rights and it was only gradually that they stopped sleeping two to a bed and were accorded a degree of privacy. In everything else, they took what they were given. No pester power in those days; no children's tsar;

no Archbishop of Canterbury to stand up for your rights. Indeed for Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, the 19th century family was no sort of haven at all. Writing in his 1886 autobiography, he called the family "the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children."

No servants for the poor, however. No comfortable women here. Conditions in British slums were terrible and Charles Dickens was only one of many who wrote movingly about what he saw. The slum tenements came to be known as "rookeries" because of the habit of letting out space in a room to non-family members - the analogy was appropriate as rooks, unlike other birds, do not live in separate family units.

In lower class families, it was often the case that both parents went out to work. If the children were old enough, they went too; if they weren't they stayed at home, if they had homes. Speaking in the house of Commons in 1848, the reforming MP Lord Ashley talked of some 30,000 "naked, filthy" children "roaming lawless and deserted - in and around the metropolis".

In 1904, socialist thinker August Bebel wrote that "with the extension of female labour, the family life of the working class goes even more to pieces, the dissolution of marriage and the family is the natural result and immorality, demoralisation, degeneration - increase at a shocking pace".

For Giddens, the "traditional family" as it is hailed by today's politicians - breadwinner father, stay-at-home mother, two kids and a dog - was only a transitory moment in the ongoing evolution of the family unit.

This "lost haven", as Giddens terms it, existed not in the Victorian era but in the 1950s, at a time when the men had returned from war and, consequently, there were few jobs for women, but when divorce still carried a stigma. Along with the Victorian era, this is the period most often cited as the golden age of the family, a settled period after the tumult of the second world war.

Certainly the nuclear family as Cameron understands it was highly visible in the 1950s.

You only have to think of the advertising of the time to conjure up an image of the ideal housewife and mother, the working husband and the well-adjusted children. But let's not forget that the 1950s also saw the birth of the teenager and that that in turn laid the ground for the sexual revolution of the 1960s which had a huge impact on family life and on the way families were viewed.

American essayist Michael Ventura once wrote that when Elvis first swung his hips in 1956, an entire generation of teenagers was lost to its parents. Writing in 1962, the sociologist Jules Henry put it more prosaically: "The second modern commandment, 'Thou shalt consume', is the natural complement of the first, 'Create more desire'. Together they lead the attack on the key bastion of the Indo-European, Islamic and Hebrew traditions - the impulse control system."

This is a fancy way of saying that selfgratification became the order of the day.

Certainly control of any impulse was anathema to the counter culture in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly if it was a sexual one, and with sex and procreation firmly uncoupled thanks to the advent of the pill and the legalisation of abortion in 1967, family structures changed once more.

The statistics speak volumes. Between 1971 and 2005, the number of one-person households in the UK grew by 11per cent, while the number of children born outside marriage leapt from 12per cent to 42per cent between 1980 and 2004. Bastard, as a term of abuse, has not yet become archaic but the day can't be far off.

This Christmas will see many different types of family sit down to their festive turkey.

There are 17 million of them in the UK, according to figures published by the Office for National Statistics last year and, while 70per cent of them are still headed by married couples, that is a drop from a decade ago.

Among the other 30per cent will be gay couples, some with children, most without but families nonetheless; groups of people connected by friendship rather than blood; stepfamilies;

lone-parent families; huge extended families composed of ex-wives, their current partners and all their combined offspring.

It is this picture that so worries the politicians, at least those who look in their rearview mirrors and see the family as a thing with fixed points and set parameters. But experience tells us it is no such thing. In fact, who would bet against the politicians of 2050 looking back on the early 21st century and calling for a return to the familial values of those years? Perhaps the safest thing to say is this: the family is dead, long live the family.

Brian Morton on the trouble with modern parents: overleaf