Single parents can be `ideal' too, says head

SINGLE PARENTS are just as capable as traditional families of bringing up children, a headmistress said yesterday.

Jackie Anderson, president of the Girls' Schools Association of girls' independent schools, said the emphasis on family values in the recent Green Paper was not always possible in reality. She challenged "the idealisation of family life".

Mrs Anderson, head of King's High School, Warwick, told the association's annual conference in Glasgow that Elizabeth I, Cherie Blair, and Jane Austen's brother were examples of well-adjusted people who were brought up outside conventional families.

Two months ago, Dr Patrick Tobin, chair of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference of public schools, argued that divorce was the biggest single cause of serious disciplinary problems in independent schools.

Mrs Anderson, who has been married for 35 years and has two adult children, said: "There are plenty of happy, well-adjusted people around who did not have the conventional two-parent families.

"Elizabeth I was a highly successful leader whose home life offered a series of role models who taught her to avoid following in their footsteps. Or more seriously, families such as Jane Austen's, where her brother was happily nurtured by her aunt and uncle to the apparent advantage of all concerned.

"Like Cherie Blair, I owe much to my grandmother. Cherie was looked after by her father's mother by the age of six weeks and she says her grandmother taught her how important it was to remember." Mrs Blair's father, the actor Tony Booth, left his wife and two daughters, who were brought up by their mother - who went out to work - and their grandmother. However, Mrs Anderson warned that parents need to be generous during divorce to limit the damage done to their children. Fathers could keep in touch by telephone, by post, by e-mail and by taking an interest in their child's school.

Asked about girls' reaction to divorce, she said they became subdued, lacked concentration and were very sad when their parents separated.

A daughter might feel abandoned if her father left home, or she might idealise him so he became a "fantasy father".

She added: "He becomes the perfect parent, unlike the poor parent living with the child 24 hours a day."

Boys were more likely to go off the rails during a divorce because they lacked the "culture of talking", which helped girls to support each other.