The war of the generations may soon be over

The possibility of living my life the way I wanted while under my parents' roof did not exist then

The Social Market Foundation, as think-tanks are wont, has identified a new trend. It has been christened "lifelong parenting", and is predicated on the findings of a new survey. The idea is that people are beginning to see having children as a long-term commitment, extending deep into adulthood. Far from longing for the day when their kids are "off their hands", parents now are in for the long haul.

The facts that the Social Foundation wonks are getting excited about may seem modest. Simply, they are that while one in four Britons in their 20s is still living with their parents, more than half of these young adults don't actually want to move out at all. Living as an adult in the parental home, until recently seen as the pathetic compromise of the socially stunted, is once again reasonable.

I'm not sure whether this really means what the Social Market Foundation thinks it does – although the explanation of "lifelong parenting" is designed also to encompass statistics that among people in their 20s who have left home, two thirds rely on their parents for some form of financial help.

But I do think that in these times of unrelenting bad news about the fragmenting family, this vision of the consolidating family is something to be celebrated. For while such banal difficulties as "the cost of living" are obviously contributing to the trend, these facts also, surely, give rise to the hope that the toxic trench so many families in recent decades have found themselves sliding into is finally being filled in.

For decades we have been obliged to normalise, in that cute but uncompromising phrase "the generation gap", a painful process whereby parents find their children are living in a world with entirely different rules and morals to the one they were brought into. The result, in the fairly recent past, has sometimes been parents and children who are irreparably alienated, or at least able to reach only the most fragile of compromises about the shape of each other's lives.

These clashes, even though they have been characterised merely as the battle of age against youth, have actually been much more deep-rooted than that. In a time of unprecedented change in social, sexual, cultural and consumer attitudes, it is within families, among parents and children, that individuals have been called to personal account for seismic shifts in acceptable behaviour across society as a whole.

In 1952, for example, when my parents were teenagers, cohabitation accounted for 2 per cent of first partnerships among young adults. Now, half a century on, that figure is 75 per cent. Many parents now confronted with a child who wishes to cohabit will recognise such an arrangement as one they themselves found to be both flexible and beneficial. In fact, if they don't much like the partner in question, they may count the limited commitment as a blessing.

But when my parents found out that I was living with my boyfriend, they were devastated. Trying to explain to them that such a relationship was neither unusual nor damaging was quite impossible. They judged by the standards of their own youth, and were quite convinced I had foolishly given away all the bargaining chips I could muster as a female, to a man who would never marry me, because I had left him with no incentive to do so.

Attempts to explain that I didn't want to marry him anyway, were met with suggestions that I was so much under his evil influence that I was dangerously deluded. My parents didn't like the young man in question much at all. But they still thought the best possible outcome would be for me to somehow, miraculously, manage to hang on in there with him until I dropped dead.

At the time, my parents seemed to me to be the dangerously deluded ones, living in the dark ages and determined that I, their only daughter, should have to hunker down there with them. Now I see what a terrible situation they were in.

I was, after all, still a teenager, and a particularly difficult one at that. Crammed with daft ideas and an unshakeable belief in my own invulnerability, I made a dozen idiotic choices and lunatic decisions every week. Why on earth should my parents have been able to set aside those aspects of their wayward daughter, and put this latest act of capriciousness down to a changing world as much as a "rebellious child"?

The truth was that we were caught in a moment in time when the "generation gap" was wider than it had been at any point in history. The possibility of living my life in a way that resembled the life I wanted, while under my parents' roof, did not exist. How could we share the same home, when we didn't even live in the same society? For young people now, a couple of generations into the massive social liberalisation we have experienced since the Second World War, the situation is not so extreme.

The generation gap is still very much with us. It's telling, of course, that despite the over-sexualised culture we are surrounded by, that the thing parents and children still find it most difficult to discuss is sex. But nevertheless, the gap in social experience that left parents and their children living in entirely different cultures is thankfully closing fast. So while conservative critics tend to think of social liberalisation as a never-ending process, destined forever to weaken social cohesion and endlessly to marginalise the family, the truth instead may be that what we have been through is merely a scary and difficult period of adjustment, one to which an end is very much in sight.

Looked at in this light, it is possible to see such depressing decisions as that last week in the Lords, which rejected the right of gay couples to adopt children, as one of the last rearguard actions in that huge generational shift in attitudes. A survey in Scotland earlier this year confirmed that across the generations. In the survey, 90 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds believed pre-marital sex was "not wrong at all", while only 57 per cent of those aged over 35 thought the same. To 60 per cent of young people, gay sex was perfectly acceptable, while among over-35s, only 22 per cent sanctioned same-sex partnerships.

But even bearing in mind that there is a definite drift towards conservatism as we grow older, it is fairly safe to assume that when the 18 to 24-year-olds become the over-35s, this polarisation will have become significantly less marked. My belief – as the Tories start chasing the single-parent vote – is that in matters of social morality, consensus counts as much as content. The optimistic view must be that once everybody is singing off the same songsheet again, things can only get better.

For half a century now, the generation gap has been vast, a clash of values so profound that it has made even more troublesome a time when change itself has promoted instability.

Maybe, as the new sexual landscape settles down, and the generations are able to set down the cudgels, the sheer good sense of a commitment to "lifelong parenting" will help people to recognise the obvious fact that you can't just make a baby with any old person, then expect, not much later on, to be able to write them out of your life.

It is consensus and understanding between generations that will result in new rules for families that work. One day soon, we'll all be able to understand what they are, and start taking a consensually dim view of those who don't stick to them.

d.orr@independent.co.uk