Parenting & Family Quote by Iain Duncan Smith

The line lands like a blunt corrective to modern liberal pieties: we may have updated our language about divorce, but we havent updated the consequences. Iain Duncan Smith is doing two things at once. First, he revives a supposedly outdated norm ("stay together for the kids") and frames it not as moralism but as realism. Calling it "out of fashion" concedes the culture war before he wins it, positioning him as the unfashionable grown-up willing to say what polite society avoids.

Second, he shifts the problem from conflict to absence. "It's not arguing parents that children don't like" is a deliberately provocative reframe, almost daring you to challenge it. The subtext is that family breakdown, not family tension, is the real harm; and that the state can patch poverty but cant patch missing daily adult presence. The phrase "having one parent" is doing ideological work, compressing a complex landscape - divorce, bereavement, single parenthood by choice, abandonment - into a single deficit model.

Context matters: Duncan Smith has long tied social deprivation to family structure through a centre-right, communitarian lens. This is less a private counsel to couples than a public argument about responsibility, welfare, and the moral ecology of communities. The intent is to restore stigma around separation without naming stigma; the wager is that voters will hear "children" and accept the implied trade-off: tolerate some adult unhappiness to avoid producing a generation with fewer buffers, fewer role models, and less stability. The risk is obvious too: it erases households where leaving reduces harm, and turns "two parents" into a moral credential rather than a lived reality.