The single most important thing for a child's welfare is to be brought up by a natural mother and father.

As if on cue, European statistics released on the same day underlined the urgency of the problem. They showed the number of lone parents with dependent children had almost doubled between 1983 and 1996 to nearly one in four, the highest proportion by far in the whole of the European Union.

This is because Britain has the highest divorce rate and a very large number of children born outside marriage.

Now it's crunch time. Next month we get the government's green paper on the family. The signs are that this will have all the backbone of an eau-de-nil blancmange.

The government seems set to interfere with what it should leave alone, while cowering from what it should be changing. The green paper will unveil before our wondering eyes the full range of the therapy culture: touchy-feely registrars, souped-up health visitors, parenting classes, even - God help us - secular vicars.

The modern commandment is: thou shalt not preach, but parents shall jolly well bring up their children in the way we tell them to.

Thou shalt not preach, but parents shall jolly well bring up their children in the way we tell them to.

The really hard issues at its heart are marriage and no-fault divorce. To distract attention from a divisive matter that affects its own friends, the government is expounding a number of myths.

Myth one: the government will promote the interests of all children, regardless of their families. Who could possibly object to such a heart-warming sentiment?

Unfortunately, it will have the opposite effect. This is because the single most important thing for a child's welfare is to be brought up by a natural mother and father. It is simply not true, as the single-parent campaigner Maeve Sherlock said last week, that no single family model is always right. All relationships have their problems, but in general it remains far better for children to be brought up by their natural married parents.

Myth two: the alarming rise in teenage pregnancies can be halted by better education. But the kind of girls who are now getting pregnant at such a rate have always been badly educated. The change is more likely to be due to a growing set of emotional needs.

Part of the reason for that may be the increasing numbers of such girls who themselves come from broken backgrounds where they have not been properly loved and nurtured.

Rather than being dumped alone in a flat, they might be better off in mother-and-baby homes.

Such teenage mothers also assume a baby is a passport to an "independent life", with their own place as of right. But such independence is a fantasy and a disaster for their children.

What they need is support; which is why, rather than being dumped alone in a flat, they might be better off in mother-and-baby homes. That way, the state could discharge a proper responsibility to vulnerable people while not providing a perverse incentive to irresponsible behaviour.

However, getting the incentives the right way round requires a clear statement from the government that there is a preferable family structure for the raising of children and that the state has a duty to promote and protect that structure. This it will not do. It is terrified of alienating the many whose lives are now touched by irregular family life.

So there's a hole at heart of its policy. Instead of reversing the perverse incentives in the tax and benefits system that discourage traditional family life, the chancellor's last budget redefined the family as the mother and child alone.

The chancellor's last budget redefined the family as the mother and child alone.

Tony Blair himself knows how important traditional families are. The trouble is that he is virtually on his own. You can count the ministers and MPs who support him on the fingers of one hand.

The vast majority of ministers and advisers are themselves caught up in irregular lifestyles, or subscribe to (or are cowed by) the female triumphalism that is now the orthodoxy among the intelligentsia.

Parenting is being used as a Trojan horse to undermine marriage. This was specifically foreshadowed in a speech made in 1996 by Patricia Hewitt, then a rising Labour star. Marriage, she said, "doesn't fit any longer" in Britain.

In its place, she said, the state should draw up a document of parental responsibilities, providing for unmarried parents the same rights over children as married couples, compulsory paternity leave and government-run "father resource centres, to help them take over the role of housewives". Hewitt is now a junior minister at the Treasury, and virtually that entire programme is well under way.

The strongest families are those where there is the clearest separation of roles.

The fundamental error is the failure to understand that the strongest families are those where there is the clearest separation of roles. That does not mean women shouldn't work. But it does mean that men and women have distinct primary and secondary roles in life. Restoring marriage means ensuring that young men above all have jobs. And mothers should not be starved into the workplace, but should have a choice.

Tackling family breakdown means cultural change. It cannot be done by coercion but by persuading people of the disastrous consequences of certain accepted attitudes and behaviour. Instead, we are to get the new Family and Parenting Institute, which ominously is to represent a "broad spectrum of opinion". It will therefore almost certainly be dominated by precisely the "no single model" types who are now undermining the family.