If you watch the soaps and read the tabloids, you'll have a pretty bleak view of family life.
You might think the traditional family was in crisis. What was once a stable institution seems to be splitting apart under the weight of trendy new ways. Where once the traditional couple with a couple of kids was the common habit, now anything goes: divorce is rife and rising; old ways have been replaced by gay marriage, gay adoption, single parents (of either sex), weekend dads and a host of other un-traditional forms.
The family, you might think, is fractured.
Except that it isn't. There is a lot of myth and misinformation about the family. After all, no soap opera ever got the ratings up by depicting a placid life of happy families. And trouble sells tabloids.
The BBC Cymru Wales Real Families season aims to separate the myth from the truth – and maybe the truth is happier than the fiction. That's certainly what a poll specially commissioned by BBC Wales found – we Welsh are a nation of happy families.
BBC Cymru Wales Real Families season cards
On the official statistics, there has been change but not as dramatic as you might imagine. Figures for Wales alone are hard to come by but there's no reason to think that the Welsh picture is that different from the British one.
Broadly, in the last decade, the number of families has risen slightly, with a rise in couples living together without marrying or bringing up children as single parents, and a small fall in the number of families made up of a husband and wife, with or without children.
So it's true that there's been some erosion of the traditional family but it's by no means dead: two of every three families remains a married couple with or without children.
Steve Evans
And divorce has been falling. It rose steeply in the 1970s when the law made it easier (and maybe that was people leaving unhappy marriages which previously they would have been bound into). But in recent years, divorce has been falling. People are getting married later (perhaps because tougher economic times mean people hold off from financial commitment).
In England and Wales between 1990 and 2010, the total number of children of divorcing couples fell from nearly 153,000 to just over 104,000.
One big change has been in the numbers of children staying at home into adulthood. The figures indicate that one in four young Welsh adults still live with their parents. The high cost of housing and unemployment and squeezed pay for those in work means that the economic balance has swung against the old way of leaving home at the end of our teens to make a new home.
One thought: was the old traditional family really as happy as we like to imagine? Delve deep enough and you often find dark stories – affairs, illegitimate babies or couples who stayed together despite obvious unhappiness. The traditional family is far from dead. It has diminished as proportion of total families – but that may be no bad thing.
Real Families with Steve Evans starts Monday, 10.40pm, BBC One Wales.
