In modern vernacular, having children has become synonymous with the phrase "having a family".

This is clever linguistic manoeuvring, because it suggests that, prior to becoming a parent, you did not have one.

That you were not already involved in multiple familial relationships with parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Of course, this is necessary manoeuvring, because increasingly, these relationships are being phased out.

As the average age of parents continues to rise - meaning children are decreasingly likely to be born with all, or even any, grandparents - and only children become ever-more common, meaning aunts, uncles and cousins don't exist for the next generation, the idea of being born with a family (rather than having to create your own later) is becoming obsolete.

I was born with a family. I had three out of four grandparents - my paternal grandfather having died just weeks before I was born - and continued to have all three until my early twenties, when my maternal grandfather died. My grandmothers went on for many more years, and one is with us still.

When I was born, I had three uncles (the youngest aged just 12) and three aunts, plus progressively more as they all became partnered. By the time I was ten, I had five cousins, with ten more subsequently arriving over the years.

My grandparents lived just up the road, and in my earlier childhood, three of their children still lived with them.

This meant the prospect of "going to see my grandparents" was pretty straightforward: I walked up the road. (Then visited London a couple of times a year to see my other grandmother.)

Pity the poor children of today, who, as well as having to spend most of their childhood travelling between "my Mum's" and "my Dad's", as about half of all children now have to do, also have to traverse between up to four different abodes at all ends of the country in order to see four divorced grandparents, and all manner of imaginatively titled "step-grandparents", as well.

Then the step-grandparents have their own children and grandchildren, so these are what? Step-in-laws? In-laws-once-removed?

No wonder 'family' is being phased out, it's getting too complicated to keep track of without a spreadsheet (I once asked a ten-year-old girl, who was the product of a modern "blended family", with both parents having had children with other partners before and after her birth, how many brothers and sisters she had. She thought for a moment and then said "I don't know").

I have been contemplating these issues after seeing this tragic story - all the more tragic given it's been treated as a celebration - where a 56-year-old woman has given birth to a child, courtesy of IVF and donor eggs. This woman has no partner, no other children, and her own parents are dead.

This means this child is being raised in a complete family vacuum. Not only is he not biologically related to the woman raising him, but he has no father, no siblings, and no grandparents. By the time he is 30, he is unlikely to have a mother either.

This is being treated as a great triumph by various propagandists, because this is the perfect citizen model of the future - a person who exists entirely outside of the structure of a family.

The woman who gave birth to him claims she has "had a family". I say she has not, she has had a child, and it's not the same thing. It's vital to keep the distinction, because not everyone becomes a parent, but everyone has a family, by virtue of the fact that, at the moment they are born, they are already a son or daughter, a grandchild, a likely niece or nephew, cousin, and sibling.

That's the most fundamental and primal identity human beings have - being part of the tribe they are born into. It far predates, and often much more powerfully forms who we are, than any later identity we might acquire through qualifications, interests, and jobs, and we're hardwired to understand ourselves this way - as part of an intricate web of close kin. Nobody is built to be an only child living alone with a single mother in a poky flat.

This is not to criticise single parents, most of whom didn't choose their circumstances and do their best under tough conditions, simply to draw attention to the fact that the next generation is being raised in increasingly unnatural ways, whilst society is obliterating what have been historically some of the most important and defining identities in people's lives. People have treasured memories of grandparents that endure until they are grandparents themselves; siblings and cousins provide our first playmates and experiences of other children; aunts and uncles are alternative adults providing different perspectives to Mum and Dad. All these relationships profoundly shape childhood and the person the child becomes. The stronger they are, the stronger the child, and the stronger the adult they grow into.

It is for that reason that social engineers want to get rid of them. They do not want anyone to see themselves as part of an intricate, supportive group of other people to whom they are powerfully tied from birth, but rather, as rootless cosmopolitans, only defined by qualifications, career, and allegiance to the state.

The little boy I mentioned earlier, who was born to a single 56-year-old woman, is a perfect example: he barely has any family to begin with, and by the time he is thirty, he will likely have none at all. He is thus the ideal vulnerable victim to be moulded just as the state desires. He is perfectly placed to become a completely obedient worker-drone whose only allegiance is to employer and state, because what other choice does he have? What safety net does he have? If he runs into hard times, his family won't be there for him (he doesn't have one): but the state will.

And this is the desired model the state is relentlessly reaffirming across society by extending the time children spend at school each day, by introducing more and more state schemes where the government does what parents and grandparents once used to, and by radically reframing the idea of what 'family' means at all.

'Having a family' now means 'having a child', and that means childhood is being radically reframed. Childhood used to be understood as a critical developmental period where the next generation was being built: supported to become strong, stable adults who can carry on the culture. Parents, grandparents, and the extended family felt an obligation to the child and its welfare, because they knew a maladapted child would create a maladaptive future environment that they themselves would have to live in, so there was a powerful incentive to ensure a child grew up in a functional, stable, nurturing way.

Nearby grandparents and aunts and uncles also provided a built-in safety net if there were problems at home: if Mum and Dad are having a row, the child can go down the road to Grandma's, or the next street over to Aunt Sue's.

Now, however, if Mum and Dad have a row, the child either has nowhere to go because there is no extended family nearby (or no extended family at all), or Mum and Dad split up, thus reducing the child's family size and support network yet further.

A situation has increasingly been created in the post-war era where childhood is less and less about children, and more and more about parents: that bringing up a child has been increasingly framed as a life experience parents choose to have, defined by the conditions under which they choose to experience it, rather than it being centred around the child - and thus the future of the community - and what would be best for them.

Single 56-year-old women can have a child because that is an experience they would like to have, and they can choose the conditions to raise the child that best suit them. The child has no say and there is no wider family or close community to contradict the woman's decision.

The same formula (although usually slightly less extreme) is replicated all over the country. As mobility trends mean families fracture and scatter, and trends in family formation mean less and less extended family exists at all, the whole notion of 'childhood' and 'family' are taking on wild new definitions that they have never had at any prior stage in human history.

We are now at the point where one adult and one child can be considered "a family", even in the absence of a biological relationship. IVF and surrogacy makes this arrangement possible for millions, including single elderly men.

If that is so, then what is to stop the state creating children in labs, placing them with unrelated adults, and calling the arrangement "a family"?

That is to say, phasing out the whole concept of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, entirely.

Well, nothing is stopping them really, because we're basically already there.

There is a great deal of energy poured into discussing the Western fertility crisis and the collapsing birth rate, but very little spent examining the collapse of the infrastructure that has always sustained parents and children, in terms of the wider extended family.

We cannot look at one without the other, because a key reason, if not the key reason, many people choose to have few or no children (the European birth rate is now just 1.34) is the lack of wider support. Not support in terms of daycare and fancy washing machines, but an actual human community that they are deeply embedded in and have been since birth. That's how humans are supposed to live. That's why childhood friendships are often experienced as so intense, and why childhood attachments are felt so strongly - because we are building a social infrastructure that is supposed to sustain us for life.

When people live like this, in close, interconnected, intergenerational communities in which they stay their whole lives, then the birth rate is high, as per the Amish and Orthodox Jews.

When they don't, the birth rate collapses.

It's also what leads to the proverbial Lindsay Clancys. Whilst I believe the Clancy case itself to be a psyop, it is drawing attention to very real wider trends, where women are increasingly failing to cope with the stresses of parenthood, and that is because they are experiencing them in such an unnatural way.

These unnatural circumstances have been engineered by social controllers, so they can eventually abolish the family altogether and make the raising of children entirely a state-controlled business. That is why child benefit is only around £1,000 a year, whilst foster carers can receive over £70,000 (tax-free).

Why would the state pay a child's own parents such as small sum to help raise the child, and a stranger a small fortune?

Because when a child is in foster care, parental authority belongs to the state. The foster carer cannot make meaningful decisions about the child's life - such as, whether to vaccinate - only the state can. So this is clearly the state's preferred model for the future: pay strangers to do the day-to-day childcare for children they are not related to, whilst all meaningful decisions about the child's life and future can be made by the state.

Then, when the child turns 18 and ages out of foster care, they officially have no family at all, as only rarely do foster carers adopt (as then they lose all the financial benefits of the fostering arrangement).

Perfect fodder for the future as desired by the overlords. No family identity, no family safety net, just a lone individual at the mercy of the state. If they wish to later "have a family" of their own, they can apply to a lab to be the assigned keeper of a state-owned embryo once it is born to its gestational carrier (although we could be onto artificial wombs by then).

So, although it may on the surface seem a small thing, I think it's important to stop referring to having children as "having a family" - as that necessarily suggests that some elderly man buying a baby from an impoverished surrogate mother he's never met has successfully created "a family". He has not. He has acquired a child, and it's not the same thing.

Not all people have children, but all people have families. Everyone is born a son or a daughter, a grandchild, likely a niece or nephew, cousin, and sibling. We must preserve that as the true definition of "family", as the cost of doing otherwise may quite literally be the future of our civilisation.

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