It's not easy for six people to live on one income. The nuclear family is where traditional and modern worlds meet, writes Kitty Holland.

Money, says Kevin Monks, is very tight. Although he earns well over the average industrial wage - €40,000 a year compared with €29,000 - the father of four says "budgeting, budgeting, budgeting" is always on the agenda.

Sitting in the spacious living room of the family home, in Oldtown village in north Co Dublin, he says his salary as a technical supervisor in a plastic components plant "basically just gets us through".

His wife, Patricia, who sits with us while also managing one-year-old Luke, sits forward to explain exactly how it just gets them through. "You have to be clever the way you shop. I go to Lidl in Ashbourne, and then there's a great place in Swords, J. C. Savage, where you buy things in bulk. You can get your nappies, wipes, and they last a few weeks."

Patricia, who is expecting their fifth baby, works at home with five-year-old Liam, eight-year-old Nathan and 12-year-old Daniel as well as Luke. The couple have been married for seven years, since just after Nathan was born. "We were living together, had a house in Navan, and I suppose getting married was just the next obvious step," says Kevin. Patricia looks sideways at him, and then, smiling towards me, says, "Oh we were going to get married. We wanted to get married."

"And for taxation purposes," says Kevin. "When Patricia was working we split them, but now I use all the credits." Patricia was working in a factory but left after having Daniel. "I did the Avon lady" - selling cosmetics - "for eight years. I do miss it, but you couldn't work and pay childminders." Amazingly fresh and un-harassed looking, she agrees the boys are a handful. "But they are a good help as well. I have them well trained to do the dishes and keep their rooms tidy."

Kevin works shifts, from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. or vice versa, depending on the week, and spends his days off catching up on family life. About three evenings a week he trains with a local football team, the Wild Geese. The boys go to school in the village and are involved in a variety of sports and activities.

This classic nuclear family is one of the 462,283 married couples with children identified in Census 2002. Despite the rapid social changes of the past decade and the proliferation of other family types, the married couple with children remains by far the most prevalent, accounting for 66 per cent of families.

The highest proportion of married couples with children - 167,256 families - have two offspring. Another 133,022 have one child, 102,852 have three, 41,741 have four, 11,633 have five, 3,704 have six, 1,267 have seven and 808 have eight or more. These families account for almost two million people, or about half the population.

Although researchers and policymakers speak urgently of increasing rates of cohabitation, pointing to the 27,188 cohabiting parents identified in 2002, who account for 8 per cent of families, the figures also suggest that a high proportion of such couples, like Kevin and Patricia, go on to marry. Frequently, this progression has as much to do with the tax system as with a desire to publicly express a commitment to each other.

Michael Rush of the Family Studies Centre at University College Dublin points out that although the nuclear family prevails, 70 per cent of those with under-fives rely on someone other than the mother to look after them. The economic pressure on young families means most parents have to work.

"The big drop-off comes when the children reach primary-school-going age. This is where women's careers in the formal workplace are being curtailed or even end. With the child having to be picked up at 2 p.m. it all gets too complicated. Then there are school holidays, whereas the crèches are 52 weeks a year."

It is also the point, perhaps, at which the husband's earning power has increased enough to do without the other income.

Those women, or men, who choose to stay at home are largely ignored by policymakers, says Rush - a point repeated several times at the family-consultation forums held by Mary Coughlan last year, when she was minister for social and family affairs. A participant in the Donegal forum spoke of the "non-personhood" of those who cared in the home; another woman said society regards you as a nobody if you just look after children.

Oldtown is a small village, and the family would be relatively cut off if they had no car. There's just one bus a day, which leaves for Swords at 7.45 a.m. and returns in the evening. "Basically, there is no public transport. Patricia drops me at work so she can have the car. You'd have to have a car here. Most families have two. I used to bike it into work but couldn't afford to run that and the car, so we had to go for a car."

There are other stresses. The local primary school is set to lose its remedial teacher, who currently visits three mornings a week. "They are trying to get her to another school, but she's very important to help some of the children catch up. That's a big worry."

There are few if any facilities for adolescents in the village. Despite the best efforts of Kevin and others they have been unable to secure funding from the National Sports Council for an under-18s football team. And the village hall, which could host many activities, is in disrepair.

But the smiles and affection between the Monks suggest a thriving family, whatever their money, transport and child worries. This will be their first Christmas in the home they finished building earlier this year. They had spent the past three years in a mobile home on the site where the solid stone house now stands. "Yes, well it was a big mobile home," says Patricia, smiling. "We didn't realise how long it would take, with planning problems and that." They had sold their small home in Navan and planned to build on Kevin's parents' land within a year. "So, yes, Christmas will be good. We'll be having brothers and family over who had us for the last few Christmases," says Kevin.

According to Census 2002, 1,287,958 families will be celebrating - or not, if they don't observe the festival - Christmas in just over two weeks. The diversity of family types within that number has never been greater: single mothers, fathers cut off from their children, families coping with disability, families that foster or adopt, grandparents caring alone for grandchildren, elderly siblings caring for elderly siblings, couples without children and foreign families, to name just a few.

This growing diversity in a rapidly changing society was largely behind the statement last year from the National Economic and Social Forum that "the deepest anxieties of this prosperous age concern the erosion of our families".

But in the introduction to her report on last year's family forums, Mary Daly of Queen's University Belfast wrote that although there was an anxiety that space be reclaimed for family life, there was recognition it was changing. People wanted to refocus on the values associated with family - altruism, caring and nurturing - while negotiating how these could exist with the values of contemporary life. There was a sense that the traditional boundaries of family - mother, father and children - needed to be extended to include other relatives and even non-relatives, she said.

While the 1988 Report of the Commission on the Family equated family strength with the strength of marriage and, therefore, traditional family types, last year's report Family Well Being was more optimistic for the welfare of less traditional families.

"The type of family in which one lives - such as a one- or two-parent household and whether the parents are married, cohabiting, single or separated - has virtually no impact on family well being," said its authors. What matters, then, is not what type of family you have but the caring and nurturing you give it. Series concluded

THE NUCLEAR FAMILY:

462,283

That's how many married couples with children the Republic has - 66 per cent of families. The biggest group (167,256) have two children.

The main issues

Childcare and recognition of care work done in the home

Transport

Given the level of marriage breakdown, availability of mediation supports to families under stress