Shelley Emling

That which should not be allowed is a visit to England by the Ezzos, who plan to invade Leach’s territory this week to give a series of lectures (the largest is set to take place at London’s Westminster Chapel on Saturday). Leach, backed by an alliance of 200 organizations called Children Are Unbeatable, has condemned the Ezzos as “dangerous” and has attempted to ban them from any advocacy on British soil. (The British government has not yet responded to her demand.)

Gary Ezzo, who has no plans to cancel his trip, has a “now more than ever” attitude about the whole affair. In fact, he says in a phone interview, Leach is to blame for “Britain’s decline into immorality” and must be stopped.

“One of the most destructive influences in England has been the child-centered parenting plan — the Penelope Leach philosophy — which has dominated for the last 20 years,” says Ezzo.

But Leach has no intention of relinquishing her child-care crown. In a struggle for the hearts and minds of suggestible parents, she is firmly entrenched at the head of the pack. Her words have been gospel since the late ’70s, when “Your Baby and Child” replaced “Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care” as the parenting bible. Her franchise has since expanded to include five books that address parents around the world in 29 languages. She also is featured in an ongoing series for Lifetime Cable Network called “Your Baby and Child With Penelope Leach.”

Undaunted by either the threatened ban or Leach’s status as a parenting eminence, the Ezzos say both hurdles will be overcome — if only, they claim, because it is God’s will.

But faith notwithstanding, the Ezzos are counting on more tangible support in the face-off with Leach and her backers. The couple run a successful, for-profit “parenting ministry” out of Simi Valley, Calif., called Growing Families International. Gary Ezzo is the author of many child-care guides, the most popular of which, “On Becoming Babywise” and “Babywise II,” consistently dwell in the top 10 on both mainstream and Christian booksellers’ lists of the most requested parenting titles.

The couple’s trip to Britain has been organized by Christian Education Europe Ltd., a group that supplies biblical teaching materials, including some designed by the Ezzos, to evangelical and home education projects. The group’s goal — to highlight a new “moral emphasis” in British child rearing — is “really catching on with folks,” reports Mark Severance, a California assistant to the Ezzos.

This is not the first time that experts have battled over nurturing styles, particularly disciplinary techniques. In a recent, spirited engagement, John Rosemond, an advocate of “adult led” (early) toilet training, publicly criticized Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, champion of the “child-led” (late) training, for serving as a spokesman for Pampers.

But the Leach-Ezzo spat is something of a “High Noon” moment in the feud between child-centered advocates and those who believe in the Ezzos’ brand of (in their words) “rightly applying God’s principles in parenting.” At stake: both the “future of our children” (everyone’s words) and the very lucrative market that preys on parental concern. It is hardly a simple matter of you say tomato/I say tomahto.

Leach is famous for her “child-centered” approach, which encourages parents to painstakingly “kidproof” their houses rather than swat a toddler for fiddling with the stereo. The Ezzos say that indulging children makes them dependent and irresponsible and that, once children reach the age of 2 and a half, they should be required to clean up their own “accidents,” even soiled clothing.

Leach believes children thrive with unlimited affection. The Ezzos say excessive cuddling creates spoiled children. An occasional spanking, they say, is not child abuse but good parenting — since children are born with a natural tendency toward “waywardness.”

In fact, the Ezzos, parents of two grown children and grandparents of six, recommend swatting babies on the hand or thigh for misbehavior that includes such minor wrongdoing as putting fingers in food. Spanking, or “chastisement,” can begin at 18 months, they say, with parents giving as many as five swats a day until the child is 3. Beyond that age, more swats are allowed. (The Ezzos recommend using a flexible instrument, such as a rubber spatula.)

This sort of advice enrages Leach, who helped found a group called End Physical Punishment of Children (EPOCH). Smacking children legitimizes the use of violence in society, says Leach. “My feelings have never changed: I still don’t believe there’s anything to be gained by making small babies unhappy,” she says.

Such is Leach’s influence in the world of parenting and child welfare that her outcry over the Ezzos’ impending visit has caused the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Britain to initiate an investigation of the pair. The agency says it is “looking into the couple’s teachings” in anticipation of their visit.

“Babies need love and care, not physical punishment,” a spokesman for the society said. “We don’t believe these people are qualified to give advice, or that they have any credible research to back up what they’re saying.”

Backed by many fundamentalists and a growing number of parents who believe children are out of control due to parental permissiveness, the Ezzos are unconcerned about their reception in Britain.

It’s hardly the couple’s first brush with controversy. In 1997, their approach to feeding infants drew “letters of concern” from approximately 100 health-care providers to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Later the AAP, which is the world’s largest organization of pediatricians, issued a “media alert” in which it emphatically reaffirmed its stance that it is best to feed babies on demand.

Yet the Ezzos soldier on. Perhaps they are buoyed in their efforts by surveys like the one conducted last August for BBC Radio 4′s “Today” program, in which seven out of 10 parents questioned said they believed it was acceptable to smack their children if they misbehave. (Under British law, a parent has the right to use “reasonable chastisement”; six other European countries — Sweden, Austria, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland and Norway — have banned all physical punishment against children.) In any event, despite the protest of Leach and her devotees, an estimated 1,200 people are expected to show up for the Ezzos’ lecture Saturday on raising “model offspring.”

Celebrity couples, too, greeted the New Year by kissing their spouses goodbye. The former Spice Girl Melanie Brown, better known as Scary Spice, announced that her marriage to the Dutch dancer Jimmy Gulzar was ending — 15 months after they took their vows. (In the United States, Ted Turner and Jane Fonda announced their separation on CNN’s Web site this month following eight years of marriage.)

Vanessa Lloyd Platts, of matrimonial law specialists Lloyd Platts & Co., calls it “matrimonial millennium madness.”

“We have a flu epidemic in Britain, but we also have a [divorce] epidemic. If people continue to call us as they are now, there won’t be anyone left to get a divorce in 10 years,” she said.

Since New Year’s Day, her firm has received more calls than ever before — a volume so daunting that it’s been forced to turn clients away. Counseling agencies, too, have reported a flood of calls from disillusioned spouses eager to leave their mates — and supposedly all their troubles — behind.

Counselors at Britain’s largest relationship help line, the Samaritans, said they were so swamped with calls between Christmas and New Year’s that they beat last year’s record of 124,000 calls during the same period. Many of this year’s callers indicated that they had planned to get divorced once the holidays were over.

The consensus among counselors was that many couples put too much pressure on themselves to have a fantastically good time together on New Year’s Eve. They built New Year’s Eve up to be a night of revelry, unrivaled romance and — the piece de resistance — unbelievably great sex. But lots of couples woke up with a severe relationship hangover. Nothing had been as good as it was supposed to have been.

“Couples woke up and started to wonder whether their relationship was really a solid one,” said Judy Cunnington, director of London Marriage Guidance. “Then they started to wonder whether they wanted to spend another year like the last one.”

Symptoms of clean slate syndrome have been spotted in at least some parts of the United States as well.

“I couldn’t get anything done this past week because people constantly have been calling or e-mailing me. These are all people who are upset that their husband or wife has just left them. They don’t know what to do about it,” said Diane Sollee, founder of the Washington-based Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education, who says that she normally receives only one or two calls a month from abandoned spouses.

Certainly, the number of marriages and divorces in any given country are prone to fluctuate with the seasons and the social tides. But marriage advocates argue that Britons’ sudden keen interest in divorce is particularly alarming since it comes on the heels of a long-term decline in the number of weddings here. At the same time, divorces have been creeping upwards: Last year, an estimated 167,000 couples divorced in Britain, compared with 155,332 in 1994. More people divorce each year in Britain than in any other country in Europe except Belgium.

All this has been reason enough for church leaders to predict — for the umpteenth time — the imminent demise of the nuclear family in Britain.

Meanwhile, the marriage experts are left scrambling for an explanation as to why so many Britons seem to be so eager to resolve their marital problems with divorce.

To explain the millennial madness, some experts speculate that people had given their partners an ultimatum: Shape up by Jan. 1, or this marriage is over. When their spouses didn’t reform, they dumped them.

Others argue that the divorce wave is a knee-jerk reaction to family problems over the holidays, a time of year that’s known for draining one’s emotions and finances.

“Many couples wanted to hang on for the holidays — especially because they were such a big deal this year — for the sake of the children,” said Andrew Price, a divorce lawyer in Paignton, south of London, who’s also noticed an increase in calls to his office this month. “All those days of forced frivolity really got to lots of people and so they were more than ready to seek a divorce once January arrived.”

But in the end, experts place most of the blame at the feet of the media, who, they say, raised couples’ expectations for the new millennium to unrealistic levels.

“A lot of people expected New Year’s Eve to be the best night of their lives. When it wasn’t, they blamed their partners and decided to start over again,” said Lucy Selleck, a counselor with Relate, Britain’s largest counseling agency for couples with 100 offices across the country.

Many of those offices have seen a rise in calls since Jan. 1. The office in Portsmouth, for example, took 57 calls on the first day of the year — more than twice the number recorded last year.

“People’s gut reaction is always to get rid of what they don’t like, but really we think people should work on their relationships and not go straight for a divorce,” Selleck said.

Meanwhile, church leaders say that they’ve been disappointed to see that Britons continue to be obsessed with Ferris wheels and the Millennium Dome, while they seem hesitant to engage in a discussion of serious issues — such as the collapse of the stable family in Britain.

Consider the statistics: There were 279,000 weddings in 1996, compared with 348,000 a decade earlier — a 20 percent decline. The most dramatic fall — 27 percent — was among couples marrying for the first time, down to 161,000 from 220,000 in 1986.

The declining marriage rate can be attributed, in part, to more couples choosing to live together outside of marriage. The government predicts the number of unmarried cohabiting couples — now about 1.5 million — will nearly double over the next 25 years.

At the same time, the number of divorces — which had fallen since peaking at 165,018 in 1993 — is back on the rise. Two in five marriages are now expected to end in divorce, although the rate is projected to climb to one in two by year’s end.

“Family breakdown is to our social ecology what global warming is to our natural ecology,” said Dr. Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth.

The church has greeted the rise in divorce rates with new programs to promote family life. Some of their tactics have been decidedly quirky — such as conducting marriage and parenting courses for men in pubs. (They presume that the pub provides a more comfortable atmosphere than, say, a church hall.)

The church also has urged the British government to cut taxes for families, to give couples a financial incentive to get — and stay — married. Currently, those couples who live together have little to gain financially by getting hitched.

Ironically, the millennium seems to have had a very different effect on the marriage rate in other European countries. In France, for example, the institution of marriage is more popular now than at any time since the 1970s with 400,000 weddings expected there this year — compared with 280,000 in 1999. And, although France already has one of the lowest rates of divorce in Europe — almost half that of England — the number of divorces is falling for the first time in 10 years.

But back in the United States, Sollee predicts the year 2000 will not only be a boom time for divorces, but, eventually, for weddings as well.

“A lot of people who have been living together for 10 years think it could be jazzy to get married in the year 2000,” she said.

But will it be enough to reverse the long-term trends? Probably not.

In Britain, Vanessa Lloyd Platts may have summed up the modern relationship best when she said: “Some people wanted to rush out and get divorced before the millennium. And, obviously, lots of people have decided to get divorced now that the millennium is here. People these days are always looking for an excuse to get out of a relationship and to search for something better.”