Family cause that makes me proud ...

KIND readers often tell me snippets of good news from their lives, just to cheer me — and I was thinking of the importance of optimism when I went to London for a celebration of the charity Gingerbread’s centenary.

Why? Because this terrific organisation ( gingerbread.org.

uk) offers practical, economic and emotional support to families that have (for various reasons) one parent at the head — there are two million such families in Britain. It fundraises, lobbies, runs a helpline (0808 802 0925) and helps turn people’s lives around.

When I was still a student, the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child had already been campaigning against the stigma of what was once called ‘bastardy’ since 1918. As a young journalist I wrote about it (by then it had renamed itself One Parent Families) and also about the newly formed Gingerbread. In 2007 the two charities merged.

I was so happy to raise a glass to their campaigning energy at London’s Foundling Museum.

All around us were portraits of 18th-century philanthropists, led by Thomas Coram, who deemed it an outrage that children should be abandoned on the streets by mothers too poor and shamed to care for them.

It took Coram 17 years of fundraising before the original Foundling Hospital could open its doors. Poverty, widowhood and desertion were all common reasons for women to give up their children.

Think of how attitudes change. My mother’s generation thought having a child out of wedlock shameful. In the Sixties that was still the case. Divorce was unusual, too.

So, as an antidote to fashionable pessimism, I ask you to celebrate with me that a man or woman bringing up children alone is no longer seen as an aberration. For that matter, nor do we imprison homosexuals or put up horrible notices refusing ‘Blacks or Irish’.

Imperfect as we are, things do get better.

÷Bel answers readers’ questions on emotional and relationship problems each week. Daily Mail, londonW85TT,