It's high time we let go of outdated prejudices about parenting and celebrated fatherhood properly
Ties, socks, mugs, books, gizmos, shirts, brandy, aftershave, cigars, tobacco, golf balls and, once, an apron – the booty from Father's Day mounted up in the 60-plus years John Trevor Ellis Roberts was a dad. Last week, I went to buy him the umpteenth card to mark next Sunday and then I remembered: this is the first Father's Day that I don't have a dad.
He died in October, two months short of his 90th birthday, after a long and tormenting period of dementia that ravaged his body but mostly, thankfully, left intact his affection for others and his sense of humour. A father is the first man a daughter loves, for better and, sometimes, for worse. In the years since the 50s when my dad first tried his hand (no nappy changing, no pram pushing and very little indication that he had any idea that children require sustenance on a fairly regular basis but lots of funny faces, adventures and chat), fatherhood has begun to creep in from the cold – and yet it is still stubbornly sidelined and essentially mistrusted when it comes to the nuts and bolts of bringing up baby. Can a man really do it "right"?
On Tuesday, Labour MP David Lammy, reared without a dad, is calling for the government to enact 2009 legislation that would ensure children born to unmarried parents, around 45,000 a year, will automatically have both parents registered on the birth certificate. Currently, a mother is always recorded on a birth certificate. The father is recorded if the mother agrees by marrying him or, if unmarried, by giving her consent. The long-term study that has followed 5,000 American families with low skills and incomes for over a decade has established that including the father on the birth certificate makes a remarkable difference. It has a positive impact not just on the father's continuing financial and emotional involvement with his child, even after a couple break up, but also on the way in which maternity services and other professionals treat the dad as an active parent and not just a nameless sperm donor.
Some feminists argue that making registration automatic might put women at risk from violent men, but there are robust safeguards in place. It's as if the opponents of change find it hard to give up the negative, antiquated stereotypes that split men into patriarchal, abusive disciplinarians, a breadwinner distanced from the family or the macho, deadbeat, useless, narcissistic, serial philanderer.
Both stereotypes are undoubtedly alive and well and possibly parked in front of the telly somewhere near you watching Euro 2012 for the next three weeks. However, a growing body of statistics plus a million photographs of David Beckham, the über daddy cool, and countless images of more ordinary Joes singlehandedly tending children in every park and high street, say they are definitely not the rule.
Parenting, "love's austere and lonely offices", is sometimes joyous and uplifting; at other times, it is repetitive, boring and screamingly stressful (and that's without even a hint of Oedipus thrown in); either way, dads can do as good or as bad a job as mothers. If, that is, a woman will give them the opportunity: female domestic control has rusted many a relationship. A small band of pioneers, including academics Charlie Lewis and Michael Lamb, Duncan Fisher and Jack O'Sullivan, founders of the Fatherhood Institute, and Adrienne Burgess, author of the classic Fatherhood Reclaimed, has given a much fuller picture of fathers, ancient and modern. (Social conditioning is a powerful sedative when it comes to radical change. In the 17th century, rocking the cradle was said to have a weakening effect on men not all that different from the message my dad was given 200 years later.)
From the Second World War to the 1970s, the dominant view was that it didn't matter that men's participation in childcare was minimal. This was just as well since in 1971, on average, fathers spent 37.7 seconds a day with their newborns. Psychiatrists such as John Bowlby accepted that it was "natural" that men should provide and women should "mother" (keeping the value of caring cripplingly low in the process).
Since then, women have moved into the workforce and male unemployment and the cost of childcare means that willingly and unwillingly many thousands of men have become the main carers of their children. Research also tells us that children who have close relationships with their fathers are more likely to stay out of trouble, do well in school, have a large circle of friends and have greater levels of adult wellbeing.
Fathers in employment in the UK earn two-thirds of the family income, work the longest hours in Europe and have limited paternity rights but according to a 20-year study, What Good Are Dads?, babies bond as easily with their fathers as with their mothers, even when work reduces contact.
Yet still the "househusband" is treated as a neutered wuss; men in childcare are rare and suspect (and wages won't go up until there are many more); schools, hospitals and other branches of officialdom often regard the father as immaterial and the unmarried dad may be omitted from his own child's birth certificate.
Somewhere along the line, when women wanted to leave the home and join the traditional male world of work, in addition to their own collective determination and the power of the law, men gave them the benefit of the doubt. Women, for centuries portrayed as hysterical, frail, scatty, mindless and, at certain times of the month, alarmingly erratic ,were nevertheless hired. Dads, biological, legal, social, homosexual and heterosexual, separated, divorced, en famille or step, deserve the same benefit of the doubt. We know they can be very good indeed for children, young and old, and better still when they are in a good relationship with the mother (or, in these strange days, the surrogate), so why is it still so exceedingly difficult fully to be a father? And how do so many, in spite of that, rise so brilliantly to the challenge?
Thanks, Dad.
