The Silence of the Fathers is What Really Harms Families
It is not for women alone to carry the weight of domestic responsibility. Fathers' rights groups such as Fathers4Justice and Families Need Fathers have done pretty well over the past few years.
Fathers' rights groups such as Fathers4Justice and Families Need Fathers have done pretty well over the past few years. Stunts with purple powder and Spider-Man outfits and campaigns in the media have certainly got through a barrier of scepticism to make people more aware of how fathers can be sidelined after divorce. Indeed, the consultation process on the recent green paper on children and divorce will be dominated by fathers' groups arguing for a presumption of equal parenthood after separation.
Genuine as their grievances are, let's not forget that injustice appears on both sides. There are those women who don't like fathers seeing their children, of course, but don't tell me that you have never met a divorced mother who has to beg an indifferent father to keep up some interest in his children. We also need to ask: why do we hear such a loud cry for equal parenting only when it concerns divorced fathers? Because the need for fathers to be more involved is not just about the rights of fathers who have left family homes, it is about the responsibilities of fathers who are in those homes.
Perhaps courts would be quicker to recognise that a father and a mother should be equal parents after divorce if fathers were a little more eager to be equal parents before divorce. Wherever you look, in liberal or conservative circles, the presumption that care in two-parent homes is still the preserve of the mother is going unchallenged. When the debate about what was the best style of childcare for young children resurfaced last month in the media, all you heard were female voices on this subject, women talking to and about one another.
The research into nursery care that was published in this newspaper quoted various male experts on the subject, but all the parents whose voices were heard were mothers. When cruelty in some private nurseries was exposed, a typical headline in the Mail ran "Millions of mothers were shocked". And only mothers were quoted in the accompanying articles: one "admitted that she had felt guilty"; another is "considering legal action", and so on. Do not fathers feel guilt and anger too? Why don't they let us hear it?
It was briefly fashionable a couple of years ago to discuss how much more involved fathers were becoming in their children's lives, and a few powerful men were trotted out as examples. I remember praising Tony Blair for saying that the first thing he thought of in the morning was whether his child's nappy needed changing, or David Beckham for taking time off training when his child was sick, or a senior civil servant, Suma Chakrabarti, for negotiating a package that meant he could spend one day a fortnight with his children. But these days you'll look in vain for similar examples being paraded around the media.
Of course, what hits the media may not reflect the reality of life at home. Surveys on time use inside families suggest that even fathers in full-time work spend about an hour every weekday looking after children. It may not sound much, but compare the assumed average of about 15 minutes a day 30 years ago. And families are clearly responding to images of men who care: if you have a young child, the chances are you are reading about Bartholomew Bear, who is looked after by his father alone, or the little hare who snuggles up with his father after he guesses How Much I Love You.
Indeed, there seems to be a longing not so much for a domestic goddess but for a domestic god in many of the fables of domesticity that we hold most dear. Disney's last big success was that cute dream of passionate fatherhood, Finding Nemo, which ended up with one of the nicest father-son reunions ever filmed. And as we'll be reminded at the new staging of Mary Poppins this autumn (if Richard Eyre sticks to the structure of Disney's film), its turning point occurs when the workaholic father learns to fly a kite with his children. That is the emotional centre of this sentimental work - a centre that feels as close to us now as it did when the film was released 40 years ago.
And if you've ever tuned into Wife Swap, one of the most addictive reality shows, you will have seen that the fulcrum is so often whether a man can be more like a woman. Over and over again the most vivid struggle is in the heart of a man asked to take on a stronger domestic role who finds at the end that he doesn't want to give it up.
Surveys show that the desire for involvement with home life is gathering strength among younger men - one YouGov poll published six months ago found that 71% of men under 30 said that if it was financially possible they would like to stay home to look after their children. More than half of fathers in this age group said that they felt left out of family life. An ICM poll commissioned by the Guardian last month showed that three-quarters of young men felt that paternity leave - two weeks at £102 a week - was too little, as indeed it is.
Such polls show that men do feel an unfulfilled desire to find a better balance between work and home, just as women do. If that desire isn't heard enough in the media, maybe it is partly because by its very nature that kind of liberation from convention involves men stepping back from public roles and into something quieter. Women's liberation, on the other hand, necessarily involved women taking on a louder public voice.
But the silence of the fathers is a block to progress - a missing link in a debate that is foundering without their voices. Indeed, it is slightly absurd for a woman to be writing this piece at all. Why aren't the male commentators who write on these pages agitating for men to be given more of a role in the debate about men in the home? Men are allowing themselves to be patronised by absurd pronouncements on how to play with their children or with itty-bitty measures on paternity leave. They are too happy to be caricatured as slack dads and to say that it is just natural that women should carry the weight of family life.
The crunch question of our times, about how to preserve family life against the pressures of the workplace, cannot be solved by women making each other feel guilty about going to work. It could, however, be solved by men making each other feel guilty about refusing to abandon long hours in the workplace. They, too, should learn to spend some years letting promotion pass them by as they do another kind of work, the kind that is irreplaceable to those who love them.
Real involvement with domestic life creates shared joy, and would surely mean that fewer fathers end up out of the family home. As it is, you can't help feeling that some of the men who so bitterly contest care arrangements are men who never realised what an equal family life would entail until too late.
Genuine as their grievances are, let's not forget that injustice appears on both sides. There are those women who don't like fathers seeing their children, of course, but don't tell me that you have never met a divorced mother who has to beg an indifferent father to keep up some interest in his children. We also need to ask: why do we hear such a loud cry for equal parenting only when it concerns divorced fathers? Because the need for fathers to be more involved is not just about the rights of fathers who have left family homes, it is about the responsibilities of fathers who are in those homes.
Perhaps courts would be quicker to recognise that a father and a mother should be equal parents after divorce if fathers were a little more eager to be equal parents before divorce. Wherever you look, in liberal or conservative circles, the presumption that care in two-parent homes is still the preserve of the mother is going unchallenged. When the debate about what was the best style of childcare for young children resurfaced last month in the media, all you heard were female voices on this subject, women talking to and about one another.
The research into nursery care that was published in this newspaper quoted various male experts on the subject, but all the parents whose voices were heard were mothers. When cruelty in some private nurseries was exposed, a typical headline in the Mail ran "Millions of mothers were shocked". And only mothers were quoted in the accompanying articles: one "admitted that she had felt guilty"; another is "considering legal action", and so on. Do not fathers feel guilt and anger too? Why don't they let us hear it?
It was briefly fashionable a couple of years ago to discuss how much more involved fathers were becoming in their children's lives, and a few powerful men were trotted out as examples. I remember praising Tony Blair for saying that the first thing he thought of in the morning was whether his child's nappy needed changing, or David Beckham for taking time off training when his child was sick, or a senior civil servant, Suma Chakrabarti, for negotiating a package that meant he could spend one day a fortnight with his children. But these days you'll look in vain for similar examples being paraded around the media.
Of course, what hits the media may not reflect the reality of life at home. Surveys on time use inside families suggest that even fathers in full-time work spend about an hour every weekday looking after children. It may not sound much, but compare the assumed average of about 15 minutes a day 30 years ago. And families are clearly responding to images of men who care: if you have a young child, the chances are you are reading about Bartholomew Bear, who is looked after by his father alone, or the little hare who snuggles up with his father after he guesses How Much I Love You.
Indeed, there seems to be a longing not so much for a domestic goddess but for a domestic god in many of the fables of domesticity that we hold most dear. Disney's last big success was that cute dream of passionate fatherhood, Finding Nemo, which ended up with one of the nicest father-son reunions ever filmed. And as we'll be reminded at the new staging of Mary Poppins this autumn (if Richard Eyre sticks to the structure of Disney's film), its turning point occurs when the workaholic father learns to fly a kite with his children. That is the emotional centre of this sentimental work - a centre that feels as close to us now as it did when the film was released 40 years ago.
And if you've ever tuned into Wife Swap, one of the most addictive reality shows, you will have seen that the fulcrum is so often whether a man can be more like a woman. Over and over again the most vivid struggle is in the heart of a man asked to take on a stronger domestic role who finds at the end that he doesn't want to give it up.
Surveys show that the desire for involvement with home life is gathering strength among younger men - one YouGov poll published six months ago found that 71% of men under 30 said that if it was financially possible they would like to stay home to look after their children. More than half of fathers in this age group said that they felt left out of family life. An ICM poll commissioned by the Guardian last month showed that three-quarters of young men felt that paternity leave - two weeks at £102 a week - was too little, as indeed it is.
Such polls show that men do feel an unfulfilled desire to find a better balance between work and home, just as women do. If that desire isn't heard enough in the media, maybe it is partly because by its very nature that kind of liberation from convention involves men stepping back from public roles and into something quieter. Women's liberation, on the other hand, necessarily involved women taking on a louder public voice.
But the silence of the fathers is a block to progress - a missing link in a debate that is foundering without their voices. Indeed, it is slightly absurd for a woman to be writing this piece at all. Why aren't the male commentators who write on these pages agitating for men to be given more of a role in the debate about men in the home? Men are allowing themselves to be patronised by absurd pronouncements on how to play with their children or with itty-bitty measures on paternity leave. They are too happy to be caricatured as slack dads and to say that it is just natural that women should carry the weight of family life.
The crunch question of our times, about how to preserve family life against the pressures of the workplace, cannot be solved by women making each other feel guilty about going to work. It could, however, be solved by men making each other feel guilty about refusing to abandon long hours in the workplace. They, too, should learn to spend some years letting promotion pass them by as they do another kind of work, the kind that is irreplaceable to those who love them.
Real involvement with domestic life creates shared joy, and would surely mean that fewer fathers end up out of the family home. As it is, you can't help feeling that some of the men who so bitterly contest care arrangements are men who never realised what an equal family life would entail until too late.
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