I WANT to explode. A couple of weeks ago,
staying with friends, I picked from their bookshelves Germaine Greer’s The Whole
Woman and found a chapter headed “Fathers”. Blithely she portrayed men as
sexual predators whose approach to children was one of neglect, mistreatment or lack of
interest. She cited reams of statistics from the Child Support Agency of how some absent
fathers fail to support their families. And that was pretty much it. That was the
professor’s take on fatherhood.
A fortnight ago, on these pages, my usually astute colleague Alice Miles claimed that
men have no interest in their babies and cannot wait to leave them to their mothers. Only
by forcing them would fathers spend time with their older children, she wrote.
Meanwhile we’ve had a range of government proposals for maternity leave and
childcare which are presented universally as a pitch for women’s votes. Memo to
Patricia Hewitt: childcare matters to dads, too. And what use is unpaid parental leave to
fathers who are sole or primary breadwinners?
To cap it all, the media airwaves are hijacked by selfpitying egotists in outsized
superhero costumes scaling public buildings in the name of fathers’ rights.
Why is such a warped perception of fatherhood being allowed to take root? Are most dads
really Neanderthal, absent, invisible, feckless or cruel? No.
In fact, a profound cultural change is under way. Many, many middle-class fathers in
their thirties and forties want to be more involved in their children’s upbringing,
not less, and wrestle daily with dilemmas of how to do so.
I know men who work from home and do school runs and childcare tasks so their wives can
work office hours. Others, like me, battle vainly to be home in time to read bedtime
stories. If feminist polemicists and ministers overlook the difficulties that men face in
juggling careers with active parenthood, we must fill the void.
Perhaps we should write polemics ourselves, lecturing women on why paternal influences
are paramount to boys. Or we could scale Whitehall ministries in sports kit or business
suits and regale television networks with readings from The Gruffalo and Where
The Wild Things Are.
Fathers of Britain unite! You have nothing to lose but your reins. Who’ll join my
Dad’s Army?