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13 May 2012
There are three policy proposals on the table at the moment, put there by Government, current and previous. They all change the way fatherhood is constructed in UK law and policy.
Birth registration: a proposal to increase the expectation on unmarried fathers to sign a birth certificate by (rather gently!) setting joint registration as the default for unmarried parents as it is for married parents. The change was proposed by the previous Government and is in the Welfare Reform Act, but the current Government has refused to enact it.
Leave entitlements: a proposal to make it possible for mothers to share more of their maternity leave with their partners if the family wants to. This proposal was in the Queens’ Speech this month.
Separating parents: a proposal to make explicit in law the value of a continuing relationship between a child and both parents where contact with them is safe. This was also in the Queen’s Speech.
These are rather mild, nevertheless serious changes that go to the heart of the matter. Such laws help to communicate a set of values, reflecting widespread public opinion and acting beyond the immediate circumstances to which they apply. Yet there is a spirited lobby against all three proposals. The pressure on Government to back track will be enormous and there is a very real risk that the two new proposals in the Queen’s speech will go the same way as birth registration.
The opposition to all three measures is the same – dire consequences for women and children:
- In the case of birth registration, informing mothers that the default is for both parents to be on the birth certificate would open the way to abuse of some vulnerable women by their partners.
- In the case of maternity leave, it would result in employers illegally pressuring women to give up their maternity leave.
- In the case of separation, it would lead to courts awarding contact to dangerous fathers.
These concerns have rightly been seriously and meticulously considered – those who raise the concerns are serious people whose position demands respect. Yet in every case, the conclusion is the same – there is no evidence of these possible consequences. They don’t happen in countries where the proposed arrangements are already in place (which is very many countries). The dangers are purely hypothetical.
I wrote a book about how difficult it is to share parenting responsibilities in the home, Baby’s Here! How Does What? and I concluded that the main barrier to sharing of responsibilities is the difficulty for both mothers and fathers to relinquish their designated sphere of leadership – mothers tend to feel guilty if they are not the primary carer and fathers tend to feel inadequate if they are not the primary earner. Perhaps the same dynamic operates in the public domain?
Dire and unfounded warnings of what might happen if the status quo is changed has bad consequences. It stops us from seeing the benefits of change – how sharing of responsibilities can lead to numerous better outcomes for women and children, including the vulnerable (and, this way round, there is a great deal of evidence). If we saw these advantages, the cost of keeping the status quo would start to be more of a worry. It also distracts us from the important task of looking at what really is a risk to vulnerable mothers and children – we need to be constantly exercised on this front.
We must defend the changes proposed in the Queen’s Speech, with rational argument based on evidence. We owe it to mothers, to children, and to fathers.
7 May 2012
 Parenting minus the fathers The recent discussion, Motherhood vs. Feminism, in the New York Times’ Motherlode Blog, demonstrates to perfection the blindness to father-child attachment that blankets the western debate about parenting. For all five parenting experts who start the debate, there is no such thing as father-child attachment. The perception of the utter difference between mothers and fathers when it comes to parenting will inevitably generate a perpetual debate about motherhood and feminism.
Mayim Bialik describes “attachment parenting” only in relation to mothers. La Shaun Williams proposes that the pressure to work only applies to mothers and then proposes that the working role is only the husband’s – no pressure, then, on fathers! Heather McDonald states “being a mother is part of what you are” but has nothing to say about what being a father is like. Erica Jong states “some mothers can afford helpers, but many can’t” and harks back to when grandparents could take on caring roles – no role for fathers in her world. Annie Urban exclaims against patriarchy, arguing fathers are essential, but only so that mothers can bond with their babies.
None of these experts has talked to fathers to find out what fatherhood is like; if they did, they would see things that the current paradigm renders invisible. I am sure they don’t mean to offend, but their statements certainly feel offensive to me because they deny the biggest reality of my life.
But the lack of any connection between their world and my experience is not enough – perhaps I am a special case. Actually I thought I was when we had our first baby, and millions of fathers still think they are too. But happily not – what we are experiencing is universal and quintessentially and gloriously human – just absent from the narrative about parenting.
The science of father-child attachment is well researched and adequately understood. Proximity to pregnant mothers and babies changes a man’s hormones. The more exposure to babies a man has, the quicker his hormones change on encountering another baby – more hands-on fathers become more highly attuned to caring. These are powerful instincts – for many men the strongest feelings they ever experience. (Before we get too excited, humans are not unique in this regard – similar hormonal changes take place in male blackbirds, for example!) Meanwhile, babies are adapted to multiple parenting – they attach multiply and those who do so, get on better. Babies have extraordinary abilities to attract adults in to love them – our tendency to gather round to coo over a newborn is a salient characteristic of the human race. Anthropologists such as Sara Hrdy, author of Mothers and Others, a seminal study of motherhood, have looked at the collective nature of human parenting and have found an answer to the astonishing success of our species. Human babies are very “expensive” to raise – it takes ages and it is very difficult too; babies require social nurturing as well as physical to survive. Mothers have never in all of history been able to care for their young alone. Fathers have done so much parenting in the last 200,000 years that we have evolved – we are hard wired to love and care for our babies and children and our hormones make it feel like falling in love. Modern fatherhood is not modern at all – it is an adjustment back to normality after an aberration brought about by the industrial revolution and the separation of work and home and of male and female labour.
Once we understand that human parenting is fundamentally collective exercise and that both mothers and fathers are biologically wired to attach and that babies need multiple attachment, then the debate about motherhood and feminism is transformed. It is no longer the case that only mothers are responsible for children, it is no longer the case that work is a problem only for mothers, mothers no longer need “help”, they need partnership. Fathers cannot escape any of the expectations that are currently applied only to mothers.
And, to conclude with my own contribution to the debate about attachment parenting. I think it is a great concept – it worked for me. But I cannot bear reading about it, because those who preach it deny my experience entirely and being a parent is difficult enough without that.
29 April 2012
 The modern village to raise a child? Fathers not included. Here is a proposed answer to the question all advocates for supporting fatherhood are asking themselves – why are we failing to such an extent?
There is an ice-berg that sinks nearly every programme that supports fatherhood. It is a fundamental and difficult difference of view that we have not talked about openly.
The fundamental rationale of most family services is to support mothers to be the sole carer in their own family – services provide support and companionship with parenting (a fundamental need in human parenting which is collective by nature), they provide support with finding work, and they provide childcare. The premise is that fathers are providing nothing; instead, the service itself provides all the functions of a family. Services are the village to raise the child.
But supporting fatherhood requires a different premise – the support of collaborative parenting within the (actual) family. So supporting fatherhood is actually about how we engage with mothers. And that simply does not fit into most family services. And so all those who work to support fatherhood have the experience that they are rolling a ball up the hill the whole time – one blink and the ball is back at the bottom of the hill, year after year after year.
I am not sure about this argument. I hope that if I am off the mark friends will tell me!
22 April 2012
 Last week I attended an event put on by a large County Council to hear about the Council’s plans for their Children’s Centres – they are contracting out the running of all 58 Centres. They want to reach more families, they want to get to mothers and fathers who are less willing to use the services and they want to reach whole families. And they want to do all this for the same price as now! Let’s be realistic – if we adopt a business-as-usual approach, there is no chance at all of achieving such a change. This is going to require some serious innovation.
We have to start thinking differently about how services are delivered. I do not believe that requiring people to come into Children’s Centres is going to work as a single strategy – lots of parents just don’t want to, including almost all the fathers in the country, lots of young parents and lots of mothers. And visiting people in their homes is vastly expensive and can only be reserved for those whose needs are at the top of the scale.
We must open new channels – we must start delivering services to mothers and fathers of young children digitally, via phones, mobiles, internet, through Facebook and through live chat. This is not about shoving material at them and hoping for the best, but engaging in two-way conversation and building up a relationship over time on the basis of all the interaction that has gone before. It is about allowing parents to move from one channel to another, depending on what they want and need at any one time.
If we make more choices about how people can use a service, more people will sign up. And digital channels, whenever they are introduced into services, are enormously popular. The space between on-line browsing (which can be a wilderness experience) and face-to-face contact (a daunting first step for many) is by and large empty in most family services, yet that’s where most people want to engage, at least at first, and for most of the time.
The technology exists, developed with vast investment in the private sector and now being used successfully in not-for-profit services at reasonable prices. The time is here for a big change in how we deliver early years services. The contracting out of services provides a big opportunity – provided that those who are tendering have the capacity to deliver this degree of innovation.
13 April 2012
I have come back to the field of fatherhood after a break. I have given myself six months before allowing a reaction, but now it is time. I am shocked at how the agenda has stagnated.
It is time for a campaign that makes it impossible for family services simply to drop engaging . . . → Read More: Time for a new fatherhood campaign: high expectations
3 April 2012
Since I have returned to early years work after a break of a couple of years, I have been struck by how the father engagement agenda seems to be falling off the back of the lorry. So I was delighted to discover that Bath & North East Somerset Council has just launched a . . . → Read More: Has engaging fathers fallen off the agenda in early years? Not in Bath.
1 April 2012
I listened this week to Schubert’s song, Erlking, a terrifying account of a child’s death as his father “holds him safely, keeping him warm”. The powerful music has an incessant pounding, with the boy’s cries increasingly desperate as he appeals to his terrified father to save him. I was amazed to learn that . . . → Read More: Goethe on fatherhood
24 March 2012
This week I organised a joint letter to Sarah Teather, Minister for Children and Families, asking her to support new legislation that would make it the default for unmarried fathers, like married fathers, to sign the birth certificate. It was a response to the story in the Daily Mail saying that she is . . . → Read More: Birth registration and fathers: please sign the letter to the Minister for Children!
17 March 2012
It is time to make the case: human attachment is different from chimpanzee attachment. I am going to take my first step to challenge this near universal belief.
I read an article in Children’s England Outlook magazine this week. I attended their conference in Manchester on Thursday. Written by Alice Cook, Senior Family . . . → Read More: Human attachment is not the same as chimpanzee attachment
3 March 2012
Earlier this month in North Wales, a mother died just after giving birth. She was not married to the father, though he was declared in the maternity records as the father. Afterwards, the father was not allowed to take the baby home until social workers had visited and gone to a court . . . → Read More: Why is an unmarried father treated as a stranger to his baby if the mother dies in childbirth?
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