Duncan Fisher

My last post was about the FAMILIES who protested for better maternity services in London at the weekend. I took lots of photos, particularly of the men. This is the headline in The Independent. A different picture entirely.

My family once arranged a family photo and the photographer asked me to hand the baby to Clare “because it does not look right” with me holding the baby.

Does it matter that editors and photographers change the reality and tell a lie? So what if men who care for children are airbrushed out of the picture “because it does not look right”? Is not the important thing that they are doing it?

I think it does matter. Because a false picture underpins inadequate policies and services. There are striking statistics from the former Equal Opportunities Commission about how much more caring of children is shared these days. But people don’t believe these statistics - “they don’t look right”. And so policies and institutions remain unchanged. This affects the vulnerable families much more than the well-resourced, because it is the vulnerable who need services more.

It also matters in families. When one parent, the mother, finds that her role as a parent is persistently elevated and impossibly idealised, whilst the other sees that his role is persistently unrepresented, it has an impact on family dynamics. Take a debate about parenting methods between a mother and father - in most couples both parents will feel the mother is more entitled to assert an opinion than the father.

The new debate about families is all about relationships. This is good because a relationship implies more than one person; the word itself changes the picture. But to understand relationships, we still need to understand how differently messages are conveyed to mothers and fathers and how much this affects how they see themselves and each other and how they negotiate with each other.

Personal family, Fatherhood, gender equality, media, motherhood, parental relationships, parenting

At the weekend I went to the demonstration in London against the destruction by King’s College Hospital of the Albany Midwives, a beacon of family and community based midwifery. I even spoke at the demo from the top of a double decker bus in front of the Department of Health - the listeners were certainly a lot more responsive than at any of the many meetings I have been to inside the Department!

The demo showed once again that maternity is a family issue. I took my camera and had some fun.

Parenting together Add new tag, birth, family, maternity, media

In the last month, the Daily Mail has run five particularly good pieces on modern fatherhood - well informed, sympathetic, challenging of stereotypes.  Taken together, they represent a remarkable portrait of fatherhood today.  I take my hat off to the Daily Mail!

Greg Williams (Exhausted, guilt-ridden, torn between career and children. No, not YOU, girls. Having it all is even harder for us men) heralds the arrival of equality for women and men - they are now both impossibly pulled in both directions by the demands of home and work.  For men, work expectations are impossible - men are judged, he writes, by their career performance, not whether they attend their daughter’s ballet performance.

Vince Cable (Why, amid our quest for personal fulfilment and happiness, fatherhood matters more than ever) challenges the stereotypes of fathers and calls for some carrots - to balance the many sticks - to promote responsible fatherhood.  He calls for more paternity leave as a start.

Lucy Bulmer (How FATHERS can get post-natal depression: One man’s harrowing testimony) writes about fathers’ experiencing postnatal depression and quotes a proposal that mental health round the birth should be seen as a family issue, not just one for women.

Kate Hilpern (Teenage fathers: ‘I love my child as much as any older dad’) ran a long series of case studies on young fathers, the most positive thing ever run in the media on the subject.  She opens: “Young dads are often maligned by society.  But, as these four prove, many turn their lives around, face up to grown-up responsibilities and swap socialising for night feeds.  And they wouldn’t have it any other way.”

The old ideas remain - the genetic incompetence of fathers to do a good job of parenting.  But when Emily Andrews (The fatherhood taboo: Men finally break their silence on the ‘potential misery’ of becoming a dad) reported the comment by an American author, Steve Doocy, based on a sample of one (himself), “New mums are better at parenting than new dads…they are programmed to mother”, it resulted in a chorus of dissent - 176 comments in just two days.  I blogged about this discussion thread two weeks ago, regarding it as the most interesting and well-informed on-line discussion on fatherhood I have ever seen.

I believe the uncomplicated and positive tone of these articles heralds a new step forward - we are now able to talk about fatherhood like we talk about motherhood.

Fatherhood Fatherhood, media