Duncan Fisher

I was talking to a divorced single father the other day.  I know all the theory about the difficulties that single parents face (I lack the direct experience, being neither divorced nor separated) but being faced by the reality of a single case sometimes has more power than the theory.  And I was really taken aback at the extremity of his difficulty.

This father looks after his son almost exactly 50% of the time - 3 nights and four days a week. He is wise enough to know that he must obey to the letter every agreement that has ever been made with the mother of his children.  His case is a text-book study of good working arrangements emerging from an acrimonious divorce.

His income is uncertain from month to month – he runs his own business.  He has to pay £200 child-support to the mother of his child each month.  He knows that if he cannot pay that, she will immediately challenge the sharing arrangements and the child will not be delivered at the agreed time, and that will lead quite possibly to extended loss of any contact.  A few months ago, one of his business invoices was paid late and the £200 was paid two days late; the mother had already threatened to refer the matter to her solicitor.

He has a mortgage on a flat that has a room for the child, and that too must be paid each month.

So, one hic-cup in his business and

• the child’s relationship with him is put at severe risk

• his occupancy of a house that enables him to care for the child is also put at severe risk

• he has no access to any kind of benefits to help him through the crisis because, as far as the state is concerned, he is not a parent at all

I know what it is like not to know where one’s income is coming from the next month – it is a constant worry with the costs of caring for children.   But the consequences for me of even an extended period of no income are as nothing compared to the consequences for this single father.

The other single parent in this scenario has quite a different experience.  She lives in a much larger house (she is now wealthier than he).  If she loses her job, she gets additional benefits to care for the child and to secure her accommodation.  And she gets £200 guaranteed income every month along with Child Benefit.  Everything about her parenting role is supported.

In the UK, we argue that most children are not cared for 50/50 and that the “parent with care” is likely to be more needy and more likely to spend money they receive on the child.  This is incontrovertible.  But is it acceptable to place a minority of children in a highly vulnerable situation – as is the child in the case I here describe – for the benefit of other children?  In other areas of separated family policy, much emphasis is placed on the idea that “every case is different” – why in this area is every family not treated as different but as within a certain limited range?

I was telling this story to a clinical psychologist who works in the community with adults with mental health difficulties.  She reported that she sees fathers in this situation all the time: they live in constant fear of losing the connection with their child.  They get no support or recognition for their role as parent and they are powerless.  One foot wrong (and vulnerable adults are not always sure-footed), and the axe comes down on the relationship with their child.  Meanwhile the other parent plays by a different set of rules, able to indulge in a very high degree of rule breaking before there is any challenge.

We never hear anything from these parents because keeping silent is a crucial part of their strategy to sustain their child’s relationship with them.  They know they must face the situation without support; they develop quiet resilience instead.  Many, however, fail, and there is no safety net.

Australia has a system that addresses all this, so no rocket science is needed.  The state recognises that when parents split, two single parents are created – the UK system of regarding separation as a reduction of two parents to one parent is difficult to understand.  Child support is fully flexed down to no payments at all from one parent to the other, depending on relative incomes and extent of sharing – in short, it recognises that every family is different and does not undermine those families less near the average than others.

All three main political parties are working on family policy just now and are seeking ways of improving things. Finding a way of making the tax, benefits and child support system robust without sacrificing the good of some children for the good of the majority would be one valuable part of reform.

Parenting together child poverty, Fatherhood, parental relationships, parenting, separation

On Monday I am on Woman’s Hour discussing the issue of fathers losing their jobs and being pitched into full-time care of children.  I will comment on their experiences.  So what should I say?

It seems to me there are two key factors.  First there is the burden of social expectation - which is very hard not to internalise.  Men should work, women should look after children.  So when a father loses a job and the mother is earning most of the money, there is often a mother who feels guilty at not caring enough, and a father who feels inadequate at not earning enough.  This is bonkers - with earning and caring  both essential to a family and with both mothers and fathers equally capable of doing both (on average, at least) it should not matter; but we have boxes in our heads which make us squirm when it is one way round but not the other.

Another factor is the largely unacknowledged burden of earning money for a family.  There is a widespread narrative about the burdens of looking after children and the home, but the pressure of earning enough money for a family is huge - ever since we lived in caves, mobilising all the resources needed to bring up children has been the hardest challenge for human men and women.  So when a father (or mother) has been inhabiting the role of main earner, suddenly being cast out of that role, by unemployment, illness or disability, is bound to be traumatic.  Of course one is going to feel a failure.  What happens to the family now?

But let’s look at the positive.  If you are kicked out of a box, you discover things outside that you did not know were there.  When I suddenly found myself caring for a baby on certain days of the week all by myself, it was a transformative experience.  And let me be honest, we would not have chosen this way of doing things had we had a choice, such was our ignorance of anything outside the box until we were ejected from it.  The kind of intimacy you get in sole care of a child is normally the privilege of mothers only and I certainly had never heard anyone talk about it like that.

Work is fluid these days and mothers and fathers are equally qualified to do it.  Similarly, both mothers and fathers have evolved to be good at caring for children.  Both parents will move in and out of employment, unpredictably.  The best we can do to create a resilient family is ensure we are flexible - competent and confident to take up any role when the time comes to do so.  At every point in the process, there will be factors that distress us and factors that delight us, so perhaps it is better not to stay too long in any one pattern.

Parenting together family, motherhood, parenting, work

“What really upsets me are those fathers who have chosen not to be with their children.”  Janice, aged 17, who lost her father when she was 8.

Hodder is publishing a new edition of The Sixty Minute Father by Rob Parsons, making this the longest lasting book on fatherhood - and, in my opinion, the best.

It focuses on time - and helps by being readable in one hour (hence the title).  It points out that your child lives with you 6570 days and invites fathers to seize every one of those days - “carpe diem!”  Parsons points to the biggest illusion of all - that we will have more time tomorrow.  ‘No-one was ever heard to say on their death bed, “I wish I had spent more time at the office.”‘

Gently but firmly, the book points out that much of a father’s busyness with work is not the inevitable turn of fate - it is a choice.  He puts it crisply: “If we are going to make a difference as fathers we need to do it now.  The decision is practical.  It has to do with bedtimes, Saturday football games, stories and hamburgers and it has to do with carving those times out of busy lives - today.”

He appeals to fathers: give less priority to presents and focus on presence.  The poorest father can give a child the best gifts.

The book has lots of practical tips for raising children (”start a hobby with your child”, “tell your children every day that you love them”, “develop family traditions”), but by focusing on the biggest issue of all - the problem of obsessive working or feeling terrible about not being able to work - the book gets straight to the heart of the matter.

Fatherhood family, Fatherhood, parenting, work

Is the key challenge of sharing the care of children in fact stepping out of one’s culturally determined earning or caring role rather than the challenges of the new role?

The Daily Mail is still at it, with yet more excellent articles about motherhood, fatherhood and family life (see my earlier blog on The Daily Mail).  The latest is a confessional piece by a mother, Diana Appleyard, about her struggles to let her partner into her territory in the home: I hate being the bread winner says resentful working mother-of-two.  She found herself constantly on the attack, feeling bad about not having the primary caring role, and he found himself forever on the defensive, feeling it impossible to prove himself on her territory.

There have been 24 books written by fathers about new fatherhood in the last six years - men trying to produce a road map having travelled through unchartered territory.  I wonder if they miss the point - the key challenge is perhaps not how to be a hands on parent - that is not rocket science, it just means rolling up one’s sleeves and doing what needs to be done.  There is loads of advice and help at hand…. so long as one does not feel such a social misfit that one dares not access it.

Is the key challenge in fact stepping out of one’s culturally determined role?  For a mother to step out of the primary domestic role and for a father to relinquish the main earning role can be a really difficult experience, accompanied by intense feelings of inadequacy, guilt and fear.  Fathers and mothers can start inventing fantasies about how the sky would fall down if they moved away from their prescribed roles - he might lose his job, even if he asked to leave early from work just one day a week; she might lose her primary attachment to the child if the father becomes competent.

And with more sharing, perhaps inevitably comes more argument - two parents active in the house and two parents active in the care of a child will have two different styles and their weaknesses will be clearer to each other.  When a mother criticises a father’s way of caring, or when a father criticises a mother’s way of caring, one can expect strong currents of emotion!

That this debate is warming up in the recession is no coincidence.  The recession is tipping families into patterns of work and care that do not correspond with cultural prescriptions.

Fatherhood family, Fatherhood, motherhood, parental relationships, parenting, work

I recently blogged about the need to find the space and time simply to contemplate the series of precious and never-returning moments of our children growing up.  Like this morning being chased around the kitchen by my daughter brandishing a vacuum cleaner.

This is a favourite poem of mine, which wonderfully describes the yearning for time simply to stand still.

At the top of the stairs
I ask for her hand.  OK.
She gives it to me.
How her fist fits my palm.
A bunch of consolation.
We take our time
Down the steep carpetway
As I wish silently
That the stairs were endless.

Beattie is Three, Adrian Mitchell, Heart on the Left: Poems 1953-1984

Fatherhood family, Fatherhood, parenting, work

The Daily Mail, along with various other national papers, reported last week on a new genre of confessional literature - by new fathers experiencing negative feelings after their baby was born: The fatherhood taboo.

One of the authors of the three books, is quoted as saying, “New mums are better at parenting than new dads, but there’s a reason why: they are programmed to mother.”

This resulted in an outpouring of comments in the following days, most characterised by generosity and common sense - 176 comments in total.  It is the best discussion on fatherhood on-line that I have ever seen.  Participation was 50/50 men and women.  About one quarter of respondents agreed with the statement and the rest disagreed - vehemently.

Read more…

Fatherhood birth, Fatherhood, maternity, parenting, postnatal depression

Now there is a book (from USA) on the subject of sharing earning and caring, Getting to 50/50: how working couples can have it all by sharing it all, by Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober.  A pity they could not share the telling of the story with the fathers of their children, but it is full of good sense and demonstrates the early shoots of a new way of thinking about parenting - a thinking that is increasingly essential for families to function in the 21st century economy.

Fatherhood family, parental relationships, parenting, USA, work

Like practically every other person in the country, I was deeply saddened by the death of David and Samantha Cameron’s son, Ivan.  “He leaves a hole in our life so big that words can’t describe it” said David and Samantha.  I read again the media articles about the intense struggles that parents of a disabled child experience as they battle with an unforgiving system to get what they need.  Ian Birrell, deputy editor of The Independent, who himself has a profoundly disabled child, wrote movingly about his family’s love for Iona, and the struggles he and his partner face on a daily basis: Iona and Ivan - a tale of two children and two families.

It struck me that I should do something in response to this.  I am currently involved in developing a new information channel to all parents through maternity units, Mum Dad Baby, with the University of Chester and with Dad Info.  I have written to Contact a Family, the lead national charity for families with disabled children, to invite them to become a partner in this project.  If anything comes of this, let it be in honour of Ivan Cameron.

Fatherhood Add new tag, birth, disability, family, Fatherhood, maternity, parenting

I have just come across a fantastic website, reviewed in the Guardian, Equally Shared Parenting.  A mother and father, Amy and Carl, have decided to share parenting absolutely equally and to blog their way through the entire project.  They have achieved quite a following in the US.  By going all the way, they get to the heart of the matter - how true sharing requires above all that both parents relinquish ownership of traditional roles, how sharing demands complete mutual respect and how it must be founded on a belief that fatherhood and motherhood are of equal importance to children.  It confirms that maintaining sharing is a constant effort, given the pressures not to.

I also read this week the report by Gingerbread, I’m not saying it was easy, by Victoria Peacey and Joan Hunt.  This documents the real difficulties that parents face in sharing care after separation.  A lot of the same issues emerge - the power of beliefs about who is most important for the child, the constant struggles to get the right balance, the need for mutual respect.

It struck me that the oceans of advice for parents out there are almost all individually targeted - either at the mother or at the father.  But there is almost nothing about the really key issue - the art of sharing.  And sharing roles is not a lifestyle choice for many - it is a necessary adaptation to the 21st century economy.

The Good Childhood Enquiry recently stated that “above all” we need to “reverse the increase in family conflict….the heartbreak that damages so many children.”  How much conflict is generated by parents unable to work out a mutually acceptable balance of roles and feeling unsupported by each other as a result?

Fatherhood family, parental relationships, parenting, USA

I am going to write three blogs in quick succession on the Good Childhood Report - one on supporting c0-parenting instead of individual parenting, one on parents and work and one on pregnancy and birth.

Supporting co-parenting instead of individual parenting

Parenting in Britain is seen as an individual activity.  When a baby is due to be born, the NHS registers one parent only and targets one parent with information about baby health and baby care.  Only one parent is given time off work enough to be able to care for the baby.  Nearly all parenting support programmes are designed to engage with one parent only and are evaluated on this basis.  When parents separate, only one parent gets child benefit and all the tax reliefs and benefits that go with that, whatever degree of sharing there is.  Where there is serious conflict between parents, it is vanishingly rare for both parents to get adequate support.

The public debate this week about parents working focuses only on one parent - the mother - and debates whether she should work less; it does not consider whether fathers should work less, even though they work for more than mothers.

Anything to do with two parents is controversial – relationships between parents are held to be a private matter, supporting two parents together is seen as a risk to support services for a parent living alone.

And then there are the practical difficulties – working with two parents together, particularly if living apart or (worse) in conflict, and working with men, both require skills and knowledge that are simply not widespread in the children’s workforce.  Training for this workforce currently involves no challenge to personal beliefs and prejudices about men in parenting roles.

The Good Childhood Report unequivocally and absolutely repudiates this approach.  It does not just say that parental relationships are important – it says they are the most important thing in the world for children.  “Parents getting on well is one of the most important factors in raising happy children.”  “How can we reduce the level of conflict in family life?  Nothing is more important for children than this.”  “We need above all to reverse the increase in family conflict.”

And so we have the biggest study of childhood ever taken in the UK stating that the most important thing in the world for children is the very thing that is most notably overlooked in the entire infrastructure of family support.  One could not set a more radical agenda for change.

Just before the Good Childhood Report, a campaign to support parental relationships got underway backed by 24 of the nation’s Agony Aunts and Uncles – Kids in the Middle.  The campaign has already mobilised millions of pounds of Government spending and is now gearing up as a major partnership between relationship and parenting organisations.  It is calling for exactly the same things as the Good Childhood Report is proposing: real and effective relationship education in schools, relationship support around the birth of a baby, child centred support for separating couples with an emphasis on reducing conflict and maintaining the child’s relationship with both sides of the family.

What with this and the Good Childhood Report, the prospects for real change are very promising.

Fatherhood, Personal parental relationships, parenting