Duncan Fisher

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

Antenatal education is in trouble.  The latest review of the evidence by the Department of Health is discouraging – put simply, there is little evidence that antenatal education works very well.  This may be because it has always been given a low priority by the NHS – half-hearted evaluations of half-hearted attempts are not going to result in anything inspiring.

We also know that many parents find what is on offer from antenatal education in the NHS to be wide off the mark.  Some maternity services, particularly where midwives are involved high up in the management, have pioneered better antenatal education, but they battle against a system that prioritises only management of medical risk.  That some mothers and fathers find antenatal education valuable is clear from the success of NCT in selling a service to a proportion of parents.  But the interest of parents in things like money and relationships are not going to feature high on the list of medical risks.  Furthermore, the feminisation of the transition to parenthood that comes about from marking birth as a medical event for a “woman” (the NHS never uses the word “mother” or “mother-to-be”), rather than the extension of a family, also means that the perspective of fathers in the transition to parenthood is typically very poorly represented.

I think it is time to start thinking from scratch.  Here is a small contribution.

Health issues

Health is the legitimate concern and responsibility of the NHS.  We must move beyond trying to transact all health business in antenatal appointments for mothers-to-be (sorry, “women”).  Unlike antenatal education, the evidence base for well constructed health interventions that target the family is very strong – spectacular improvements can be easily achieved in over-early hospital admissions during labour, smoking cessation, breastfeeding and so on.  Preparing mothers and fathers for the birth falls in this territory.  We need to expand group work, community drop-ins and workplace supports, all routinely targeting both parents-to-be.  We need to reconfigure health visiting to be a family support that recognises that health is a family issue, not an individual one.  These are big changes - it shakes the very fundamentals of the NHS system, in particular the designation of only one parent as the ‘patient’.

All the other issues: a social enterprise approach?

But let’s not pretend that the NHS can deliver reliably on anything beyond health.  It never could and now we are in the middle of a massive financial squeeze.

Parents know what they need and want.  Those that cannot articulate it could with a little help.  Let them decide what they want and take into their own hands the task of getting it.  Rather like some parents make a choice to use NCT support.

Who can facilitate this?  It has to be someone with an interest.

The good news is that expectant and new mothers and fathers are indeed very interesting.  They are people at a transition point, with a new interest in employment, in the state of their community, in the future of the world.  For individuals in some disadvantaged groups – teenage parents, for example - motherhood or fatherhood can bring about a transformation in the way they relate to work and engagement in their communities.  This is a tremendous resource for every community.  Communities should organize to capture it.

So I propose, instead of antenatal education, regular local “New Family Markets” for expectant and new parents where they can purchase locally available supports and training, using vouchers given to each mother and to each father.  The market would need to be organized by a social entrepreneur embedded within their community.

Here is a random collection of stuff that could be for sale in a New Family Market:

• NVQ in child development (the ultimate way to understand your child as s/he grows up)
• Baby training sessions for all the family - reading babies’ cues, toy workshops, first aid (really they are parenting training sessions, but saying so is not a good marketing ploy!)
• Fitness sessions
• Sports coaching with children (be a professional by the time your child is ready for football, tennis, netball…..)
• Photography (ensure you get a superb record of your child’s growing up and end up with a qualification)
• Cooking for kids
• Careers advice for new mums and new dads and management of caring/earning balance
• DIY
• Specialist services for young mothers and fathers, parents who live apart, etc.
• An introduction to the local support services of Relate
• English as a Second Language
• Financial check-up
• Home insulation help

Prices for these things would vary, of course, because some will already be funded also from other sources; some services could even be free.  It matters not – what matters is that mothers and fathers are deciding for themselves what they want.  And having made their choices, they find themselves rubbing shoulders with other fathers and mothers with similar interests – and the mutual parent support networks come as a free bonus, even networks inclusive of fathers.

As these parents pursue their chosen paths, the social enterprise model will ensure they are continually supported to move to the next rung of the ladder, improving their parenting skills, their local support networks and their readiness for better employment, all in one process.

So instead of a penniless maternity service struggling with antenatal classes, the NHS service focuses on innovations in health promotion, and you mobilize the whole panoply of local labour and training networks around the transition to parenthood.

Parenting together, Social Entrepreneurship birth, family, maternity, work

I was busy writing my second blog on shared parenting when the debate about maternity and paternity leave took off.  Here is what I said to the journalists and policy people who have phoned me in the last two days.

The two changes - transferability of maternity leave to fathers and extension of paid maternity leave from 9 to 12 months - were firm commitments five years ago when nine months of paid maternity leave were put in place for mothers and two weeks for fathers.  The actual news is that one of the commitments has been dropped and the other has been kicked forward to be dealt with by the next Government.  The desk has been cleared.

Good, I am pleased.

The extension of leave for mothers, without an extension of leave for fathers, immediately precedes the increase in the pay gap starting in 2007, after years of progress towards equality.  This was predicted beforehand and I believe the connection is causal.  The currrent leave system has legitimised the idea that men have an entitlement to unblemished work and career prospects when they become a father and has legitimised the idea that the sole responsibility for nurturing children rests with the mother.  This is one of the biggest differences in paid leave entitlements between women and men in the world.  So I am happy that further extension of paid maternity leave has been stopped.  I do not think that stopping this extension will reverse the damage to women from this legislation, but at least we have stopped digging deeper.  We can start introducing more leave for mothers only when we have adequate leave for fathers; then, quite apart from the benefits that accrue from fathers being more active in caring for children, women will avoid the penalties of being the only parent expected to take time off work.

As for transferability, I am, frankly, rather bored by the debate.  It is a debate about empty gestures.  Government knows the system is not going to work anyway; it published its analysis of why not in 2004 (see paragraph 28).  Only 4-8% of families where the mother is eligible for maternity leave, are predicted to use transferability.  Partners of women who are not eligible for maternity leave will have no entitlement, whatever their employment status.

It is obvious why it won’t work.  What mother and father, after six months, want complete role reversal?  Very, very few.  But if the leave were flexible, then you would see something very different.  Take one conservative possibility of the millions that flexibility would make possible - perhaps mum on 2 days/week of work with 3 days maternity leave, and dad on 4 days/week of work and 1 day of leave.    In that arrangement, baby is only out of parental care 1 day a week, and the smallest amount of work flexibility could remove even that.  We need the leave system to be amenable to the boxing and coxing that is the stuff of life for parents of babies.

And why the transferability?  This is a nightmare to administer - someone has to track what both parents are doing.  Just let each parent have a period of leave, and then each can negotiate individually with their employer.

Then there is the problem of pay.  The leave is not well enough paid to be affordable by many families.  The unpaid component of the maternity leave is purely hypothetical - there is already three months of unpaid parental leave for each parent, but hardly anyone knows it exists because it is not affordable and not worth knowing about.  In the example above, the family might even decide that one day off a week for the father is not affordable, given all the other penalties he is likely to face by declaring to his employer that he is prepared to compromise work for something else.  I would rather see, for a specified sum of public money, less leave and more pay.

I also question the six month rule - that any mother wishing to return to work, even part-time, before the child is six months, is not allowed to use her leave to let her partner take care of the baby.  Human beings are distinct in the degree to which the care of infants is shared with kin; six months alone at home all day is a pretty tough call for mothers, going against how we humans are hard-wired to share this work.  Breastfeeding is often used to justify six months, but going back to work for short periods does not stop breastfeeding, and a father who has been well prepared to support breastfeeding can be the best person to look after the baby while the mother is at work.  I am not presenting this as the way to do things; I am just asking how it helps mothers to withhold this choice? (And, of course, there is the problem that most fathers are not well prepared to support breastfeeding, even though, in terms of bang for buck, this would be the cheapest way to increase the UK’s amazingly low breastfeeding rates.)

The shelving of changes to the leave system till the new Government means there is the opportunity for a real re-think.  If we introduce the currently proposed changes in 2011, it will take about five years to ascertain they do not work, then three years to introduce a change.  So by 2020, we will be starting to introduce a workable system.  Let’s save ourselves a decade and start the incremental process of building a rational system, starting with a sound foundation, based on what real families really need.

Fatherhood breastfeeding, gender equality, paternity leave, work

Over the next few weeks I will reflect on the future of the campaign to achieve equal pay for men and women and I want to relate this directly to the needs of children.  Unequal pay is not good for children - it restricts how their parents can look after them and it presents boys and girls with different future opportunities, irrespective of the effort they have invested in their education and training.  The decades long campaign has fallen into a rut, with pay becoming more unequal since 2007, despite years of effort and high level Government commitment.   I will consider why this has happened and what must be different in the future to restart progress.

The Equal Opportunities Commission examined the pay gap and determined that the main cause (not the only cause, but by far the biggest) is the unequal sharing of caring roles between women and men.  There has been a revolution in the expectations in how roles will be shared, but the reality has been much slower: disillusionment within families and in the public domain between aspirations and realities is a sign of our times.   The focus of this disillusionment is the amount of caring and domestic work that working fathers actually do, compared to what they are now expected to do.

There has been no analysis in UK about what makes sharing of caring roles possible within individual families.  The best material is on the Equally Shared Parenting website in USA and they are producing a book next January based on interviews with 50 couples in US who are striving for a real sharing of roles.  Some essential ingredients have immediately emerged:

• Both parents must actively let go of their own traditional ‘primary’ earning or caring role and let the other in; this can be more difficult than stepping up to the non-traditional role.

• Sharing is obstructed by external factors, particularly how work is structured and paid.

The key to understanding the dynamic of a family is interdependence - the role of each parent is defined by the other.  Where families are happy with the balance they have achieved, they have achieved it through the active dedication of both mother and father.  Trying to fix things for one parent without engaging with the situation of the other will achieve only very limited success.

Such interdependence exists externally to individual families also.  If it is the norm for women alone to look after children, then men will be free to and expected to commit time to work that no person with caring responsibilities could, so creating a two-tier workforce that imposes itself on everyone.

My basic proposition is that policies to tackle these problems must be achieved by active partnership between women and men - women and men managing workplaces and women and men in politics.  This is not how the current campaign for equal pay is configured, not even remotely.  I believe this is why the campaign has fallen on hard times.

Fatherhood Add new tag, family, gender equality, parental relationships, USA, 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

Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, gave a speech on the family on 8 July at Relate.

He said that it was important to support family relationships of all kinds and in all family formations.  He talked about the need at the present time to support relationships under stress from unemployment, repossession and debt.

He presented again the Liberal Democrat proposals for leave entitlements - 18 months of parental for parents between them (after maternity and paternity leave), with six months apportioned on a “use it or lose it” basis to each parent - similar to Scandinavian systems.

He devoted the latter part of the speech to fathers, calling for three changes: (i) better leave entitlements and more work flexibility for men; (ii) greater engagement with men by maternity services at the transition to fatherhood; and (iii) changes to child support, benefits, tax and housing to facilitate a father’s continuing caring role after separation.

Fatherhood Add new tag, family, fatherhood policy, LibDems, maternity, parental relationships, paternity leave, politics, separation, work

In an earlier blog, Fathers are a resource in the fight to end child poverty, I wrote an open letter to the Minister for Children.  I made three points:

• how fathers work is important to children in poverty; employment offices should engage with men with caring responsibilities as they do with women; at present only women are assumed to have caring responsibilities

• the so-called “non-resident” or “absent” parent (who is often neither) needs support both in delivering a caring role and a financial role; at present he is not designated at all as a parent, except when it comes to enforcing his financial contribution

• I proposed a new way of considering child poverty, looking at the earning and caring role of both parents (whether living together or not)

This week I got a reply from the Minister for Children - here is a copy.

It describes the work to promote engagement with fathers by Local Authority services and Read more…

Fatherhood child poverty, Fatherhood, parental relationships, 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

"Time to stop work, Dad". Taken as part of the DCSF's Think Fathers Campaign at RAF Halton last week.

I hand this week’s blog to Barack Obama, the greatest ever orator on fatherhood.

He gives a message we can all identify with…..

It is rarely easy. There are plenty of days of struggle and heartache when, despite our best efforts, we fail to live up to our responsibilities. I know I have been an imperfect father. I know I have made mistakes. I have lost count of all the times, over the years, when the demands of work have taken me from the duties of fatherhood. There were many days out on the campaign trail when I felt like my family was a million miles away, and I knew I was missing moments of my daughters’ lives that I’d never get back. It is a loss I will never fully accept.

Here is his whole essay.  Remarkable.

Fatherhood Fatherhood, USA, work