Features
Are fathers really changing?
Posted: June 19, 2005
Father's Day, once just "a poor, jokey sideshow" in comparison with Mother's Day, has come into its own in recent years, according to Terence Blacker, writing in The Independent.
However, there remains some suspicion that this may have more to do with its promotion by the greetings card industry (which now manages to find cards for practically every day of the year) than that dads today are more worthy of praise and recognition than our fathers were.
But the fact is that fathers now are more involved that ever before in their children's lives. According to an Equal Opportunities Commission report published this week, no less than 94% of fathers took time off work when their baby was born. Almost eight out of ten fathers said that they would be happy to stay at home and look after their baby, given the choice. And just one in five believed that a mother's place is in the home, compared with more than half interviewed for a similar survey 20 years ago.
This is "nothing less than a social revolution" according to Mary Ann Sieghart in The Times, as British men have "reinvented what it means to be a father" is less than a generation. Back in the 1970s when I was growing up, the average father of a child under the age of five, spent less than a quarter of an hour a day in child-related activities. Today that had increased to nearly two hours a day. Dads today are happy to change nappies, push prams (even if they do so one-handed) and read bedtime stories.
The involvement of fathers is now so great that children actually see more of their parents now than they did thirty years ago. And this is despite the fact that more children are now brought up in families where both parents work, and that working hours and commuting times have generally increased.
And the influence of fathers is wholly beneficial. There is now a large body of evidence showing that children whose fathers are actively involved in caring for them do better at school, and are less likely to commit crimes or suffer from mental heath problems, and teenage daughters are less likely to become pregnant.
So the statistics are heart-warming: more fathers doing more childcare; children benefiting as never before. But is this the whole story?
It's one thing to claim that you would like to spend more time with your children, quite another to do it. I for one certainly think that the eight out of ten statistic is unrealistically high. Many fathers I meet might admire what I do. They certainly envy the time that I get to spend with my kids. But at the end of the day they wouldn't want to commit themselves to being at home day-in, day-out with them. As Matthew Sweet in the Independent on Sunday succinctly put it: "I look after my child three days a week. Why do I never encounter any other men pushing buggies around?"