Where do fathers fit?

Although no formal family policies have been issued by the Coalition government as yet, every sign shows they think the family just as important to social policy as the last Labour government. David Cameron has talked about the profound influence of his late father Ian, claiming warm and committed two parent families have a greater impact on a child’s life than income. Nick Clegg has declared: ‘Good parenting, not poverty, shape a child’s destiny’.

With this outlook underpinning future policy, it’s interesting to consider what a child’s ideal destiny is supposed to be. If it’s to be prime minister of England, then it would appear income does have something to do with it. Paying to go to Eton, being educated well enough to get into Oxford and then having the right social connections in the wider world, for instance, would seem to support that destiny considerably. However, what policymakers identify as good “outcomes” from good parenting are at much more degraded level than this: that there will be x less crime in the future, which will save y amount of public money. Policy’s highest aspiration is for children to grow up into adults with decent self-esteem, who enjoy a sense of well-being and are socially normative.

Where do fathers fit into this much narrower view of what social beings are? It’s telling that David Cameron’s celebration of what his father was and did is not the model promoted as “good fatherhood” in policies about family. Ian Cameron was an old fashioned father model. He went out to work early and came back late as he commuted from the suburbs to his stockbroking job in London. He was born with a disability; but stoically refused to let that become a barrier to his full engagement in society. He was the model of a father which now seems a call from a dim and distant past. He’s a father whose role was to support his family by working, by showing what a man is.

But that type of role model is not the one promoted for the father of today. As Nick Clegg’s quote shows, it’s what happens in the home that’s important, not what happens outside it in the world. Increasingly, we’re told that who a child will become is shaped even before they’re conceived. Women of child bearing age are being told to think about their alcohol intake, their food intake, their folic acid ingestion in the event they may conceive. The propaganda war surrounding breast feeding brings into play the idea that children who are breast fed have higher IQs than those who don’t. And there is book after book from neuroscientists and pop psychologists warning that brains get hard wired by the age of three, so the nurturing of infants is elevated to a high status in the development of a child.

So, where do fathers fit into this world where there’s limited social validation given to an adult – man or woman – acting autonomously in the public sphere? Inevitably, the role that public policy wishes fathers to play is increasingly inward looking. The coalition is announcing a new system of flexible leave to allow new fathers to take six months off work. In practice, there may be limited take up of this offer. But the public message is clear: a father’s place is in the home.

I am all for fathers loving their children and spending time with their children. But fathers have always done that. BBC Four recently ran a series on fatherhood which examined ‘The myth of the tyrannical dad’. It showed that fathers were close to their family in the early twentieth century. ‘They helped look after their babies, they played regularly with their sons and daughters, they helped educate them and they tried to get them jobs’.

What’s distasteful about the discussion of fatherhood today is it assumes fathers can’t relate to their children without being told what to do. Instead, they’re offered leaflets as part of the antenatal information on how to be a father. It’s problematic that looking after your family by going out to work, and seeing your role in the family as the stoic, less emotive one is disparaged. A doting dad has become one who wears his intensive parenting on his sleeve. If he doesn’t play with his children for X amount of hours, it could lead to terrible consequences. Worryingly, policy is doing for dads what it has so successfully done for mothers: scaring the living daylights out of them and then dictating how they should behave.

So, I say to fathers: be confident that you can look after your children, love them and have a good relationship with them without being patronised by government information. It’s important for children to have a comfortable domestic life, but it’s also important children can see there’s a life outside the home to aspire towards.

Instead of accepting a father’s place is in the home, both mothers and fathers should question just how narrow and one-sided that way of thinking is.

Throughout October and November, The Independent Online is partnering with the Battle of Ideas festival to present a series of guest blogs from festival speakers on the key questions of our time.

Jane Sandeman is the convenor of the Institute of Ideas Parents Forum. She produced the Battle of Ideas debate Doting Dads last month and is the author of the Battle in Print entitled Where do fathers fit?

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