Five years ago, when our children were still very small, I had to go on a work trip to California and I gave my husband the list of things he would need to know and do while I was away. Meals to defrost, shopping, sterilising bottles, nappy sacks, Calpol and babysitter numbers for emergencies, location of the wrapped present and card for our daughter to take to a birthday party, suitable clothes for her to wear to that party, reminder to pleeeeease comb her hair and wash her face so she didn’t turn up looking like a ketchup-streaked Apache, and so on and so on.
My husband stared at the list for some minutes with a kind of wincing wonderment. Finally, he said: “But it looks like a plan for invading a small country.”
He was right, of course: every mother runs a small country called Home. It’s only when she tries to delegate control of that benign dictatorship to a man that you glimpse the full awesome extent of her responsibilities. Fathers, according to every new survey that comes along, are doing more than ever before. This may be a good sign, proof of a giant step-change in society, or it could just tell us how painfully little they did to help in the past.
A study by the Future Foundation found that the housework gap between working men and women has narrowed over the past 40 years, but at the present rate of progress we won’t have domestic equality until 2015, and that’s only if some geneticist finds a way of reprogramming the male so he can grasp that the stuff left at the bottom of the stairs needs to be taken to the top of the stairs.
Men can invade countries at will, they can clone sheep and will probably end up cloning themselves, yet they still leap blithely over the hill of books, toys and clothes on the bottom step, on the barely conscious assumption that by morning it will have been magicked to the floor above. By the Housework Fairy, who else? Except that the Housework Fairy has been on a bit of a go-slow lately, what with nearly two-thirds of British mothers being in full-time employment outside the home. The HF can no longer work miracles and sometimes her wings break.
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The impact of this on fathers has been fundamental and shattering. As daddy sits up in bed this morning to be greeted by excited small people bearing dinosaur cards and strangely boiled eggs, he can reflect with pride that he belongs to the first generation of men in history who have seen active service to win their Best Dad medal.
For centuries, the paternal role was distant and relatively undemanding. It was briskly summed up by George V: “My father was frightened of his father, I was frightened of my father, and I’m damned well going to make sure that my children are frightened of me.”
The deal was to be a figure of authority, to go out and win the bread, mow the lawn, and occasionally turn up to a parents’ evening, where you distinguished yourself if you could remember both the name of your child and his birthday. Contrast that with the daddies now to be seen every Saturday morning at the local swimming pool or park, keeping the kids entertained while mum catches up on all the tasks she didn’t have time for in the week.
My husband once unleashed a moose-sized moan when it occurred to him that he had clocked up more hours in the Zoomaround indoor play centre than he had in the National Gallery. It was a rare moment of complaint. Like the majority of New Dads, he takes the extra work on the chin and on the shoulders, where the four-year-old likes to hunker down when he is tired.
It would be a gross exaggeration to claim that all papas have willingly embraced every aspect of this social revolution. The lovely and formidable Mrs Jeremy Clarkson once told me she had left the baby with Jeremy for a day. Freaked out by the sounds of a nappy being filled, Daddy Clarkson put the baby in the car and moved at high speed to a neighbouring county, where a female relative was persuaded to change the offending article.
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Changing nappies is the least of it, though, compared with the transformation in emotional intimacy between father and child. A writer I know, who splits the childcare 50-50 with his teacher wife, says: “New fatherhood is a big improvement on the old kind. Yes, there’s probably more wear and tear, but also much more warmth and tenderness. That isn’t to say there is more love, it’s just better expressed.”
A few weeks ago at the gym, I heard a young guy on his mobile explaining to his mate that he could not take up the offer of a free ticket to the Cup Final. The missus had booked a much-needed day out with the girls and he had to look after the kids. The friend was clearly incredulous. Ten years ago, even five, such a conversation would have been unthinkable.
This growing rapport between men and their offspring is driving changes in public policy. Much mocked as strictly for wimps, and still frowned on by many employers, paternity leave is now taken on the quiet by thousands of grateful men. (Only Utopians can imagine a time when it will be standard practice in an Anglo-American culture of blood, sweat and fears.) The Equal Opportunities Commission calls on the government today to improve paternity pay and flexible working to give “the best Father’s Day present many could hope for — the opportunity to spend more time with their children”.
Meanwhile, Fathers 4 Justice has staged a series of stunts in the run-up to June 20 to draw attention to divorced men who are denied access to their kids. How ironic that these justifiably sad dads chose to lob a purple flour bomb at, of all people, Tony Blair, surely the first prime minister to be dragged out of bed in the middle of the night to solve a teething-baby crisis.
Prominent paters from Blair to Beckham are subtly altering our idea of how to be a father. When Alan Milburn left his senior cabinet job last year, citing a wish to see his kids grow up and to play an active role in their lives, there was a half-hearted attempt in the media to stir up malicious gossip. But it wouldn’t stick. “Spending more time with his family” is no longer a euphemism for being exiled in disgrace after shagging the researcher.
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More time with the family means an awareness that childhood passes like sand through a sieve and that you’d better be there to catch it because there’s no rewind button on love. James, a consultant friend who recently finished training the senior directors of a major British retailer, said he had asked all of the fifty and sixtysomething men if their career had left them with any regrets. “Each one said, I wish I’d spent more time with my kids while they were young. It was amazing.”
Women can be forgiven feelings of mild agnosticism towards some of the more fervent born-again daddies. Katrina, a lecturer with teenage children about to fly the nest, told me how she felt her heart contract when her daughters admitted how much they wished she had picked them up from school.
“I constantly ask myself about whether I did the right thing by working. I just know their father is not asking himself the same questions. The guilt isn’t there in the same way for men.”
She would appear to be right. A devastating 40% of divorced fathers never see their children two years after the marriage has ended: invariably, it’s the mother who is left holding the jagged pieces of a broken and unmendable childhood. As for the much-publicised rise in male domestic prowess, I don’t know a single woman who believed the recent survey which found that men spend about 3½ hours each weekday on childcare. (Where are they doing it: in front of Wayne Rooney?)
And I don’t know a single man who will ever suffer that sick lift-shaft lurch in the stomach during a meeting at work when he remembers that he has forgotten the Pippi Longstocking costume he is meant to be running up for School bloody Book Day, which is, of course, tomorrow. (Plaiting orange wool around a coat-hanger at 3am to make a wig for a Swedish fictional character remains, to my knowledge, a female-only pursuit.)
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Recently, I was at a dinner for mothers where one disillusioned divorcee wondered aloud what men were good for. There was a thoughtful silence among those around the table, eventually broken by a redhead who suggested brightly: “Bins and wine?”
That’s a little unfair. We should never underestimate the contribution made by those who deal with all the rubbish, pour the drinks and generally keep our spirits up. The strange thing is that, although it’s hard to say exactly what fathers are for, there is no doubting the misery when they are taken away.
We didn’t need a recent psychologists’ report to tell us that there is now hard evidence of the crucial role men play in bringing up their children, nor that there is a direct link between a child’s behavioural problems and the amount of contact they have with their father. Our town centres are full of angry young men; they are complete losers and the thing they have lost is their dads.
Children instinctively grasp the mum plus dad equation, after all, they are the result of that most basic sum. I found my daughter downstairs just now making a card for her father and asked her, out of interest, what daddies were for. “Mummy is for doing things and knowing where things are,” she replied. “Daddy is for fun.”
WHO’S A GOOD DADDY, THEN?
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Did you remember that today is Father’s Day?
a. Yes, but only because my children told me
b. No and I haven’t a clue when Mother’s Day is either
c. Of course, because it’s our wedding anniversary as well, darling
Do you do 50% of the housework?
a. Yes — 50% of the time
b. I’ve got a full-time job, you know
c. Actually, I find ironing quite soothing
If your freshly laundered shirt is at the bottom of the stairs, do you:
a. Wonder vaguely what it is doing there
b. Not see it and tread on it with your muddy boots
c. Carry it upstairs and put it away
Have you any idea when the rubbish is collected?
a. I think it’s Tuesdays
b. What rubbish?
c. Rubbish is Tuesdays and recycling is on Wednesdays. Garden waste is every other week on Mondays
If your young children want to watch a video on a sunny Sunday, do you:
a. Check that it’s a PG
b. Suggest Scream III might be a laugh
c. Take them to the park for a cycle ride instead
Men are from Mars and women are from:
a. Venus
b. Argos
c. Heaven
Multi-tasking is the ability to:
a. Collect the children from school while talking on the mobile to Bill in the office
b. Carry three drinks and a packet of peanuts from the bar and still catch Rooney’s goal on the widescreen TV
c. Hold down a full-time job, love your wife and children, pay the mortgage, help with the housework and put up with the carping that you don’t do enough
RESULTS
Mainly As: Congratulations, you’re an old-fashioned dad and lovably imperfect with it
Mainly Bs: It’s not that you’re necessarily Neanderthal, but don’t expect a kiss this morning
Mainly Cs: Incredible, but are you really a bloke?