UK Special – Fathers Direct, Dads On The Air, 3 July, 2007.

With special guest:

This week Dads on the Air interviews Adrienne Burgess from the UK. In 1992, Random House commissioned Adrienne to write Fatherhood Reclaimed: the making of the modern father. Her groundbreaking policy document Men and their Children: proposals for public policy was published by IPPR in 1996. Fatherhood Reclaimed appeared a year later to great acclaim, and is now a mass-market paperback in the UK, Australia and South Africa and, in translation, all over Europe.

Her influential A Complete Parent: towards a new vision for child support was published by IPPR in 1998, and during 1999 she supervised an IPPR project ‘mapping’ fathers groups in the UK, which was published in 2001 under the title Fathers Figure. She was the consultant on Carlton TV’s First Edition: Fathers which was nominated for a BAFTA in 1998.

Adrienne is currently Policy Advisor to Fathers Direct, the UK information centre for fathers set up with initial funding from the Department of Health and the Home Office. She also contributes to family policy in the Lord Chancellor’s Department, the Cabinet Office and Number 10 Downing Street, and has given presentations and workshops on fatherhood in the US, Australia, Europe, the UK and the Republic of Ireland.

Adrienne is a strong supporter of fatherhood. Some quotes from her writing give an idea of some of the positions she takes: “In most countries we’ve still got a long way to go working on our institutional practices. For example, in the UK there’s a 6-month paid ‘mummy leave’ none of which a woman can transfer to her partner: he just gets two weeks, paid at a very low level, round the time of the birth. This paradigm confirms fathers as breadwinners and mothers as carers in an almost unbelievably total way.”

“What’s powerful for men is not just telling them that they matter, but being quite specific about the ways in which they matter. Providing them with evidence That’s a very powerful thing for fathers to hear, given that a lot of the discourse around fathers is that they don’t have much of an impact on their children whether they’re present or not – that as long as mum is there, everything’s OK”

“There is incontrovertible evidence that men are just as innately sensitive to babies and young children are mothers are, that they learn childcare skills at the same rate given the same degree or practice. And even that there are no innate sex-differences in multi-tasking, and so on. Where motivation is concerned, it’s really important for men – and for women too – to hear that there are no physiological reasons why fathers shouldn’t be really good carers.”

“If the way institutions are run means they don’t hold appointments or classes at times working fathers can attend… if they don’t take the father’s perspective or needs into account in their curriculum… If they don’t record his name on the hospital records… If they don’t refer to him as the ‘father’ but instead tell him he’s the ‘birth partner’… If they only want to show the mother how to bathe the baby… all this acts as a disincentive to father involvement.”

“Every time a writer or an artist or TV commercial pokes fun at a father who makes mistakes when he looks after his children, or praises involved fathers in a patronising way, or hints that ‘real men’ don’t do that kind of thing. The effect of all this is to tell men very clearly that childcare is not their business.”

“Anthropologist Margaret Mead developed a theory as to why so many cultures set out to prove to men that childcare was not to be their business. Mead noted that no developing society ever allows fathers in to touch and handle their newborns. No developing society: Mead believed the fear was not that men wouldn’t like looking after their babies. The fear was, rather, that they might like it too much – that if they became as close to their children as women routinely were, they would not be willing to go out and do their duty. Kill and be killed, conquer new lands, work long hours away from home. Mead is clear that economic development has been built on maintaining distance between men and their children. What she was pointing out was, that we don’t start from a kind of neutral position where men and childcare are concerned. Those of us who live in developing, go-getting cultures, start with centuries of active hostility to the idea of men taking care of children.”

“We’re talking about fathers being empowered to have their own opinions, make their own demands, develop their own relationships with their children – relationships not primarily mediated through us, their children’s mothers. And it will mean talking publicly about how much fathers matter… And also it means we have to stop talking about a mother’s right to choose whether or not she works when her children are young. If men are to be equal partners in parenting, it has to be the couple, not the mother, who make the choices. Two people, not one. Two informed and competent people.”

You can find out more about Adrienne Burgess here and at her website adrienneburgess.com.