David Lammy writes:
To the lexicon of man-bags and mankinis, the Centre for Social
Justice has added "man deserts". Giving warning of family homes throughout Britain
devoid of present and engaged fathers, it talks of a "national
emergency", seeing a million children growing up without positive male
role models. Many have disputed the Centre's figures and criticised its
alarmist language, but at least the right is engaged in this issue. When did a
left-leaning thinktank last publish a report about fathers?
I know that fathers matter. My father walked out on my mother and her five children when I was 12. I never saw him again. I have always felt that hole in my life – and I am not alone. By the age of 16, nearly 3 million children in Britain no longer live with their dads and a million others never see theirs.
Absent fatherhood isn't all about fecklessness though – the overwhelming majority of dads want to be involved. Last year, I met Warren at a young fathers' group in a Brixton church. Typical of many young, poor dads, he can find no job and no house. He is left without any money to spend on his children and no place to see them in even if he had. Even dads who are better off than Warren, and are still with their partners, struggle to be there for their children.
British fathers work the longest hours in Europe and statistics tell us that more than half have missed a significant event in their children's lives in the past year because of their jobs. Paternity leave is paid at a measly £136 a week – £100 less than a full-time job on minimum wage – and the government's recent shared parental leave is so complicated and filled with loopholes that it is expected that only 4% of dads will take it up.
This is unacceptable – and not only for fathers; 82% of working dads want to spend more time with their children and half of British mums say that, though they are actually the main carer for their children, they do not think that they should be. This anger has built up because Britain combines a 21st-century economy with 19th-century social policy.
Today, women are working longer hours but social policy hasn't caught up, and still assumes that families will have one carer (generally the mum) and one earner (generally the dad). The burdens on women have increased but they are still expected to provide the majority of childcare. My mum had no choice but to take on three jobs because she had been abandoned. Today, many women who want to share childcare with their partners are being pushed into staying at home by our archaic social policy.
Family policy is not a zero-sum game: any gain for dads need not come at the expense of mums. Dads are not a risk to be managed, but a resource to be used for the benefit of the whole family. Sadly, the Labour party has yet to make these arguments unambiguously.
The key public services that families rely on struggle to recruit men in significant numbers. Four out of five primary schools have fewer than three male teachers and even fewer men are active and present in children's centres. This feeds through to the father's experience of these services. Social workers often don't even record a father's name on individual care plans. GPs and schools will often only write correspondence on the child's development to the mother. Life is made difficult for mothers who want their partners to be fully involved.
And life is even more difficult for mums whose partners do not want to be involved – the government now wants to charge them for chasing the fathers of their children. Because we expect too little from dads who don't want to be there and are too hard on dads who do, mothers lose out either way.
A tacit conspiracy builds up on both political extremes that is entirely to the detriment of women. The instinct of many commentators on the right can be to berate mothers who happen not to live with the fathers of their children, even though many will do so because they have been widowed or abandoned. Yet the commentators on the extremes of the liberal left who insist mothers do not need anything more than financial assistance from their partners are just as damaging.
All the evidence shows that active dads are good for children. Children, particularly boys, who grow up without fathers are more likely than their peers to be involved in crime, heavy drinking and drug use; have low educational attainment; suffer low self-esteem and anger issues; and, ultimately, become poor parents themselves. Active dads make a positive contribution: they are good for children and they are good for mothers.
Ed Miliband should pledge to make Britain the most father-friendly nation in the world. It is not good enough for us to cede these conversations to those who demonise single mums and deadbeat dads but have nothing to say ourselves.
We need a family policy that is fit for the 21st century and we need a language of love and respect with which to frame it. Without this, it won't just be the Labour party that loses out – it will be the next generation of children who grow up without a father figure in their lives.
I know that fathers matter. My father walked out on my mother and her five children when I was 12. I never saw him again. I have always felt that hole in my life – and I am not alone. By the age of 16, nearly 3 million children in Britain no longer live with their dads and a million others never see theirs.
Absent fatherhood isn't all about fecklessness though – the overwhelming majority of dads want to be involved. Last year, I met Warren at a young fathers' group in a Brixton church. Typical of many young, poor dads, he can find no job and no house. He is left without any money to spend on his children and no place to see them in even if he had. Even dads who are better off than Warren, and are still with their partners, struggle to be there for their children.
British fathers work the longest hours in Europe and statistics tell us that more than half have missed a significant event in their children's lives in the past year because of their jobs. Paternity leave is paid at a measly £136 a week – £100 less than a full-time job on minimum wage – and the government's recent shared parental leave is so complicated and filled with loopholes that it is expected that only 4% of dads will take it up.
This is unacceptable – and not only for fathers; 82% of working dads want to spend more time with their children and half of British mums say that, though they are actually the main carer for their children, they do not think that they should be. This anger has built up because Britain combines a 21st-century economy with 19th-century social policy.
Today, women are working longer hours but social policy hasn't caught up, and still assumes that families will have one carer (generally the mum) and one earner (generally the dad). The burdens on women have increased but they are still expected to provide the majority of childcare. My mum had no choice but to take on three jobs because she had been abandoned. Today, many women who want to share childcare with their partners are being pushed into staying at home by our archaic social policy.
Family policy is not a zero-sum game: any gain for dads need not come at the expense of mums. Dads are not a risk to be managed, but a resource to be used for the benefit of the whole family. Sadly, the Labour party has yet to make these arguments unambiguously.
The key public services that families rely on struggle to recruit men in significant numbers. Four out of five primary schools have fewer than three male teachers and even fewer men are active and present in children's centres. This feeds through to the father's experience of these services. Social workers often don't even record a father's name on individual care plans. GPs and schools will often only write correspondence on the child's development to the mother. Life is made difficult for mothers who want their partners to be fully involved.
And life is even more difficult for mums whose partners do not want to be involved – the government now wants to charge them for chasing the fathers of their children. Because we expect too little from dads who don't want to be there and are too hard on dads who do, mothers lose out either way.
A tacit conspiracy builds up on both political extremes that is entirely to the detriment of women. The instinct of many commentators on the right can be to berate mothers who happen not to live with the fathers of their children, even though many will do so because they have been widowed or abandoned. Yet the commentators on the extremes of the liberal left who insist mothers do not need anything more than financial assistance from their partners are just as damaging.
All the evidence shows that active dads are good for children. Children, particularly boys, who grow up without fathers are more likely than their peers to be involved in crime, heavy drinking and drug use; have low educational attainment; suffer low self-esteem and anger issues; and, ultimately, become poor parents themselves. Active dads make a positive contribution: they are good for children and they are good for mothers.
Ed Miliband should pledge to make Britain the most father-friendly nation in the world. It is not good enough for us to cede these conversations to those who demonise single mums and deadbeat dads but have nothing to say ourselves.
We need a family policy that is fit for the 21st century and we need a language of love and respect with which to frame it. Without this, it won't just be the Labour party that loses out – it will be the next generation of children who grow up without a father figure in their lives.
This is naturally a left-wing cause, and
specifically an anti-Thatcherite one. Only a generation ago, a single manual
wage provided the wage-earner, his wife and their several children with a
quality of life unimaginable even on two professional salaries today.
This impoverishment has been so rapid and so
extreme that most people, including almost all politicians and commentators,
simply refuse to acknowledge that it has happened. But it has indeed happened.
And it is still going on.
If fathers matter, then they must face up to
their responsibilities, with every assistance, including censure where
necessary, from the wider society, including when it acts politically as the
State.
A legal presumption of equal parenting.
Restoration of the tax allowance for fathers for so long as Child Benefit is
being paid to mothers. Restoration of the requirement that providers of
fertility treatment take account of the child’s need for a father. (There is no
point saying that Labour abolished the second and third of those. The point now
is that the Tories are doing nothing to put them back in place.)
For repeal of the ludicrous provision for two
women to be listed as a child’s parents on a birth certificate, although even
that is excelled by the provision for two men to be so listed. (There is no
point saying that Labour introduced, etc.)
And for paternity leave to be made available at
any time until the child was 18 or left school, thereby reasserting paternal
authority, and thus requiring paternal responsibility, at key points in
childhood and adolescence. Of course a new baby needs her mother. But a 15-year-old
might very well need her father, and that bit of paternity leave that he has
been owed these last 15 years.
That authority and responsibility require an
economic basis such as only the State can ever guarantee, and such as only the
State can very often deliver. And that basis is high-wage, high-skilled,
high-status employment. All aspects of public policy must take account of this
urgent social and cultural need.
Not least, that includes energy policy: the
energy sources to be preferred by the State are those providing the high-wage,
high-skilled, high-status jobs that secure the economic basis of paternal
authority in the family and in the wider community. So, nuclear power. And
coal, not dole.
Moreover, paternal authority cannot be affirmed
while fathers are torn away from their children and harvested in wars.
Especially, though not exclusively, since those sent to war tend to come from
working-class backgrounds, where starting to have children often still happens
earlier than has lately become the norm. Think of those very young men whom we
see going off or coming home, hugging and kissing their tiny children.
You can believe in fatherhood, or you can support
wars under certainly most and possibly all circumstances, the latter especially
in practice today even if not necessarily in the past or in principle. You
cannot do both.
Nice article, but you have to laugh at Lammy presenting the lack of men in "children's centres" and "primary schools" as a catastrophe.
ReplyDeleteI know that the PC culture has gone deep these days, but does it occur to Lammy that, in the real world, men are about as likely to want to work as nannies, primary school teachers and "children's centre" carers, as women are to rush out and become firemen, soldiers, bricklayers and truck drivers?
There are simply some jobs more suited to women than to men-and vice versa.
Women are just better at childcare than men-this paternity leave fantasy is based on the notion that men and women are interchangeable.
The absence of fathers is terrible-but it's the secrecy of the family courts, the easy divorce laws and the subsidisation of single motherhood that are the problem-not the absence of men in "children's centres" or "paternity leave".
Rectifying that doesn't require any public spending or state intervention, but it does require taking on the 60's radicals-which is why Lammy isn't interested in it.
Oh, no, there used to be lots of men working in primary schools, especially at the junior end.
ReplyDeleteYou are probably too young to remember it. In fact, from what you have written, you are clearly must be too young to remember it.
But I remember when primary teaching was somewhere between a third and half male. Yes, in some junior schools especially, half.
And the Heads of junior or (as were rarer in those days) primary schools were usually men, who had of course started out as classroom teachers. That was the norm.
Because the steelworks shut down in Corby, we travelled around when I was young, running tough pubs. I went to two (catholic) primary schools, three (catholic) junior schools and, technically, two (catholic) senior schools which later amalgamated. All were comprehensive in their intake. In the first, a male headteacher was replaced by a nun, but there was nothing strange about his headship, except perhaps his prominence as a local Tory. In the second and third schools, in Rugby and Kettering, there were plenty of male teachers, one male headmaster, and a beloved Mr Singh (I later learned, in a bus station conversation with him, that he was a devoted follower of the English Romantics, whom he could not separate from the cause of his immigration). In my (Catholic) senior schools, the heads were male, and the staff ratio was equal.
ReplyDeleteMost of that is gone now. My secondary school is literally rubble. Men got pushed out, or more, scared away from primary and junior schools in the nineties, as far as I can tell. This was partly caused by the 'professionalisation' of teaching in universities biased against male teachers of infants, and partly by social fears propagated by an atomising media. A terrible shame.
It occurs to me, though I should blog about it myself, that the social respect male teachers were held in, particularly by bricklayers and steelworkers of whom I have known many, stemmed a little from the fact that the teachers were men who weren't working with their muscles all day, but who through intelligence and compassion offered a model of how to get a good wage without doing so. People wanted that for their sons, who were not 'kids', and the teachers reciprocated by playing up to the standard. You need a functioning working class if you want men doing non-working men things--a paradox that Thatcherites, liberals and neoconservative atomists and the sundry Trots and communists masquerading as mainstream leftists these days never quite understand.