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A sexist culture of low expectations is

limiting our ideas of fatherhood


Blame it on my own daddy issues or the sound of the Daily Mail counting
down my biological clock, but I have to admit I have a soft spot when it
comes to dads. Be it a cringeworthy Facebook comment from a friends
proud father or the mere sight of a man playing peekaboo with a giggling
baby on a train, my heart instinctively melts for a man carrying out the bare
minimum of his parenting duties, while I largely take for granted the many
millions of mothers doing the same.

The problem is, of course, that this reaction is not so much about me as it is
about societal gender norms and resulting expectations of what a family and
its constituent parts should look like. These are the standards that see dads
looking after their own children described as babysitting while mums are
met with raised eyebrows for daring to venture outside for an evening.

Theyre the cliches of subservient housewives and reliable breadwinners,

(adj) willing to follow other peoples expectations

the foundations for a society that says the best citizens are raised by
heterosexual, anodyne parents who spend the entirety of their offsprings

(adj) (f) avoid causing offence /n.o.dan/

childhood asking each other how their day has been.

And theyre the stereotypes that I fear research released this week by Oxford
University could be used all too easily to reinforce.

The study, published in the journal BMJ Open, uses data from the Avon
Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children to analyse the influence of
fathers on the behaviour of their children at various points in their lives.
Ultimately, say the researchers, the children of fathers who are confident
and secure in their parenting role and who form an early, strong bond with
their offspring are less likely to experience behavioural problems in later
life.
So far, so agreeable: good fathering, in short, has a positive impact on the
children benefiting from it. A focus on the role of fathers is also refreshing
amid decades of research and conjecture culminating in a creative
range

a guess about something based on how it seems and not on proof

end up in sth

of ways to criticise women for the raising of their children. On top of which,
at a time of a widely acknowledged masculinity crisis, reassurances about
the positive effects of mens emotional availability should be welcomed.

These findings, though, are framed in terms that are all too familiar, and
frustratingly convenient for a sexist status quo. The conclusions, for
example, are said to suggest that it is psychological and emotional aspects
of paternal involvement in a childs infancy that are most powerful in
influencing later child behaviour and not the amount of time that fathers
are engaged in childcare or domestic tasks in the household.

Men are offered their pick of a false dichotomy between emotional

a difference between two completely opposite ideas or things:


/dak.tt .mi/ (f)

involvement and practical responsibility; if the children are unwashed and


thirsty, its just because you were too emotionally invested in them.

Perhaps most pertinently, its difficult to imagine a woman being afforded


the luxury of an either/or when it comes to loving and caring for children
versus feeding, watering and cleaning them all duties seen as integral to
the role of a mother.

The researchers do suggest that involved fathers may influence children


indirectly by being a source of instrumental and emotional support to
mothers who provide more of the direct care for children, something that
seems a particularly strong argument for the equal distribution of domestic
tasks but the lines falsely drawn between emotional parenting and
domestic work precludes this conclusion from being easily reached.
The relationship of women to families and the domestic sphere they inhabit
is a crucial battleground in the feminist fight, and one that will be won only
by interrogating the roles of both mothers and fathers accordingly. But this
necessarily requires questioning the stereotypes attached to men too.

While a conversation about the role of fathers is long overdue,


the idea that a strong, confident male figure is crucial in the development
of happy and well-behaved children is hardly new; indeed it invokes age-old
stereotypes about wise old patriarchs and off-the-rails teenagers who would
have been all right if it hadnt for the absence of a strong male role model.

With 1.8 million single mothers in the UK, it seems time to look past a
storybook male breadwinner for the answers.

For all the discussions of objectivity and neutrality associated with scientific
research, it remains the product of the society in which it exists. Families
come in many shapes and sizes in 2016, but traditional gender
roles endure. Mothers deserve better than the restrictive yet
overwhelming expectations they are laden with; fathers deserve better than
the patronising one-dimensional image of them as cavemen unable to
grapple with domestic life.

Most important, their children deserve better than a society so reliant on


tired and oppressive gender norms that operate to everyones detriment.

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