IT IS Father's Day on
Sunday. A website in the United States, whence this observance has
come, has been offering discounts on Father's Day gifts; but only
one, a "grill package" of different types of barbecue-ready meat,
suggests any family activity. The others are a golf bag, a pair of
headphones, and a subscription to Rolling Stone.
It is natural to be a
little sceptical of the day, created 100 years ago as a counterpart
to Mother's Day, the US version of Mothering Sunday. A Bill was
introduced in Congress in 1913 to turn Father's Day into a national
event, although it did not take off till the 1930s, when it was
backed by the canny New York Associated Men's Wear Retailers. It is
perhaps significant that, whereas the term "mothering" is applied
primarily to the rearing of children, the equivalent term,
"fathering", refers only to the act of procreation.
As in the past, the
approach of Father's Day prompted the release of a report on
unfatherly absenteeism, the latest one by the Centre for Social
Justice. It suggests that about one million children grow up with
no contact with their father. It talks of "man deserts" where, in
areas of Liverpool and Sheffield, as many of 75 per cent of
households with dependent children have no father present. (The bar
is set very low: three or more contacts a year, and the household
is deemed not to be fatherless.)
The disturbing thing is
that this phenomenon has gone largely unexamined. Part of the
problem is that families are varied and complex, so that any
broad-brush consideration is only ever going to approximate to the
truth. There are two things going on. One might be termed a social
construct: housing benefit and social welfare mean that it is
possible, if difficult, for a single mother to raise a family
without a full-time income. The other is deeper rooted, the fact
that child-rearing has traditionally been left to mothers. Thus the
financial and political climate of the present has met the
traditions of the past, without reference to the fact that the
chief reason for those traditions, the long hours worked by men, is
largely gone.
If there is no financial bar to equality of the sexes in
child-rearing, there remains a psychological one. The current
generation of absentee fathers was schooled on the previous
generation, where the norm was for fathers to distance themselves
from domestic life, often with the encouragement of their wives.
Fathers of 50 years ago were commonly uncomfortable with babies,
gruff with boys, awkward with girls, tongue-tied with teenagers.
Their male offspring have taken this one step further. The question
now is whether the next generation of males, reared largely by
females, will follow this pattern to yet another level of
dysfunction; or whether they will draw on the example of their
mothers, and develop into the first generation of boys who are
willing and able to nurture their offspring. Such a rosy view is
subverted, however, by the financial demands on single mothers, as
a result of which many children are growing up virtually without
either parent.
