Caring fathers get a raw deal

When I was tiny, my dad would come home from work in the evening and tap me on the head with a rolled-up newspaper. In return for this casually tender annunciation, I loved him with all my heart. When I was feverish, I would have terrible nightmares about him dying. Not my mother, who did everything for me. I took her for granted. I was daddy's girl.

When I was tiny, my dad would come home from work in the evening and tap me on the head with a rolled-up newspaper. In return for this casually tender annunciation, I loved him with all my heart. When I was feverish, I would have terrible nightmares about him dying. Not my mother, who did everything for me. I took her for granted. I was daddy's girl.

By the conventions of the times, he was an involved father. But it was unquestionably my mother who was entirely responsible for all the practical aspects of child-rearing. Things are different today. When my father became my father, 37 years ago, there was no question of a man expecting a morning off work while his wife gave birth. To this day my mother thinks it's pretty disgusting that fathers are expected to be actually present when their partner has their baby.

I rather think it is a measure of how far we've all come, that despite the cynical belief that caring-father photo-ops would boost Tony Blair's popularity, his commitment as a father has actually been accepted as normal rather than exceptional. In a recent survey, a substantial majority of men said that they still had faith in marriage, that they wanted to have families, and that the wanted to be good, committed fathers. It is Father's Day on Sunday, and in this rosy climate, it is an occasion well worth celebrating.

But Fathers Direct, the information service for fathers, launched last year, has asked us to have a bit of a think about what we are celebrating and how. Today it has launched a campaign to move Father's Day from 18 June to the Monday of the autumn school half-term holiday on 23 October.

The group - co-founded by The Independent's Jack O'Sullivan - will lobby employers to offer a day's pay to those dads who take the day off to be with their children, and will ask the entertainment industry to offer "dads go free" packages on that day. The argument behind this is that Father's Day, modelled on Mother's Day, is outmoded. The idea that fathers need a day to put their feet up and be apart from their children is, Fathers Direct says, ridiculous. "Our chief concern as fathers is lack of time with our children because of work commitments."

Fathers Direct has no doubt Mr Blair is lucky to be able to take time off to be with his family, rather than saintly. Nearly half of all fathers receive no paternity leave when their child is born, while the rest average three days. Most cannot afford to take the three months' parental leave now available to fathers of under-fives.

But this is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to comparing how much we expect of fathers now and how little we will actually acknowledge their expanded role as carers. Turn up with your toddler at any one o'clock club and it will be full of women. Fathers say that when they go to them, they are made to feel unwelcome and out of place. One father I know was questioned by the police about his motives as he watched his daughter in a playground.

According to Fathers Direct, this sense of isolation extends far beyond such broadly informal networks. The group argues that family centres cater only for women, and that health centres, parenting classes, ante-natal groups, health visitors, nurseries and schools must make efforts to be more father-friendly.

But my worry is that even those demands do not go nearly far enough. Perhaps it is time for social services and the courts to be a little more father-friendly, as well. For although we all surely understand that not all women are good mothers and not all men are bad fathers, the law continues to insist that in all but the most extreme of parental break-up cases, a child is better off with its mother. This wisdom continues to prevail, even though the evidence suggests that children who are abused or killed are most likely to be attacked by the boyfriends or husbands of their mothers, who fail to protect them.

Of course, the latter are only the most extreme and awful of cases, even though they come to light many times each year. But all around me, again and again, I have seen mothers who, having broken up with the fathers of their children, clearly want the children to break up with their fathers, as well. Not for their children's sake, but because they cannot grasp that, even if their own relationship with their partner was destructive, the same is not likely to be true of the man's relationship with his children.

Sometimes, their insistence on failing to encourage paternal relationships is quite clearly driven by bitterness and vengeance. By contrast, even in situations of tremendous opposition between estranged mothers and fathers, the men tend to recognise that in most cases of equal love and ability to care, the child really is better off with the mother.

The high number of men who lose touch with their children after a break-up is often seen as an indication of men's fecklessness. And it is true that many men make irresponsible, bad fathers. But for many it is the difficulty and pain of the situation they find themselves in, and the lack of support for their rights, that finally lead them to conclude that a "fresh start" is better for all concerned.

But sometimes, it is simply the wrong parent who is awarded care and control. One distressed father recently contacted me to tell me his own story of a custody battle he had recently lost. His long, long letter is heartbreaking. Here are some extracts from it.

"No credit could be attached to my having moved my times of starting and finishing work back by one hour, to give me more time to be with child A in the evening, compared with Mrs C's use of her flexitime to delay her departure for work to about 10.30, so increasing the time that child A had to spend with the childminder after school...

"No value could be seen in the arrangements that I had made to be able to work from home, so being able to do both school runs, and enabling child A to come straight from school to his home, which I had testified had been his stated wish on more than one occasion...

"My diary had to be 'exaggerated' - in fact, it contained a large number of straight, factual descriptions of events that were not susceptible to being exaggerated. Take one of the 'Chinese man' episodes as an example: for misbehaving, at the age of three, Mrs C put child A outside the front door 'for the Chinese man to come and take away'. The door was then closed. After a little while, she brought him back in, very distressed. One can only imagine the terror in a three-year-old, waiting, alone, outside the door, to be taken away...

"Statements from the school had to be partisan - the judge decided that child A's class teacher and his headmaster had so little concern for their professional standing or, more importantly, the welfare of a child in their care, that they allowed themselves to be somehow tricked or railroaded into writing and signing sworn statements in my favour, which they were not sure were in child A's best interests...

"The views of X, a professional social worker, which were described vividly in their force and credibility, had to be dismissed as 'untested'.

"The letter from child A's stepsister, graphically describing her own abuse at the hands of Mrs C, although in court the judge seemed sceptical of Mrs C's claim that it was a forgery, also had to be ignored."

What, after all of these - and more - independent statements are "ignored", is left? Just a man and a woman both claiming their son should be with them. In such cases the mother always wins. But does the child?

16 June 2000

d.orr@independent.co.uk