Why don't men get more involved in caring for children?

Men are MUCH more involved in looking after their children then they were 30 years ago. But not enough, according to children, who still say that they would like their fathers to be more available to them – more time and more in tune with their world.

Programmed to care?

One argument is that men are not programmed to care for children. People who argue this often refer to cavemen and hunting. Rubbish – they know nothing about cavemen.

Human beings have evolved to look after children collectively – mothers share children around from the very earliest age. Mostly they share with other women, but human fathers have evolved with extraordinary caring capacities – men even undergo hormonal changes when in the presence of babies and pregnant women, as their genes pull them into the work of caring for babies.

Humans need more looking after as babies and children than any other animal – mothers and fathers have always had to work very hard to keep food on the log/stone/table. The success of the human species is largely founded on our unique ability to be flexible around the extremely ‘expensive’ task of raising human young.

Fathers being able to care is not so unusual across the animal kingdom. What is unique is how variable human fathers are in caring for children. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Anthropologists believe this is part of the extreme flexibility of the human race – fathers do what needs to be done in any given situation, be it caring for babies, fighting, searching for new territory and so on.

A moment in history

In the western world, we have hit a moment in history where men are needed for the care of babies, following an extended period when they were needed to fight wars, build empires and do physically demanding work to dig stuff out of the ground and make big things. We all live in small units – so mothers don’t have the opportunities they had in the rest of human history to share children round an extended family. And in the current economy, the skills of women and men are equal and are equally needed.

The problem is that our laws, our institutions and our beliefs are still stuck in the last century. In the 1950s, we had to produce lots of babies having lost a generation of young men in the war. We invented the ideal of the perfect stay-at-home mother uniquely bonding with her children, and the working man striding out every morning and coming back to a meal on the table.

Mothers who do not live up to this ideal are still made to feel guilty – there is hardly a month goes by when some research does not say that a working mother is damaging her children in some terrible way. All this research is nonsense, because it is not measuring the important thing – the care that the child is receiving from the whole family and also carers outside the family.

And at the same time, men still see their role as earning for the family – the fear of not earning enough and the feeling of inadequacy if one is not earning can be very strong. And so both women and men tend to cling to traditional roles and when they really start sharing they have to tackle all kinds of weird reactions in themselves and with each other. And there is no roadmap – we all have to work it out for ourselves from scratch. Knowing that boxing and coxing around children was just as hard work for cavemen and cavewomen as it is nowadays certainly makes me feel a bit better about it all!

Back to the 1950's

Meanwhile, external things also drag us back to the 1950s. Workplaces expect women, not men, to make compromises for children. In one experiment the same CV was presented to some employers with a woman’s name and to others with a man’s name. The person wanted to work part-time and had children. The CV in the man’s name did much better – it was assumed he would compromise work less. The leave system in UK – 2 weeks poorly paid leave for men, compared to 39 weeks for women much of it well paid – rams home the message of the last century.

I think this all explains why mothers are under such enormous pressure. They almost all have to work – that is economic reality. But they are still expected to do everything in the home else as well, otherwise their children will be permanently damaged. And they are expected to live in small homes where sharing the care of children around is difficult. This is simply far too much to ask and we never evolved to be able to handle this way of doing things.

So I take my hat off to all those families where mothers and fathers are sharing roles effectively – and there are a lot of them. They have tackled the confusions and the external barriers. Their children are better off for it, and so is the economy.
 

Author

Duncan Fisher is the father of two daughters. He's a social entrepreneur and loves building organisations. As co-founder and Chief Executive of the Fatherhood Institute, he's been one of the key people shaping national and local policies and the public debate about fatherhood. Duncan was an Equal Opportunities Commissioner between 2004-2007 and serves on several Government task forces dealing with children's issues. He's a co-founder and the Chief Executive of Dad Info and is also involved in Do the Green Thing as a Trustee.