Men, Masculinities and the Care of Children: Images, Ideas and Identities 9781138234550, 9781315306636

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Images and representations
2 Discourses and debates
3 Ideas and perspectives
4 Identities and experiences
Conclusion
Appendix: details of the research studies discussed in Chapter 4
References
Index

Citation preview

Men, Masculinities and the Care of Children

Sharing the care of children in families is increasingly becoming the norm in modern-day society as more mothers enter paid work and government campaigns endeavour to increase the number of men working in childcare. However, running alongside debates of gender imbalance in childcare, there has also been mounting anxiety from the media and public about the risks of child abuse, often perceived as being mostly perpetrated by men and calling for firmer regulation of men’s involvement with children. This book asks whether men’s care for children, both as fathers and practitioners, actually differs at all from the care provided by mothers and female carers? In what ways do men and concepts of masculinity need to change if they are to play a greater role in the care of children or are such societal perceptions based on outdated gender stereotypes? Bringing together cutting-edge theory, up-to-date research and current practice, this book analyses the role of both fathers and male professionals working with children and highlights the implications of this for future policy and practice. It also examines dominant notions of masculinity and representations of male carers in the media and popular culture, asking how our societal expectations may need to evolve if men are to play an equal role in the care of children as demanded by current policy and wider social developments. Martin Robb is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Health, Wellbeing and Social Care at The Open University, UK. His research has focused principally on issues of gender, identity and care, and has included studies of men working in childcare, fathering identities and young masculinities. Before joining The Open University he worked in community education projects with socially disadvantaged groups and communities.

Men, Masculinities and the Care of Children Images, Ideas and Identities

Martin Robb

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Martin Robb The right of Martin Robb to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-23455-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-30663-6 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To my mother and father

Contents

Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

1 Images and representations

5

2 Discourses and debates

25

3 Ideas and perspectives

46

4 Identities and experiences

67

Conclusion

81

Appendix: details of the research studies discussed in Chapter 4 References Index

84 86 94

Acknowledgements

This book is the product of countless collaborations and conversations over two decades, with colleagues at The Open University and elsewhere, including Sandy Ruxton, Brid Featherstone, Mike Ward, Anna Tarrant, Gareth Terry, David Bartlett, Rod Earle, Debbie Braybrook, Lester Coleman, Clare Deane, Jonathan Rix, Rachel Thomson, Mary Jane Kehily, Peter Redman, Wendy Hollway, Yuwei Xu, Jo Warin, Keith Pringle and Petr Urban, and with my PhD students, including Alison Davies, Chris Chaloner, Jane Reeves and the late Jeff Hunt. Needless to say, the arguments made and conclusions reached in these pages are entirely my own and I take sole responsibility for them. Thanks are due to all at Routledge, especially for their patience and generosity with deadlines. I am grateful to the following for permission to reprint copyrighted material: the Centre for Social Justice for their press release, The Sunday Times for the article by Iain Duncan Smith, and The Guardian for the article by Tony Sewell. Finally, I would like to express my thanks to those nearest and dearest to me, who have each in their own way helped to shape my thinking on these subjects: first of all to my parents, Peter and Joyce Robb, to whom the book is dedicated, who presented me with outstanding examples of caring fatherhood and motherhood; to our children, James and Anna, for the privilege of being your father; and last but by no means least to Helen, my partner in parenting and in life, without whose unfailing support and encouragement this book would not have been possible.

Introduction

In August 2019, as work on this book was in its final stages, a photograph of a man holding a baby and feeding it from a bottle appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the world and attracted an enormous amount of comment and attention. The man was the Speaker of the New Zealand Parliament, Trevor Mallard, and the baby belonged to one of his fellow parliamentarians. As discussed in Chapter 1, the online reaction to this image was overwhelmingly positive, and seemed to reflect a widespread acceptance of men playing a significant role in the care of young children. But the viral popularity of the image was perhaps also a testament to its unusual nature. The photograph was remarkable in showing a man in a business suit, caring for a young child in a place of work in which children are not normally present. So this image and its reception could be said to reflect, at one and the same time, both a positive acceptance of men’s role in the care of children, and the fact that is still unusual enough to make front page news. A variety of other examples, from media stories, popular culture and current political policies and debate, could be cited as evidence that men’s role in the care of children remains a ‘hot’ topic in many countries in the industrialised world. To mention just a few recent examples from recent news stories in the United Kingdom: a campaign to make fathers’ names compulsory on birth certificates, concern about the take-up of shared parental leave policies, and fresh initiatives to recruit more men as primary school teachers and childcare workers, all reflect society’s continued concern with this issue. At the same time, the subject of men’s role in childcare forms part of, and is framed by, intense debates at a societal level about the nature of gender identity and by a radical questioning of conventional gender differences. The continuing centrality of the question of men’s role in relation to children, whether in public policy, professional practice, media debate or everyday experience, means that there is a need for a clear and deeper understanding, informed by robust research and critical thinking, of the fundamental issues and questions that inform those discussions. This book aims to contribute to that understanding, by exploring the ways in which men’s care for children has been represented in culture and the media, analysing the key social discourses framing current debates, and examining the ideologies and theories that inform those representations and discourses. It also draws on recent research, in order to connect these issues to the

2 Introduction everyday experiences of men and their children, and to analyse the ways in which men develop a capacity to care. The field of fatherhood studies continues to expand rapidly, with many important research studies of men’s experience of involvement in the care of their own children appearing in recent years, including influential books by Doucet (2006), Dermott (2008), Miller (2010), and Ranson (2015) among others. Studies of men working in childcare are somewhat thinner on the ground, though early pioneering work by Murray (1996) and by Cameron et al. (1999; see also Cameron, 2001; Owen, 2003) has recently been supplemented by a number of important studies, the most recent and significant at the time of writing being that by Warin (2018). There have been even fewer studies of men’s experience of care more generally, with Hanlon (2012) being a rare exception. There is an urgent need for a book that brings together the topics of fatherhood and men as professional carers for children and examines the underlying question of men’s role in the care of children more generally. This book draws on 20 years’ experience of thinking and writing about issues of gender and care as a researcher and educator, and much longer experience of grappling with these issues as a parent and as a practitioner working with children, young people and adults. Before becoming an academic, I spent a number of years working in community education projects with socially disadvantaged and marginalised groups: organising a project for mostly male ex-offenders in an Essex new town, then working in an ethnically diverse education project in inner London, followed by a spell as a community education worker based in a primary school in rural Oxfordshire, and finally managing a basic skills project in Milton Keynes. All of these professional experiences forced me to engage on a daily basis and at a practical level with questions of gender, identity and equality. But it was personal experience, as the new father of two young children, that first prompted my interest in the specific issue of men’s care for children. Reflecting on my own role in the care of our children, and on the response of others to that involvement, raised fundamental questions for me about the relationship between masculine identity and care. And it was conversations with a young male worker at our children’s day nursery that sparked my interest in the subject of men who choose to care for young children in a professional capacity: that worker became a participant in my first piece of academic research in this area, a small-scale study of men working in childcare (Robb, 2001). Having developed an interest in the ways in which men intimately involved in the care of children described their experiences, I then undertook a second small-scale study, this time of ‘involved’ or ‘hands on’ fathers (Robb, 2004a, 2004b). A growing interest in how men develop their capacity to care, and the influences on their gender identities more generally, led to my involvement in two major studies of young masculinities. The ESRC-funded study ‘Beyond male role models: gender identities and practices in work with young men’ (Grant No. ES/K005863/1), in association with the charity Action for Children, for which I was principal investigator, explored the perspectives and experiences of young men using social care services in England, Scotland and Wales (Robb, Featherstone et al., 2017; Featherstone et al., 2017; Ward et al., 2017; Ruxton et al., 2018). Following on from that

Introduction  3 study, I led a research project on ‘Young men, masculinity and wellbeing’, which formed part of a three-country study in the UK, USA and Mexico, organised by the US gender equality organisation Promundo, and funded by Axe/Unilever, exploring the ways in which social expectations around gender frame the experiences of young men, and for which we organised focus groups with young men in various locations in England (Robb, Ruxton et al., 2017; Robb and Ruxton, 2018; Heilman et al., 2017). My own interest in the findings from these two most recent studies has focused particularly on their implications for an understanding of men’s experiences of caring and being cared for (Robb, 2018). At the time of writing, I am involved with colleagues in developing further research projects on young fathers; fathers’ relationships with their disabled children; and men’s experiences of loss after perinatal death. In all of these plans and projects, there is a continuing concern with fundamental issues of gender, identity, relationships and ‘care’. My thinking about these issues has also been influenced by involvement, with colleagues, in the development of a range of Open University modules – many of them designed to support practitioners working with children and young people, for example in social work, early years education and care, health care or youth work – and most recently in the development of the OU’s Masters programme in Childhood and Youth (Montgomery and Robb, 2018; Robb et al., 2019). Beyond The Open University, I have been privileged over the years to work with, and my thinking has been influenced by, colleagues at the Parenting Education and Support Forum, the Fathers’ Development Foundation and the Government Equalities Office, who gave me the opportunity to represent the UK at a seminar on men and gender equality in Helsinki in 2014, and invited me to participate in the Men as Change Agents committee set up by the Women’s Business Council, who appointed me as a ‘Champion Advocate’. In reflecting this wide range of influences and experiences, this book does not set out to promote a particular ideological position on men’s role in the care of children, but rather to present clearly the range of ideas and discourses that come into play when this issue is represented or discussed. At the same time, the book reflects my own dissatisfaction with some of the ways in which the topic is currently theorised, and a wish to move beyond existing orthodoxies to develop a perspective that is true to my own personal experience and to the findings from research in which I have been involved. Thus, the book represents, in part, my own search for a better understanding of issues that continue to be of concern to me as a parent and researcher, and could be viewed as an ongoing debate with myself. The conclusions reached at the end of the book should be regarded as, at best, tentative, and as work in progress, rather than anything resembling a final and definitive word on the subject.

The structure of the book The book is divided into four substantive chapters, each consisting of a number of separate sections, followed by a Conclusion which summarises the discussion and its implications and which attempts to sketch out an agenda for future research.

4 Introduction Chapter 1, ‘Images and representations’, examines the ways in which the issue of men’s care for children, and men’s relationships with children, have been represented in popular culture in recent years, exploring examples from films and other cultural productions, as well as from news stories and online sources. The rationale for beginning with images and representations is that popular culture can provide an unrivalled insight into current societal thinking on important issues, and at the same time constitutes a key influence on that thinking. Chapter 2, ‘Discourses and debates’, analyses the ways in which discussion of the issue of men’s care for children, whether in policy debates, media coverage or popular thinking, has been framed by a number of powerful and often competing discourses, or ways of talking and writing about the issue. Particular attention is paid to the contradictory discourses of equality and risk, and to the influential discourse of father and wider male absence from children’s lives. Detailed analysis of examples of this discourse in action reveal the undoubted grain of truth at its heart, but also some of the flaws in its logic. Chapter 3, ‘Ideas and perspectives’, examines the main ideological positions that inform both representations of, and debates surrounding, the issue of men’s care for children, and the theoretical ideas on which those positions are based. The chapter argues that two powerful and contrasting sets of ideas are currently dominant, concluding that both have some strengths and some weaknesses, and that there is a need to draw on alternative theoretical sources in order to move beyond this binary to a ‘third position’ that more accurately reflects the realities of men’s distinctive role in the care of children. Chapter 4, ‘Identities and experiences’, draws on findings from my own research, and research conducted with colleagues, to explore the key influences on the development of men’s capacity to care and suggests that a relational model of men’s development is needed to counter the dominance of social learning theories. Finally, the Conclusion draws together the key points from the book as a whole, discusses their implications and suggests some avenues for future research and theoretical work on the subject of men and the care of children.

1

Images and representations

This chapter explores the ways in which men’s role in the care of children has been, and continues to be, represented in contemporary culture. Using examples from popular culture, the mass media and the internet, the chapter will suggest that men’s relationship with children has been a persistent focus of cultural representations for the past half century. More specifically, it will argue that contemporary culture continues to be characterised by a profound anxiety about men’s absence from children’s lives and its impact, by a persistent questioning of men’s role in relation to children, and by a sense of ambivalence about men as carers for children. The rationale for focusing on cultural images and representations rests on a belief that they are able to express, often in indirect and subliminal ways, ideas and themes that are on the cusp of emerging into popular consciousness. Films, television programmes and news stories can encapsulate ideas in the process of change, and at the same time embody and work through tensions and contradictions within those ideas. This is not to say that culture is in any simple sense a direct reflection of popular thinking or of current realities. Rather, culture should be seen as a system of shared meanings or shared cultural maps for understanding reality (Hall et al., 2013). What Fiske and Hartley maintained about television – that it ‘does not represent the manifest reality of our society, but rather reflects, symbolically, the structure of values and relationships beneath the surface’ – may be taken to stand for popular culture, and indeed culture itself, as a whole (Fiske and Hartley, 1978, 24). Lupton and Barclay argue that ‘language and visual imagery do not simply “reflect” or describe reality, but play an integral and inextricable role in constituting reality, our knowledge of the world’ (1997, 4–5). The relationship between culture and popular consciousness is thus a two-way process, in that cultural productions not only reflect, albeit in a complex and refracted way, ideas that are circulating in society, but they also have the power to influence popular thinking. The discussion in this chapter will focus on images and representations of men’s relationships with children, as reflected in popular films, in a number of other arenas of popular culture, in news stories and online. The range of examples discussed in this chapter is necessarily selective, but I would argue, by no means random or unrepresentative. Similarly, although the discussion inevitably

6  Images and representations focuses mainly on cultural products and stories from the Anglosphere, it could be argued that the themes represented in these mainly British and American examples are replicated elsewhere in western culture, and if time and space allowed, it would be interesting to undertake a comparative analysis of the ways in which men’s care for children has been represented cross-culturally in the same period. The chapter does not claim to be the first, or even the most comprehensive, exploration in the academic literature of cultural representations of fatherhood, or men’s care for children. Lupton and Barclay (1997) drew on poststructuralist theory for their analysis of images of fatherhood in films and television programmes. However, their discussion included very little that was specifically about how men’s care for children is represented, and at the same time this chapter, written some 20 or so years later, represents an attempt to bring that discussion up to date. Stella Bruzzi’s (2005) examination of the ways in which fatherhood and masculinity have been depicted in post-war cinema makes reference to some of the same examples explored in the first section of this chapter, but the discussion that follows will take issue with some (though not all) of the conclusions resulting from her radical feminist analysis. Other books addressing the depiction of fatherhood in popular culture have included Podnieks’ edited collection (2016), while a multitude of other texts have explored popular cultural images of masculinity more broadly (for example, on masculinity on screen, see Powrie et al., 2004; Shary, 2013). Moreover, as well as making reference to more recent cultural representations, and to the growing phenomenon of online or ‘viral’ fatherhood, this chapter will draw out some underlying themes and tendencies that have scarcely been discussed elsewhere and, as suggested above, argue for different conclusions from some earlier discussions of these themes. The necessarily brief and selective discussion of cultural images and representations in this chapter is a prelude, first to an analysis of contemporary social discourses and debates surrounding men and the care of children in Chapter 2, and then to a detailed examination in Chapter 3 of the ideological assumptions and theoretical ideas that inform, and are informed by, cultural images and social discourses.

Men and children on the big screen This section of the chapter will examine the ways in which men’s relationships with their children, and the issue of men’s care for children, have been represented in popular films of the past half century. The case for focusing on films is, first, that they reveal the underlying debates and tensions surrounding this issue particularly clearly and extensively, and, second, that they represent cultural productions that have had the most profound societal impact. However, an argument could be made that the discussion might equally well have focused its attention on television programmes, popular music, theatrical productions or other art forms: and indeed, following this analysis of popular films, there will be a brief discussion of a few selected examples from other popular cultural genres.

Images and representations  7 ‘Daddy, my Daddy’: the return of the father in family films of the 1960s These heart-rending words, spoken by Jenny Agutter’s character at the emotional climax of The Railway Children (1970), can stand as a motto for many of the family films of the decade that preceded it. That film itself, which is about children coping with a mysteriously absent father, is unusual in family films of the period in having at its emotional centre a physically rather than emotionally absent father, one who does not appear until the final reel of the film. But in other ways The Railway Children is typical of family films of the period, in that it its emotional driving force is a father’s absence, and the fact that the narrative will only be resolved with the return of the father: a physical restoration in this case, but an emotional one in many of the other films of the decade. More typical of the period are family films that chart the redemption of an emotionally rather than physically absent father, leading to the restoration of the family and the children’s happiness, which is shown as having been in abeyance until this resolution is achieved. This is not to say that the subject of men’s relationship with their children was absent from popular cinema before the 1960s. Bruzzi (2005) has discussed the repeated trope of the returning father in films made during or about the Second World War, while Lupton and Barclay note that in the 1950s a new type of father emerged in popular cinema, even if this was mainly in comedies, a man who was ‘openly affectionate to children and displaying [his] emotions’ (1997, 69). One example of this growing trend was the film Houseboat (1958), starring Cary Grant, which in some ways prefigures the concerns of family films of the following decade, in that it features a man estranged from his wife and children, who is ‘restored’ to his children through his relationship with a woman, in this case a beautiful housemaid played by Sophia Loren. However, unlike those later films, it could be argued that in Houseboat the children are more or less incidental to the film’s central concern with the romantic relationships of the adult characters. The 1960s, by contrast, saw the appearance of a number of family films in which repairing the relationship between men and their children becomes a central theme. This discussion will focus on three of the most successful, and enduringly popular, of those films: Mary Poppins (1964), The Sound of Music (1965) and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). Interestingly, there is an overlap in the casting of these films, with Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke each starring in two of them. The persistent cultural power of these films, and the themes with which they are concerned, is evidenced not only in their continuing popularity (they continue to sell well on DVD and are a mainstay of ‘holiday’ television viewing), but also by their many spin-offs and remakes, such as Saving Mr Banks (2013), a film about the production of Mary Poppins, and the sequel Mary Poppins Returns (2018). In the original Mary Poppins film, set in Edwardian London, the unhappiness of brother and sister Jane and Michael Banks is clearly attributed to their parents’, and especially their banker father’s, emotional absence from the family, until the arrival of the magical nanny of the film’s title, who sets about restoring the parents, and particularly Mr Banks, to their rightful, caring roles. In The Sound

8  Images and representations of Music, set in pre-war and wartime Austria, another dysfunctional household, also led by a distracted father, Captain von Trapp, a widower, is redeemed by the arrival of Maria, a playful, musical nun, as governess. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang also has at its centre a widowed father, distracted from his children by his obsession with his inventions, until both he, and his relationship with his children, are transformed, in part by the arrival of a magical car, but more importantly by the influence of a woman, Truly Scrumptious. In all of these films, as in many other family films of the period, the dysfunction of the family, and the unhappiness of children, is seen to be the direct result of the emotional absence of the father. The narrative arc of each film is similar: the arrival of a ‘redemptive’ female figure eventually restores the father to himself, and to his children, and the family is made whole again. The women in these films represent a creative and caring femininity, focused on the happiness of children. By contrast, the men, whether the Captain, Mr Banks, or Potts, are shown to be distracted, self-obsessed, focused on the external, masculine world, and therefore negligent towards their children. It is by learning from these women that the men slowly take on more ‘feminine’ characteristics, eventually becoming engaged, relational and child-focused themselves, and therefore are restored to their children, who in turn are made happy and whole. The films could thus be seen as a prefigurative argument for involved and ‘caring’ fatherhood, and for a more creative, expressive and relational form of masculinity. The centrality of this theme to these family films of the 1960s, hardly noticed by critics at the time, was made explicit in the more recent Saving Mr Banks, which suggested that the redemption of the father – whether Mr Banks himself, or the father of the original author of the ‘Mary Poppins’ stories, P. L. Travers – was the principal purpose. In the case of The Sound of Music and Chitty (and also in Mary Poppins Returns), the father at the centre of the story is a widower, a man without a woman, therefore implicitly incomplete, and unable to care properly for his children. But the films’ message is not primarily that a woman is needed to care for the neglected children, but that the man needs to be redeemed, saved from himself, and released into being able to fulfil his role as a caring father. Nevertheless, one should be careful not to claim too much for these films’ portrayal of men’s role in relation to children. In none of these films is it the case that the father suddenly becomes a ‘carer’, or a substitute mother. Rather, he becomes playful, which, some might argue, is itself a stereotypical role for a father to play. Bruzzi (2005) offers a sceptical feminist critique of this genre of films, asking ‘Why is the father left alone to tend his children such an attractive image?’ I would question whether this is the case: there is little that is attractive about the coldness and neglect of Mr Banks or Captain von Trapp before their ‘redemption’. Surely Bruzzi is also wrong to characterise Captain von Trapp as simply ‘another of these conventional and gently incompetent fathers of Hollywood comedies’, perhaps thinking of Cary Grant in Houseboat. The dominant mood of The Sound of Music and the other family films of the 1960s, before the father’s ‘change’, is one not of comedy but of pervasive gloom and sadness. The children’s suffering is viewed not as a result of paternal incompetence as in earlier comic portrayals of fatherhood, but of their fathers’ emotional disengagement. Bruzzi concedes that

Images and representations  9 a more positive interpretation of The Sound of Music ‘could focus on how music and Maria change von Trapp for the better, and how, under their twin influences, the Captain is transformed from wooden patriarch to warm husband and father, his prior deficiencies becoming attributable . . . to grief.’ However, she also writes of the way that ‘patriarchal stability is reaffirmed’ at the end of film: Imbedded within such a structure is the desire, by the 1960s, to recuperate not merely patriarchy and heterosexual conformity, but to establish a minutely modified version of traditionalism that makes the dominant masculine archetype just about acceptable to those more radical forces calling for social and political change. (Bruzzi, 2005, 93) In my view, this is an unduly negative and pessimistic reading of this and other similar films of the period. These films might equally well be interpreted as foreshadowing the emergence a more caring and expressive form of masculinity. Similarly, Bruzzi argues (2005, 94) that at the end of Mary Poppins, Mr Banks’ ‘reintegration into the patriarchal system is complete’ and that ‘the depressing conclusion . . . is that what women’s liberation (of whatever era) wants more than anything is not a monumental change in how gender roles are conceived, but merely a traditional father who is also sometimes available for play’. This reflects Bruzzi’s radical feminist view of the traditional family as inescapably patriarchal, making it impossible for her to view the ‘redemption’ of the father in these films as anything other than a restoration of male dominance. More positively, and equally legitimately, it could be argued that these films represent a deep cultural yearning to re-establish connection between men and their children, a reaction against the conventional image of the father as distant and emotionally disengaged, and part of the search for a type of fatherhood, and masculinity, that is more emotionally expressive and child-centred. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge the legitimacy of one aspect of the critique that Bruzzi and other feminist writers make of these family films from the 1960s, which undoubtedly include elements that, with hindsight, seem distinctly regressive. For example, while on the positive side of the equation, the agent of men’s redemption in these films is usually female – Maria in The Sound of Music, Poppins in the eponymous film, Truly Scrumptious in Chitty – at the same time the way in which some women in the films are depicted is perhaps less praiseworthy. Perhaps the most striking example is Mrs Banks – the children’s mother – in Mary Poppins, whom the film implicitly excoriates for putting her campaign for votes for women before her children. Another example might be The Sound of Music’s implicit, if light-touch critique of the Captain’s erstwhile fiancée Baroness Scheider and her pleasure-seeking childlessness. Thus, it could be argued that, despite giving central roles to female characters, these films tend to see women’s main function as helping to redeem and restore men to their rightful place in the family, while at the same time being implicitly critical of women who reject their ‘natural’ role of caring for children. Women are instruments in the process of saving men: Saving Mr. Banks, indeed. However, it

10  Images and representations is possible for both arguments to be legitimate: one can acknowledge the somewhat negative portrayal of women in these films, while at the same time recognising that they also argue indirectly for the emergence of a more caring masculinity that might contribute to greater equality between the sexes. Interestingly, Mary Poppins Returns (2018) deliberately sets out to portray its female characters rather differently, while retaining much of the original concern with the return of the caring father. In this sequel, the secondary female figure, after Poppins herself, is no longer the mother, but the sister of Michael Banks, now grown up and himself in need of ‘redemption’. This sister is a political activist like her mother in the first film – the new film is set at the time of the General Strike in the 1930s – but female activism is here viewed more positively, and does not detract from Jane Banks’ care for her brother’s children. The familiar central theme emerges, of a father distracted from his vocation as an artist, but also more importantly as a father (it is interesting that the two are seen as in harmony, unlike the work/family roles of his father, the original Mr Banks), not this time by work but by grief for his lost wife (echoes here of both The Sound of Music and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), and has to be brought back to life by the influence of a woman, the returning Poppins. If these films are all in some way about the redemptive power of women, at the same time there is also a sense of women being inadequate without men around, and needing the man to play his complementary part for women to be fulfilled. So while representing what might be seen as a forward-looking concern with emotionally engaged fatherhood, these films also reflect a traditional belief in the essential complementary of the sexes, rather than foreshadowing any sense of gender fluidity. Daddy daycare: fathers in films of the 1980s and 1990s If the 1960s were the heyday of the ‘redemption of the father’ film, then the decades that followed saw a new phenomenon emerging. The family films of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s continue to show evidence of a search for connection between fathers and their children, but the focus is now frequently on men having to care for children more or less alone. Bruzzi describes these films as ‘a spate of father- and child-centred comedies’ that ‘focus on the “new man” ideal of the man who actively participates in childcare’ (2005, 146). Examples of this genre include Three Men and a Baby (1987) and its sequel Three Men and a little Lady (1990), Look Who’s Talking (1989) and its sequels, Cheaper By The Dozen (2003) and Daddy Daycare (2003) and its sequel Daddy Day Camp (2007). All of these films featured men, either individually or in groups, left in charge of young children, largely without the help of women, who are still perceived as the children’s ‘natural’ carers. The comedy in each of the films arises from the perceived abnormality of the situation, and from the men’s more or less hopeless efforts to cope with the role thrust upon them, echoing the stereotypical depiction of useless dads from a hundred television sitcoms and advertisements. E. Ann Kaplan (1992) has argued that the comedic mode of these films trivialises new fatherhood, whereas Bruzzi (2005) counters that it is equally valid to suggest

Images and representations  11 that the film critiques an over-emphasis on the importance of biological bonds in parenting. On the one hand, it can be argued that the comic treatment in these films of ‘hands on’ fatherhood is evidence that popular thinking about the care of children was going through a process of change, with men’s care for children still not taken entirely seriously. On the other hand, the emergence of so many films with a similar theme at around the same time, allied to the fact that in each case the men’s love and dedication to the children wins through in the end, can be taken as a sign of a definite shift taking place in social attitudes. The films are further evidence of the fact that, as new ideas emerge into the culture, they are often explored initially through the medium of comedy, and only later treated more seriously. The 1993 film Mrs Doubtfire exemplifies this sense of social attitudes on the cusp of change in a rather different way. In this film, the only way a father can maintain contact with his children following divorce is by returning to the family in disguise as a female housekeeper. On the one hand, the film treats sympathetically a father’s desire for a closer relationship with his children. But on the other hand, it seems to suggest that (at this stage, anyway) a man can only achieve that kind of relationship by becoming like a woman, conveying the sense that caring fatherhood is still a kind of cross-dressing. As Lupton and Barclay write: ‘A major irony of the film is that it is only in the persona of Mrs Doubtfire that Daniel [the father] is able to behave responsibly as an authoritative parent figure, bringing order to the household and winning his wife’s affection and gratitude. . . . As Mrs Doubtfire he is simultaneously the ideal mother figure and the ideal father figure, combining love for his children with giving them a stable, orderly environment’ (1997, 70). It could be argued that the legal drama Kramer vs Kramer (1979), which tells the story of a couple’s divorce and the impact on their young son, is another special case. Lupton and Barclay argue that it ‘departs from the comic lampooning of the man as primary carer’ typical of the period by showing a man learning to care for his six-year-old son after his wife abandons them (1997, 70). His care contrasts with the depiction of his wife as ‘the preoccupied, distant mother’, a feature that it has in common with a number of other family films of this period, including the 1994 remake of the classic Christmas film, Miracle on 34th Street. The latter is evidence that many family films from this period continue to focus on the theme of father absence and children’s desire for the restoration of a father figure that was central to family films of the 1960s. Miracle on 34th Street is fundamentally about a little girl’s search for a father figure. What she wants most of all for Christmas is a dad (she is being raised by a single mother), and she eventually gets her heart’s desire, when the mother and her boyfriend marry at midnight on Christmas Eve. This outcome is thanks to another character who is clearly a father figure: Kris Kringle, alias Santa Claus (who significantly is known in Britain as Father Christmas). Interestingly, it is not the father, or rather potential father, who is shown as cold-hearted and in need of redemption here, but the work-obsessed and ‘unbelieving’ mother. The initially spurned boyfriend and eventual husband is the one who is shown as ‘caring’ for the child. Unlike the fathers of the 1960s

12  Images and representations films, he does not need ‘redeeming’, but at the same time his restoration to the heart of the family implicitly heals not only the child but also the mother, and thus completes the family. It is worth noting that a search for the lost father is at the emotional heart of a number of other Christmas films, which are arguably the archetypal family films. Elf (2003) provides a striking example, a comedy whose plot is driven by Buddy the Elf’s search for connection with his hitherto unknown human father, a mean-spirited, work-driven man, depicted as alienated from his other son and on Santa’s ‘naughty list’. Once again, the film includes other alternative father figures, not only Santa Claus, but also Buddy’s adopted elf father, whose bumbling but affectionate masculinity offers a stark contrast to, and an implicit critique of, his human opposite number. Once again, the resolution of the film includes the restoration of the alienated father to his rightful ‘caring’ nature, and thus the redemption of his family. Thus, the decades following the 1960s saw both a continuation of the concern with redeeming or restoring the father to the family, and to a rightful relationship with his children, and at the same time some acknowledgement of a changing world of gender relations, in which men’s role as legitimate carers for children, with or without women, was beginning to find acceptance. ‘Your father is alive in you’: men and children in films of the new millennium A number of popular films made since the year 2000, including some of the most successful, have had men’s relationship with children as a central concern, and it could be argued that the continuing cultural concern with this theme goes some way to explaining that success. In some ways, the treatment of this theme is much more explicit and self-conscious than in the films discussed above. The plot of the 2013 film About Time turns on a secret power possessed by the men of the family at its centre: to travel back in time and change events in their past. However, the film is also fundamentally about relationships, and perhaps most importantly about the relationship between the central character, played by Domnhall Gleeson, and his father, played by Bill Nighy. The emotional climax of the film turns on the fact that, once a man becomes a father himself, he loses the power to time travel, except for one last visit to the past. So, following the Nighy character’s death, and after his son, played by Gleeson, has become a father, the latter travels back in time, for one final encounter with his father. It is an astonishingly emotional scene, in which we see father and son skimming stones together on the beach, recalling their life together as father and son, for the last time. It is interesting that the film closes on the tender and evanescent nature of a father-son relationship. Gleeson also features, this time as a father, in Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017), a film that has many echoes, particularly in its final scene, of About Time. Here he plays the author A. A. Milne, and the film focuses on his troubled relationship with his son, Christopher Robin. Milne, like the fathers in the family films of the 1960s, is presented as an emotionally damaged man, in his case as

Images and representations  13 a result of his experiences during the First World War. Although father and son are shown as, briefly, enjoying happy, playful times together, Christopher Robin will come to resent the fact that his father has turned these experiences into stories for public consumption, and this leads to a breach in their relationship. As a young man, Christopher goes off to fight in the Second World War, and for a time is missing in action. The eventual reunion between father and son at the end of the film is a redemptive, reconciliatory one, in which Milne recalls, in a scene that vividly and emotionally echoes the final scene of About Time, their happier, playful times together. Thus, the father is redeemed by reconnecting with his son, finally restored to his true role as a caring man, after exhibiting a form of masculinity that exploited that relationship. It is worth noting that in this film Milne’s wife, and Christopher Robin’s mother, played by Margot Robbie, is a mostly unsympathetic character, portrayed as something of a barrier to a close father-son relationship, rather than as the instrument of the father’s redemption. In this, she is closer to Mrs Banks in the original Mary Poppins than the female figures responsible for bringing about men’s redemption in those earlier films. It is also significant that, as in About Time, but unlike those earlier films, the final, redemptive scene is exclusively between a father and son, rather than being a wider family reunion that also embraces the mother. Interestingly, Disney’s Christopher Robin, released a year after Goodbye Christopher Robin, also focuses on the restoration of a father to his family, but this time the protagonist is Christopher himself, now grown up. Like Mr Banks in the original Mary Poppins, he is caught up in his obsession with his work, and thus alienated from his wife and children. Although his wife is portrayed positively, as both strong and caring, it is not a woman, but his childhood toys, magically come to life, who restore this father to his playful self, and to his family. The phenomenally successful ‘Harry Potter’ books (1997–2007) and films (2001–2011) have at their heart a fatherless boy hero, and focus to some extent on his search for his father and for substitute father figures. The orphaned child is a familiar figure in children’s literature. Getting parents out of the way is often a necessary precursor that enables child protagonists to embark on adventures without adult interference. But in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, the young hero’s parentless state is more than a mere plot device: it is the emotional engine that drives the stories. The opening scene of the first book and film shows the orphaned baby Harry being delivered to the home of his adoptive parents, Vernon and Petunia Dursley. The Dursleys will present the reader/viewer with a horrific caricature of bad parenting: they are shown as completely lacking in love for Harry, while spoiling their biological son Dudley. A complete contrast to the Dursleys is offered by the family of Harry’s best friend at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, Ron Weasley. The Weasleys’ home at The Burrow presents us with an image of an impoverished, chaotic but loving and inclusive family, a contrast to the tidy but loveless world of Privet Drive, home of the Dursleys (Seden, 2002). The three people who deliver Harry to his new home with the Dursleys – Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts, Professor McGonagall, and Hagrid the

14  Images and representations bumbling giant – will also act, in their different ways, as substitute parents. None of them are his biological parents, but they provide Harry with infinitely more care than his blood relatives. The institution they represent – Hogwarts – will become Harry’s real second home, the place where he can become his true self. In the final scene of the first book/film, as Harry and his friends are about to catch the train home at the end of term, Harry says ‘I’m not going home, not really’. On one level, it can be argued that the Harry Potter series are as much about motherlessness as fatherlessness, and the point is made repeatedly that Harry is only alive because of his mother’s sacrifice of herself. One of the most poignant scenes in the series occurs in the first book and film, when Harry discovers the magical Mirror of Erised. He thinks he can see both of his dead parents, waving back at him, until Dumbledore informs him that what people see in the mirror is simply their deepest desire (Erised = desire spelt backwards). But it is also undeniable that the books and films place a particular emphasis on their young hero’s quest for a father, and a number of father figures appear in the stories. Dumbledore represents the father as wise mentor, and Hagrid is the father as playful man-child. Another father figure emerges in the third book, though this is initially hidden from Harry by the dark reputation that precedes him: Sirius Black represents the father as hero. Harry’s biological father, James Potter, though no longer physically alive, remains a vital presence in the stories. In an episode in the third book (Rowling, 2014), Harry is rescued from the ghastly Dementors by his late father’s Patronus, a magical charm in the form of a silver stag. These apparitions can be seen as symbolising the way that children internalise an image of their parents. As Dumbledore tells Harry: ‘Your father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself most plainly when you have need in him.’ There are obvious religious overtones here: God (the original Father) is said to be alive in the hearts of Christian believers. The identity of the parental figure, whether they are male or female, wizard or ‘Muggle’, biological or non-biological, matters less to Harry than whether they show him genuine affection. After all, as Dumbledore explains to Harry, what saved him from Voldemort’s evil magic as a baby was his parents’ selfgiving love. The Harry Potter stories are thus less concerned with the redemption or restoration of the father than with a child’s search for an absent father, or for a fatherfigure to take his place. However, they share with the films discussed above a concern with father absence, and a sense that children, and families, are incomplete without the presence of a loving father. Richard Linklater’s ground-breaking 2004 film, Boyhood, is as much about fatherhood, and to some extent motherhood, as it is about boyhood. As such, it is yet another sign of contemporary culture’s continuing fascination with the subject of men’s relationships with their children, and at the same time presents new insights into the nature of fatherhood, and changing ideas about masculinity. The film tells the story of a modern American boy, Mason junior, from the age of about six to the moment he leaves home at the age of 18: the remarkable thing being

Images and representations  15 that the film was shot in real time, over a period of 12 years, so that we witness the actual physical ageing process in both children and adults. As for the film’s treatment of fatherhood, it has to be said that men don’t come out of it particularly well. At the beginning of the film the children’s biological father, played by Ethan Hawke, is presented as an immature and mostly absent boy-man who has left their mother, played by Rosanna Arquette, with the responsibility of bringing up the children, reappearing every now and then to take them off for ‘fun’ weekends. So far, so stereotypical. As the film unfolds, we see Arquette’s character form relationships with two other men who become substitute fathers for Mason junior and his sister Samantha. Both are revealed as, to varying degrees, drunks. Interestingly, both men present on the surface as paragons of responsible masculinity: the first, a middle-aged college professor who is singlehandedly raising two children of his own, and the second, a younger army veteran whose experience of combat is at least superficially a badge of mature masculinity. But both are depicted as damaged men and therefore unable to act as adequate father figures to Mason junior. We see this only fleetingly in one scene with the second man, before he disappears from the family and the film, but spectacularly in the case of the first, whose alcoholism leads to controlling and explosively abusive behaviour. While all of this is going on, we witness a slow transformation in Ethan Hawke’s character, Mason senior. Hawke’s character evolves over time to become more ‘adult’ and responsible, but crucially without losing any of the energy and likeability of his younger self. Mason senior studies accountancy, gets a proper job, meets a new partner and has a child with her, but without ever letting go of a kind of expressive and playful masculinity, symbolised by his enduring love for rock music. The scenes between him and his growing children – scenes of disappointment, embarrassment and momentary joy – are some of the most engaging and memorable in the film. What Mason senior appears to represent is, not so much the stereotypically irresponsible manhood that appeared to characterise him at the outset, as a kind of open and fluid masculinity that is able to adapt and conform to the adult world without losing its own identity. On one level, it seems that the film is exploring and problematising the notions of ‘absence’ and ‘presence’ that characterise some of the debates around contemporary fatherhood which will be explored in later chapters of this book. To put it crudely (though the film is too complex to be reduced to crude dichotomies), it could be argued that the two substitute fathers are physically present in the children’s lives but emotionally absent, and indeed emotionally hobbled, while the biological father is for the most part physically absent, but at least emotionally engaged and attempting, if not always successfully, to express genuine feelings and to make the relationship with his children work. At the end of the day the film offers no simple dichotomies between stolid, responsible mum and ‘fun’ but irresponsible dad. It is much more complicated than that, and in fact the film itself is endlessly reflexive about these very issues, making them the subject of countless conversations between the characters. It is

16  Images and representations this complexity and ambiguity that makes Boyhood a landmark film about the relationship between men and their children – and about masculinity.

Men and children on the small screen If cinema has provided some of the most iconic and influential representations of men’s changing relationships with children, and the most striking evidence of contemporary culture’s persistent concern with this theme, then television has not lagged behind in presenting images of fatherhood. It is widely recognised that fathers have had a poor deal from television, and particularly from situation comedies, with the feckless or useless dad a more or less stock figure in many British and American comedy programmes. As Peter Kunze has written, ‘the most fertile ground to observe the father in American comedy remains the television situation comedy, where the father or father figure . . . is nearly indispensable’ (Kunze, 2016, 57). Kunze identifies two dominant tropes: the nurturing, authoritative father – ‘this father is the caring breadwinner who is prone to compassionate guidance and loving discipline’ – and at the other end of the spectrum, and perhaps more commonly, ‘the oaf: the father who is absent-minded or even dimwitted’, the cartoon character Homer Simpson being perhaps the most extreme, but in some ways typical figure here. The same thing has been true, at least until quite recently, of representations of fathers in television advertisements. As Lupton and Barclay note (1997, 68), men performing domestic tasks in advertisements tend to be shown as ‘foolishly incompetent’. However, as a sign that ideas about men’s role in relation to children are changing, at the time of writing the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority has introduced a ban on ‘harmful gender stereotypes’ in advertisements, including those that ‘depict a man or a woman failing to achieve a task specifically because of their gender’, with one of the examples given being ‘a man’s inability to change nappies’ (ASA, 2019). At the same time, just as on the big screen, some small screen productions have attempted to grapple in a more serious way with men’s relationships with their children, and once again, we can see evidence of the restoration or repair of that relationship emerging as a persistent theme. Writing in the 1990s, Lupton and Barclay mention Michael, in the then popular US series thirtysomething, as one of the first examples of an ‘involved’ father being depicted sympathetically on television (1997, 65), and there have been many more since. Looking for examples of a concern with fatherhood, and men’s relationships with children, in contemporary television series, one might take any one of a number of programmes at random. While writing this book, I have been watching the popular US drama series Scorpion (2014–2018). Of course, this could simply be a case of selective perception: if one is researching or writing about a particular topic, one begins to see it everywhere. But it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Scorpion, like many other contemporary popular television series, is obsessed with the topic of fatherhood, and more specifically with the figure of the absent father and with repairing broken father-child relationships.

Images and representations  17 The ostensible subject of Scorpion is the adventures of a team of ‘geniuses’ and their efforts to save lives and solve global problems. But the programme returns repeatedly to the troubled relationship between the central character, Walter O’Brien, and his father. O’Brien, an apparently emotion-less genius, was taken away from his family in Ireland at a young age. It is significant that the man mainly responsible for removing O’Brien to America, and away from his family, US government agent Cabe Gallow, acts as an explicit substitute father for O’Brien throughout the series. A number of the secondary characters in O’Brien’s team of geniuses also have difficult paternal relationships, with Silvester’s and Happy Quinn’s attempts to mend their relationships with their respective fathers forming recurrent story lines throughout the series. Thus, one sees in this series, as in so many others, the quest to repair broken connections between men and their children as, not simply a plot device, but the emotional driving force of the narrative.

‘My father wasn’t around’: men and children elsewhere in popular culture Although the main focus of this chapter has been on representations of men’s relationships with children on screen, it is worth noting briefly the ways in which similar themes are reflected in other cultural genres, such as theatrical productions and written accounts. Here, there is space to mention just two high-profile examples, in order to demonstrate that the cultural obsession with these issues is not confined to cinema and television. The phenomenally successful US musical Hamilton (2015) is evidence that a concern with father absence, and with seeking a closer relationship between men and their children, remains at the heart of contemporary culture. It is remarkable that a show that is ostensibly the life story of a hero of the American Revolution repeatedly emphasises its hero’s fatherlessness – he is described in its opening song as the ‘Founding father without a father’ – and at the same time makes a central theme of his own, as well as his main political rival’s fathering role. The play is also replete with substitute father figures, including Hamilton’s ‘good’ substitute father, George Washington, and the bad or rejected father figure, King George. The two deadly rivals at the heart of the drama, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, find unity in singing parallel songs to their young children: Burr to his daughter, Hamilton to his son. The lyrics of Dear Theodosia, with their reference to a father who ‘wasn’t around’ and a promise that ‘I’ll be around’, seem to speak as much to twenty-first century concerns with father absence, and with discovering a new kind of ‘involved’ fatherhood, as to the show’s ostensibly eighteenthcentury setting. It is surely remarkable that Hamilton’s relationship with his son Philip is as important a theme in the play as the character’s political exploits. The poignant song, It’s Quiet Up Town, sung after the death of Hamilton’s son in a duel, provides perhaps the most intensely emotional moment of the whole show.

18  Images and representations This Boy: A Memoir of A Childhood (2013), the bestselling autobiography by Alan Johnson, the UK Labour MP, ex-Home Secretary and former union leader, can be read on a number of levels: as an indictment of the harsh conditions in which many working-class families lived before the economic boom and social reforms of the 1960s, as an account of London in the era of race riots and the early stirrings of youth culture, or even as the story of one young man’s failed attempt to break into the music industry. However, what is particularly striking and emotionally affecting about the book is the depiction of Johnson’s disrupted family life, following the departure of his unreliable and abusive father, and its impact on him as a young man. From one perspective, the book can be read as an extended tribute to the author’s mother, who died when Alan was in his early teens. Abandoned by her husband and suffering from the heart condition that would eventually kill her, Lily Johnson brought up two children in appallingly unhealthy conditions in condemned housing in Notting Hill. After her death, Alan was looked after by his sister, who was herself only 16 at the time, and it is the love, courage and resilience of these two women that shine through the book. In a sense, Johnson’s memoir provides confirmation that women are able to provide positive role models for boys as well as girls (see Chapters 2 and 4 of this book). The reader is certainly left with the impression that it was Lily’s clear moral sense (she was a fierce opponent of the forces fomenting racial discord in west London at this period), as well as her dedication to her children and aspirations for their future, that provided the inspiration for her son’s later achievements. In the second volume of his memoir (2014), Johnson writes: ‘I had the example of my own father to guide me in what not to do – a kind of reverse role model.’ When his father, Steve, finally abandons the family, Alan and his sister Linda feel nothing but relief: For me, it was a red-letter day; a Saturday I would always remember for the happiness I felt when I was sure Steve had really gone. The sense of exhilaration floods back every time my mind returns to that morning . . . My dread was not that Steve would be lost to me for ever but that he might come back . . . For Linda and me, Steve’s departure marked the end of a terrible life and the start of a brighter future. Johnson’s attitude to Steve’s departure is something of a rebuke to suggestions that a father’s presence is always preferable to his absence. Nor is there any evidence in Johnson’s story to support the theory that boys with absent fathers tend to look for alternative male role models elsewhere, often with negative consequences: There are no surrogate fathers in this story. The lack of any meaningful relationship with Steve did not spur me to seek an alternative father figure. In fact it had the opposite effect: it made me mistrustful of men in general and uncomfortable in their presence. I much preferred being with women. The author’s appreciation and admiration of women seems to have stayed with him, though his later friendships with other men suggest that his mistrust of masculinity

Images and representations  19 was only temporary. However, Johnson does reflect on the kind of father he would like to have had, if things had been different: ‘But if I had been inclined to fantasise about the ideal father . . . Albert Cox would have been my choice.’ Albert was the father of Johnson’s close friend, Tony Cox, and he was invited to live with the family for a time after his mother’s death. For Johnson, Albert Cox epitomised the kind of steady, decent, hard-working man who had fought the war in the forties and delivered the peace in the fifties. . . . Mr Cox provided for his family: not only did he dedicate all his wages . . . to ensure their wellbeing, he devoted his spare time to the same cause. In a way this is a fairly traditional depiction of the ideal father as head of the family and main breadwinner. However, from other comments we gather that Albert Cox was also an affectionate husband: Johnson describes Mr and Mrs Cox snuggling together on the sofa each evening and watching television with their ritual glass of whisky. For Johnson, it seems to have been Albert Cox’s reliability and consistency of care, as well as his obvious affection for his family, that marked him out as something of a model father. This Boy is a reminder that simplistic generalisations about the impact, especially on boys, of absent fathers and lone mothers can often misrepresent the complexities of real-life experience. Nevertheless, in its persistent concern with the subject of father absence, and its search for an alternative ideal of the engaged, caring father, Johnson’s memoir can be seen as typical of contemporary popular culture’s concern for a new understanding of the relationship between men and their children.

Men and children in the news In December 2018 the news and opinion website Huffington Post collected together its ‘best dad stories’ of the year, which among other stories included one about a dad who pushed for change tables in men’s public bathrooms, and another about a father who encouraged other men to take paternity leave. The post began: ‘Gone are the days of the “clueless dad” stereotype – today’s dads are more involved in parenting than ever. They’re staying home with their kids . . . and playing a more pro-active role in parenting’ (Stecheyson, 2018). One of the stories, headed ‘This dad who talked about the challenges of working dad life’, featured a photograph of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau standing beside his office desk, where one of his daughters was sitting. The caption read: ‘Being a working dad isn’t easy. Even when you’re the prime minister.’ The message conveyed by the image, and the story accompanying it, was clearly that modern fatherhood, just like modern motherhood, is about finding ways to combine a career with ‘hands on’ caring for children. As mentioned in the Introduction, in August 2019, another image of a man in a suit with a child in the workplace went viral. The photograph showed Trevor Mallard, the Speaker of the New Zealand House of Representatives, holding and feeding a baby belonging to fellow lawmaker Tāmati Coffey (Webster, 2019). Online comments on the image were overwhelmingly positive: ‘This is sending a great message that men can take care of babies too’ was fairly typical.

20  Images and representations These news stories are clear evidence that the popular image of the ‘good’ father is no longer the traditional one of the provider and head of household, spending long hours working outside the home and leaving the day-to-day care of his children to their mother (Henwood and Procter, 2003; Locke, 2016). Today’s good father needs to be physically and emotionally present in his children’s lives. The absent dad is, by implication, a bad dad. This is a major change from the 1950s, for example, when the dominant image of the good father was of a man physically and emotionally detached from his children’s lives. In advertisements from that period, if a man was shown with his children at all, he tended to be engaged in activities that were mostly confined to evenings or weekends, such as reading a bedtime story, or playing ball with his son, when he returned from his mostly invisible but implicitly primary role in the external, working world, and certainly never usurping his wife’s role as the main carer for children. Often in these photographs, this is represented by the fact that the father is still wearing his workaday suit (see King, 2013). This is not to say that a father was not supposed to be warm or approachable, in contrast to the rather austere image of the Victorian or Edwardian father, though that may itself be something of an unfair stereotype, as my own research into the First World War letters of my great grandfather demonstrates (Robb, 2016). However, the fact that websites like Huffington Post feel a need to highlight stories about ‘good’ dads, and the fact that images of men caring for children, such as the photograph of the politician holding a baby, still make front page news, are perhaps evidence that ideas about what constitutes ‘good’ fatherhood, and about men’s role in the care of children, are still in transition. It is difficult to imagine an image of a female politician holding a baby, or bringing her child to the office, attracting the same degree of viral attention. It could be argued that the true sign of caring fatherhood becoming the norm would be that images and stories like these no longer attracted media attention. Evidence that men’s involvement in the care of children is not yet regarded as the norm is also provided by media stories that feature men complaining that their care is regarded as second-rate or a poor substitute for that of the children’s mother. In June 2016 Huffington Post featured an opinion piece by Rachel Toalson, who complained that her husband’s share in the care of their six children was viewed by those outside the family as ‘babysitting’, or as ‘helping’ rather than simply as parenting. She comments: ‘It would be nice to live in a world where men took care of their children and it wasn’t considered exceptionally exceptional’ (Toalson, 2016). In the following year, a Facebook post by Jeremy Martin-Webber, about his care for their children when his wife was away from home on business, went viral. He wrote: ‘I’m not the babysitter. I’m not just their playmate. I’m their dad. And looking after them and guiding them and caring for them is my responsibility.’ His wife Jessica added: ‘People find out he’s home with six kids and say things like ‘Oh poor Jeremy’ or ‘How does he do it’ or even ‘Who is with the kids?’ (Brown, 2017). Other news stories and viral images demonstrate that society is still working through ambivalent feelings about the issue of men’s care for children. For example, there have been a number of cases in which photographs of men naked

Images and representations  21 with their young children have gone viral, and provoked intense discussion about men, children, care and sexuality. In 2015 Danish comedian Torben Chris faced accusations of paedophilia after posting online a photograph of himself bathing naked with his two-year-old daughter. He responded to the furore: ‘A father in the shower with his daughter’s not paedophilia, it’s fun’ (Hartley-Parkinson, 2015). On the other hand, in 2014 a photograph of Thomas Whitten showering naked with his seriously ill son was initially removed by Facebook, after a degree of hostile reaction, but reinstated after the story went viral and prompted a more positive response. These online responses reflect continuing ambivalence about men’s intimate care of children, with some deeming the image ‘inappropriate’ while others described it as a powerful and moving example of parental care (Wells, 2016). These two cases perfectly encapsulate the ambivalence inherent in contemporary attitudes to men caring for children: on the one hand, lingering anxieties about men and risk, and on the other hand, a sense that men’s intimate care for their child is ‘natural’ and to be celebrated, rather than feared. This ambivalence, and its reflection in public debates about men’s role in family life and in work with children, will be explored more fully in the next chapter. By contrast with the media’s concern with the ‘new’ (and by extension ‘good’) father, one of the other recurrent tropes of news stories continues to be the feckless or irresponsible father, who can be seen as the ‘new’ father’s persistent shadow image. The most extreme examples of these news stories are those concerning the rare but high-profile cases of men who kill their own children, often in the course of committing suicide. Although unusual, these stories seem to convey a powerful and influential message, by contrast with those featuring caring and nurturing fathers, that men are still too risky to be left alone with children. Here are some headlines from the past few years, chosen on the basis of a brief internet search: Father, 40, kills his six-year-old daughter and 18-month-old son on Father’s Day before hanging himself in the midst of a bitter custody battle with his estranged wife (2017) (www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4623430/Father-sDay-tragedy-dad-kills-2-children-himself.html) Father Kills Teenage Children In Sydney. Then Shoots Himself

(2018) (www.ndtv.com/world-news/father-commits-suicideafter-murdering-son-and-daughterin-australia-1878805)

Deputy head killed his wife and slit three sons’ throats leaving murder scene that reduced police officer to tears (www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/harrowingdetails-how-dad-killed-11716362)

22  Images and representations Doctor kills his two kids aged 9 and 5, ‘because he feared they would inherit his depression.’ (www.thesun.co.uk/news/5144855/surgeon-shot-dead-childrendepression-wife-christopher-dawson-texas/) The men at the centre of these tragic stories tend to be portrayed as narcissistic and self-centred, viewing themselves as the indispensable centre of their partners’ and children’s worlds. While they are driven primarily by a desire to end their own lives, at the same time they seem unable to imagine their loved ones living on without them. It is as though the male perpetrator is saying to those whom he kills, not only ‘I can’t go on living without you’, but ‘I can’t imagine you living without me’. Other people, even those he supposedly ‘loves’, have no independent existence for the narcissist: they only exist as a reflection of himself, to satisfy his wishes and fantasies. Whether this kind of psychotic self-obsession is a peculiarly male phenomenon is a moot question. It is tempting to fall back on a gendered essentialism that views the defensive aggression of these men as due to some kind of biologically determined male trait. Interestingly, media stories about men who kill, whether their own family members or random others, often make reference to the perpetrators’ fatherlessness as a possible contributory cause. In 2010 we saw the high-profile case in the UK of Raoul Moat who shot and wounded his former girlfriend, killed her new partner, and then injured a policeman, prompting a manhunt that ended with the fugitive turning his gun on himself. On the Andrew Marr show on BBC1 on the following Sunday (11th July 2010), the two newspaper reviewers, former London mayor Ken Livingstone and journalist Rachel Johnson, reflected on the affair, both focusing on issues of fatherhood and masculinity in their attempts to understand Moat’s actions. Livingstone referred to Moat’s supposed complaint ‘I haven’t got a dad’, just before he shot himself, and recalled the impact of his own father leaving when he was a child. The former mayor also contrasted the situation of working-class men in earlier generations, whose identity was secured through skilled work and providing for their families, with the plight of many young men in a period of manufacturing decline and long-term unemployment. Johnson was more direct, accusing Moat of a ‘narcissism’ which she implied was widespread among contemporary males. Without knowing the full circumstances of Raoul Moat’s life, it is difficult to draw conclusions about the impact on him either of his experience of a disrupted family life, or of wider social factors. But it is undeniable that massive changes in the economy, as well as in family and community relationships, have dislodged the foundations of traditional masculinities in the course of a generation. For many men, this continues to have consequences at a psychic and emotional level, even if most do not end up resorting to extreme violence, as Moat did. As for attributing his sorry condition to the absence of a father, it seems that here Moat was parroting a powerful contemporary discourse, to be examined in detail in the next chapter, that many of the problems faced by men and boys today are due to the absence of adequate male role models.

Images and representations  23 Stories about ‘bad dads’, including these extreme examples of men murdering their own children, seem to provide confirmation of a narrative that masculinity is risky and dangerous and therefore to be kept apart from vulnerable children. The stories provide a corrective to the notion that men’s close involvement with children is always necessarily positive. The men in these stories seem to be deeply dependent for their identity on their children, and inseparable from them, in a way that is radically unhealthy. The persistence of these media stories, the ways in which they are narrated and the public discussion they provoke, are evidence that feelings about fatherhood, and about men’s role in relation to children, remain highly ambivalent, poised between celebration of the ‘new’ and ‘involved’ father, and subliminal anxiety, surfacing from time to time in extreme stories such as these about murderous ‘bad dads’, about the risky and unpredictable nature of masculinity.

Men representing themselves: dads online The media stories discussed in the previous section demonstrate the growing power of the internet to influence popular thinking about issues of public concern, of which the role of men in the care of children is a clear example. In this changed media landscape, men are increasingly able to represent themselves and to present their fathering, or their care for children, in their own voice. Elizabeth Podnieks writes that men ‘are using social media to voice their frustrations with how they have been depicted and to command greater recognition and respect for their paternal competencies’ (Podnieks, 2016, 5). The advent of the internet, and particularly the explosion of social media, has been accompanied by an exponential growth in the number of personal websites and blogs, in which individuals share their experiences and opinions with the rest of the online world. The immense popularity of blogs by mothers, and websites aimed at mothers such as Mumsnet, has more recently been followed by an increase in the number of blogs by fathers, and especially stay-at-home, primary carer or single fathers intimately involved in the care of their children. Fathers are using ‘dad blogs’, with links to social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, to represent their care for their children in a way that challenges many of the more negative attitudes towards ‘involved’ fatherhood. Writing about her own study of blogs by fathers, Gillian Ranson concludes: ‘Many of these fathers were explicit in their intention to reframe conventional understandings of fathers and fathering, and to position themselves as competent caregivers who are deeply engaged with their families’ (Ranson, 2017; see also Deane and Robb, 2017). Others have been more sceptical about the messages conveyed by fathers’ blogs. While conceding that, on the whole, ‘fathers online document a shift toward increasingly engaged paternal involvement’, May Friedman contends that dad blogs ‘both maintain and interrupt dominant discourses of fatherhood and masculinity’, arguing that ‘the parenthood they collectively describe both resists and inhabits tropes of masculinity and femininity, of discipline and nurturance’

24  Images and representations (Friedman, 2016, 87, 88, 99). Ranson (2017) reflects something of the same ambivalence when she notes that two of the consequences of the increasing ‘online reach’ of fathers’ blogs were that, first, ‘they were becoming recognised by advertisers as a valuable means of reaching potential consumers, and by the bloggers themselves, as a potential source of revenue’, and, second, that the fathers involved ‘were increasingly being positioned as parenting experts . . . They were becoming professionalised as fathers.’ Those wary of accepting that the ‘new’ fatherhood represents a profound change in masculine identity might argue that men’s readiness to ‘perform’ their care for their children online, and their willingness in some cases to monetise that role, are evidence of the persistence of aspects of traditional masculinity. At the same time, as much as they are a reflection of a new, more caring masculinity, one might suggest that dad blogs also reflect a very masculine desire to achieve public confirmation or approval of that identity.

Summary The examples from cinema, television, theatre, popular literature, news stories and blogs discussed in this chapter provide ample evidence that men’s relationships with their children have been, and continue to be, a key concern of contemporary popular culture. Popular culture, media narratives and online stories reflect both changing ideas about men and the care of children, and at the same time tensions and contradictions within popular thinking. Above all, I would argue that contemporary culture embodies a quest to overcome the perceived damage of father absence, or paternal alienation, and provides evidence of society feeling its way towards a more caring and expressive role for men in children’s lives, while retaining a degree of ambivalence and uncertainty.

2

Discourses and debates

The previous chapter explored some of the ways in which men’s care for children has been represented in contemporary culture. The chapter identified a persistent cultural concern with the subject, and particularly with the apparent alienation of men from their children, and with attempts to repair and restore men’s relationships with children. At the same time, it was noted that images and representations of men and children in contemporary culture encapsulate a number of tensions and contradictions, and display a profound sense of ambivalence. For example, in media stories about men and children there is a decided movement back and forth between images of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ dads, of men as caring and responsible on the one hand, and as reckless or risky on the other. Similar concerns, and some of the same tensions and ambiguities, can be found when we turn to public discussion and debates around men’s role in relation to children, whether represented in policy documents, political speeches, media commentary, or in everyday discourse. Following on from the analysis of images and representations in the previous chapter, this chapter will explore some of the continuing public debates that lie behind them, and the ways in which the issue of men’s care for children is framed in those discussions. This will involve analysing the main discourses that frame discussion and debate of these issues in the public realm. By ‘discourse’ we mean shared ways of speaking and writing about a topic. Writing about the ways in which masculinities are constructed within discourse, Nigel Edley makes the claim that ‘when people talk, they do so using a lexicon or repertoire of terms which has been provided for them by history’ (2001, 19). As Potter and Wetherell explain, the term ‘discourse’ has been used in many different ways. Some use the term ‘to cover all forms of spoken interaction, formal and informal’, whereas the influential French theorist Michel Foucault used it to refer to ‘broader, historically developing, linguistic practices’ (Potter and Wetherell, 1987, 6–7). For Foucault, discourse is ‘a conceptual terrain in which knowledge is formed and produced . . . the effect of discursive practices is to make it virtually impossible to think outside them’ (Hook, 2001; Foucault, 1981). Drawing on a Foucauldian understanding of discourse and subjectivity, Lupton and Barclay argue that discourses, ‘as ways of framing, speaking about and giving meaning to phenomena, are the sites of struggle, open to challenge from other discourses’ (1997, 9).

26  Discourses and debates Common to all forms of discourse analysis is the notion that ideas are not simply properties of the individual, but instead that the thoughts and words of individuals are to a greater or lesser extent framed and influenced by the shared ways of thinking and speaking within their social group, or in the wider society. Importantly, social discourses also have a historical dimension, since they change and develop over time, building on and responding to earlier ways of thinking and speaking about an issue. Discourses also reflect and embody power relationships between and within social groups. Lupton and Barclay note that ‘some discourses are hegemonic over others, taking charge over the definition of what is considered to be “truth”. . . . The hegemony of any particular discourse, however, is tenuous, continually subject to contestation and new attempts to define meaning’ (1997, 9). Within any society or social context, certain discourses achieve dominance – or hegemony – but there are always other competing discourses, some discourses coming into being and others fading away. This is not to suggest that discourses are sealed containers: there is considerable overlap and leakage between discourses. Nor is it to imply that there is nothing outside discourse, as some postmodern theorists would argue, or that discourses bear no necessary relation to an objective ‘reality’. Rather, the perspective adopted here is one of critical realism, which assumes the existence of an objective reality outside discourse, but accepts that ways of understanding that reality are always shaped by social, historical, and cultural factors (Bhaskar, 1975). This chapter will argue that public discussion and debate about men’s care for and relationships with children, whether in the family or in the professional sphere, is currently shaped by a number of key discourses, or ways of speaking and writing about the issue. These discourses frame the debate, whether at the level of public policy, media stories or everyday conversation. Like all discourses, those identified here are in constant tension with each other, and at the same time contain within themselves a number of contradictions. For example, in debates about men’s role in early years childcare, there continues to be a tension, as Cameron and colleagues (1999) identified some years ago, between a discourse of risk and a discourse of equality. But there are also other discourses at work in this field. One of these, analysed at length below, is a discourse of absence, which in turn is informed by what we might call ‘male role model’ discourse, rooted in social learning theories (Tarrant et al., 2015). Since these discourses inform much debate and discussion about men’s role in relation to the care of children, it is important to analyse them in detail, in order to understand the ways in which they ‘work’ to frame everyday thinking.

A discourse of equality Perhaps the dominant discourse framing public discussion of men’s role in the care of children at the time of writing is what might be termed a discourse of equality, or of equality of care. This discourse has been influential in debates, both about men’s role within families, and about their role in the professional care of

Discourses and debates  27 children. As was noted in the previous chapter, the ideal of the ‘good father’, as represented in media stories for example, has undergone a significant change in recent decades. To be a good father, and by implication a good man, it is no longer enough for a man to be simply a breadwinner and provider for his family. Since absence from children’s lives, whether physical or emotional, is now viewed as inimical to good fatherhood, then the good father is one who is present in the lives of his children, both physically and, more importantly, emotionally. Research with fathers demonstrates the potency of this new ideal, and the increasing desire of men from all social backgrounds to aspire to it (Robb, 2004b). ‘New’ fatherhood The advent of the ‘new father’ ideal has been fuelled by a number of factors. These include dramatic changes in gender roles, in the wake of second wave feminism and campaigns for gender equality, leading to a reappraisal not only of women’s roles in society, and in the home, but a concomitant reappraisal of men’s roles, particularly in the family. At a practical level, as more women have entered the workforce there has been a renewed focus on the gendered division of labour both within the workplace and at home. In a context in which more than two-thirds of women in the UK are in paid work (Office for National Statistics, 2013), the question of sharing childcare within families has become increasingly urgent. As one Irish study of men and childcare argued: A recurring obstacle to the full participation of women in employment is the fact that women have the dual burden of work and domestic care. The traditional view is that childcare is ‘women’s work’ and is something men cannot or do not do. Encouraging men into childcare challenges these prejudices and promotes equality in roles between men and women, both at home and in the workplace. (Fine-Davis et al., 2005, 1) Social pressures, backed by government initiatives, have encouraged men to take a greater share in childcare within families (Doucet, 2006; Dermott, 2008; Miller, 2010). Alongside these practical changes, the influence of feminism since the 1960s has prompted a shift in popular perceptions of gender. As will be discussed at length in the next chapter, there has been a general movement away from an essentialist view of gender roles as immutable, and towards a more dynamic view of masculinity and femininity as socially constructed and thus amenable to change (Butler, 1990). As a result, a new orthodoxy about what constitutes ‘good’ masculinity is emerging, emphasising men’s capacity for care and encouraging emotional expressivity (Robb and Ruxton, 2018). One of the policy areas in which these changing ideas have had an influence has been parental leave following the birth of a child, which traditionally was granted only to mothers. A number of European countries, particularly in Scandinavia,

28  Discourses and debates have pioneered progressive policies of paternity leave (Plantin et al., 2003). In 2015 the United Kingdom introduced a policy of shared parental leave for mothers and fathers, supplementing the existing allowance of maternity leave. Media coverage of the issue in the UK has often focused on the disappointing take-up of paternity leave by men, with less than a third of eligible new fathers currently using their allowance, according to some reports (Petter, 2019). While some have argued that this is due to the low level of paternity payments (Chapman, 2019), others maintain that what is needed is a system of dedicated leave for new fathers, as exists in some Scandinavian countries. For example, Iceland has a ‘use it or lose it’ policy of dedicated, non-transferable paternity leave, with the result that 90 per cent of new fathers make use of it. According to some reports, the policy has led to an improvement in father-child relationships and greater gender equality in the workplace (Gunn, 2013). At a European Commission seminar on the role of men in gender equality in Helsinki, Finland, in 2014, attended by the author, Iceland’s paternity leave policy was held up as an example for other countries to follow, while similar schemes in countries such as Finland and Austria were also seen as successful in promoting both a closer bond between fathers and children, and greater gender equality (European Commission, 2014). However, as I noted in my own contribution to the seminar, ‘the suggestion that [parental] leave should be mandatory, or that government should dictate the details of how parents use it, would probably not be popular in the UK’ (Robb, 2014). As Keith Pringle has suggested, there are important cultural differences between the UK and some other European countries, with regard to the acceptance of state involvement in family life, arising from distinctive welfare regimes and traditions (Pringle, 1998). There are even significant differences within the four nations of the UK, concerning the extent to which government should dictate parenting practices, as evidenced by the controversy surrounding the Scottish government’s proposal to introduce the ‘Named Person’ policy, which would involve the appointment of a named professional to monitor the welfare of every child in the country, whether or not they were perceived to be at risk (Nicolson, 2017; see also Waiton, 2016). Media reports and online discussion of paternity leave oscillate between support for shared parental leave policies and praise for men who take advantage of the scheme to share the care of their young children, on the one hand, and a scepticism about the usefulness of such policies combined with a humorous dismissal of men’s interest in taking on this new role, often drawing on familiar negative stereotypes about the useless or disengaged dad. This kind of ambivalence is perhaps to be expected at a time of rapidly changing gender roles, and around an issue that arouses such complex and conflicting emotions. Men working in childcare While public policy has sought to encourage the closer involvement of fathers in the care of their children, the same period has witnessed a number of initiatives aimed at increasing the number of men working in services for children (Robb,

Discourses and debates  29 2019). These have included a series of campaigns to recruit more male workers in early years childcare. The Early Years Workforce Strategy, published in 2017 by the Department for Education in England, declared: ‘We want children in early years provision to have both male and female role models to guide them in their early years, and we want more men to choose work in the early years sector’ (Department for Education, 2017, 25). There have been parallel initiatives in primary education, prompted by concern at an apparent decline in the number of male teachers, with the Teach First initiative making the recruitment of male trainees a priority (Wells, 2016). Many of the social changes affecting the reappraisal of male and female roles in the family that were discussed above have also had an impact on debates about gender and professional work with children. Moreover, the entry of women into traditionally male professions, and the gradual erosion of gender divisions in the workplace, have encouraged a re-evaluation of what is meant by genderappropriate work (Simpson, 2009). However, it is important not to overlook another important strain behind campaigns to recruit more men to work with children. Rising anxiety about the absence of men from family life, and the increasing numbers of children being brought up by lone mothers, has to some extent fuelled concerns about the apparent departure of men from areas of work with children where they have traditionally been fairly well represented, such as primary teaching. As will be discussed further below, these concerns have focused particularly on boys, and the supposed need for positive male role models to substitute for the increasing absence of fathers from boys’ lives. This is linked to a broader social anxiety about the so-called ‘problem’ of boys and the state of young masculinities (Tarrant et al., 2015). According to Harnett and Lee (2003, 84),‘demand for more male teachers might be interpreted as a moral panic; more male teachers would serve as appropriate role models for young boys and act as stabilising influences’.

A discourse of risk If public discussion about men’s role in the care of children has generally been characterised by a discourse of equality, at the same time this discourse can be seen as held in tension with a discourse of risk. This is particularly true of debates about recruiting more men to work on in early years childcare. According to Cameron and colleagues: ‘The contradictions are plain: on the one hand, valuing and encouraging men workers so as to improve gender equality, and on the other suspecting their involvement in something damaging to children’ (1999, 17). Paradoxically, increasing calls for more male workers have run alongside rising anxiety about child sexual abuse, much of which has focused on men. A discourse of risk was also evident in some of the images of men and children that were explored in the previous chapter. Moral panics about viral images, such as those of men photographed naked with their children, draw on underlying fears about the inherent ‘riskiness’ of men in relation to children. A discourse of risk is evident in the attitudes of some parents, and even female co-workers, to male childcare workers. Kevin, a young male nursery worker who

30  Discourses and debates participated in my own study, recalled that his training included a talk by a worker from the NSPCC, ‘and as soon as he left the room – it was about child abuse – one of the girls turned round to me and said “Oh, is that why you’re doing the course, to get at children?”’ Kevin also reported hostility from a number of parents, recalling a particular family: ‘They had come in, apparently the father had come in with his child, saw me in the nursery and asked if I was allowed to change nappies, and when he got the answer “yes” promptly walked out again with his child’ (Robb, 2001, 232–233). The clear implication is that a male worker would pose a greater risk to a child than a female worker, with that risk focusing on sexual rather than any other form of abuse. Ruth Simpson notes that similar notions of sexual riskiness sometimes attach to men working in other settings, such as primary teaching and nursing, where ‘men’s bodies are “marked” as potentially paedophiliac, their touch carrying meanings associated with sexuality’ (Simpson, 2009, 126). At the same time, the discourse of risk can be said to have greater or less salience depending on the professional context. The discourse tends to come into play in relation to work with very young children, and with regard to roles involving intimate care, rather than in men’s work with older children in other roles. Thus, there tends to be more public concern about men working in childcare than there is about men as teachers. However, fears about the risk of abuse seem to be partly contextual. For better or worse, schools (with the possible exception of boarding schools) are regarded as more or less ordered and transparent environments in which the opportunities for sexual abuse (but arguably not abuse of other kinds, such as bullying) are less than in care settings, which are both more ‘fluid’ and at the same time largely hidden from public view. However, just as important is the difference between the roles that men are called on to perform in relation to children. There is arguably much greater acceptance of men’s legitimate role in the education of children – the transmission of knowledge being viewed as an acceptable masculine responsibility – than of their involvement in intimate care. In searching for the underlying causes for the persistence of a discourse of risk in relation to men’s care for children, the most obvious reason is the rise in public awareness over recent decades of the phenomenon of child sexual abuse. The moral panic about child abuse, including abuse in care and welfare settings, began in the late 1980s, paradoxically at around the same time as the first organised campaigns to recruit more male childcare workers (Campbell, 1997). In recent years this awareness has been enhanced by a number of abuse cases involving religious ministers and others in positions of responsibility for children (Samuel, 2018), as well as the publicity associated with high-profile celebrity convictions for sex offences involving children, in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal (Furedi, 2013; Smith and Burnet, 2018). Public anxiety specifically relating to men working with young children has also been fuelled by well-publicised cases of childcare workers convicted of sexual abuse. Although not all of these cases have involved male workers, reports tend to focus on the gender identity of the perpetrator, and to prompt renewed debate about recruiting men to these roles, as well as confirming suspicions that a decision by men to work in this field is abnormal and a sign of sexual attraction to

Discourses and debates  31 children. When a male nursery worker from Birmingham, England, was arrested and later convicted of abusing children in his care in 2011, some parents claimed that it simply confirmed their earlier suspicions of him, with one mother commenting: ‘I objected to a man working in the nursery and doing things like changing the children’s nappies. He was a nice, pleasant boy, but I was a bit suspicious of him’ (Ellicott, 2011). However, a discussion on the website Mumsnet at around the same time conveyed generally more positive attitudes to men working in childcare. One mother noted: ‘I think it’s a shame if this latest incident puts parents off male pre-school workers or puts prospective men off nursery work’, while another wrote: ‘There is one at my son’s nursery and he is brilliant.’ A woman who was an ex-nursery nurse drew on concerns about a lack of male role models for children in her response: ‘Some children don’t have male role models to look up to and I think they need to see that men have a role in society in a caring way and that they can also work well with women’ (Mumsnet, 2011). However, if the discourse of risk surrounding men’s care for children has been informed in part by very real reports of child sexual abuse perpetrated by men, it can also be seen as building on deeply rooted assumptions about relationships between men and children. Traditionally, or at least in the western world for the last two centuries, the world of men and the world of children have been largely separate and sealed off from each other. Some historians have argued that this has not always been the case, and that before the Industrial Revolution, when much manual work was carried out in the family home, men were more ‘present’ and implicitly more involved in domestic life (Lamb, 1987; Tosh, 2005). However, since the early nineteenth century, it can be argued that there has been a growing separation between the public, external world of men, and the world of children, a world dominated at least in the early years by mothers, grandmothers, female nurses and carers, meaning that young children existed in a largely feminised space. The phenomena of fathers becoming more involved in the care of their children, and of men working in childcare, can be seen as transgressing these conventional boundaries separating the external, masculinised world of men from the feminised and protected world of young children. Arguably, men are still an alien and unusual presence in the feminised and domesticated world of childcare and early years education. This phenomenon is self-reinforcing, since the more that men are underrepresented in childcare, then the longer their presence will be seen as unusual and intrusive, as ‘matter out of place’, to adapt Stuart Hall’s explanation of racism, drawing on the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas (Hall, 2006; Douglas, 2002). Until recently, any man who expressed a desire to work with young children was likely to find himself subject to the assumption that he was not a ‘real’ man, while running alongside this aura of effeminacy was often a suspicion that he must be gay. In her study of male childcare workers in California, Susan Murray argued that ‘gay’ was a sexualised identity in the popular imagination, and that as a consequence, gay men (or those perceived to be gay) were at greater risk of being suspected of a sexual interest in children, citing examples from her research of gay male workers accused of abusing girls, even when the men’s actual sexual

32  Discourses and debates preferences were well known (Murray, 1996). Perhaps popular attitudes towards homosexuality have become more tolerant in the two decades since Murray’s research, but a residual tendency to assume that male childcare workers belong to sexual minorities may still be a contributory factor in the unspoken assumption that male workers constitute a sexual risk to the children in their care.

A discourse of absence In June 2013 the right-of-centre UK think tank, the Centre for Social Justice, issued a press release to promote its new report on ‘Fractured Families’. The following is an extract:

Lone parents tally heads for two million as numbers rise 20,000 a year, says CSJ report Around one million children grow up with no contact with their father. Many are in ‘men deserts’ and have no male role model in sight [. . .] The report . . . finds that at least one million children are growing up without a father and that some of the poorest parts of the country have become ‘men deserts’ because so few primary schools have male teachers. [. . .] Father absence is linked to higher rates of teenage crime, pregnancy and disadvantage, the report warns. In a foreword to the report [. . .] Director Christian Guy warns of the ‘tsunami’ of family breakdown battering the country. He says the human, social and financial costs are ‘devastating’ for children and adults alike [. . .] Mr Guy adds: ‘For children growing up in some of the poorest parts of the country, men are rarely encountered in the home or in the classroom. This is an ignored form of deprivation that can have profoundly damaging consequences on social and mental development. There are “men deserts” in many parts of our towns and cities and we urgently need to wake up to what is going wrong.’ (Centre for Social Justice, 2013)

This press release was interesting for a number of reasons. First, it viewed the increasing numbers of fatherless families and the decline in the number of male teachers as part of the same phenomenon, and saw both in the context of a more widespread absence of men from children’s lives. Second, it made causal connections between men’s absence and a range of social ills, such as youth crime, teenage pregnancy, problems with child development and wider social disadvantage. In making these links, the CSJ press release, and the report to which it referred, provided a striking example of the discourse of male absence that has become a significant feature of debates about men’s role in relation to children. Over the past decade or so, policy and media debates about the role of men in children’s lives have frequently focused on the apparent absence of positive male role models from children’s, and particularly boys’, lives. A range

Discourses and debates  33 of commentators has argued that the absence of fathers and the disappearance of male role models from the lives of many young men are key factors in their involvement in crime and educational under-achievement (Murray, 1990; Dennis and Erdos, 2000; Lammy, 2011). In his Introduction to Dennis and Erdos’ classic (2000) text on the subject, A. H. Halsey claimed that the children of parents ‘who do not follow the traditional norm’, which includes the children of lone parents, are thereby disadvantaged in many major aspects of their chances of living a successful life. . . . such children tend to die earlier, to have more mental illness, to do less well at school, to exist at a lower level of nutrition, comfort and conviviality, to suffer more unemployment, to be more prone to deviance and crime, and finally to repeat the cycle of unstable parenting from which they themselves have suffered. In August 2011, then UK Prime Minister David Cameron blamed the riots that broke out in many British cities during that month primarily on father absence: I don’t doubt that many of the rioters out last week have no father at home. Perhaps they come from one of the neighbourhoods where it is normal for young men to grow up without a male role model, looking to the street for their father figures. So if we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where we’ve got to start. (Mahadevan, 2011). Some conservative cultural commentators see father absence as part of, and as partly the consequence of, a general downgrading of the father’s role in reproduction and in the economics of family life: ‘No longer the primary breadwinner, today’s father is not even necessarily the one who engendered his own child, thanks to the wonders of IVF. Technology, which already in the 1960s severed the connection between sex and reproduction, now promises to separate gender from parenthood entirely. It is hardly surprising that so many fathers are missing from the landscape of the contemporary family’. (Caldecott, 2013) In a similar vein, the late sociologist Geoff Dench blamed what he described as the ‘male flight from fatherhood’ on the more relaxed mores resulting from the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, arguing that ‘divorce and separation are neat ways for a man to shed his domestic responsibilities’ (1998, 14). More recently, the US political scientist Charles Murray has argued that family breakdown and absent fatherhood have had a disproportionate impact on poor and minority families, while the middle class and privileged have been mostly shielded from these ill effects by their social and economic capital (Murray, 2012). By contrast, some commentators have expressed scepticism about this emphasis on fathers’ centrality to the upbringing and wellbeing of children. Susan

34  Discourses and debates Golombok’s research has challenged the notion that a male parent, rather than simply an additional adult, is essential to a child’s healthy development (2000). Silverstein and Auerbach (1999, 397) note the arguments of ‘neoconservative’ authors, that ‘the roots of a wide range of social problems (i.e. child poverty, urban decay, societal violence, teenage pregnancy and poor school performance) can be traced to the absence of fathers in the lives of their children’, but they suggest that this ‘is an incorrect or oversimplified interpretation of empirical research’. Interestingly, there is not much evidence of a parallel moral panic surrounding absent mothers. For various reasons, mothers are less likely than fathers to leave the family home, and they are more likely to retain custody of children. However, just as modern reproductive technology has made it possible for women to conceive without the participation of a male sexual partner (see below for the debate about lesbian parenting), so the widespread social acceptance of surrogacy has opened the way for men to become fathers without having a sexual relationship with a woman. Media coverage of gay fatherhood has been largely positive, with high-profile examples such as pop singer Elton John and swimmer Tom Daley contributing to its social acceptability. When the Daily Mail journalist Richard Littlejohn published an article expressing concern about the children of gay fathers growing up without a mother, the reaction was overwhelmingly hostile, with some companies going so far as to ban the newspaper as a consequence (Littlejohn, 2018; Sweeney, 2018). This acceptance of a form of mother absence stands in perhaps surprising contrast to the widespread moral panic about absent fatherhood. A moral panic about father absence has had definite outcomes in terms of public policy, resulting in efforts to encourage absent fathers to face up to their responsibilities, campaigns to recruit more male primary school teachers and the development of mentoring schemes for boys and young men from lone parent families, especially those from socially disadvantaged and minority ethnic families. A controversial policy that seemed to encapsulate many features of this moral panic, and of male role model discourse, was Troops to Teachers, the UK government’s drive to recruit former soldiers, and particularly male soldiers, as teachers. One rationale for the programme placed it in the context of ‘rising youth violence’, arguing that it ‘would benefit the many children in our increasingly violent and unsafe schools who lack suitable male role models’ (Bukard, 2008). As Esther Dermott has noted, the policy was explicitly prompted by ‘a . . . concern around the absence of men in single parent, mother-headed households’. She adds that, while research ‘has challenged the idea that single parent families “lack” men in this way . . . father absence continues to be constructed as a problem . . . so that male teachers are portrayed as filling a “fathering vacuum”’ (2011, 226) Criticising the policy, Andrea Peto (2012) accused it of ‘supporting stereotypes of “urban youth”’ and of ‘promoting a particular ideal of teachers and of education, based in militarist and masculinist values’. The discourse of father absence undoubtedly contains a grain of truth: it is certainly easier for two parents of either sex to raise a child than it is for one, and there is clear evidence of the long-term impact on children and young people of family breakdown, particularly when compounded by other social disadvantages (see Robb, Featherstone et al., 2017). However, it can also be argued that the proponents of this discourse frequently claim too much for the effects of paternal

Discourses and debates  35 absence, and at the same time that there are a number of lacunae or absences in their logic. Since this discourse has become such a key feature of public debates about men and children, it is worth spending some time analysing how the discourse works in practice and assessing its strength and weaknesses. What follows is a detailed critical analysis of two typical examples of the ‘absent father’ discourse in action. ‘Men are being erased from family life’ In 2008, former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith, founder and chairman of the think tank that produced the report quoted at the beginning of this chapter, published the following article in the Sunday Times newspaper:

Iain Duncan Smith, ‘Men are being erased from family life’ The Sunday Times, 25.05.08 I met Sandy Weddell, a Baptist minister in Easterhouse, Glasgow, at the end of a slow walk through the area’s run-down tenements. The day was bonechillingly damp and the sky seemed to blend in with the bleak housing. In one of the blocks I peered into a stairwell and saw a child had left its teddy lying on an old pillow. I smiled, then my eyes alighted on some burnt silver foil and a blackened needle and my heart sank. Sandy greeted me outside his church, where he ran a breakfast club for children. I told him what I had seen and he shrugged. ‘Easterhouse,’ he said with a sigh. He then told me about two boys of six and eight whom he had found standing outside his breakfast club one winter morning. It was 6.30 a.m. and he didn’t open until seven o’clock but they had been standing there for half an hour. Inside they told their story. The eight-year-old got his younger brother up every morning and they would go to school. There was hardly any food in the house and their mother was normally crashed out, sleeping off the effects of heroin. They didn’t know their father, although men were in and out of the house. ‘All too typical,’ Sandy said softly. Listening to him, I just couldn’t believe how we had let this level of social breakdown continue. Last week I and others tried to stop the government doing away with the necessity to consider a child’s need for a father when women apply for fertility treatment. Its argument centred on the rights of gay and lesbian adults not to feel discriminated against. It may seem far removed from the children of Glasgow’s poor but it seemed to me just another case of how, bit by bit, we are airbrushing men and their responsibilities from society. Too many children are failed because their fathers play no part in their lives; I wonder how long it will be before we finally admit that we need to put men back and rebuild our fractured society.

36  Discourses and debates Sandy, like so many who work in small community projects in difficult areas, tells a familiar tale of fatherless households where the women struggle, particularly with older, unruly children. It is predicted that in the next few years single-parent households in Glasgow will account for one in two of all households with children: in England and Wales the number of lone parents is approaching a third of all families with dependent children. It costs us as taxpayers £22 billion – between £500 and £800 each per year – to pay for broken homes. As more and more children are born to cohabiting parents, it is worth noting how fragile such arrangements are. Half of all cohabiting couples will break up before their child is five. (Even with high levels of divorce the rate is only one in 12 for married couples.) At the time of the break-up, the woman’s income will fall by, on average, a third. Having set up the Centre for Social Justice, I spend a large amount of time visiting housing estates and too often I find them full of young mums and no men. The local community groups always tell the same story – young men without any sense of responsibility, no family ties and the state picking up the bills. They hang around getting into trouble, then get caught up in petty crime and gradually move into drugs and gangs. With few fathers around, the young boys find other role models: the drug dealer or the gang leader. But it isn’t just young men who suffer: girls do too. Studies show that it is from a father that young girls learn about empathetic unconditional love. Without this, vulnerable girls who have no father are more likely to be flattered by male attention and to be drawn into early sex, which is often regretted and unprotected. It seems, as I look around, that the system conspires to break homes, then does its best to lower the life chances of those it is meant to care for. The benefits system is set so that if you are a couple living together, married or otherwise, you will have to work three times longer than a lone parent to get above the poverty line. Small wonder, then, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, that we recently had 250,000 more lone parents claiming benefits than we have lone parents in England and Wales. People quickly learn that staying together on benefits is a mug’s game, so some at first pretend to be single; but very often this becomes a reality. So first we drive the fathers away and then, when the mothers can’t cope, we stick the children into care homes which seem to prepare them for a life of crime. More than 30% of the men in our prisons are from care homes, yet only 0.6% of our children have ever been in care. The irony is that the great drive, quite rightly, to set women free and give them equal opportunities in life has in many parts of the country also set men free. The women are working, looking after the children and looking after the house. The pressure on those women, particularly those on low incomes, is enormous. Yet men also suffer: single men have much lower health outcomes with mortality rates 250% higher than for married men and suicide rates three times higher as well.

Discourses and debates  37 A few weeks ago I visited a lone parent on a housing estate in Kent. It was in a middle-class town and yet it had the highest concentration of lone parents in Europe. She was 19 years old, the same age as my daughter. I was struck by how tired she looked. The estate was a soulless place with a windswept shopping area and had absolutely nothing to recommend it. Her flat was dingy, with one side of the building subsiding; inside, the television was permanently on. A little child ran around with a dummy in her mouth and there were no books on the shelves; just children’s videos. She confessed that she didn’t read to her child and was amazed when I said that it was important for her development. It turned out that her sister, 17, also had a child and lived alone, a couple of streets away, and her brother, 16, had gone to live with an older woman on the estate. She and her mother, who was in her late thirties, did not get on and the mother did not help with the child because she herself had other young children by another man. All were living on benefits. As I left I wondered: what chance did that little girl have to break free from a life of dependency, ill health and hopelessness?

The article begins by painting a grim picture of life in Easterhouse, a deprived area of Glasgow, Scotland, a place apparently characterised by bleak housing, drug problems, pessimism and a general air of hopelessness. A story is introduced, presumably one of many stories that the minister could have told, or that Duncan Smith might have selected for the purpose, of two boys at a breakfast club: a story featuring an absent father, a mother taking drugs, no food at home, and children having to be self-reliant. This anecdote is used by the author as a potent symbol of wider social problems. The article moves from this local vignette to a brief mention of an unsuccessful campaign in Parliament, also in 2008, to ensure that a father is always involved in applications for fertility treatment. In that debate, Iain Duncan Smith attacked plans to ensure that lesbians were not discriminated against in applications for in vitro fertilisation as ‘breath-taking’: What kind of message is this sending to fathers? If you go to disadvantaged communities you see fathers have gone missing because they see no necessity to stay in their children’s lives. For the first time, the state has a view that fathers are not important in the upbringing of their child. We are going to be engineering families where fathers are not included. [. . .] The vast majority of children born to a family without a father will see a reduction in their quality of life. (quoted in Evening Standard, 2008) In Duncan Smith’s Sunday Times article, the acknowledged distance between the two stories is elided by a focus on a key element in both: the absence of fathers.

38  Discourses and debates Both stories are seen as examples of the exclusion of men, of ‘how we are airbrushing men and their responsibilities from society’. The next paragraph contains a clear statement of the central message of the article: ‘Too many children are failed because their fathers play no part in their lives; I wonder how long it will be before we finally admit that we need to put men back and rebuild our fractured society.’ It is interesting that there is an elision between the passive mood of ‘are failed’ and the active ‘we’. On the one hand, there seems to be a denial of individual responsibility, on the other hand a sense of communal failing and a collective responsibility to put things right. Children like those in the Easterhouse story are seen to have been ‘failed’, not by public policy or by poverty or by poor housing, but by their fatherlessness. Conversely, repairing this grim scene of social breakdown – rebuilding ‘our fractured society’ – can only be achieved by putting men ‘back’. Thus, the absence of men is portrayed as the root cause of a whole range of social problems, and at the same time re-inserting men into families and communities is seen as their solution. The paragraph goes to some lengths to withhold blame from lone mothers, highlighting instead their ‘struggle’ with ‘older, unruly children’ (the implication being that only men are able to deal with them). Here, two further consequences of father absence are highlighted: the problem of disciplining children, and that of financial cost, both to the taxpayer and to the lone mother herself. The next paragraph returns to the use of anecdote, while expanding the notion of fatherlessness to embrace whole communities ‘full of young mums and no men’, anticipating the concern about ‘men deserts’ in the Centre for Social Justice report (2013). However, the sentence that follows suggests that men are in fact around, but involved in undesirable activities like crime and gangs, rather than providing for their families. This is the first hint in the article that men’s behaviour, as opposed to their simply not being present, might be problematic, though significantly this is not pursued further. The next paragraph charts some of the apparent effects on children of absent men, and here the term ‘role models’ is introduced for the first time. The impact on boys is a particular focus, and we learn that the lack of proper role models (i.e. their fathers) leads boys to seek a replacement in the negative role models of the gang leader or drug dealer. Once again, the phenomenon of the absent father is viewed as the root cause of a range of complex social problems, without any mention of other possible causes, such as poverty or unemployment. Next we read about the impact of male absence on girls. There is a brief reference to research, though details are not given, which apparently shows that girls learn ‘empathetic unconditional love’ from their fathers. At this point, the reader may wonder whether mothers might not have a role in this process. The author also claims that fatherlessness means a girl is more likely to be drawn into early sexual experience and early pregnancy. In order to succeed, this argument needs to draw on an essentialist view of gender roles: if the case that men need to be restored to families and communities is to work, then it has to be demonstrated that fathers can provide something that mothers and women are unable to. This is followed by a digression in which the current welfare system is blamed for driving fathers away from families, before a return to ‘evidence’ that a

Discourses and debates  39 disproportionate number of men in prison have been in care. Although the lack of paternal influence is not specifically blamed, that is the clear implication. The next paragraph includes an acknowledgement of arguments for gender equality, and an attempt to avoid blaming women in general and lone mothers in particular. There is also a wider argument for the benefits of marriage and family stability. Duncan Smith’s article concludes with an account of a visit to another housing estate, this time in Kent, so that these powerful personal accounts bookend the article’s central argument, enhancing its emotional impact. The reference to the middle-class character of the town seems calculated to counter the argument that poverty is the root cause of the social problems under discussion, and to bolster the claim that, regardless of social class or income, it is the breakdown in family life, and in particular the absence of men, that is to blame for the problems faced by the people that the author visits. As with the account of the visit to Easterhouse, there is an initial emphasis on aesthetics and visual impressions: the damp air and ‘bleak’ housing of the first is complemented by the ‘windswept’ and ‘soulless’ Kent estate and the ‘dingy’ flat visited by the author. This is a world of women, and the account, while not explicitly blaming women, seems to at least implicate them in the social problems discussed. Duncan Smith draws attention to the television that is constantly switched on, as well as the absence of books and the mother’s failure to read to her children. Then follows a description, and an implicit criticism, of the pattern of early pregnancy, partner-swapping and welfare dependency in this family of women and girls. Despite efforts earlier in the article to avoid attributing blame to lone mothers, what is described here is presented implicitly as a failure by women. The mother who is the focus of this final vignette is seen as providing an inadequate upbringing for her child, while the other women and girls in the account are presented as irresponsible. There is no mention of men in this paragraph. As well as being physically absent, men are also absent from the blame that the author attaches to the mother and other women in her family. Because they are not there, the children’s fathers cannot be blamed for not reading to them, or allowing them a constant diet of television. Because they are not there, they cannot be blamed (as the women implicitly are) for having children with different partners, or even for getting girls pregnant at an early age and for leaving them to cope alone. Once again, men’s absence is implicitly seen by Duncan Smith as the root cause of these distressing symptoms, as if, by their being there, those symptoms would somehow go away. But a critical reader might reflect that teenage girls do not get pregnant by themselves, or necessarily become lone mothers by choice. There is little sense here of men’s agency, or of men having some part to play in causing this nexus of social problems. In general, there is an unresolved contradiction at the heart of Duncan Smith’s article, an uncertainty about where to direct blame, and at the same time an uncertainty in how to talk about men and masculinity. Men are not just physically absent from these women’s and children’s lives, but they are also rhetorically

40  Discourses and debates absent from Duncan Smith’s account, and especially from the powerful closing paragraph of the article. Since the article seeks to argue that the mere presence of men would be the solution to the problems it describes, it cannot therefore blame men for those problems, though it is forced to recognise, at least in passing, that it might be men’s actions, rather than their mere absence, that are in part to blame. A further critique of the article’s argument might be that it personalises and individualises a nexus of social problems, abstracting father absence from that complex mix, and laying blame for wider social failings at the feet of individuals living in poverty. Most obviously, neither these women nor their absent partners are responsible for the soullessness of the estates where they live, or even for the dinginess of their flats, but these features, together with the architectural bleakness of Easterhouse and even the damp, cold day, are made to stand as a symbol of their apparently bleak and soulless lives. Without wishing to deny the role of personal responsibility, some of the symptoms described in the final paragraph, such as the dependence on television for entertainment or failing to read to a child, could equally legitimately be seen as the result of a lack of education, and as having little to do with absent men. Similarly, while it is possible to read welfare dependency as a sign of personal irresponsibility, it can also be seen as the consequence of a lack of resources, resulting at least in part from abandonment by a feckless male partner. Thus, Iain Duncan Smith’s article contains a number of significant tensions, between agency and passivity, blame and blamelessness, responsibility and irresponsibility. While its overt subject is men’s purported absence from families and communities, and its consequences, it can be argued that the article itself is guilty of an absence of its own: a failure to confront men’s responsibility, and the role of masculinity. There is a contradiction between the implicit sense that men’s absence is the root cause of a range of social problems, and the belief that men’s presence will somehow be the solution to those problems. The article fails to acknowledge the fact that ‘present’ fathers might also a problem, especially if they are violent or abusive towards their partners and children. Moreover, against Duncan Smith’s claim that young men with absent fathers are more likely to join gangs and get involved in criminal behaviour, must be set the experiences of young men in the West of Scotland interviewed as part of our 2015 study. For example, one young man claimed that he was introduced to gang membership by the older men in his family, claiming ‘all my family was involved, [I was] brought up with it’, while another said: ‘I looked up to my father, my father was very criminally active . . . that was who I kind of looked up to at first, because that was my role model. Your father’s your superhero. His influence was actually bad, and I grew up thinking, that’s the right thing to do.’ The article’s failure to confront this contradiction is at least in part because its author’s intellectual toolkit does not include a notion of masculinity as something dynamic and mutable. This might have made it possible to criticise the feckless masculinity that abandons partners and parental responsibility, and at the same time argue for a more positive masculinity that would take those responsibilities seriously. There is a sense in the article of men, and masculinity, as a kind of

Discourses and debates  41 ‘magic bullet’ or panacea for a range of social ills, accompanied by an implicit sense that ‘any man will do’, reflecting an unproblematic view of masculinity and failing to acknowledge the ways in which men, and certain kinds of masculinity, may have contributed to these social problems in the first place. ‘Black boys are too feminised’ Similar tensions and contradictions can be found in a Guardian article written in 2010 by Tony Sewell, now CEO of the UK charity Generating Genius, and someone who has had many years’ experience of working with, and writing about, the problems faced by young people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. Sewell’s article lays the blame for many of those problems squarely on father absence, and more explicitly than Iain Duncan Smith’s piece, on the failures of lone mothers.

Tony Sewell, ‘Black boys are too feminised’ The Guardian, 15.03.10 Martin, a mixed-race 15-year-old south Londoner, had just downed half a bottle of vodka. The boy was already known for attention-seeking, bad behaviour and aggressively challenging authority figures. But in his drunken state, with his inhibitions gone, he wasn’t more threatening. He was crying – violently sobbing – for his father. ‘I want my dad. It’s not fair. I’ve only spoken to him once on the phone. Why does he hate me? I fucking want to see him now.’ Martin was taking part in a residential summer camp run by my charity, which takes black boys and offers them educational coaching and mentoring. Martin had smuggled in the alcohol without us realising. Raised by a single white mother, he had never known his dad. Higher education minister David Lammy today appealed for black fathers to become more involved with their children. He is aware, as I am, of the devastating consequences of absent fatherhood within the black community: 59% of black Caribbean children live in lone-parent households, compared with 22% of white children. Another boy at camp couldn’t get along with the others; he told me that he loved fighting and displayed an excessive amount of attention-seeking. The headteachers of each boy’s school – who were also both black – told me that the mothers blamed school for making their sons behave badly. The heads spoke of a personal dislike shown by the students, which they reported as a wider dislike of black male authority. When the boys did open up at camp, it was to our female staff whom they felt they could trust. Psychologists have known for some time that children’s attachment to fathers and mothers derives from different sets of early social experiences.

42  Discourses and debates Specifically, mothers provide security when the child is distressed, whereas fathers provide reassuring play partners. As part of our orientation we played a simple game called Trust; I stood behind Martin who had to blindly fall into my arms. He refused to do it. Typically, this kind of tough play love would never come from his mother. Instead of allowing him to fall, she would probably grab him from behind and whisper in his ear: ‘This game, it’s too dangerous; I’ll buy you a PlayStation instead.’ A typical father would say: ‘Come on, son, fall. I’m behind and you’d better not look back.’ We have been running summer camps for five years: boys are taken from their familiar environment and work on high-level science projects at universities. All the boys have bucked the trend for inner-city AfricanCaribbeans, scoring an average of nine high-grade GCSEs. When we set up the programme, we had high aspirations to nurture the next generation of black Britain’s intellectual best. However, our academic ideals soon became secondary; many of the boys, once freed from the arms of their single mothers, suddenly had to cope with a world run by adult black males – figures in their lives who were mostly absent, unreliable, despised by their mothers, and usually unsuccessful. These boys kicked up against us. It was like we were their dads who had walked out of their lives, and suddenly we demanded their respect. More than racism, I now firmly believe that the main problem holding back black boys academically is their over-feminised upbringing. First, because with the onset of adolescence there is no male role model to provide guidance and lock down the destructive instincts that exist within all males. Second, in the absence of such a figure a boy will seek out an alternative. This will usually be among dominant male figures, all too often found in gangs. This is the space where there is a kind of hierarchy, a ritual and, of course, a sense of belonging. We have wasted years, and lives, looking in the wrong direction as to the causes of crime and education failure. We’ve had endless studies attempting to prove institutional racism – while all along our boys’ psychological needs weren’t met. The current government policy of rolling out role models to black youngsters is another attempt to externalise the problem that lies within. It has left us with little research and knowledge about a group that gets kicked out of school the most. Meanwhile, the black family continues to disintegrate and it seems no one dares say a word.

Like Duncan Smith’s article, Sewell’s begins with a powerful vignette, conjuring up a vivid picture of the problems faced by one ‘mixed-race’ young man. It then proceeds quickly to the boy’s broken relationship with his father – ‘Raised by a single white mother, he had never known his dad’ – and the latter’s

Discourses and debates  43 ‘hate’ for his son. Sewell does not, at least at this early stage in the article, draw direct causal links between father absence and social problems, but the suggestion is implicit, and there is a racial undercurrent too: the reader might wonder why is it relevant that Martin was raised by a single white mother? The suggestion is that her parenting was inadequate, not just because of her sex but also because of her ethnicity, and that somehow (as the article goes on to elaborate) boys need to be able to identify with adults on the basis of both gender and ethnicity in order to achieve healthy adult identity. Thus, to Duncan Smith’s gender essentialism is added an essentialising of ‘race’. The author sees this boy, and the others mentioned in the article, primarily as black boys and therefore needing an initiation into black masculinity, as much as masculinity per se. This means that the boy’s white mother is doubly incapable of fulfilling her proper parental role. In the next paragraph the author lends support to British MP David Lammy’s call for black fathers to be more involved with their families. He also cites statistics on the number of lone parent black families, describing the consequences as ‘devastating’, without saying exactly what these are. The paragraph that follows includes a dismissive account of mothers blaming schools for their sons’ bad behaviour, and a reference to the boys’ ‘dislike of black male authority’, which co-exists with their apparent trusting relationships with female staff at camp. The unspoken suggestion is that all of this is the result of fatherlessness. The two sentences about women are significant. The mothers’ blaming of the school is viewed as a shifting of blame away from the women themselves, who, the reader is supposed to think, are the ones who are really at fault for their sons’ behaviour. The final sentence about trusting female staff is intriguing: is the reader meant to view this as a problem, rather than a healthy sign, and might it not also be true of many boys from dual parent homes? Moreover, one may wonder if this might undermine the attempt in the article to problematise female care for boys: perhaps there is something about women’s care for boys that is also vital? Like Duncan Smith, Sewell then attempts to essentialise the distinctive contributions of men and women to boys’ development, claiming the support of psychologists, and arguing that ‘mothers provide security’ while ‘fathers provide reassuring play partners’. As in the unspecified ‘studies’ referenced in the Duncan Smith article, the psychologists cited here are not named, and there is an implicit assumption that all psychologists would agree with this thesis. Readers might also wonder if fathers never comfort or provide security for distressed children, or if mothers never play with their children. The next sentence, describing Martin’s refusal to fall into the author’s arms in a trust exercise, suggests that fatherless boys do not trust men, and maintains that only men can provide ‘tough love’, while mothers provide false, consumerist comfort for their sons: ‘This game, it’s too dangerous; I’ll buy you a PlayStation instead.’ This represents both a crude essentialising of gender roles, and at the same time an idealising of fathers which is surely at odds with the pervasive anxiety about absent men. The reader might wonder why, if fathers are so wonderful, they keep abandoning their children, in ways that mothers seem not to.

44  Discourses and debates The next paragraph sings the praises of the author’s mentoring programme for black boys. But then we read that ‘many of the boys, once freed from the arms of their single mothers, suddenly had to cope with a world run by adult black males – figures in their lives who were mostly absent, unreliable, despised by their mothers, and usually unsuccessful’. The image of liberation from their mothers – ‘freed from the arms’ – is wholly negative, but once again the article is unsure who to blame. Is it the men’s fault for being absent and unreliable, or the women’s for despising them? Are we sure that the mothers really did ‘despise’ the men in their lives, and if so, whether they might have had reason to? What if separation occurred as a result of male domestic violence? In the next paragraph, the reference to black boys’ ‘over-feminised upbringing’ is another instance of explicit mother-blaming. There is no suggestion here of the value of maternal influence for boys, despite what was said earlier about boys’ preference for female counsellors at the camp. Then there is an explicit reference to male role models, whose role is to ‘lock down the destructive instincts that exist within all males’. This plays into an essentialist view of masculinity, and to a crude developmentalist theorising that sees masculinity as something wild and uncontrolled and therefore to be tamed. One might catch echoes here of Robert Bly’s controversial writings (Bly, 1991) about male development, and there is certainly something Bly-like in the references to hierarchy and ritual in the final sentence. As in the Duncan Smith article, there is also a reference to the theory, unsupported by any reference to evidence, that fatherless boys who drift into gangs are looking for a substitute father. The next paragraph argues that blaming racism has been the wrong strategy in dealing with the problems of black young men. But it is unclear where the author has proven this in what goes before, and the reader is left wondering if racism really has no role to play in the problems faced by young black men? If the Duncan Smith article was implicitly aimed at shifting the blame away from poverty, then this piece is aimed at shifting it away from racism. So what the two articles have in common is that both are arguing against a societal cause for the problems of young men, and for shifting the focus on to the actions of individuals. Both seek to ‘responsibilise’ (Rose, 1996) particular individuals, families and communities. However, in both articles a question remains as where blame should be directed. The fundamental contradiction is the same in both cases. While the absent men’s irresponsibility is seen as the underlying problem, the restoration of those same men to their children’s lives is proposed as its solution.

Summary This chapter has examined three of the key discourses informing recent public debates about men’s role in the care of children. It has demonstrated that discussion of men as carers for children continues to be poised between competing discourses of risk, based on concerns about child abuse and anxieties about men who transgress the conventional boundaries of masculinity, and equality, rooted

Discourses and debates  45 in notions of gender equality and shared care. A third influential discourse of absence, shaped by concerns about the impact on children of fathers’ and more generally men’s supposed increasing absence from their lives, was analysed at length, demonstrating both its strengths and its weaknesses. A key criticism of that discourse, as represented in the examples discussed at length, was that it lacked a sense of the dynamic and mutable character of masculine identity, a critique that will be developed in greater detail in the next chapter.

3

Ideas and perspectives

The preceding chapters have explored, first, the ways in which men’s care for children has been represented in popular culture, arguing that these cultural productions reflect a widespread societal concern with the issue of men’s role in relation to children, while providing an insight into the complexities and tensions surrounding those concerns, and into the ways in which beliefs about these issues are changing. In the next chapter, we saw similar concerns reflected in continuing debates in the public sphere, and in the tensions and ambiguities between the different discourses at play in those discussions. This chapter takes a further step back to examine some of the underlying ideas, beliefs and theories that inform those public discourses and those cultural images and representations. An examination of this kind is sorely needed, and might help to resolve some of the confusions that currently surround discussion of men’s role in relation to children. The chapter will argue that there are currently two contrasting sets of ideas about men and the care of children dominating representations and discourses surrounding the issue – what we will describe as a ‘conservative’ and a ‘progressive’ perspective – and that the differences between them are often obscured and their roots poorly understood. Elucidating the key beliefs and assumptions of these positions and their implications can contribute to clarifying the debate and to moving it forward. At the same time, the chapter will argue that these opposing ideological positions are both, in their different ways, flawed and unsatisfactory, and will explore ways of moving beyond them, by drawing on theoretical resources that have been underrepresented in public debate. This tentatively proposed ‘third way’ might help to resolve some of the dilemmas and make up for some of the inadequacies in the two currently dominant ideological perspectives. Much of the confusion in debates about men and the care of children tends to arise because people on different ‘sides’ of the debate often use similar language, but starting from very different premises and assumptions, for example about gender roles and the nature of masculinity. ‘Conservatives’ and ‘progressives’ might find themselves on the same side of the argument for greater paternal involvement in family life, and for more men to be employed to work with children, but for very different reasons, and with very different aims and outcomes in mind. For example, conservatives might want to restore men to a central role in families to provide discipline and

Ideas and perspectives  47 financial security, and to support women in fulfilling their ‘natural’ maternal role, whereas progressives would want men at the heart of family life in order to take an equal share of childcare, thus releasing women to pursue a career. In the case of professional work with children, conservatives might be concerned with recruiting more men in order to restore discipline to the classroom and to model traditional masculinity for boys, while the aim of progressives in attracting men to work with children would be to model a more caring and nurturing form of masculinity. Although for the sake of clarity the chapter is divided into a number of sections, each discussing a particular theoretical or ideological position, in practice the different perspectives analysed here have quite porous boundaries. They should be seen as existing on a spectrum or continuum, rather than as rigidly fenced off from each other. In addition, there is also a degree of diversity and difference within individual perspectives, with ‘moderate’ and ‘extreme’ positions identifiable within each. It is also important to note that, for much of the time, those engaged in debates about men’s role in the care of children, whether in policy forums, professional practice or in media commentary, are probably not aware of the theoretical or ideological grounding of their arguments. Therefore, what are described here are more or less idealised or abstracted versions of those ideological positions. Alternatively, these positions might be viewed as sets of ideological resources that individuals and groups draw on in different ways and in different contexts to support their case. At the same time, lest this discussion of theory appear far removed from the everyday issues faced by parents, professionals and policy makers, it should be noted that the ideological positions discussed here have important ‘real world’ consequences, shaping public debate and directly determining people’s everyday practices. A note on terminology. I have wrestled with the question of what to call each perspective, and am not entirely happy with my final decisions. I have used the terms ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ to describe the two dominant positions, but I might equally well have used words such as traditionalist for one, and genderegalitarian or liberal for the other. Nor should these terms be in any way confused with the ways they are used in political debate. Although there is some alignment between conservative positions on men’s role and right-of-centre political parties, and between progressive positions and left-of-centre groups, there are notable exceptions, as discussed below.

A conservative perspective Where is it found? A conservative or traditionalist perspective on the issue of men’s role in relation to children can be found articulated, broadly speaking, in right-of-centre newspapers and media outlets, in the reports of conservative-leaning think tanks such as the Centre for Social Justice and the Institute of Economic Affairs in the UK, in the campaigns of groups such as Families Need Fathers and in the proclamations of some mainstream religious organisations. The conservative position has been less well represented in academia, particularly within social science and social policy,

48  Ideas and perspectives which tend to be dominated by variations on the progressive perspective (see below). However, there are notable exceptions, including in the UK the work of the late Geoff Dench (1996, 1998) and in the US the work of Charles Murray (2012). It should be noted that the conservative or traditionalist perspective does not always align exactly with ‘big ‘C’ conservative politics. On the one hand, some would argue that in recent years mainstream right-of-centre political parties, particularly in the European context, have departed from traditionally social conservative positions on issues of gender and the family, adopting a kind of consensus liberalism on these issues that now tends to be shared across most mainstream parties. For example, in recent years in the UK Conservative-led governments have been responsible for introducing shared parental leave, recognising same-sex marriage and working to close the gender pay gap, and at the time of writing the Conservative government is considering a reform of the Gender Recognition Act that would reduce gender identity to a matter of personal choice (Government Equalities Office, 2018). Conversely, some of the main voices associated with conservative or traditionalist positions on men’s role in relation to children have aligned with the political left. In this context, one might point to the ethical socialist position espoused by Dennis and Erdos (2000), or the pro-family policy proposals of the Labour MP Jon Cruddas and of Blue Labour (Cruddas and Rutherford, 2014; Merrick, 2015), or the support of Labour MPs for the campaign, also strongly supported by conservatives, for fathers’ names to be entered on the birth certificate of children born to unmarried parents (BBC, 2012). To some extent, the enormous recent popularity of the Canadian psychologist and academic Jordan Peterson, whose support for traditional gender differences is rooted in Jungian archetypes, is a sign of the ability of conservative views on gender to cross conventional ideological boundaries (Peterson, 1999; 2019). Beliefs and assumptions A fundamental component of the conservative perspective is a belief in the traditional family as a bulwark of social stability, and as a positive influence on children’s development and prospects. Conservatives would maintain that children generally fare better within a two-parent family consisting ideally of a married and co-resident mother and father. Alongside this belief in the centrality of the family there often runs a scepticism about state or government interference in the upbringing of children, and a belief in parental autonomy and rights. In the often quoted, and arguably frequently misunderstood words of former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: ‘There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women and there are families’ (Margaret Thatcher Foundation, 1987). Similarly, those arguing from a conservative position regard family breakdown, the rising divorce rate, the separation of parents, the absence of fathers and children being brought up by lone parents as wholly negative developments, and as the root cause of many of the problems faced by many children and young people in contemporary society. A second, fundamental belief common to those espousing a conservative position relates to the understanding of sexual difference and gender roles. Those who argue from this perspective tend to hold to what might be termed essentialist notions of gender identity and relations, believing that there are clear and

Ideas and perspectives  49 immutable differences between men and women, though the ways and the extent to which this belief is articulated vary enormously. According to Hanlon: ‘Biological and evolutionary essentialist gender discourses downplay the shared basic capabilities which men and women have in common whilst exaggerating common sex-based differences’ (Hanlon, 2012, 182). This assumption is due in some cases to a fundamental religious belief in divinely ordained gender roles, while for others it is based on particular kinds of biological or psychological theory, or simply on a conservative faith in roles that have been hallowed by tradition and culture. It is important to note that a belief in fundamental differences between the sexes is not confined to social conservatives. It might be argued that a form of gender essentialism is evident in the writings of feminist researchers such as Carol Gilligan (1982), who argues that women and men have different ‘moral voices’, with the former focused on relationships and care and the latter more concerned with rights and justice. Out of the work of Gilligan and other ‘difference feminists’ has grown the burgeoning field of feminist ethics (Kittay, 1999; Held, 2005). In recent years, the rise of neuroscience has tended to lend support to conservative ideas, particularly concerning the innate character of gender roles (BaronCohen, 2003). Conservative Catholic author Greg Bottaro (2018) finds support in neuroscience for his fundamentally religious belief in the distinctive roles played by men and women in family life. He argues that the male brain is ‘more naturally suited to work with objects in the environment’ which gives boys a head start on learning how to manipulate their environments and ultimately best serve the external needs of a family . . . The drive towards fatherhood is imprinted in the man’s brain. . . . Men’s voices have also been shown to register differently for children, especially in areas of attention and obedience . . . Women are better able to connect feelings to words and use language to express interior experiences and memories. This helps them to communicate verbally with others, which builds relationships. These ideas have been popularised in bestselling and influential books such as John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (1992), though critics such as Deborah Cameron (2007) and Cordelia Fine (2010, 2017) have argued vigorously that the science behind them is flawed. In relation to the issues under discussion here, conservatives tend to believe that women have a ‘natural’ disposition to care and are therefore more suited than men to caring roles, whether in the family or in the professional sphere. This belief in more or less immutable gender roles leads to a belief in the complementarity of the sexes, and a sense that men and women have distinctive but complementary roles to play in family life, and specifically in the upbringing of children. In the words of the philosopher and Catholic convert Edith Stein: ‘Woman naturally seeks to embrace that which is living, personal and whole. To cherish, guard, protect, nourish and advance growth is her natural, maternal yearning.’ (Stein, 1996, quoted in Urban, 2016, 45)

50  Ideas and perspectives According to Greg Bottaro: ‘As a woman is totally focused within on the new person developing in her body, knowing how to care for new life intuitively and transrationally, man is built to forge the way forward, providing for the needs of mother and child, and protecting against any outside threat to the other.’ (Bottaro, 2018) This belief in gender complementarity is a key plank in conservative support, not only for the conventional two-parent family, but also for the importance of fathers, and lies behind conservatives’ anxiety about the growing phenomenon of father absence and lone fatherhood. If fathers and mothers both have important, but distinctive roles, to play in a child’s upbringing, then the absence of one or other parent – usually the father – will have a negative impact on the child. As already stated, there are important differences among those holding to a conservative position, as there are with other perspectives, and it should be noted that what is described here are ideas that are constantly in flux and changing as society itself evolves. Therefore some who espouse a conservative position may accept, for example, that men have a role to play in caring for children within families, and not necessarily espouse the ultra-traditionalist perspective that men’s role is simply to provide, support and defend the family from the outside. Similarly, very few conservative commentators today would want to argue that ‘a woman’s place’ is exclusively in the home, as a Victorian or even a 1950s conservative might have done. However, while accepting that women have roles to play outside the home, in the workplace and in public life generally, some conservatives would still wish to argue that a woman’s most important role in life is as a mother, and maintain that women are ‘naturally’ better equipped than men for roles such as childcare. Although those adopting a conservative perspective tend to believe that gender roles are to a greater or lesser extent ‘natural’ and fixed, there is a perhaps paradoxical emphasis by conservatives on the importance of role models. Conservatives tend to instinctively adopt a social learning model of child development, believing that children develop their adult gender identities – learning how to be men and women – by observing the significant adults in their lives, and more particularly adults of the same sex. Therefore it is important for fathers to be present in order to model for sons what it means to be man, and for mothers to model female gender roles to their daughters. Thus, a key element of conservative concern about lone parenthood is that boys in particular will grow up without a male role model, leading to antisocial behaviour, mental health issues and poor performance at school. This concern with male role models also lies behind conservative anxiety about the apparent decline in the number of male teachers, and explains conservative support for recruiting more male teachers, while at the same time they express scepticism about men working in childcare. There is perhaps a contradiction here. On the one hand conservatives tend to see sexual differences as largely innate, and as predetermined by biology and psychology. But at the same time they emphasise the need for positive role models to ensure the development of a healthy masculine identity in boys. There seems to be

Ideas and perspectives  51 an assumption that, while girls acquire their adult feminine identities unproblematically, boys need the intervention of positive adult role models in order to ensure their successful negotiation of the transition to a strong and stable adult masculinity. This sense of the fragility and uncertainty of masculine identities sits uneasily alongside a belief in the innate and predetermined nature of sexual differences. Policy and practice As a result of their belief in inherent and complementary gender differences, and in the value of social practices hallowed by tradition, conservatives tend to be wary of attempts by government policy to override these essential characteristics, which they would see as a form of social engineering. More positively, conservatives tend to support policies that uphold traditional marriage and family life, such as tax policies that favour married couples. At the same time, conservatives have tended to be supportive of fathers’ rights for access to their children following separation or divorce. The campaign for fathers to be included on birth certificates is interesting, because it is supported by those with a conservative, and even a men’s rights agenda, but also by ‘progressive’ fatherhood campaigners, such as the Labour MP David Lammy (BBC News, 2012), an example of how ideas ‘leak’ across some of these permeable boundaries between ideological positions. In the past, social conservatives might have been hostile to efforts to bring women into the workplace, or to encourage their promotion in business. However, this reluctance has largely disappeared, whether for economic or other reasons. At the same time, conservatives remain supportive of women who opt for traditional motherhood, and of policies that encourage it, and on the other hand are opposed to policies which appear to disincentivise ‘stay at home’ or full-time motherhood, or propel mothers (including lone mothers) into the workplace when their children are still young. For similar reasons, many conservatives are reluctant to support the universal provision of professional childcare, since it risks undermining the key roles played by parents, and especially mothers, in the care of young children. Strengths and weaknesses One of the main strengths of the conservative perspective, in relation to the debate about men’s role in relation to children, is that it has a clear and well-founded sense of men’s specific role in family life, and in the socialisation of children more generally. A belief in sexual difference and complementarity makes it easier to argue for fathers having a distinctive and irreplaceable role in families, and for the recruitment and support of men to work professionally with children, particularly in schools. This belief can also be seen as helping to explain phenomena such as the low take-up of paternity leave, or the failure, despite years of campaigns and government initiatives, to recruit more men to work in childcare. In her study of men working in childcare, Jo Warin poses the question: ‘So if adult roles are interchangeable, why does such a strong gendered division of labour still persist?’ (Warin, 2018, 69). A conservative might respond that this persistence

52  Ideas and perspectives is, on the contrary, clear evidence that adult gender roles are not completely interchangeable. However, as the analysis in the previous chapter of the discourse of absence suggested, a key weakness of the conservative perspective is that it has little sense of masculinity, as something mutable and distinct from maleness, or from men as such. In other words, unlike the progressive perspective discussed below, those adopting a conservative position tend not to distinguish men or maleness from historically or culturally influenced constructions of what it means to be a man. One consequence of this is that proponents of a conservative position, relying on a universal notion of maleness, will often view criticisms of certain forms of masculinity or male behaviour as criticisms of men as such. Hence the frequent hostility to any talk of ‘toxic masculinity’, and the tendency to see campaigns against it as an attack on men as such. A recent example at the time of writing was the widespread negative reaction to the 2019 advertisement by the razor manufacturers Gillette (Guardian, 2019). There is little sense in conservative arguments that the presence of men in families, for example, might on occasion be detrimental to both women and children, not because men are essentially ‘bad’, but because certain forms of masculinity might actually have a negative influence, including acting as a negative role model for children. Similarly, as was noted in the discussion in the previous chapter of newspaper articles by Iain Duncan Smith and Tony Sewell, this kind of inability to distinguish men from masculinity can make it difficult sometimes for conservative commentators to accept that men – or more accurately, men manifesting certain kinds of masculine behaviour – might themselves be responsible for phenomena such as widespread father absence. A more nuanced understanding of how gender works would make it possible to understand that certain aspects of ‘traditional’ masculinity might sometimes be the problem, while alternative forms of masculinity might be the ‘solution’.

A progressive perspective Where is it found? Since a progressive perspective on men’s care for children is the dominant position in UK and European social policy and in media debates, as well as in academic writing on the issue, then it could be argued that it is more or less omnipresent in public discourse. A progressive, liberal or gender-egalitarian position on men’s role in relation to children is evident in policies and campaigns of the European Union (EC Childcare Network, 1994; European Commission, 2014), and increasingly in the political programmes of all mainstream political parties of the United Kingdom, at least since the political realignment following the election of New Labour governments of the late 1990s and early 2000s. It could be argued that, unlike the situation in the United States, there is not a strong social conservative movement in the UK, and most centre-right parties now share a broadly liberal position on social issues with their left-of-centre opponents, even if some political conservatives still adhere to a traditionalist perspective in many ways.

Ideas and perspectives  53 A progressive position on gender and family issues is reflected in the policies of many local authorities and voluntary organisations providing services to the public, and in the codes of practice of many professional bodies, including those working in the education, care and welfare sectors. A generally gender-egalitarian perspective also finds expression in the work of most academic researchers and educators working in the fields of social policy and social science. Beliefs and assumptions As was the case with the conservative perspective, it is important to reiterate the point that ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ are shorthand terms, designed to capture a broad tendency in contemporary thinking, rather than to describe a coherent or uniform school of thought. So, as with the conservative perspective, what is described here as the progressive or gender-egalitarian perspective covers a wide spectrum of thinking and writing on the issue. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify some key assumptions that are distinct from those of the conservative or traditionalist position. One of these fundamental differences derives from the fact that, although those arguing from a progressive perspective might believe that biology plays some role in the formation of gender identities, it is more important to pay attention to social factors, such as socialisation, cultural conditioning, and the influence of social contexts and structures, in the development of those identities. In other words, those arguing from a progressive position tend to adopt a constructionist or constructivist, rather than an essentialist or ‘naturalist’ view of gender differences (Heinamaa, 2013; see below). Discourse theory, which is based on social constructionism, argues that gender identities are ‘accomplished in the course of social action’, and rather than being permanent and fixed are ‘constantly remade on a moment-to-moment basis’ (Edley, 2001, 192–193; see also Wetherell and Edley, 1995). Opinions vary within the progressive camp as to the differential weight that should be accorded to social factors, with some at the radical end of the progressive spectrum agreeing with gender theorist Judith Butler (1990) that even biological differences are, in a sense, socially constructed: as Warin notes, ‘Butler’s concept of performativity challenges gender as a fixed identity and uncouples gender from sex’ (Warin, 2018, 29) However, as Lupton and Barclay suggest, ‘when taken to its extreme, social constructionism can become overly relativist, giving the impression that bodies and identities are endlessly malleable or “written upon” through social and cultural processes’, while tending ‘to discount biological explanations for gender differences as essentialist’ (1997, 10). At the time of writing, the debate surrounding transgenderism has raised questions about the degree to which sexual identity is malleable, with claims on one side of the argument that the male-female gender binary might itself be a mere social construction and that a ‘postgenderist’ future can be imagined (Dvorsky and Hughes, 2008). If gender identities and roles are to a greater or lesser extent socially constructed, this means that they are dynamic and malleable rather than fixed. If gender roles have changed over time, and are variable depending on culture and context, then it

54  Ideas and perspectives is possible to imagine them changing again. The consequence of this for thinking about men’s and women’s roles in relation to children is that it makes it possible to argue that existing roles are simply social conventions and can be changed, and indeed that they should be changed, in order to achieve the aim of a more gender equal society. A belief in promoting gender equality is another cardinal principle of the progressive perspective, together with an assumption that current gender roles and divisions disadvantage women and girls. If a belief in family is central to the politics of the conservative position, then feminism plays a similarly vital role in the progressive politics of gender. Thus, in addition to seeing gender roles as influenced by convention, those on the progressive side of the debate claim that those roles have also been shaped by power relations which have benefited men and disadvantaged women. At the same time, a critique of the traditional nuclear family, as being inherently patriarchal and oppressive to women, has been a feature of much feminist criticism (Oakley, 1974, 1976). From this perspective, campaigning for a greater role for women in work and in public life, beyond their traditional or ‘natural’ role as mothers and carers for children, is a key part of the broader campaign for gender equality. Two arguments about men’s role in childcare flow from this. First, it is argued that, simply in the interests of gender equality and to enable women to play a full role in society beyond the home, men need to take a greater share in the care of children, and in domestic life more generally. Second, if one believes that women should not be constrained by conventional understandings of their gender role, then neither should men. Some feminists and male pro-feminists have argued that although men have been the main beneficiaries of unequal gender relations, they have also suffered from not being able to develop the caring, nurturing and expressive aspects of their humanity, which includes being involved in caring relationships with children, whether in the family or in the professional arena. To quote Neil Hanlon: ‘Affective equality includes women and girls having men equally share in the burdens of care work; it also includes the rights of boys and men to have access to more emotionally fulfilling relationships. Men need to be understood as needing caring too!’ (Hanlon, 2012, 216). This sense of masculinity and femininity as malleable is one of the main ways in which the progressive perspective differs from its conservative counterpart. As noted in the previous section, the conservative or traditionalist position on men and their role in relation to children lacks a concept of masculinity as something socially defined and distinctive from biological maleness. By contrast, gender egalitarians, influenced by feminism and academic gender studies, tend to see masculinity, like femininity, as dynamic and mutable. Connell’s (1995) notion of ‘masculinities’ as plural, and the associated idea that some forms of masculinity tend to be ‘hegemonic’ or dominant in any given society or social formation have been enormously influential. If masculinities are multiple and mutable, then it is possible to imagine a different role and future for men: less violent, aggressive and oppressive towards women, and more caring, expressive and able to take on roles previously associated with women and femininity. The second wave of feminist writing in the 1970s and 1980s was followed by

Ideas and perspectives  55 a concomitant explosion in research and writing on men and masculinities (see Whitehead, 2002; Hearn and Connell, 2005; Anderson, 2009; Kimmel, 2010, 2018), generally pro-feminist and arguing that masculine identities, like femininities, are largely shaped by history, society and culture, and therefore capable of being challenged and changed. Policy and practice From a progressive perspective, campaigns for men’s greater involvement in the care of children are part of a wider pro-feminist movement, to change ideas and assumptions about men and masculinity. Progressive arguments for recruiting more men to work in caring roles, including work with children, tend to emphasise its contribution to effecting social change, and more particularly a transformation of gender relations. Writers on men’s role in childcare, such as Jo Warin for example, have suggested that recruiting more men to work in early years education and care might contribute to a ‘de-gendering’ of society: ‘The greater involvement of men in the care and education of young children has the potential to transform gender relations [. . .] The inclusion of more male teachers and carers in the ECEC workforce can make a vital contribution to the ongoing development of a more gender-egalitarian society’ (2018, 3; see also Warin, 2006, 2016). Elsewhere Warin asserts her belief that ‘the inclusion of more men in early childhood education has the potential to challenge traditional gender roles and . . . is a small step in the direction of “undoing” gender and moving beyond the gender binary’ (2018, 5). The very presence of men in professional caring roles with children will demonstrate – primarily to children, and particularly to boys – that men can ‘care’, and therefore contribute to a breaking down of rigid gender distinctions in society more generally. As one young male nursery worker in my own study put it: ‘Having a male in there, so that children grow up thinking that it’s not only mummy that looks after baby, that daddy can do it as well . . . or a male can do it as well’ (Robb, 2001, 236). According to a parent quoted in Warin’s study of men working in childcare: ‘It is a way of showing them without words or explanations that both genders can be carers, can look after them and can be involved in the same way’ (Warin, 2018, 126–127). It should noted here that those who espouse a progressive position on men’s care for children share with their conservative counterparts at least an implicit belief in the importance of role models in children’s development. But whereas traditionalists believe that positive male role models are needed to ensure the inculcation of a healthy masculine identity, progressives see a need for alternative male role models to present boys with different ways of being a man. Thus, it could be argued (perhaps controversially) that progressives are not campaigning for more men to be recruited to work with children primarily for the good of children themselves, or to enhance the quality of care, but to influence the next generation of men into becoming more caring, and thus to effect social change.

56  Ideas and perspectives Strengths and weaknesses One of the strengths of the progressive position by contrast with the conservative position, in terms of debates about men’s role in the care of children, is that it understands gender identity as dynamic, plural and subject to change. This enables proponents of a greater role for men in the care of children to argue that men’s traditional exclusion from these roles has been the result of societal expectations and social conditioning, and that it is possible to imagine different roles for men. A social constructionist approach to gender roles makes it possible to critique aspects of ‘traditional’ masculinity, for example its supposed oppression of women, and at the same time to imagine more positive ways of being a man. In the same way, if gender roles owe more to social and cultural convention than to biology, then women can take on roles once associated exclusively with men, and it is possible to foresee a future in which men and women, fathers and mothers are able to take an equal share in the care of children. However, despite this undoubted strength, it can be argued that there is also a fundamental weakness at the heart of the progressive or gender-egalitarian perspective. If any form of gender essentialism is rejected, and with it any sense of sexual difference or gender complementarity, then it becomes difficult to identify a distinctive role for men in the care of children that is not already being fulfilled by women. If gender differences are simply a social construct, then what is the justification for recruiting more men to work with children, or for fathers to be more intimately involved in the care of their children, beyond simple gender equity, or the ‘social change’ argument described above? If men’s and women’s care are interchangeable, then why not have a nursery staffed entirely by women, or a family headed by a lone mother, or by two mothers? Thus, if a belief in gender complementarity is a strength for conservatives, then it can be maintained that its absence is a definite weakness for progressives. When making the case for engaged fatherhood, or for employing more men in childcare, progressives tend either resort to the ‘social change’ argument, or have recourse to traditional stereotypes surrounding men’s role in relation to children. Thus, in advertisements seeking to recruit men to work in childcare, in interviews with male workers, and to some extent in Warin’s 2018 book, the key argument for employing men seems to be focused on how men play with children in a different way than women. Similarly, in my own interviews with male childcare workers, when asked about the reasons for employing more men in childcare, they tended to fall back on fairly traditional arguments drawn from the traditionalist rhetoric of gendered differences. As one male nursery worker in my 2001 study put it, ‘I think the child always needs a bit of male influence around the place’, while another maintained that it was important to employ men so that children could ‘see what the difference is in a man and a female’ (Robb, 2001, 236). Another possible weakness of the progressive position is that its liberal beliefs about the family prevent those espousing it from being too critical of the phenomenon of absent fathers and lone parenthood. Feminists and their supporters tend to

Ideas and perspectives  57 be critical of the traditional family and of marriage, supportive of the liberalisation of divorce laws, and more tolerant and accepting of alternative family forms. For those adopting this perspective, any moral concern about ‘family breakdown’ risks coming across as reactionary. Thus, progressives will tend to argue that children with lone parents suffer mainly because of a lack of state support, rather than from father absence per se. Not all feminists and political progressives are fully supportive of a greater role for men in the care of children. Some would argue that recruiting more men to work in childcare, for example, risks men taking over what have been longestablished and hard-won female spaces. There is also research to support the argument that men working in female-dominated professions, whether childcare, primary schools, nursing or social work, tend to benefit from what has been termed the ‘glass escalator’, being promoted into senior positions more rapidly than women (Snyder and Green, 2009; Cognard-Black, 2012). At the same time, some radical feminist and pro-feminist writers have suggested that social policies designed to enhance men’s role in families can be viewed as risking a reinstatement of patriarchy (Pringle, 1992, 1995). Similarly, some feminists, including those influenced by psychoanalytic accounts of gender relations (see the next section), remain pessimistic about men’s capacity to change simply as a result of playing a greater role in the care of children.

A third way (1): a psychosocial perspective So far this chapter has explored two ideological positions regarding men’s role in the care of children. What has been described as the conservative or traditionalist perspective on the one hand, and the progressive or egalitarian perspective on the other, are arguably the two dominant positions in discussion of the issue, whether in the policy context or in political, media and popular debates. It has been shown that there are important differences between the two perspectives, in relation to ideas about the nature of sexual or gender roles, the nature of the family and personal and intimate relationships, and the priorities for public policy as it relates to men, women, children and family life generally. It has also been demonstrated that each position has a number of key strengths when it comes to debating men’s role in the care of children, but also some significant weaknesses. The conservative position’s firm belief in more or less fixed sexual differences and in the complementarity of gender roles provides a powerful advantage in arguing for a distinctive role for men, whether as fathers or professionals, in the care and upbringing of children. This core belief also strengthens and motivates traditionalists’ critique of absent fathers, family breakdown and the apparent decline in the numbers of men in certain professions in contact with children, such as teaching. However, the main weakness in the conservative rhetorical armoury is the absence of an understanding of masculinity as something distinct from universal maleness, and consequently the lack of a sense of the dynamic and plural nature of masculine identities. This makes it difficult for those approaching the issue from a conservative perspective to be critical of some men, for example

58  Ideas and perspectives for their absence from family life, without being seen to criticise all men, and simultaneously makes it difficult for them to understand that men’s presence may not always be a good thing, or to criticise certain kinds of masculinity as being bad for children and families. By contrast, the progressive or gender-egalitarian perspective, because of its core belief in the constructed nature of gender, has a well-developed understanding of the dynamic and mutable nature of gender identities, which is a powerful driver in arguing for change in gender roles, and specifically for men to be more involved in the care of children. One of the strengths of this perspective is its grounding in an analysis of the social and historical variability in gender identities, and also an understanding, based in feminism, of the way that power operates in sustaining gender divisions. At the same time, this very constructionist belief is responsible for a central weakness in progressive arguments for a greater role for men in the care of children. Those arguing from this perspective find it difficult to describe a distinctive role for men in the care of children, without either reducing it to an argument for social change, or falling back on stereotypical views of gender differences. At the same time, it has been noted that those arguing from both perspectives share some beliefs and priorities in common. Both conservatives and progressive argue that men have an important role to play in family life and in work with children. Both perspectives also have in common a tendency to argue, at least at the level of policy debates, for the importance of male role models, particularly for boys, though their arguments on this point derive from very different starting points. Whereas conservatives maintain that boys need positive models in order to become healthy, ‘masculine’ men, progressives argue that both boys and girls need to see models of men caring for children, in order to bring about a changed future in which men’s care for children is normalised. Is it possible to move beyond this binary opposition, based on a clash between essentialism and social constructionism, and to identify a way of thinking about men’s care for children that addresses the weaknesses in each of these two positions, while building on their strengths? This section of the chapter and the one that follows will suggest that the flaws in each of the perspectives already discussed might be addressed by having recourse to alternative theoretical resources. This section will explore the contribution that a psychosocial perspective might make to debates about men’s care for children, while the next section will draw on insights from phenomenology. Psychosocial studies is a dynamic field of intellectual inquiry that has been growing in influence in recent decades. According to the website of the Association for Psychosocial Studies (undated), a psychosocial approach ‘studies the ways in which subjective experience is interwoven with social life’: Psychological issues and subjective experiences cannot be abstracted from societal, cultural, and historical contexts; nor can they be deterministically reduced to the social. Similarly, social and cultural worlds are shaped by psychological processes and intersubjective relations.

Ideas and perspectives  59 In other words, a psychosocial perspective shares with a social constructionist approach a concern with the ways in which subjective experiences – for example, of gender identity, or of care – are shaped by social contexts. But those working within this framework would suggest that a purely constructionist analysis risks reducing such experiences to the social and overlooks the vital role of intersubjective relations, including those early in life, in shaping experience. As Stephen Frosh has put it, a social constructionist view risks ‘flattening’ out emotional life and reducing it simply to the interplay of social forces (Frosh, 2002, 189). A psychosocial perspective seeks to combine a sense of the importance of social context with the insights of psychoanalysis. According to Wendy Hollway and Tony Jefferson, common to all psychoanalytic schools is ‘the idea of a dynamic unconscious which defends against anxiety and significantly influences people’s actions, lives and relations’ (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000, 19). Those working within a psychosocial framework would argue that these unconscious and intersubjective influences cannot be overlooked in attempts to understand issues relating to gender and care. Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, understood masculinity as ‘the repudiation of femininity’ and described a boy’s progress to healthy manhood as in some sense a rejection of his mother’s influence, prompted by a fear of femininity (Freud, 1937, 357). Hanlon summarises Freud’s position thus: ‘In normal development the boy puts aside a desire for the mother and identifies with the father. The father models masculinity for the boy, who distinguishes himself from women and femininity’ (Hanlon, 2012, 53). However, while recognising the strengths of Freud’s fundamental insights, psychoanalytic feminism has drawn principally on the object relations theory of Melanie Klein, which accords a more significant and positive role to relationships between children and their mothers (Klein, 1986). Jessica Benjamin has argued that the pressure on boys ‘to repudiate their identification with their mothers’ leads to them losing “a vital source of goodness inside” in the transition to adulthood’: Emotional attunement, sharing states of mind, empathetically assuming the other’s position, and imaginatively perceiving the other’s needs and feelings – these are associated with cast-off femininity, emotional attunement is now experienced as dangerously close to losing oneself in the other; affective imitation is now used negatively to tease and provoke. Thus the intersubjective dimension is increasingly reduced, and the need for mutual recognition must be satisfied with mere identification of likeness. . . . The devaluation of the need for the other becomes a touchstone of adult masculinity. (Benjamin, 1988, 170–171) Benjamin suggests that this masculine repudiation of the feminine in the transition to adulthood can help to explain gendered differences, for example in the capacity to care. This process is both the product of unequal gender relations, and at the same time the result of unconscious processes, thus suggesting why gender roles might be slow to change. At the same time, it is possible to imagine the process

60  Ideas and perspectives being different and that boys’ turning away from their mothers as they grow to adulthood might be defined by renunciation rather than repudiation. Commenting on this distinction, Wendy Hollway (2006, 94–95) argues that renunciation is more benign than repudiation and that there may be ways in which a boy can ‘preserve his earlier identificatory love with the mother’ and ‘preserve identificatory love with the pre-Oedipal father’. Hollway suggests that men’s capacity to care as fathers will depend, to some extent ‘on whether, as boys, these fathers succeeded in retaining their positive identifications with maternal capacities to care for them, while at the same time coming to terms with being boys’ (2006, 99). Benjamin argues that changes in gender relations might, in the long run, lead to the development of different forms of masculinity and femininity: ‘the changing world of social relations of gender have given us a glimpse of another world, of a space in which each sex can play the other and so accept difference by making it familiar’ (Benjamin, 1988, 169). In a similar way, the psychoanalytic feminist Nancy Chodorow has argued that what appear to be ‘specific personality characteristics in men’ should be seen as at least in part the product of the isolated nuclear family in contemporary society, and it is possible to imagine those characteristics changing under different social and gender relations (Chodorow, 1978, 181). While drawing on the work of Benjamin and Chodorow, Hollway is perhaps more pessimistic than they are about the prospects for change in gender roles, and about men’s capacity to provide the same kind of care for children as women (Hollway, 2006). Hollway argues that existing gender divisions cannot simply be wished away by social action. Her work offers a useful corrective to social constructionist accounts, suggesting that existing gender roles are more deeply rooted and less amenable to change than those accounts, based in social learning theory, maintain: Socialisation and learning theories assume that changes in the external world, in this case gender relations and positions, will be reflected in an unproblematic way in gendered subjectivities . . . this is not my view. The inner world is particularly salient during early development . . . This is why a developmental perspective is necessary to address my question about whether there is a gender to parenting. (2006, 84) Taking issue with some ‘progressive’ accounts of gender roles in the care of children, Hollway argues ‘that mothers and fathers cannot fill identical positions in early childcare’ and suggests that ‘gendered subjectivity and the capacity to care can never be simply read off external changes in gender relations’ (2006, 83, 85). Hollway contends that the development of a capacity to care has an important intergenerational component, providing a corrective to the view that a new generation can simply disavow the ways in which it was parented: Boys’ and girls’ gendered self development is affected by identifications with both their parents differently in every phase, as well as by the parents’ relationships and the parents’ identifications with their own parents and sons and daughters. The children’s own way of parenting and their

Ideas and perspectives  61 own later capacity to care will be affected in complex ways by an amalgam of these. (2006, 85) Hollway is also sceptical of ‘feminist post-modernism’ and its deconstruction of all fixed gender categories. Echoing Lupton and Barclay’s criticism of social constructionism’s tendency to see bodies as ‘endlessly malleable’, Hollway argues that it is important not to overlook the fact of ‘different bodies and their significance’ in considering men and women’s roles in the care of children: I have argued that there are psychic reasons for the father, or any ‘not mother’ object involved in caring at this early stage, to be experienced as different. If we are talking about a man here, this gains significance through the experience of difference at the somatic level. Held against his chest, the baby is cushioned in a different way, receives the pulse of a different heartbeat, hears a different register of voice. When the baby puts her first up to his face, she feels the bristly quality of his skin, in contrast to the mother’s. (2006, 91–92) As a consequence of these embodied gender differences, ‘the experience of care from the father or mother (or a surrogate carer, man or woman) is never going to be identical’. However, according to Hollway, this does not mean falling into the trap of biological determinism. Rather, ‘the role of biology is not deterministic because sexual differences get caught up in the creative imaginings of the inner world and are used in unique ways to inform a child’s struggle with developing a gendered subjectivity’ (2006, 92–93) . A psychosocial perspective provides a useful corrective to social constructionist assumptions that gender roles and divisions can be wished out of existence or that they will inevitably be dissolved in the course of social change or as a result of social policy. At the same time, the work of Benjamin, Hollway and others is a salutary reminder of the inescapably embodied nature of care, and the differences, as well as the similarities, in a child’s experience of care from differently sexed bodies.

A third way (2): a phenomenological perspective Another theoretical perspective that emphasises the embodied nature of care is the philosophical tradition known as phenomenology. Put simply, phenomenology is, according to Robert Sokolowski (2000, 2), ‘the study of human experience and of the way things present themselves to us in and through experience’. Its founding moment was the publication in 1900 of Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations which, writes Sokolowski, ‘can justly be considered the initial statement of the movement’. Phenomenology was developed in the writings of those who followed in Husserl’s wake, including in Germany Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and in France, among others, Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907–1960). Sokolowski distinguishes phenomenology from a ‘postmodern understanding of appearance’ in which ‘we have bricolage

62  Ideas and perspectives and nothing else, and we think we can even invent ourselves at random by assembling convenient and pleasing but transient identities out of the bits and pieces we find around us’ (2000, 4). Thus, phenomenology, like the psychosocial perspective examined above, offers a challenge to the relativism of social constructionist and poststructuralist accounts of experience. Dan Zahavi (2019, 46) also contrasts Husserl’s philosophy with ‘the relativism espoused by some social constructivists’. However, he maintains that Husserl’s ‘type of essentialism’, his concern with disclosing essential structures in lived experience, ‘should not be conflated with the kind of (socio-biological) essentialism criticised by many scholars in racial, postcolonial, and feminist studies according to which race, ethnicity, gender, etc. are fixed, inherent, and ahistorical determinations’. According to Linda Finlay, all schools of phenomenology ‘share a similar focus on describing lived experience and recognising the significance of our embodied, intersubjective lifeworld. To a greater or lesser extent, they all investigate consciousness and the intentional relationship between persons and situations’ (Finlay, 2009, 4). The work of the French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty (2014) has been especially influential in explorations of the embodied world of lived experience. According to Sokolowski, ‘Merleau-Ponty stresses the prereflexive, the prepredicative, the perceptual, the temporal, the lived body, and the life world’ (Sokolowski, 2000, 221). Maurice Hamington writes of Merleau-Pointy that his ‘phenomenological approach challenges objectivist epistemologies while also providing insight into the human experience and the moral workings of the flesh’. This ‘philosophy of the body provides a vehicle for finding deep meaning in the phenomenology of simple bodily interaction and movements’ (Hamington, 2002, 273). Hamington sees similarities with the work of Husserl’s student and assistant Edith Stein, arguing that ‘Stein reasserts the role of the body in claiming that all psychic phenomena are bound up with embodiment’ (2002, 72). The Finnish feminist philosopher Sara Heinamaa (2003, 2013) draws on the work of Merleau-Ponty, and on the writings of the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir, to offer a phenomenological analysis of sexual difference which has echoes of many of the arguments put forward from a psychosocial perspective by Hollway and others. Like Hollway, Heinamaa develops a critique of both essentialist and social constructionist accounts of gender – or, as she describes them, ‘naturalist’ and ‘constructivist’ theories – arguing that common to both is an ‘additive’ approach that leaves the biological or somatic facts of sex as unexamined and unproblematic. Instead, Heinamma, basing her thinking on Husserl’s original phenomenological insights into the ‘expressive body’, argues that ‘the living body forms an expressive whole’ and that it is impossible to separate sex and gender in the way that some social constructionists imagine. In a similar way to Hollway’s psychoanalytically influenced argument that one cannot see gender identity simply as ‘chosen’ by the individual, Heinemaa writes: To suggest that we decide to be men and women is to commit an intellectualist fallacy. Sexual identities are not and cannot be determined by will; they are experienced and formed already on the level of perception and motility. (2003, 68)

Ideas and perspectives  63 Heinamaa argues that ‘Husserl’s phenomenological inquiries into the structures of embodiment offer a very different starting point for the investigation of sexual difference than the ideas of gender and sex’: Whereas gender-theories aim at explaining observed differences between men’s and women’s behaviors, dispositions, accomplishments, and positions by the interplay of social, cultural, and biological forces, phenomenology studies how the sense of sexual difference is established in personal and interpersonal experiences in the first place. (2013, 5) According to Heinamma, Husserlian phenomenology ‘offers a philosophical alternative’ to contemporary gender theory’s understanding of human bodies: Instead of substituting social explanations for biological ones, or mixing both to theorize socio-biological interaction, it demonstrates that the explanatory framework of causes and effects on the whole is inadequate for the analysis of the plurality of our bodily existence and sexual difference as a dimension of this existence. (2013, 5) Like Hollway, Heinamaa highlights the inescapable nature of embodied sexual differences: We can of course mold our bodies in many ways, and today we can even change the shapes and functions of our sex organs. But if Merleau-Ponty is right, then sexual identity is not reducible to any such organ or function. On the one hand, it is something more encompassing, and on the other hand, it is more minute. It is detectable not (just) in the shape of the organs, but also, and more primarily, in the postures of the body, in the gestures of the face and the hands, and in the rhythms of their movements. These behaviors are not under the control of the will. Rather, volitional acts are dependent on them. (2003, 69) Elsewhere, Heinamaa argues that ‘there are two bodily norms for human embodiment: the masculine and the feminine body’ (2003, 86). This is not to suggest that there is no such thing as a shared human nature, or that men and women do not share more in common than divides them. Nor is it necessarily to argue that this is the way things ‘should’ be, but simply the way they are, as the consequence of the fundamentally embodied character of human existence. At the same time, Heinamaa is not seeking to reinstate biological essentialism. She writes of Beauvoir that she is not ‘uncritical of essentialist interpretations of according to which sexual duality is a stable structure of human existence’: But she also rejects nominalist and conceptualist positions by arguing that the duality is not merely linguistic or conceptual but an evident fact about

64  Ideas and perspectives perception: we can imagine sexless societies, but we see human bodies as masculine bodies and feminine bodies, and we experience our own bodies as belonging to one of these types. (2003, 87) What are the consequences of Heinamma’s ideas for our discussion of men’s care for children? As with Hollway’s psychosocial approach, Heinamaa’s phenomenological analysis suggests that there may be inescapable differences in the ways that men and women care for children, and the ways that children experience care from men and women, due to the fundamentally embodied nature of care and the fact that bodies are inescapably sexed. As Andrea Doucet has written: ‘The care of others is, quite simply, deeply embodied. Caring is filled with interactive, relational, and moral dimensions’ (Doucet, 2006, 240). Writing about her own research with fathers, Doucet comments that ‘what continually astounded me in this work was the weight of embodiment in fathers’ narratives’ (2006, 239). One caveat that must be entered here is that there are many different ways of being male and female, differences shaped by historical, cultural and social, as well as by personal and experiential factors. Heinemaa’s phenomenological perspective, like Hollway’s psychosocial account, is a useful corrective to the tendency of the progressive-constructionist position to see nothing ‘substantial’ in gender, and to minimise sexual difference. At the same time, taken together these two theoretical perspectives provide the resources that might make it possible to argue for a distinctive masculine contribution to the care of children, without falling back on the fixed and immutable sexual differences proposed by those who argue from a conservative-essentialist position. What might a phenomenological, or a phenomenologically influenced account of men’s care for children look like? One answer is provided by the writings of Maurice Hamington (2002), who works within a broadly pro-feminist tradition, but at the same drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty, and particularly the latter’s emphasis on the expressive body. Hamington writes of Merleau-Pointy that his ‘phenomenological approach challenges objectivist epistemologies while also providing insight into the human experience and the moral workings of the flesh’. This ‘philosophy of the body provides a vehicle for finding deep meaning in the phenomenology of simple bodily interaction and movements’ (2002, 273). Hamington uses as an example his own embodied care for his young daughter, exemplified in the experience of washing her hair. Hamington wants to argue that the ways in which bodies express care has been too little studied, and that the embodied care provided by men as fathers has been especially overlooked. He writes: ‘There are specific aspects of ethical understanding, such as a caring orientation, that find significant resources in the interactions of bodies, and yet the embodied aspect of morality has been largely ignored’ (2002, 270). Hamington proposes a greater role for men in the care of children: ‘Men, in their roles as fathers . . . have for too long been socialized to focus upon issues of duty and justice and not enough on care. The moral revolution I envision

Ideas and perspectives  65 springs from the changing ways men’s bodies relate to their children’ (2002, 270). Reflecting a phenomenological focus on the expressive body, Hamington continues: ‘The hand on the shoulder during a conversation, the arm around the waist during a sad moment, the playful roughhousing that lightens up a situation – all of these interactions have a verbal and visual context that we have learned to attend to, but they also have a subtext of touching that also communicates volumes’. In describing the experience of washing his daughter’s hair, Hamington reflects on the possible differences between a child’s experiences of a mother’s and father’s embodied care: Certainly a child can have similar tactile experiences with a mother, but I argue that caregiving in this manner on the part of the father adds significantly to the moral education of the child. Many Western social traditions have served to hide the male body and truncate embodied experiences of the father within the family. Knowledge of the father’s body does not have to be limited to corporeal punishment, roughhousing, or in an era of male abandonment, an absent mystery. Children can know their father’s body and touch as accessible, kind, and caring, just as tradition has allowed his understanding of women’s bodies . . . Acts of corporeal care by the father will break down the exclusive connection between motherhood and care. (2002, 275) Writing as a father who can recall similar experiences of embodied care for his own children, I find Hamington’s description and analysis poignant and affecting. However, I also feel a sense of disappointment that Hamington ultimately falls back on the argument that the value of this experience for a child is primarily moral or pedagogical, recalling the arguments of Warin and others that the justification for men’s involvement in the care of children is that it will contribute to breaking down gender binaries. Unlike Hollway’s analysis of a child’s differential experience of male and female bodies, Hamington ultimately draws back from a consideration of the ways in which a father’s embodied care might be different, simply because men’s bodies are different, and from an acceptance that this difference might also be something good in and of itself. Hamington does not say explicitly that men’s and women’s embodied care for their children may be different, but neither does he deny it: his interest is in the broader moral and political function of men’s care for children. By contrast with Hollway, Hamington elsewhere argues that ‘despite rhetoric to the contrary, and not to dismiss profound socially constructed differences, ultimately men’s and women’s bodies are much more alike than they are dissimilar’ (2002, 20). At the same time Hamington’s work is important in recovering the embodied nature of care. His work points towards a need for further research on the phenomenology of men’s care. To some extent, Gillian Ranson’s research on men’s experience of caring, building on Hamington’s work, has begun this (Ranson, 2015), while Andrea Doucet’s (2006) exploration of fathers’ distinctive caring practices, and Neil Hanlon’s (2012) research on men’s experience of caring, provide other

66  Ideas and perspectives examples. Doucet has written about the ‘embodied differences between mothers and fathers’, arguing like Hollway that to some extent this is due to mothers’ unique embodied experience of pregnancy, giving birth and breastfeeding, but also to some extent the result of men’s and women’s different social conditioning: ‘It should not be surprising that most fathers exhibit more traditionally masculine qualities in their caregiving, given that most boys grow up in cultures that encourage sport, physical and emotional independence, and risk taking’ (Doucet, 2006, 118).

Summary Discussion of the issue of men’s role in the care of children has been dominated by two ideological perspectives, a conservative perspective rooted in essentialist notions of gender and a belief in the traditional family, and a progressive perspective based on social constructionist theory and a belief in promoting gender equality and a change in gender relations. Both perspectives have significant strengths, but also some important weaknesses, that constrain their arguments. These weaknesses can be overcome to some extent by drawing on the theoretical resources of psychoanalysis and phenomenology, which might make it possible to move beyond the essentialist-constructionist binary and at the same time develop a nuanced understanding of the embodied and gendered nature of men’s care that does not depend on biological essentialism.

4

Identities and experiences

In previous chapters, we have explored some of the ways in which the issue of men’s care for children is represented in popular culture, and reflected in public discourses and debates, and in the last chapter we explored some of the underlying ideas and beliefs that inform these representations and discourses. In that last chapter, an attempt was made to move beyond the current binary opposition between, on the one hand, a conservative and essentialist and, on the other, a progressive or constructionist perspective on men’s care for children, by drawing on alternative theoretical resources, and in particular from psychosocial theory and phenomenology. In doing so, the chapter began to lay the foundations of an understanding of men’s capacity to care that was relational and embodied. This chapter attempts to develop that understanding further, by drawing directly on men’s experiences of caring and being cared for. The chapter draws on the findings from a number of research studies in which the author has been involved in the past two decades. These have included two small-scale studies, first of men working in early years childcare (Robb, 2001) and second of fathers closely involved in the care of their young children (Robb, 2004a, 2004b), as well as two more recent studies with colleagues, for which I was the principal investigator. ‘Beyond male role models: gender identities and practices in work with young men’ was a collaboration between The Open University and the charity Action for Children, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC Grant No. ES/K005863/1) between 2013 and 2015 (referred to in what follows as the 2015 study). Its aim was to explore the role of gender in work with young men using social care services in the United Kingdom (Robb, Featherstone, et al., 2015; Robb, Featherstone et al., 2017; Featherstone et al., 2017; Ward et al., 2017; Ruxton et al., 2018). ‘Young men, masculinity and wellbeing’ was a partnership between The Open University and Promundo, the US-based gender equality organisation, as part of a threecountry study in the United States, Mexico and The United Kingdom, exploring young men’s expectations of masculinity and the impact on their wellbeing (Robb, Ruxton et al., 2017; Robb and Ruxton, 2018; Heilman et al., 2017). The UK strand of the study, discussed here, consisted of focus group discussions with young men in London and Yorkshire (referred to in what follows as the 2017 study). The rationale for drawing on the experiences principally of young men in this chapter is that they constitute the current or coming generation of fathers, and

68  Identities and experiences male carers for children. As a consequence, it is of interest to explore their experiences and views concerning men’s role in the care for children, and more broadly on gender identity and relationships. The analysis focuses on what the participants in these studies had to say about their own formative experiences of caring and being cared for, and the links between these experiences and their expectations and aspirations as men. The discussion begins by examining what the men and boys in these studies said about their relationships with their fathers and mothers, and the impact on their own identities and capacity to care, before considering the ways in which they describe their own fathering, or aspirations to fatherhood. Finally, the chapter discusses the implications of these research findings for our understanding of the development of men’s capacity to care, and of caring masculinities.

Men and their fathers As discussed in previous chapters, the number of separated or reconstituted families is increasing, and many fathers have infrequent or irregular contact with their children. There was certainly plenty of confirmation in our studies of the growing phenomenon of paternal absence. Many of the men and boys in these studies reported either having grown up without a father present, or having had infrequent contact with their fathers. Young men in the 2015 study frequently described their fathers as having been physically absent from their lives. The experience of Adam, a young man in the West of Scotland, was fairly typical: Interviewer:

And where are you living at the moment? What’s your kind of situation? Adam: With my mam and sister. Interviewer: OK, so just your mam and your sister, so you’re kind of the man of the house then? Adam: (Laughs) I’ve always been the man of the house. Interviewer: Ah OK, so your dad’s not about then? Adam: Nah, he’s never been about. Several members of the 2017 focus groups bemoaned the lack of positive male figures in their immediate families as they were growing up. One described his experience of ‘two fatherly figures who’ve been very distant, in fact almost noncontactable’. Even when their fathers had been physically present, the men and boys in these studies often reported having had difficult or fractured relationships with them. Participants in these studies frequently expressed negative assessments of their own fathers, and of the ways in which they had been fathered. Gordon, a father in the 2004 ‘involved’ fathers study, said: My father’s dead, he died about ten years ago. He wasn’t an affectionate person, because he didn’t know how to be. He never touched me [. . .] Well, I’m not saying ever, but probably the only memories I’ve got of him touching me is probably hitting me.

Identities and experiences  69 A young man in the 2017 study said of his father: ‘I’ve learned growing up to not expect too much. Not to expect the ideal father-son relationship’, while a young man in the 2015 study said, ‘I’ve had trust issues stemming from my father’. A participant in the 2017 study noted that his assessment of his father’s parenting had become more negative over time. As a child, he thought that it was normal for fathers to be absent ‘because they had to go off and do their manly things’. However, he now believed ‘that was not an acceptable way to treat women and to treat your family’. Rather like the politician Alan Johnson quoted in Chapter 1, some young men regarded their fathers as negative role models, and as examples of fathering to be rejected. Caile from the West of Scotland, who was quoted in Chapter 2, said: I looked up to my father, my father was very criminally active . . . that was who I kind of looked up to at first, because that was my role model. Your father’s your superhero. His influence was actually bad, and I grew up thinking, that’s the right thing to do. At the same time, participants in these studies were not wholly negative in their opinions of their own fathers. One way of characterising what these men said about their relationships with their fathers, would be to say that many reported having ambivalent relationships with or feelings towards them (Robb, 2004a). On the one hand, they valued and respected their fathers for what they achieved, but on the other hand, they did not aspire to be like them, particularly in the way they expected to ‘father’ their own children. It may be that generational differences in attitudes and approaches to fathering can help to explain this ambivalence, and especially this sense of disidentification. On the positive side, some young men in our 2015 study expressed a sense of respect for their fathers, especially if they could be seen as doing the ‘right thing’, such as providing for their families. Eddie from the West of Scotland, put it in these terms: Interviewer: Are there Eddie: Aye, me father.

any guys you look up to then? Or people I should say?

[. . .]

Interviewer: Why do you look up to him then? Eddie: Just because he worked most days, he’s got

asbestosis now, because he used to do pipe covering years ago, work every f – ing day of his life, until I turned about 16 or so, when he was f – ed, just got big respect for the guy, put food on the table, aye, big respect for him, man.

Similarly, one young man in the 2017 study said ‘My dad’s like my mate, I could tell him all sorts’, while another said appreciatively of his stepfather ‘My dad’s not my real dad but he’s been there since day one’. However, this sometimes grudging respect was often combined with a criticism of fathers’ behaviour. Sean, a father in the 2004 study, said of his own father: ‘He was very much a get-up-and-go-to-work, come-home, tea-on-the-table,

70  Identities and experiences didn’t -have-a-lot-to-do-with-us type of father’. However, he added, in his father’s defence: ‘He was doing his job, and given the choice of being like my father . . . or being like a young man now with no responsibilities, I think I’d rather be like my dad.’ This sense of ambivalence, caught between admiration and criticism, was neatly captured by Paul, another father in the 2004 study, when he said of his own father: I don’t think he had much time to be a loving father, if you see what I mean. He was a father figure and that was it, yeah, he was the head of the family, and it was his responsibility to bring up the family. This ambivalent combination of attachment and distance, of affection and dislike, was also powerfully articulated by Harry, a young man in the 2015 study, when talking about his father: I haven’t chatted to him in, what is it, ten and a half years [. . .] And I will always love him, because he is my dad, but I don’t have any physical, or any face-to-face contact with him, because you know, I don’t respect him and don’t like him and just love him based on the fact that he is my dad. At the same time, there is an implicit sense of disappointment and yearning for a closer relationship with fathers in these responses, a wish that things could have been, or might still be, different. These findings echo those of earlier studies which identified a similar desire by boys for a greater emotional connection with their fathers. In the words of one young man quoted by Mac an Ghaill (1994, 100): I think in families the girls are closer to their mums and dads. But boys, who can they be close to? Like in our family and all my friends, the parents wouldn’t be close to their kids. I don’t know why. Like my dad spends all his time in the pub with his mates. Why doesn’t he want to be with me. Why doesn’t he say that he loves me? According to Frosh and colleagues (2002, 263–264), ‘there really does seem to be an embargo on close, dependent contact between young men and between them and their fathers’. They add that this feeling of paternal absence is part of ‘a broader sense of something missing emotionally in the lives of boys and men’ (2002, 259). These difficult or distant relationships with fathers, and ambivalent feelings about the way they themselves were fathered, were influential in men’s aspiration to form different kinds of relationships with their own children. As Gordon from the 2004 study put it, ‘My own father wasn’t really affectionate towards me, but I would see that element in the relationship with [my son]’ while Sean from the same study declared that his aim as a father ‘is to be close to my children, closer than my dad was, on an emotional level, that kind of thing’. As one of the young fathers in the 2017 expressed it: ‘As long as I’m nothing like my dad, I’m happy.’

Identities and experiences  71

Men and their mothers If the men and boys in these research studies tended to describe their relationships with their fathers in generally negative terms, they often reported having had positive relationships with their mothers and with other female relatives. If fathers were frequently described as absent or unreliable, then mothers were often said to provide a more consistent source of support, and many of the young men lived with their mothers rather than their fathers. Adam in the 2015 study reported that his father had never been around and that as a consequence he had always lived with ‘my mam and sister’, while Frankie contrasted his feelings towards his mother and father: ‘I’ve stayed with my mam all my life, me mam’s brand new, yer know [. . .] she’s like sound, yer know, easy going, ah but I do stay with my dad now, man, pain in the arse, but not much you can do, you know what I mean?’ In some cases, the relationship of care and support between mother and son was mutual and reciprocal, as in this example from the West of Scotland: Interviewer: And where do you live Davey? [. . .] By yourself or – ? Davey: With me mam. Interviewer: OK, and how’s that? [. . .] Davey: It’s all right aye, she’s kinda not well, so I kinda look after her as

well.

It could be argued that these young men had more to say about their relationships with their mothers than their fathers simply because the former were physically present, while fathers were, for whatever reason, not living with the family. Nevertheless, a picture emerges of many young men valuing their close relationships with their mothers. There are echoes here of the finding by Frosh and colleagues that mothers tended to be ‘more sensitive and emotionally closer to [boys] than their fathers who were seen to be more jokey, but also more distant and detached’ (Frosh et al., 2002). They quote one young man as saying: ‘I much prefer speaking to girls about my problems than I do boys, especially to older women . . . like my mum, my mum’s friends, even my nan’ (2002, 34). Grandmothers also played an important role in the lives of some young men in these studies, particularly when neither parent was living with them, or if there were other problems at home. ‘Nans’ and ‘grans’ seemed able to offer an alternative form of support, at a useful emotional distance from the more intense and often conflicted relationships with fathers and mothers. In the 2015 study, Robert, a care worker and former service user from Scotland, spoke about his relationship with his grandmother: Interviewer: Oh, you live with your gran do you? Robert: Aye. [. . .] I’m really close to her. I was at my

girlfriend’s there for a bit but me papa died last week [. . .] so we’ve been looking after the funeral, so I’ve been back at my gran’s [. . .] I’ve always stayed with my gran [. . .] since an early age. [. . .] I was always back and forward to my mum’s but she’s always had my brothers there [. . .] and me nephew and things like that so it was always crowded [. . .] so I was always to my gran’s.

72  Identities and experiences Tom, an older care worker who was also from the West of Scotland, described the part played by his grandmother in supporting him through his own troubled childhood: Interviewer: Oh OK, you were in care then? Tom: Aye, brought up in care, lived with my gran, my parents were drug and alco-

hol dependent, my gran then took me off my parents [. . .] I was only like a baby, couple of months old [. . .] Yeah I lived with my gran up until I was 13, then my gran died [. . .] So I went with my gran first, and then my mum and dad had my other brothers and then they got took into care and me and my gran fought for them and we got them out of care and to stay with us.

There was a definite sense in the 2017 focus group study of families as closeknit systems of support for young men – ‘They always just had my back’ – with mothers or stepmothers seen as particularly important figures. In the words of one young man: ‘Yeah, my step mum – that’s my mum basically . . . She just does everything for me’. Other participants cited the positive influence of female family members on their lives. One young man said that he had grown up in a female-dominated environment, and although he found being around women and girls ‘irritating’ at the time, ‘as I grew older and witnessed what they’ve done for me, and how they’ve been with me through life I was like, oh that’s pretty cool’. The men and boys in these studies often described their mothers, grandmothers or other female relatives as role models for their own parenting, or as an influence on their aspirations to fatherhood. A young man in the 2017 focus group study maintained that ‘the woman that I am going to marry is going to have the qualities that my grandma had . . . because basically she’s a good female, she’s a positive female’. He particularly valued how she had taken responsibility for him and his siblings when they came out of care. Another young man said of his mother: ‘She could be a good role model, she’s always honest, never gets into trouble.’ A number of the male childcare workers interviewed for my 2001 study also talked about having had particularly close relationships with their mothers, as well as with other maternal figures likes grandmothers and aunts, and described these close relationships as having a direct influence on their decision to work in childcare. Darren said: ‘I’ve got loads of cousins and younger cousins and things, just enjoyed when they come round, looking after them and things.’ Kevin, another young childcare worker, who was raised by his mother and grandmother, said: I suppose with being brought up by two women I’ve not been sort of taught how to go and mend a car or how to lay bricks or anything like that, so it wouldn’t have occurred to me to go and do a job like that anyway, whereas I’ve always been taught how to care for people, so it was just the natural thing to go into really. Not only did being brought up mainly by women have a direct influence on young men’s decision to work in childcare, but growing up in a female-dominated

Identities and experiences  73 environment often gave them an early experience of caring. Given the negative way in which lone mothers’ influence on their sons is often viewed, this seemed to represent a fresh and positive insight. Could the decision to work in a traditionally ‘feminine’ occupation, and the development of a more affective and expressive masculinity, have something to do with a strong maternal influence or more general female influence in a boy’s life? As already noted, the fathers interviewed for the 2004 study tended to report ambivalent or negative feelings about their own fathers, with very few of them regarding their fathers as a positive influence on their own parenting. However, they frequently cited their mothers as having had an impact on the way they were bringing up their own children. Sean described his mother’s influence on his fathering in this way: I think that my mum, certainly in the sense of emotional connection for, or practical needs being met, I would certainly perceive those as coming mostly from my mum. And, you know, the fact that I might have to get my young daughter up and wash her and give her a meal and make that some kind of experience that’s nurturing, I wouldn’t really be able to recollect a memory from having had that from my father. So I would be using memories or experiences from my mother to remember, you know, how that was accomplished and what that felt like and what might be nice about it and so on. As well as providing evidence of the positive influence of mothers on men’s parenting, this quotation demonstrates the broader importance of embodied experiences of being cared for in the development of a man’s capacity to care. What Sean describes here is a very tactile, embodied ‘experience of nurturing’ – experiences of washing and preparing food, for example – that recall Hamington’s embodied care for his daughter, described in the previous chapter (Hamington, 2002). Sean vividly describes the way in which, as a father, he uses these ‘memories and experiences. . . . to remember . . . how that was accomplished and what it was like’, and the ways in which they are carried forward into his care for his own daughter. These reports of close relationships between men and their mothers, and of the explicit influence of mothers on men’s own care for their children, are not unique to these studies. Among other findings to emerge from Jane Reeves’ study of young fathers using social services, it was striking that many of the young men she interviewed talked about having particularly close relationships with their mothers and grandmothers, and about how these relationships had contributed to their decision to stay with their partners and be a ‘good father’ (Reeves and Rehal, 2008). Reeves’ research also highlighted the key role of grandmothers in encouraging young men to stay with their partners and take responsibility for their children, while in a separate study Gavin Swann concluded that the mothers of girlfriends are the primary gatekeepers determining whether a young father will be able to play an active role in his child’s life (Swann, 2015). Diane Reay’s (2002) case study of Shaun describes a working-class boy caught between the influence

74  Identities and experiences of his male peer group and that of his single mother. Reay quotes Shaun’s teacher as saying about him: of all the boys he’s the one most in touch with his feminine side, believe it or not. I do think he’s more in touch with his feminine side but then he lives with three women, his mum, who he idolises, his elder sister, who he idolises, and his baby sister, who he idolises, so his feminine side is very much to the fore. All of these studies suggest that close relationships between boys and their mothers might play a significant role in men developing a capacity to care, and in shaping more expressive and nurturing masculinities. For some young men interviewed for these studies, problematic relationships with their fathers, and closeness to their mothers, meant that they found it difficult to trust male workers and preferred to work with female staff. Lewis from the 2015 study said: ‘I have always got on with females more, and that’s only because I grew up with a lot of females in my life, I never had a male role model in my life, so you know, it’s also that as well’, while Harry said: ‘I don’t know really, when it comes to that sort of thing, like the relationship I have with my dad, what I, I haven’t had that sort of male sort of figure thing, so um, you know I find it more difficult to get on with men, because I find men more opinioned and more like, back-offish type thing, and with women, I find I can get along with them better.’ Concerns about absent fathers and ‘men deserts’, moral panics about the ‘problem’ of boys, and a supposed lack of positive male role models for young men, have meant that the positive role played by mothers and women generally in men’s lives and development, and especially in the development of a capacity to care, has often been overlooked. In some instances, and particularly in the case of lone mothers, as was noted in Chapter 2, women’s role in boys’ upbringing has often been stigmatised or pathologised. More generally, there has been a tendency in studies of masculinity to focus attention on boys’ relationships with their fathers, and to pay less attention to relationships with mothers. This relative silence about mothers and sons is reflected in popular discourse. According to journalist William Sutcliffe (2008): Men are more likely to confess to a predilection for pornography than admit to a close relationship with their mother. There isn’t much left that the modern man is made to feel ashamed of, yet confessing to your friends that you sometimes call your mum for a chat is something few do. Even though a man’s mother is likely to be the second most important woman in his life, even though he may have deep feelings of love for her, this is a relationship about which men are sheepish, secretive and often outright embarrassed. These feelings of embarrassment are reinforced by many of the images of men’s relationships with their mothers visible in popular culture, images for the most part of domineering mothers and submissive sons. As noted in the previous chapter,

Identities and experiences  75 these in turn have been supported by some strains of psychoanalytic theory, which view men’s closeness to their mothers as something to be fought free from if an autonomous, adult masculine identity is to be achieved. Nevertheless, the research studies cited here suggest that many boys and young men have close and formative relationships with their mothers, and that mothers can play a key role in boys’ development, and particularly in the development of caring masculine identities.

Being a father While the 2004 study focused on men who were already fathers and closely involved in the care of their children, some of the young men in the 2005 and 2017 studies were also fathers, while for others becoming a father was a key component of how they saw their futures as men. Perhaps the most striking thing to report about the ways in which these young men discussed their own fathering, or potential fathering, is that they took the role extremely seriously and regarded fatherhood as a central part of their masculine identities. As one young man in the 2017 study said: ‘Being a young father is just like a lot of responsibility, and something that you push yourself to hit the mark with.’ As was noted above, the men and boys in these studies tended to reject their own fathers as models for their own parenting. The most dramatic example was Caile from the 2015 study: Then I started having my own child, and I’m sitting in the jail, and I’m thinking, I’m doing exactly what my dad done to me. This isn’t right, I need to get out of this situation and stop. The fathers in the 2004 study, as well as repudiating their own fathers’ example, were also critical of other fathers who were physically or emotionally absent from their children’s lives. Paul said: ‘You can give them everything, but what they need, what they want is your time . . . and for you to show them, you know, what you think about them.’ Tony, another father in the same study, distanced himself from fathers who are ‘absent a lot of the time, you know, they leave the house at seven in the morning, or whatever, and don’t get back until seven at night’. By contrast, he says: ‘I do feel that, most of the time, I’m there for them.’ These fathers had internalised aspects of the discourse of father absence that was described in Chapter 2. Reflecting current notions of what constitutes a ‘good’ father, they suggested that the most important and fundamental quality of modern fatherhood was being ‘there’ for your children. Beyond this shared emphasis on ‘presence’, the ways in which the men in these studies described fatherhood varied considerably, with some expressing quite conventional attitudes to a father’s role, and others emphasising a more affective role and the importance of taking an equal share in childcare and household responsibilities. Sean from the 2004 study said: ‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong, and I think on the contrary it’s good for men like myself to try and have

76  Identities and experiences this meaningful emotional relationship with their children, and that we also try and do the practical domestic tasks.’ However, some of the young men in the 2017 study emphasised more traditional aspects of fatherhood, such as providing for a family and the need ‘to be stable financially’. Young men in a mostly Asian focus group noted that, in their communities, fathers and mothers still tended to be cast in quite traditional terms, with fathers viewed primarily as breadwinners and women as carers for children. However, these young men also accepted that this traditional model did not fully represent today’s reality, and that being a father now involved sharing childcare and having an emotional connection with one’s children. As one young man in this group said: ‘It’s changed a lot now, you have a lot of stay-at-home dads and women that work.’ Another member of the group described his own fathering role as being like that of a ‘friend’, but he added, reflecting a more traditional emphasis: ‘you’re always tutoring them and watching them’. The traditional father’s role as protector was also highlighted by members of this group, especially with regard to girls: ‘[fathers] always want to protect their daughter from evil people, evil stuff’. But this combined with a modern emphasis on ‘presence’ and on emotional engagement, and echoed some aspects in the discourse of father absence discussed in Chapter 2 in expressing a fear that ‘if [your father’s] not there emotionally or physically you turn to outside sources’. Interestingly, and perhaps unexpectedly, it was the participants in a focus group of mostly teenage boys who espoused some of the most conventional notions about a father’s role, and their own aspirations to fatherhood. There was general agreement among these young men that they needed to be in the ‘right’ position financially and materially before they could become fathers. As one participant said: ‘I just want to have kids when I settle down really. Get a decent house, decent car and that.’ One said that he ‘could have a kid accidentally, but if I did I wouldn’t treat it any different’. These young men tended to express quite traditional views about the roles of mothers and fathers (for example, some thought that only mothers should change nappies) but nevertheless did not see their role as simply being breadwinners: ‘I wouldn’t put it down towards me just providing obviously.’ These examples, and those from the Asian young men’s group, are perhaps evidence of a continuing diversity of views about a father’s role, a diversity that is structured according to social class, ethnicity, geographical location and other social factors. These findings are also evidence that ideas about what constitutes ‘good’ fatherhood are in flux, so that men who are fathers, and those who aspire to become fathers, are able to draw on ideas from a range of discourses, including both traditional and newer aspects of fatherhood, in forming their own ideas about the kind of father they wish to be. Despite these differences, there was a shared sense among participants in these studies, and particularly among those who were already fathers, of the transformative effect of becoming a father on a man’s identity. As one young man in the 2017 study expressed it: ‘You’re not really chasing the money anymore . . . You’re chasing the happiness of your family, and your child’s upbringing.’ In

Identities and experiences  77 these studies there were certainly examples of young men who were not in contact with children they had fathered, for whatever reason. In a focus group in 2017 with young men in South London, one young father said: ‘I’ve got one, he’s two . . . I don’t get to see him’, while another said ‘I’ve got a daughter and she’s about two months now . . . I don’t get to see her that much’. However, for other young fathers, the experience of having a child had proved to be transformative. Eddie and Adam, from the West of Scotland, interviewed for the 2105 study, spoke about how their experience as young fathers had changed their sense of priorities: Interviewer: And are you in a relationship at the moment? Eddie: Aye, got a wee bairn as well [. . .] a three year old, yeah

. . .

three in March.

Interviewer:

Now have you got any plans for the future, say, where you want to be? Adam: Just get a f – ng decent job, I got a wee child to provide for [. . .] She’ll be in two in January. To some extent, our findings echoed those of other studies that have demonstrated the positive role of young fatherhood in enabling young men to desist from ‘risky’ behaviour (Reeves and Rehal, 2008; Speak et al., 1997). At the same time, however, many young men reported difficulties in negotiating a route from the risky young masculine identities that had created problems for them in the past, and towards a new identity as a reliable parent and provider for their child. A number of the young fathers that we interviewed described the problems they experienced in juggling disparate masculine identities and conflicting sets of relationships. In a focus group at a project in the West of Scotland, visited for the 2015 study, Burt and Johnson talked about the difficulties in negotiating their new identities as young fathers: Burt:

Obviously I got bairns and that, so I’ve had to grow up [. . .] For me now my life’s about getting a job, family, basically, in a nutshell it is family, that is like, very, very important [. . .] I’m trying to be a respectful person, I don’t wanna walk down the street, and seeing all that stuff, because when I am walking down the street with my wee boy, if I’ve been doing that at the weekend, rolling about with people, then I am walking down the street and I might bump into these people you know. Johnson: And they might not even care you got yer bairns with yer. Burt: Exactly! You’ve got their risks, you’ve also got, I can be walking down the street on a Friday night, and singing songs and I’ll get ‘Who you looking at, yer dafty’, you know what I mean, and that image, other mums and dads maybe walking down the street who are out for a wee quiet drink at the weekend and then they see me walking down the street day with my wee boy, what they gonna think? They’re gonna think, that’s the boy I seen yesterday

78  Identities and experiences kicking stuff about and smashing things, fighting with people, and he’s walking down the street with a bairn, what kind of dad’s he gonna be? There is a real sense in Burt’s narrative of the challenge of managing different aspects of his identity, including different kinds of masculinity, in different contexts, and of how easily his new identity as a young father might be threatened and overwhelmed by the former identity associated with a local culture of hypermasculine behaviour. In other words, while the experience of young fatherhood can certainly open up the possibility of alternative and more positive masculine identities for young men from troubled backgrounds, the process of achieving that new identity is by no means easy or straightforward. It involves a continuing struggle between often competing identities and sets of relationships. For young men, even those from troubled backgrounds, the experience of becoming a father can nevertheless help them to make the transition from reckless – and ‘care-less’ – young masculinity, to positive, responsible – and ‘care-ful’ – adult masculinity,

Developing caring masculinities: towards a relational model The research findings presented in this chapter suggest that male role model discourse, depending on ideas from social learning theory, offers an inadequate and misleading framework for understanding male development, and specifically for understanding how men and boys develop a capacity to care. As the research team from the 2015 study noted, ‘the male role model discourse is premised on outmoded and simplistic theoretical foundations’ while its assumptions are ‘underpinned by socialization theory and sex role theory, both of which have been subject to extensive criticism, particularly by feminist scholars’ (Tarrant et al., 2015, 71; see also Hicks, 2008; Martino, 2008). Even if it is accepted that role models, however that term is understood, play some part in the development of men’s gender identities, the ways in which the young men represented in these studies describe their experiences suggest that there is no reason why those models have to be male. The ways in which many of the men and boys who participated in these studies describe their relationships with their mothers, and their mothers’ influence on their own parenting, suggest that mothers, and women generally, have a positive role to play in that process, and particularly in modelling caring adult identities. There is, of course, no reason why a caring father should not be able to exert the same influence on a boy’s capacity to care, but under present gender relations, the evidence of these studies is that mothers are more likely to play this role, and in that context it is important to emphasise the possibility, and the importance, of cross-gender identifications. At the same time, these findings would suggest that the imitative model of development underlying the emphasis on role models is much too simplistic to capture the complex and dynamic ways in which early experiences of relationships of care shape men’s identities. Children develop their gender identities within the intersubjective contexts of family relationships and in peer groups beyond the family. The feminist care ethicist Eva Feder Kittay (1999) suggests ‘that in order

Identities and experiences  79 to grow, flourish, and survive or endure illness, disability and frailty, each individual requires a caring relationship with significant others who hold that individual’s well-being as a primary responsibility and a primary good’. Elsewhere she argues that being a person ‘has little to do with rationality and everything to do with our relationships to our world and to those in it’. She continues: We do not become a person without the engagement of other persons – their care, as well as their recognition of the uniqueness and the connectedness of our human agency, and the distinctiveness of our particularly human relations to others and of the world we fashion. (Kittay, 2002) Beyond the influence of relationships, it is also important to emphasise the impact on developing gender identities of the kinds of cultural images and representations, and wider social discourses, that were discussed in earlier chapters. In order to understand the ways in which men develop a capacity to care, or what might be called caring masculinities, there is a need for a relational and intersubjective model of gender development that takes all of these influences and processes into account. The research findings discussed in this chapter demonstrate that men’s capacity to care is shaped by their embodied experiences of being cared for, and that those tactile memories and traces have a direct influence on a man’s own caring practices. However, they also show that the actual experience of caring for another person can be transformative for boys and men, with early opportunities to care for family members often contributing to a decision to work in the care field, and the experience of caring for one’s own child potentially leading to a radical change in masculine identity, even if this process is not always easy or straightforward. At the same time, it is important to argue that the experience of early relationships, especially where these have been unsatisfactory or disturbed, is not necessarily determinative. Many of the young men interviewed for the studies cited in this chapter had experienced disrupted relationships with their fathers, and not all were fortunate enough to have a caring mother who was able to substitute for this key relationship. However, the evidence particularly from our 2015 study, primarily with young men using social care services, is that later relationships of care and support can to some extent compensate for these negative early experiences. The experiences of the young male service users at a project in the West of Scotland, visited for the 2015 study, were particularly instructive. These young men, most of them having experienced severely disrupted family relationships early in life, valued the transformative experience of care from mostly male professionals. The experience of being cared for, particularly by other men, can repair those early wounds, but only if that care is, as the young men themselves repeatedly emphasised, consistent and respectful. As Eddie said of the workers at the project: ‘They are just good people man, generally good people man, good people, they don’t treat you like scum like some other people do’, while Burt said, ‘You know you can trust them’. And as Willie, a support worker noted: ‘This might sound like

80  Identities and experiences a cliché, but you need to care, you actually need to care, these boys are, whatever has gone on in their life, one of the phrases I like is, be kind, everyone you meet is fighting a great battle, so you should just be nice to people.’ Finally Joan, a support worker in a project for young men in London, maintained that being an effective worker with children and young people was more than simply a matter of having the right qualifications: ‘Because it’s more about care. It’s about the love aspect, you know, it’s about relationship, about respecting them as individuals.’

Summary Many men have experienced difficult or disrupted relationships with their fathers and retain ambivalent feelings about the ways in which they were fathered. Young men, and the current generation of fathers, tend to reject their fathers as models for their own parenting and seek a closer and more emotionally engaged relationship with their own children. Boys have often experienced closer relationships with their mothers than their fathers, and mothers can play a positive role in the development of men’s capacity to care, providing a model for their own parenting. A relational model of men’s gender development is needed to replace the emphasis on social learning and the imitation of male role models, and embracing the complex, intersubjective influences that shape a man’s caring identity.

Conclusion

The preceding chapters have shown that the subject of men’s role in the care of children has been a persistent concern of contemporary culture and social discourse. There are many possible explanations for this. It may be that this concern is simply a reflection of changing gender roles, and a need to discover how men fit into a transformed gender landscape in which women increasingly assume many of the social roles traditionally occupied by men. Perhaps it represents a search for a new and more expressive and caring masculinity, or the long-overdue restoration of a pre-industrial closeness between men and their children, from which the past two centuries have been an aberrant departure. More negatively, this insistent anxiety about men’s relationship with children may simply be a response to the growing moral panic about father absence and family breakdown, seen as the root cause of a whole raft of other social problems. At the same time, the representations of, and discourses surrounding men’s care for children are replete with contradictions, caught between emerging ideals of the ‘new’, caring father, and lingering fears of the risky or feckless dad. These tensions might simply reflect that change is always slow, with ideas about men as carers currently in a transitional phase, but they may also speak to a persistent collective ambivalence about men and children. That ambivalence is reflected in the unresolved tension between the discourses of equality and risk that characterise debates around this issue, and particularly about men working in childcare. It is remarkable that increasing calls in recent years for more men to work with children have co-existed with increasing fears about sexual abuse committed by men. The powerful discourse of father, and broader male absence, has also shaped much public discussion of men’s role in family life and in the care and welfare professions. Depending on a social learning model that emphasises the importance of role models in children’s development, and particularly in boys’ transition to healthy adult masculinity, this discourse has presented the absence of fathers and the lack of positive male figures in children’s lives as the foundational cause of a whole range of social problems, rather than as simply one component in a nexus of contributory causes. While containing a grain of truth – children raised by two loving adults usually fare better than those brought up by a single parent – this discourse of absence is fundamentally flawed because of its reluctance, rooted in an inadequate understanding of gender identities, to see that men and masculinity

82 Conclusion might in some cases be the problem, rather than the simple solution. At the same time, this focus on absent men risks minimising or stigmatising the positive role that mothers and other women play in children’s development. Chapter 3 demonstrated that, in order to fully understand the tensions and contradictions in current debates about men, children and care, and to move beyond them, it is necessary to critically analyse the ideological perspectives, and theoretical ideas, that inform them. The dominant conservative and progressive perspectives on the issue, relying on essentialist and constructionist theories of gender identity, respectively, are distinguished by a belief in the traditional family, on the one hand, and an emphasis on promoting gender equality, on the other. Both perspectives possess key strengths, but also significant weaknesses. If the conservative perspective is constrained by its lack of understanding of the variable and mutable nature of gender identity, then the progressive perspective’s commitment to gender fluidity limits its ability to argue for a distinctive role for men in the care of children. In order to move beyond this dominant ideological binary, and to counter each of these perspectives’ weaknesses, it may be necessary to draw on additional or alternative theoretical resources. A psychosocial perspective can provide a sense of how gender identities, and gendered roles in caring, are rooted in early experiences of caring and are inescapably embodied. This is not to argue that gender roles are unable to change, but the work of psychoanalytic feminist writers suggests that such change may be slower and less straightforward than those arguing from a social constructionist position might imagine. In a similar way, a phenomenological perspective, with its emphasis on the expressive body, opens up the possibility of moving beyond the binary opposition between essentialism and social constructionism, and at the same time suggests that there may be no escape, ultimately, from the gendered nature of human embodiment, and therefore from the acceptance of some differences in the ways that men and women care. These alternative theoretical resources can contribute to a deeper understanding of the ways in which men care for children, and how they develop a capacity to care. The research findings discussed in Chapter 4, while confirming that many men have suffered from difficult or disrupted relationships with their fathers, suggested that most are determined not to follow their own fathers’ example and are committed to developing a more engaged fathering role in relation to their own children. Their experiences also revealed the importance, often overlooked in the context of the emphasis on male role models, of mothers in caring for their sons and in providing a model of care that could have a positive impact on their own parenting. Encouragingly, the research studies discussed here noted that young men take their responsibilities as fathers, or future fathers, seriously, even if the transition to a fathering identity is not always simple or straightforward for many men. These findings confirmed the important part played by the experience of being cared for in men’s development of a capacity to care, and pointed towards the need to develop a relational model of gender identity development to replace the emphasis on simplistic social learning theories. That new model needs to highlight

Conclusion  83 not only the importance of receiving care, but the significant part played in the development of caring identities of the embodied experience of caring. If one thing is clear from the discussion in the previous chapters of the book, it is that more work is needed in order to understand more fully the distinctive nature of men’s care for children, whether within the family or in professional practice. At a practical level, further research is needed on men’s embodied experiences of caring, and on the experiences of children being cared for by men, of the fine-grained kind pioneered by Maurice Hamington (2002) and Gillian Ranson (2015). This needs to be seen in the context of, and in comparison with, women’s experiences of caring and children’s experience of care from mothers and female professionals. There is a need for a deeper understanding of what these gendered experiences have in common and what, if anything, makes them distinctive. Such research needs to pay attention, also, to the ways in which social factors, such as age or generation, social class, ethnicity and culture, intersect with gender in experiences of caring and being cared for. More research is also needed on the formative role of early experiences of receiving and giving care in the development of men’s caring identities. Does the experience of being raised by women, or with strong female influences, always have a decisive influence on a man’s later capacity to care for his own, or other people’s children? Can ‘caring’ or engaged fathers play the kind of role that our research shows mothers tend to play, in enabling their sons to develop as caring men? And can later experiences of being cared for substitute for a poor experience of being cared for at an early age? Research might also help to answer the question of why some men, rather than others, choose to follow a career in childcare, or to be closely involved in the care of their own children. More understanding is needed, too, on the influences that might mitigate against the development of caring masculinities. In addition to this kind of research at a practical and experiential level, I would argue that more work is needed at a theoretical level on the contentious issue of gender differences in relation to care, moving beyond the essentialistconstructionist binary and drawing on the insights of psychoanalysis and phenomenology, and perhaps other sources, to provide a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the embodied and gendered nature of care. If the differences in men’s and women’s caring practices are the result of their different experiences of embodiment, does this mean that those differences can never be transcended? This further practical and theoretical work will have important implications, not only for our understanding of the fundamental human practice of caring for children, but for the future development of social policy, and most importantly for the wellbeing of children.  

Appendix Details of the research studies discussed in Chapter 4

Men, masculinity and childcare Funded by an internal Open University grant, this study consisted of in-depth interviews with five men between the ages of 17 and 57 working in a variety of childcare settings in southern England. Four of the participants were white and one black (British African).

Fathers and identity Funded by an internal Open University grant, this study consisted of in-depth interviews with five fathers of young children, aged between 33 and 42, four of them white and one black, all living in southern England.

Beyond male role models ‘Beyond male role models: gender identities and practices in work with young men’ was an ESRC-funded study undertaken by The Open University in association with Action for Children. Fifty young male service users, aged between 18 and 25, were interviewed at projects for young offenders, young people ‘at risk’, care leavers and those who were disabled, in England, Scotland and Wales: 60% of those interviewed were white and 40% from black and minority ethnic backgrounds.

Young men, masculinity and wellbeing This study formed part of a wider three-country research programme in the United Kingdom, United States and Mexico, organised by Promundo and sponsored by Axe-Unilever, consisted of two focus group discussions in London and two in Yorkshire. Twenty-five young men aged 18–30 took part and 30% of the participants were white and 70% from black and minority ethnic groups (mainly African, African-Caribbean and South Asian).

Appendix  85 The names of participants in these studies have been changed, except for those young men from the 2015 study who appeared under their own names in a video made as part of that project. That film, Beyond male role models: working with young men can be viewed here: www.open.ac.uk/health-and-social-care/research/beyond-male-rolemodels/node/14

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Index

About Time (film) 12 absence, paternal: from boys’ and men’s lives 68–70; in fatherhood discourse 32– 44, 75–76; in representations of fatherhood 7–8, 11, 14, 17–19, 22 advertisements 16, 20, 52, 56 Advertising Standards Authority, UK 16 affectionate masculinity 7, 12, 19, 68, 70–71 Andrew Marr (television show) 22 Asian men 76 Auerbach, C. F. 33–34 Barclay, L. 5–7, 11, 16, 25–26, 53, 61 Benjamin, Jessica 59–61 black boyhood 41– 44 bodies 30, 53, 61, 63–65 Bottaro, Greg 49–50 Boyhood (film) 14–16 boys: feminization of 31, 41– 44; seeking emotional connection 54, 59–60, 68–70, 71–76, 79–80; seeking male role models 18–19, 29, 32–38, 78 Bruzzi, Stella 6–10 Butler, Judith 27, 53 Cameron, C. 2, 26, 29 Cameron, David 33 Cameron, Deborah 49 campaigns 29–30, 34, 47, 51–52, 55 Centre for Social Justice (UK) 32–33 Cheaper by the Dozen (film) 10 child abuse see sexual abuse childcare, professional: campaigns for more men in 29–30, 51–52, 55; and gender equality 28–29 Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (film) 7–10 Chodorow, Nancy 60 Chris, Torben 21

Christopher Robin (film) 13 Coffey, Tāmati 19 Connell, R. W. 54–55 conservative perspective 47–52 constructionist perspective 53, 58–62, 66, 82–83 cross-gender identification 79–80 cultural images see representation ‘dad blogs’ 23–24 Daddy Day Camp (film) 10 Daddy Daycare (film) 10 dads see father figures de Beauvoir, Simone 62–64 Dench, Geoff 33, 48 Dermott, Esther 2, 27, 34 discourse analysis 25–26 discourses of fatherhood see fatherhood discourse discourse theory 53 divorce 11, 33, 36, 44, 48, 57; see also family breakdown Doucet, Andrea 2, 27, 64–66 Douglas, Mary 31 Duncan Smith, Iain 35–40, 41–44, 52 Early Years Workforce Strategy (England) 29 Edley, Nigel 25, 53 Elf (film) 12 equality see gender gender-egalitarian perspective essentialism: and gender 27, 38, 43–44, 48–49, 53, 62–64; and race 43 ethnicity 41–44 Facebook: dad blogs linking to 23; fathers’ posts on 20–21 family breakdown 32–34, 48, 57, 81; see also divorce

Index  95 father figures: in cultural representation 11–18; in men’s lives 33, 68–70 fatherhood discourse 25–26, 44–45; and absence 32–35; and children at risk 29–32; and erasure of men from family life 35–41; and feminization of black boys 41–44; and gender equality 26–27; and men working in childcare 28–29; and ‘new’ fatherhood 27–28; see also representation femininity: as malleable 27, 54–55; men’s attunement toward 8, 63–64, 73–74; men’s repudiation of 59–60; see also gender feminism 23–24, 27, 54, 58–59 feminist ethics 49, 78–79 feminist perspective 8–10, 49, 54–57, 60–64, 78–79, 82 films about fatherhood 5–16, 84–85 financial stability 46–47, 76 Fine, Cordelia 49 Fine-Davis, M. 27 Finlay, Linda 62 Fiske, J. 5 Foucault, Michel 25 fragile masculinity 51 Freud, Sigmund 59 Friedman, May 23–24 Frosh, S. 59, 70–71 gay men: in childcare profession 31–32; and fatherhood 34, 35 gender: complementarity 49–50, 51, 56, 57; constructionist view of 9, 27–28, 53–54, 55–61; and equality in fatherhood discourse 26–27; essentialist view of 38, 43–44, 48–49, 62–64; performativity 53; stereotypes 16, 19–20, 28, 56; see also femininity; masculinity gender-egalitarian perspective 52–57 Gender Recognition Act (UK) 48 generational differences 22, 60–61, 69–70 Gilligan, Carol 49 ‘glass escalator’ 57 Golombok, Susan 33 Goodbye Christopher Robin (film) 12–13 grandmothers 71–73 Gray, John 49 Hall, Stuart 31 Halsey, A. H. 33 Hamilton (musical) 17 Hamington, Maurice 62, 64–65, 73, 83

Harnett, P. 29 Harry Potter (literature and film series) 13–14 Hartley, J. 5 Heidegger, Martin 61 Heinamaa, Sara 53, 62–64 Hollway, Wendy 59–66 Houseboat (film) 7–8 Huffington Post (website) 19–20 Husserl, Edmund 61–63 images, cultural see representation Internet see Mumsnet; news about fathers; online dads IVF 33–34 Jefferson, Tony 59 Kaplan, E. Ann 10 Kittay, Eva Feder 49, 78–79 Klein, Melanie 59 Kramer vs Kramer (film) 11 Kunze, Peter 16 Lee, J. 29 Levinas, Emmanuel 61 liberal perspective 52–57 literature representing fatherhood 13–14, 18–19 lone parents 32–34, 36–39, 41, 50, 56–57, 73–74 Look Who’s Talking (film) 10 Lupton, D. 5–7, 11, 16, 25–26, 53, 61 ‘magic bullet’ solution 40–41 ‘male role model’ discourse 18, 26, 29–34, 38, 42, 50–52, 72–74 Mallard, Trevor 1, 19 Martin-Webber, Jeremy 20 Mary Poppins (film) 7–9, 13 Mary Poppins Returns (film) 7–8, 10 masculinity: affectionate 7, 12, 19, 68, 70–71; caring 78–80; fragile 51; mutability of 27, 40, 53–54, 56–58; toxic 52; see also gender media representations see representation Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (book) 49 ‘men deserts’ 32, 38, 74 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 61–64 Miracle on 34th Street (film) 11 Moat, Raul 22 moral panics 29–30, 34, 74, 81 mother-blaming 41–44

96 Index mothers 71–75; see also femininity; lone parents Mrs Doubtfire (film) 11 Mumsnet (website) 23, 31 murder 21–23 Murray, Charles 33, 48 Murray, Susan 31–32 musical theatre representing fatherhood 17 ‘Named Person’ (Scotland) 28 narcissism 21–22 ‘new’ fatherhood 21, 24, 27–28 New Labour governments 52 ‘new’ man 10 news about fathers 1, 4–5, 19–23, 35–44, 51–52 online dads 23–24; see also news about fathers paedophilia see sexual abuse panacea 40–41 paternal absence see absence, paternal paternity leave 1, 19, 27–28, 51 perspectives on men and childcare: conservative 47–52; phenomenological 61–66; progressive 52–57; psychosocial 57–61; see also feminist perspective Peterson, Jordan 48 Peto, Andrea 34 phenomenological perspective 61–66 Podnieks, Elizabeth 6, 23 Potter, James 14, 25 Pringle, Keith 28, 57 pro-feminist perspective see feminist perspective progressive perspective 52–57 psychoanalysis 57, 59–63, 82–83 psychosocial perspective 57–61 public policy 27–29, 34, 37–38, 51–53, 57–58 race 41–44 Railway Children, The (film) 7 Ranson, Gillian 2, 23–24, 65, 83 Reay, Diane 73–74 Reeves, Jane 73, 77 relational model 8, 64, 78–80 representation 5–6, 24; of fatherhood in late 20th-century films 6–12; of men and children in 21st-century films 12–16, 84–85; of men and children in

musical theatre 17; of men and children in popular literature 13–14, 18–19; of men and children in the news 1, 4–5, 19–23, 35–44, 51–52; of men and children on television 16–17; of selfidentified online dads 23–24 reproductive technology 33–34 Saving Mr. Banks (film) 7–10 Scorpion (television show) 16–17 Sewell, Tony 41–42 sexual abuse 21, 39–31, 81 sexual difference 49–51, 56–57, 61–64; see also gender Silverstein, L. B. 33–34 ‘social change’ argument 56 social constructionism see constructionist perspective social learning theory 4, 26, 50, 60, 78, 81–82 socioeconomic impact of absent father 32–33, 36, 38 Sokolowski, Robert 61–62 Sound of Music, The (film) 7–10 Stein, Edith 49–50, 62 suicide 21–22 Sutcliffe, William 74 Swann, Gavin 73 Tarrant, Anna 26, 29, 78 teenagers 32–34, 39, 76 television: as babysitter 37, 39–40; fatherhood on 16–17 Thatcher, Margaret 48 thirtysomething (television show) 16 This Boy: A Memoir of Childhood (book) 18–19 Three Men and a Baby (film) 10 Three Men and a Little Lady (film) 10 Toalson, Rachel 20 toxic masculinity 52 traditionalist perspective 47–52 transgenderism 53 Trudeau, Justin 19 ‘viral’ fatherhood 6, 19–21 Warin, Jo 2, 51, 53, 55–56, 65 Wetherell, M. 25, 53 Whitten, Thomas 21 Zahavi, Dan 62