In the name of the father

Here is an article by Rose Hoare who interviewed Scott about his experiences as a Stay At Home Dad, published in the Sunday Magazine (Sunday Star Times).

By Rose Hoar

Fathers used to be the ones who worked all day to put food on the family’s table, meted out punishments once they got home, and then were grateful to retire from the hubbub of family life to smoke a pipe or paint model aircraft or something.

A provider, a disciplinarian, a stranger in his own household – men may well have chafed in that role. Some forty years ago, mothers began entering the workforce in increasing numbers, and fathers began shouldering a greater share
of child care. Today, increasingly changeable working lives and a growing labour force of mothers mean more fathers are happy to forgo playing the gruff breadwinner and become nurturing nappy-changers instead.

The thing is, although men are doing more hands-on parenting, they aren’t leaving paid work in droves. Figures from the last census show that about 0.33 percent of the population are full-time stay-at-home dads. (They account for less than four percent of unemployed men.) Instead, most fathers are just squeezing their increased parental involvement in around the usual 40 or 50-hour week, stretching themselves ever thinner.

And they’re probably not getting enough credit for it. Advertisers tend to depict fathers as hapless idiots or lazy bums, marketers ignore them completely. Talking to dads, you hear stories of being treated, as the only man waiting outside school to pick up a child, like either a molester or a rock star. Although they’re likely to be involved in bathing and changing and feeding children, and have been for decades, few fathers seem to consider themselves wholly equal parents. The way we think about fatherhood hasn’t yet caught up with the reality.

“People talk a lot about what a hard job it is being a mother,” says Brendon Norman, a 34-year-old account manager. “That’s something you hear a lot: ‘It’s a full-time job being a mum!’ Dad’s still got a full-time job, but then he’s also got his family thing to do as well. So maybe we just don’t get the recognition. But is that because of the bum dads out there that renege?”

Norman was a road worker with Fulton Hogan when his son was born 13 years ago, seven weeks premature. “He was about three pounds,” he recalls, and measures his baby’s body against the span from his wrist to elbow. “That’s how
big his feet are now,” he laughs. “I’d get home and I always showered with him. Probably for the first three or four months he didn’t really settle down unless he was lying on my chest. He’d invariably go to sleep like that. He didn’t breastfeed because he was so premature so I used to get up and do that as well.”

Norman had been saving to travel extensively and, when the relationship with his son’s mother ended six months after the birth, he thought about just packing up and leaving. He could easily have walked away from it all. “His mum said to me so many times, ‘Just go and do your thing,’ but there’s just no way. In the end, I knew what I had to do.”

Norman thinks he would have been a poorer father if he hadn’t visited Fiji when he was about 18. “I went up to my family’s village and saw my uncle, who’s got 13 kids. I sat down with him and we were talking and eating, and all
his kids would be crawling all over him, and he’d be holding a conversation with me. I just sat there and thought, ‘That’s f…ing brilliant.’” A study published a few months ago by the Department of Labour and the Ministry of Women’s Affairs looked at how men can involve themselves in child care even further.

Dr Paul Callister and Dr Lindy Fursman from Victoria University’s Institute of Policy Studies looked at every piece of research they could find about Men’s Participation in Unpaid Care. They identified a string of barriers to full
participation. For biological reasons – wombs, breasts – women tend to stay at home with their new babies. For economic reasons – they typically earn more – men go to work to support their family. Once these traditional roles are established, people tend to hunker down and stay in them, even after they don’t need to.

Workplace attitudes to paternal leave unfurl around and perpetuate these arrangements. Men, it’s assumed, are less necessary parents. Even at home, most fathers are hardly ever alone with their children. The report went right back to examining how the job description of father has evolved, and what counts as involvement. “The ideal father model has gone through a number of changes over time,” it commented. “An early ideal was father as moral teacher and disciplinarian, then a breadwinner, followed by a gender role model and ‘buddy’, finally moving to a model of a nurturing, co-parenting parent.”

Tim, 33, is a freelance web designer and new father. He was able to take more than the standard two weeks’ unpaid paternity leave when his son was born 10 months ago because, like many other contractors, work had dried up slightly. He’s not really sure whether he’s a moral teacher and disciplinarian, breadwinner, buddy or co-parenting parent. “This is high-brow, ivory tower stuff, huh? I remember when he was first born, thinking, ‘It’s so buzzy: I’m your dad! But I’ve got a dad! Whoa! You’re looking at me like I’m your dad, but I’m just this guy!’ We’ve had to do all that grown-up stuff, like buy a house and… look after a baby,” he muses. “It comes with the territory, I guess.”

Justin Lopes, 32, a physiotherapist, looks after his 20-month-old daughter two days a week. He and his wife, a university lecturer, knew they both wanted to spend time raising their daughter. “You just miss so much otherwise,” Lopes says. Because Lopes’ wife earns more, the decision to split child care didn’t have as great an economic impact on their budget as it might in other households, but clearly the career versus kids trade-off is something men are increasingly likely to agonise over. “There is a financial cost in doing this, and I’ve had to make decisions around my career a little bit. My focus is football – looking after the elite teams is what I want to do, and I’ve had to step back from doing that because they travel, and I don’t want to do that at the moment. It affects that slightly, but the benefits of everything else are well worth it.”

Although a sense of obligation to provide for one’s family is traditionally ingrained deep within men, that appears to be fading away. The Department of Labour’s report cites the notion that, because of some sort of institutional bias, ‘providing’ is not given the recognition it deserves. Paying for a child’s music lesson, that argument runs, ought to be considered as important as taking the child to the music lesson. Few modern fathers agreed.

“I don’t think the kid sees it like that,” Norman says. “They don’t go, ‘That’s cool, Dad didn’t come to music but he’s paid for my lessons.’ You look along the sidelines for your mum and dad at your sports, and that’s the key.”
“Someone’s obviously got to go out to work and get money,” Tim reasons. “It’s just a fact of life. [But] I wouldn’t want to do it so much I’d never see the baby. That’s f…ed and I think that is how our parents did it.”

Many men lack role models in their own families. Their own fathers were absent or distant, or didn’t set an example
they’re keen to follow. “My dad was a hard-drinking workaholic programmer guy,” Tim recalls. “I don’t remember
even seeing him that much and then my parents split up when I was 10 and he moved overseas so I’ve never spent much time with him.” Adopting a melodramatic James Dean tone, he cries, “I don’t know who to be!” “My old man was in the navy,” Norman says, “so he was gone a lot. And when he’d come back, they’re just so indoctrinated there that they almost don’t know how to get on with other people. They really struggle to break out of that regimented discipline.”

All the same, many are seeing their father’s generation – now retired and with time on their hands – involving themselves enthusiastically as grandparents. (Although when Lopes’ father-in-law babysat his granddaughter, he put two new nappies on her, layer upon layer. Another time, he managed to put one
on back to front.)

Although it’s widely accepted that it’s good for fathers to be more involved in parenting, there’s little in the way of infrastructure or formal networks that might make this easier for men. Which is why, in 2007, Scott Lancaster and
two associates created DIYFather.com, a forum and information repository for fathers. Lancaster was in the process of selling his restaurant when his wife, a hairdresser, got pregnant. After nine months of debate, it was
decided that he would be the primary caregiver for their daughter, although both parents work from home.

“I’m an only child with no previous experience and didn’t really have a lot of affinity with children,” he says, talking on a headset while microwaving dinner for his two-year-old daughter Pyper at home in Miramar, Wellington. He looked for fathering websites with the kind of information fathers need – “stuff you don’t know that you don’t know” – and couldn’t find any. “Most of the stuff out there was written for women by women. It’s a lot different to how men would speak, how they’d relate and interact. There might be things like rough play – mothers don’t really do a lot of rough play, whereas fathers can really get in there and children love it.”

A book, Plunket courses and a series of seminars for the Wellington Lions followed the site’s launch; a DVD and information kit is in the pipeline, and Lancaster’s efforts got attention from media. “They were all going ‘We’ve been waiting for this, why hasn’t it been around?’ and it’s like, ‘Well, it took the next generation of father who’s wanting to be like this.’” But uptake from actual fathers has been slower. The site gets about 130,000 page impressions a month, but it’s hard to know if it’s women or men doing the accessing. “If there’s a problem, females are much more likely to jump on the internet and go, ‘My child’s got reflux… ?’, whereas fathers don’t operate like
that. They don’t even know what reflux is. We’re going quite well but… you can take the horse to the water but can you make him drink?”

Besides his website, Lancaster is involved in his local Plunket, his Parents in the Neighbourhood group, and running courses for the Ministry of Social Development. Twelve fathers recently attended one of his Plunket courses which, he says, “put a father’s spin” on the ticklish mechanics of babies – teething, sleeping, feeding. “Development: how and when does my child develop? When does each stage come? What they thought was completely different. They thought the child might be doing x at one year and it wasn’t doing it until [age] four or five.” Lancaster suspects it might actually be mothers who are disenfranchising fathers of their paternal duties. “I spoke to
a group of new mothers at Plunket. They said they want their partners to be more involved, but they don’t want to give away the responsibility or the control, and I said, ‘Well, you can’t have both.’” Lancaster thinks fathers can’t enjoy increased involvement in parenting if they have no confidence with their children, and confidence only comes from sole-charge responsibility. “Primarily, fathers don’t make themselves free to be a stay-at-home dad. They perhaps don’t see the benefits or they don’t necessarily have that affinity with children off the bat. A lot of them are still very scared of being left alone with the child as well.”

He thinks fathers need “the equivalent of a Women’s Lib”. Not in the sense of becoming “one of these angry men’s groups”, but in terms of being more assertive about their right to a greater share of responsibility for child care
(as masochistic as that may sound). They need to stand up for themselves, as fathers – to their bosses, at daycare centres, and even to their partners. “I think it starts at home, to be fair,” Lancaster says. “That’s what I try to get across to the women that I talk to: just let them father.” Because, in spite of the bewilderment and terror of babies, plenty of men seem to find fatherhood strangely moreish. “It’s really cool,” Tim says. “Everyone should have kids! Well, not everyone. Some people are terrible people. But overall, it’s really awesome. I think when you have kids it puts some kind of virus in your brain and you say to all your friends, ‘When are you going to have kids, man?’”

-Rose Hoare
Sunday Magazine / Sunday Star Times