“Do Men Mother?” That’s the intriguing and controversial title of a book on parenting by Dr Andrea Doucet. In it, she explores the role of fathers in the 21st-century family. And the key finding of her research is that that while men don’t exactly mother, their presence in a child’s life is no less critical.
This conclusion has brought Doucet detractors and supporters in equal shares. Some of the more extreme fathers’ rights groups have used her work on active fathering to bash mothers. Feminists have been known to give her the stink eye for suggesting women need men for anything other than procreation. And those in favour of ‘equality feminism’ assert that when necessary, men can ‘mother’ just as well as women can ‘father’.
In ‘encouraging men’s participating in care-giving while not devaluing women’s historical connection to care-giving’, she has touched a deep social nerve.
Doucet has welcomed the debate and feels that in what she calls the ‘abrasive tension’ that has come with her work, she has been able to truly explore the issues of how we bring up our children and whether that leads to equality between the sexes.
‘Difference’ can still co-exist with ‘equality’
“Rather than comparing fathers to mothers, we require novel ways of listening to… fathers’ approaches to parenting,” she writes. She wants us to look at the differences between fathers and mothers and, more importantly, how those differences matter. And for those women who still bear the lion’s share of parenting and housework, she suggests that ‘difference’ can still co-exist with ‘equality’; it’s simply a question of finding the balance.
Paternal presence
Dads are important right from the get-go. Forget the traditional parenting expert view that a single caregiver bond is enough for children to thrive; researchers such as Dr Bretherton of Wisconsin University have found that children actually do better when they bond with multiple adults and siblings. Even while freshly-minted mewling offspring seems to be glued permanently to their mothers, fathers are already playing an important role in shaping their world.
That should give us pause for thought when it comes to paternity leave. In Malta, men get a single paltry day of paid ‘birth leave’ (although fathers can also take up to four months of unpaid parental leave, this is limited to periods of one month). That means that many dads can’t be with their children in the critical few weeks after the birth, which interrupts bonding.
Babies can recognise their father’s voice versus a stranger when they are only a few weeks old, but for that to happen, they need to have a chance to hear them.
The Fatherhood Institute in the UK has collated a series of studies that show the importance of fathers taking at least two weeks of paternity leave. They are awash with examples. In Sweden, babies whose fathers took paternity leave were more likely to be breastfed and suffered from fewer infections; those fathers were more likely to be happy with the relationships they had with their children and worked shorter hours when they returned to work.
When Australian fathers took more paternity leave, their children had a higher IQ and the fathers were more likely to care for the babies at the weekend. In the UK, the children of fathers who did not take paternity leave had more developmental problems than their peers at age three and, later in life, their fathers were less involved with their children.
It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt
Beyond the baby stage, Doucet’s work shows that fathers have some special niches in their children’s lives. For example, dads used fun more frequently than mothers to connect with their kids; that’s important because children respond particularly strongly to being approached playfully. Physical play with fathers is thought to help children learn how to manage their emotions.
She says fathers were also good at getting their kids outdoors to play and pushing their limits in terms of risk-taking. And when things went wrong, and kids got hurt, they tended to react by ‘problem solving’ when it came to cuts and bruises, rather than comforting the child’s feelings. That robust response gave the children coping skills they found useful in later life.
Perhaps Doucet’s most illuminating finding is that dads are good at the ‘letting go’ part of nurturing, which encourages independence.
Dads are different… and sometimes better
In the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review, Dr Rohner of the University of Connecticut found that a bond with dad is just as important as with mum, and sometimes even more so. He says: “Knowing that kids feel loved by their father is a better predictor of young adults’ sense of well-being, of happiness, of life satisfaction than knowing about the extent to which they feel loved by their mothers.
“In some cases, the withdrawal of a father’s love seems to play a bigger role in kids’ problems with personality and psychological adjustment, delinquency and substance abuse. We hope findings like these will encourage men to become more involved in their children’s care.”
So men don’t just complete part of a puzzle; working with women, they enhance the whole game. A female approach might teach children about self worth and close relationships, but male figures help children with peer group acceptance and confidence. Men stress fairness and responsibility in their discipline while mothers focus on sympathy and help.
None of these responses are right or wrong, but they are critical counterbalances to one another. And very importantly, dads show girls how normal men react to women so that they can identify men who behave in an abusive or otherwise inappropriate way later in life.
The future of fathering
At the end of her book, Doucet says: “Rather than mothering, men are reconfiguring fathering and masculinities.” Today’s fathers are finding a different way to parent, one that doesn’t follow a traditionally masculine script but includes some aspects usually seen as mothers’ roles. They are, as she puts it, “actively reconstructing masculinities in order to include aspects of traditional feminism”. The result, when two parents work together, is what she calls, “gender symmetry”.
What she hopes is that this “gender difference can coexist with gender equality”. She’s not the only one looking forward to this. Of course, children need fathers. But women, still labouring under an unequal share of household tasks, need them just as much, equal, different or symmetrical; anything goes, just as long as they are doing the vacuuming as well as holding the baby.