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| Responsible Fatherhood Program |
Mothers have more hours in the day to get used to it, but that doesn't mean they do. There have been several books recently by writer-mothers, all of them highly intelligent and accomplished women, who have clearly loathed the relentless treadmill of parenthood. It may be that the cleverest and most career-oriented women find it most difficult to adjust to the drudgery of it all.
My girlfriend, who is also highly intelligent and accomplished, nonetheless believes you need to have a certain in-built bovine quality to get the most out of it. Although this could be her way of explaining why, when breastfeeding our two, she so often went 'Moo.'
Something similar applies to fathers. I think the only way you can make sense of the drudgery is to surrender to it completely. Because it does not last forever, and your children will be happier and more secure when they are older if you have been there, doing what needs to be done. Once you surrender to it, you might not actually enjoy it, but you won't resent it as much, either. Sometimes you are barely aware of it. Just the other day I realized that I had wiped three arses in the preceding 15 minutes, only one of them my own.
Human babies, of course, need more parental care than any other species: this is a direct consequence of our awesome evolutionary success. Other primates have only maternal care, but somewhere along the line humans started to fall in love, or 'pairbond' as anthropologists would have it, and so paternal care became available, too. Our children simply need a lot of looking after, and a mother can only do so much. When we all lived in tribes there was an extended family to help out. No longer, of course. Grandparents, increasingly, are on the other side of the country, if not the other side of the world. You could almost say that we have evolved to a point at which fathers are more important than ever before, not less important.
Two parents of different sexes also supply a certain variety. Men and women are different. Women have observed this empirically and men have proved it scientifically. So having one of each around the house means a full set of gender role models from whom the child can learn how to live its life. Here's a strange but, I think, fascinating example. Mothers, in the earliest weeks of new life, tend to carry or sit holding their baby face to face. Fathers, by contrast, usually hold the baby so that it is facing out into the world. Subconsciously, say psychologists, the father sees it as his job to introduce the baby to the world. Most men do this without realizing. It is one instinct we do not have to learn.
Your primary function is to Be There. It may not sound like much but it is too much for some. In the USA, whose social trends we tend to follow as though index-linked, 36 per cent of children live apart from their biological fathers. Of these, 40 per cent haven't seen those fathers in a year or more. We now know that children brought up by one parent are more likely as they grow up to do badly at school, suffer from depression, commit crimes. This isn't necessarily because single mothers are no good at their job; it's because the father-shaped hole in a young life can be difficult, even impossible, to fill.
So if you do look in the mirror from time to time and think, 'Mm. You're OK,' that is no bad thing, and it may even be true. As one recent academic book on the subject put it, with unacademic pithiness, 'Parenting is an ordinary everyday activity, and yet it is also one of the most skilled, difficult and demanding tasks an adult is called upon to perform.' You might as well give yourself credit for this, as no one else will. To find out more, you can check out Responsible Fatherhood Program.