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In this podcast, Esther Dermott, Paul Hodkinson and Margaret O'Brien reflect on fatherhood, gender and the changing role of men in families.
Alison Koslowski
Welcome to one of our 50th anniversary events. It's really my great pleasure to be chairing this evening. Do try and get yourselves comfortable because we can't make it any cooler. There is more of a breeze here, so maybe that's a little bit better. Make sure you keep yourself hydrated. So, the eagle eyed amongst you will notice that we've got three speakers rather than the advertised four. And sadly, Paul Ramchandani has hurt his back at the weekend and can't make it, can't be with us, can't get to us. So, wishing him a speedy recovery. The only silver lining to this is I was quite worried about keeping everything to time with four speakers... So still no hope with three, but hopefully we will get to drinks and nibbles by around 7pm. That is the intention.
So, this this roundtable is the second of three such events in the program of activities celebrating our 50th anniversary that Thomas Coram Research Unit and each roundtable roughly maps onto one of our three research clusters. So, he had a lovely event celebrating our migration cluster in February. There's a podcast available if you missed it. And today we're also creating a podcast of this event. So, we are being recorded and if someone says something they really don't want saying, we can edit it before it goes out. But just to let you know that that's going on. We are in person, we're not hybrid. And yeah, and today we're celebrating our Gender Diverse Families and Work cluster and then in September, September the 18th is a date for your diaries, we're going to be celebrating Childhood and Children Services cluster. And we had a garden party last week. I think we got the weather the right way round. So that was very, very lovely. And then the final event, just did another plug for your diaries, celebration for the 50th will be on 7th of November at Coram, another evening event, and that's be our book launch for Social Research for Our Times.
So, to today each speaker will talk for around 10 minutes or so, maybe a bit more, followed by questions and answers. And then the ideas will go round again to allow the panel to respond to each other and to your first round of questions and then keep going until we hit around 7 o’clock. Coming just after Father's Day, today's roundtable will be an interdisciplinary conversation between three scholars who have been researching fathers for many years and as well also celebrating, of course, our 50 years of research at TCRU, which has a long history of research into fathers and fatherhood. And, to plug the book again, Social Research for Our Times has a very nice chapter in that, which celebrates exactly this. Indeed, one of the things that's really attracted me to coming to join TCRU was the depth of research in the area. I've been working on fathers, fathers and fatherhood since my PhD, being inspired by Margaret's work to start doing my PhD. I remember attending PhD workshops with Esther, and Paul is a newer father pal and, but so I'm really delighted to be chairing today and look forward to the conversation, very much so.
So, our first speaker to introduce to speakers is Margaret O'Brien. I mean… very well, a professor of family and child policy, former director of TCRU for eight years until handling over the mantle to me in 2021. Co-editor of the Father Figure 1982, co-editor of Comparative Perspectives on Life Balance and Gender Equality: Fathers on Leave Alone 2017, and many other things we could list. Currently the Vice-chair of the EU Costs Project on Parental Leave and Social Sustainability, which, if you're not part of at the moment, do have a look and see if you might like to sign up too. That runs until 2026.
And then after Margaret O’Brien, we’re handing over to Paul Hodkinson, who is Professor of Sociology at the University of Surrey. He is co-editor of New Fathers Mental Health and Digital Communications 2021 and co-editor of Sharing Care: Equal and Primary Carer Fathers and Early Years Parenting. So, 2021, you've been busy during the pandemic.
And then Esther Dermott is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Bristol, author of Intimate Fatherhood: Sociological Analysis 2008, co-editor of Fathers, Families and Relationships: Researching Everyday Lives, is 2018. I know there's many other things you've been involved with, and you've been editor of the Families Relationships Society Journal. There's a bit of a theme to that to the panel. And so (we have the) previous editor, we’ve got the chair of the editorial board, Paul has published in FRC and, yeah, Esther. So, to do take a look at Families Relationships Societies journal if you haven't seen that before. It was also a 2015 special issue on fatherhood that you with Tina Miller. So, and I think without further ado, let's jump into the main event, the roundtable and Margaret, the floor is yours.
Margaret O’Brien
Thank you very much, Alison. Perhaps I should have this: I got back late last night from Sicily, the plane arrived late into Stanstead, so I'm bit sleep, sleep deprived. Got in, I think about at 1:15 am. So, apologies for not being at the great event today on gender equality, I wanted to attend, but that's a context to team my talk. I'm going to speak a bit to my notes, which I don't usually do because I have PowerPoints and speak to those or write. But it's a great occasion to do something different on our anniversary and on occasions such as this, it's important obviously, to look back as well as to the future.
Indeed, some argue that life is lived forward but only understood backwards. And as I get older, I'm becoming more and more aware of that, acknowledging that I'm making sense of my life looking back, and I'm speaking about my professional life and also my family life. My first book on fatherhood, as Alison mentioned, The Father Figure, edited with my dear friend and colleague Lorna McKee, was published in 1982, over 40 years ago, when I was just 28. And my PhD on lone fathers caring for children after separation, two years later, and was conducted at the LSE, and it's great because some LSE people here today, it was in the social psychology department. So, I've moved from social psychology to more of a social policy orientation in my working life.
At the time, when I was younger, researching fatherhood was a minority topic in the social sciences. Some of our peer group couldn't understand the interest at all. We were really at seminars criticized quite heavily and they asked what could men tell us about family life? Aren't they unreliable narrators, irrelevant subjects, distant or absent? And when at home often asleep and or disciplinarians or primarily oppressive to women and children. So, it was a research topic to be avoided at all costs. You will remember the influential anthropologist Margaret Mead’s phrase about men and fatherhood: they were a ‘biological necessity’, but a ‘social accident’. That was sort of discussed quite a lot when I was in this period of my working life. And we know now from the work on biological changes in reproduction, particularly from Cambridge, and many of the scholars here are part of that formation, that sentence ‘biological necessity’ is now under contestation. And my intellectual and indeed personal experience, however, was that fathers like mothers and indeed all humans are very influential, particularly in the family groups they form and the relationships that they connect with and for. And at the same time, however, they’re complex, contradictory, as well as being influential.
I experienced this at first hand in my own family group. I was the eldest, I am the eldest of four children from an Irish migrant family and our parents needed to navigate parenthood and work jobs across three continents doing what the scholars in America say, looking at fatherhood in inner city, doing the best they could. And at one point in my early childhood, like many migrant children, I was sent back to the homeland, to the west of Ireland, to be looked after by my grandfather and a very dear auntie. And I have great memories of that time, particularly when I had chickens, because there were a lot of chickens coming in and out of the front of the house or the cottage or the shack. Perhaps it was that, now when I got back it was pretty basic.
So, but looking back and with an academic lens, I was part, in the eighties, of this first wave of ‘fatherhood research’, as we called it, in the rich Global North, as it become labelled. We were discovering fatherhood, part of a group led by Michael Mann, and globally Michael was the father of fatherhood research, I don't know what other people would say… He was then at Yale, he talked about fathers being the forgotten contributors to family life. And we, Lorna McKee and I and others, wanted to give fathers a hearing, but give them space to discuss and describe their experiences. So, we invited like-minded scholars from a range of disciplines, including law, history, epidemiology, psychology, sociology, who were interviewing and also conducting research in a more distant way with fathers and fathers to be. So, we asked them to write about their empirical and theoretical insights. Many of these first wave studies disrupted the normative stereotype that was around at the time: that men were disengaged, irrelevant, distant, and so on. And certainly, the breadwinner model was questioned.
So, we had many accounts from… hem, in the chapter and also in our own work, on men, as we called it then, we used the word nurturant. It's not used too much in the field now, but I suppose the word and concept that is very prominent in our current academic inquiry is care, is caring. So, we as colleagues, we had accounts of caregiving in many settings. I mean, for example, one of the chapters and pieces of work was by a sociologist called Gerald Rickman. He was a great, interesting, scholar and he's very much influenced by Goffman. And he described, he was working on men and pregnancy. He talked about the heterogeneity of careers that men have when their partners are pregnant. And those of you, for this field, you know that there's the ‘couvade syndrome’ that's discussed historically about the weight that men sometimes put on when their partner's having a baby, and the rituals that they may go through, and culturally and that's very well described in anthropology of men and fatherhood. So, he just noticed a continuum and diversity in men's pregnancy careers, no homogeneity: someone micromanaging, you know, the embodied partner at her timings and her waves of change in her body; others were completely disengaged and disinterested. And I think that theme comes up now and in much of the scholarship, it is a constant.
And, similarly, an epidemiologist, Angela Brown, was doing a cutting-edge work on fathers in the labour ward because at that time childbirth had moved from the home to the labour ward, and interviewing professionals and also, she was interviewing men and women and triangulating their accounts. And there was this theme in her work coming up, as father as a nonfunctioning intruder. There was no place for him in the waiting, you know, in that waiting and present space for the new baby. It's very interesting. Now, I have a daughter who is training in obstetrics and gynaecology. So, I talk to her about how she works with fathers or not. And during COVID, she was very cross with the men and the partners around the birthing woman because she was thinking about infection. She didn't want the men to be in the room. And so, we had these family arguments really, you know, isn't birth a social event? Not just a physical event. She learned a bit, further, I think, on that (laughter). We'll see, because the power of the consultant is very strong.
So, this first wave, you know, actually then generated… was part of this amazing range of work: we’ve got Esther here with her extraordinary book, Intimate Fatherhood in 2008; Julia Brennan, our colleague here at TCRU, on fathers and migration, and we've got friends overseas, Andrea Doucet edited the Journal of Fathering. Sadly, it didn't go on for long; and we've got this new journal of Family, Relationships and Societies. There's advocacy throughout the world for men's place in families, in the caring sense, the State of the World Fathers reports. We had advocacy from the Fatherhood Institute and Adrian Burgess has been really important in this. The organization was formed during New Labor in ‘97 when men's caring was on the agenda. We wait to see in the next election whether that would be the case. And then we had a paternity leave coming to the UK in 2003. So, what we have also now in terms of the discourse is, I suppose, more on the state, the confused state, as maybe Richard Reeves would say, the Brookings scholar, in his book Of Boys and Men, the fragmentation of identities for men in families and indeed life, you know: where am I? The women in my life are getting more, are getting higher grades… And I'm maybe not necessary anymore. I mean, Richard Reeves even suggests that boys should start school a bit later than girls. If those of you've read his book, it’s quite an American model and he's British. And of course, we have Andrew Tate with the toxic masculinity issues. And thankfully, I'm being a bit personal here, thankfully, he’s got a convict… Well, he hasn't been convicted yet, but he is on the way. But that, those are some of the statements and discourses around the difficulties that men are having, I think they are very important for us to capture. So, our work is more on the benign side of fathering. I don't want to forget, however, that many family annihilations are conducted by the father.
So, you'll see in the field, that there is… Researchers tend to move around the good or the bad dad, even though that dichotomy is actually unhelpful. So, there's very important work on safeguarding of fathers now and which, you know, talks about inclusion of men being really important because if you don't support the father, he may go on to acting in a similar way with the next family. So, there are some pragmatic and child-centred reasons for engaging fathers, as well as being engaged in thinking about their own identities as men and caring fathers.
It's just two points by way of discussion that I'm going to highlight, and I've got more things to say, but I'm keeping them back. But I just want to raise two issues. When we were writing a chapter for the 50-year anniversary and it was great, it was an intergenerational piece of writing. We had Julia, myself, Kitty (Catherine Jones), who's in the room, who's a postdoctoral scholar. We had two eminent, relatively new scholars, Charlotte Faircloth and Catherine Twombly, and we tried to make sense of TCRU fatherhood research, and the field more generally. And this chapter has been sent to our speakers today. And you'll see when you read that chapter, that one of our preoccupations, in TCRU and generally I think in the field, this is my first point is: when is the second gender revolution going to happen? When is it going to happen? By that we mean during the seventies and onwards, women and mothers have increased their labour market paid participation. And, the optimistic vision was men would move into the men's fathers, fathers would move into the private sphere of family, and we'd have harmony. In fact, in our book, Lorna and I, we ended our book saying: when fathers become more involved in childcare, mechanisms of patriarchy will be dismantled. We're borrowing on short to historian of the family, at the time, of family life. That still is a really important theme in our work, and we try to understand patterning of it in writing the chapter. And, but I just want to raise the point and for discussion I'll come back to it: that actually is only one lens for understanding fathering practices, institutions of fathering, fatherhood, fathers as individuals, as David Morgan very helpfully differentiated; and the data is there indeed that women's labour market participation has increased in Britain, there's more and more working hours, paid working hours, conducted by women and mothers. And men, you know, and men or fathers have, as I suppose you were talking about in the seminar today, have increased their care time, they've decreased their working hours. You remember in the eighties, British fathers were seen as the workhorses of Europe, as it was called, and they had very, very long weekly working hours. And that's reduced to some extent. But if you look at the time year data, and that might be seen as rather non nuanced, we haven't reached equity, equality.
And I suppose I want to raise a question for our discussion: were we being overoptimistic to think that that was going to happen? Although there have been many books about it. I know Esther wants to talk about that, but still it's really important issue and I've been reflecting on it, and thinking that is driven also now by women and mothers feeling so burdened, not only by the intensive mothering discourses, that Charlotte so lovely (unclear) writes about and Catherine, her work on, but there's also the working, the paid working hours of women that this work has shown has really intensified in Britain and in many countries over this period. So, women are tired, mothers are fed up and that's important to manage and reflect on.
And the other issue I just want to flatten out and come back to in discussion is something completely different, which is about the grip globally of young men and men who are either rejecting fatherhood or can't become fathers, either through migration, not partnering with people they want to partner with, because of the constraints or potential constraints of transnational family life. And also, and we have PhD students in the room, people working on the really low fertility countries of the world; where (fathering) it's not really, I mean, it's not really an achievement object or a life stage that many young men or men are wanting to move on to. So, it depends, although we need more empirical works, it’s great looking at China and we're looking at also some PhD work on low fertility, in Japan and in South Korea. So, what is it about parenthood that's turning possibly some men off? Richard Reeves thinks it's this issue about the rise of female dominance. And although he claims to be a feminist, I think he summed his work very strongly on feminist work here in Britain when in the eighties.
So, I think there's a big problem here about men and women working together and speaking in it about different sex couples and how we form families, and, you know, and if we need to, because of environmental reasons as another factor to think about clearly in terms of sustainability. But then if you look at eldercare and the welfare system, we do need the next generation, unless it's going to be a… (inaudible).
Alison Koslowski
Thank you very much.
Paul Hodkinson
Can people hear me? Is this microphone doing something or should I use this one? Is this one? Okay, maybe take this one. Also, I think we're getting a little bit (inaudible)... So okay.
Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm other than slightly intimidated to speak alongside Margaret and Esther, who know enormously more about fatherhood than I do, them researching it an awful long time. It's really fantastic to be here. And congratulations to the research unit on its 50th birthday. It's really nice to be here to talk fatherhoods and families. Yes, I think a sort of as you said at the beginning, I'm a sort of fairly recent convert to sort of fatherhood studies, if you want to call it that. And I think my…, I guess my sociological career has been a bit sort of following the stuff that I do.
And it was when I became a father in 2011 that that sort of started me thinking about this area and thinking about the kinds of questions that might be asked as part of research, as part of the area that ended up with, I guess, sort of two main bits of work that I've been involved in. The first was a two-phase, what became a two-phase longitudinal study of primary and equal carer fathers, those who are doing more than most, as it were. And the second was a study of new fathers and mental health, including collaboration with various sort of practitioners in relation to that. So, the first project was with my colleague Rachel Brooks, and the second was with my colleague Ranjana Das.
I think what really sparked my interest was perhaps something that many men and perhaps women experience when they go through that process of, sort of first pregnancy, if you like: the sort of the stark gender inequalities that myself and my partner experienced, like a real… Felt like a real wakeup call in, I guess, you know, a relationship where we'd always been sort of largely equal and thought of ourselves as slightly, largely equal. Suddenly we found ourselves sort of placed into these fairly starkly different roles in a way that I don't think we were entirely prepared for, in spite of, you know, me being a sociologist and all of that. And we aspire to parent equally or even with reversed roles that kind of fit in with the way that we saw ourselves. But we're struck by how we were positioned during pregnancy and beyond and how we kind of, in spite of probably thinking of ourselves as being quite sort of critical people and that kind of thing, ended up taking on aspects of those positioning in various ways. And so, I think that that was it. That was what sort of triggered my interest. And, you know, there's a couple of anecdotes I could possibly go into later maybe, that will do on that for now.
And so, you know, with a particular focus on fathers, I guess I thought maybe I could explore that, that thing about how fathers in particular are positioned during the process of pregnancy and then in the various things that happen beyond that point. And the importance of that positioning for the roles that fathers might see as feasible or possible for them and for their experience of becoming parents, including their wellbeing.
So, I've got a little subtitle here. I've got no slides, but I'm kind of so not used to using slides. I'm doing my subtitle. So, my subtitle is kind of fathers as marginal supporters. So, I think across both of the research projects, which you know, in a way those research projects were very different from one another, but the thing that came through really strongly from both of them was the way in which many fathers talked about feeling a bit kind of marginal and in a sort of awkward liminal position during the process of pregnancy. And particularly at various sort of key points like scans and the birth itself and various other sort of situations. And that also have been found by sort of various other studies, too. So, John, one of the participants in one of the projects says: ‘I went to most of the antenatal classes, I went to the midwifery appointments, and you very much sit in the chair at the side of the room as a passive observer, you don't actively participate in what's going to happen’. And various people sort of said kind of similar things about various sort of stages along the way in the process and, you know, maybe connects to that, that thing about, you know, previously fathers weren't invited into the birth. They were sort of wandering around the waiting room or whatever, and they weren't particularly sort of going to scans either for various reasons. So now they are invited in, except for during COVID, of course, which is interesting in itself. And… But they're rarely sort of spoken to, and if they are, it's in their status as kind of observer supporter, possibly almost like a hospital visitor, but not something more than that, but this kind of slightly odd marginal position. So, others said similar things about midwife visits and… But then also, sort of later on, about encounters with doctors; nurseries and who they want to have contact with and who they don't want to have contact with; schools, who they want to contact in relation to children and who they sort of position as the sort of primary parent in that respect.
So, another participant in much more recent research, the second phase of my research with Rachel on primary care and equal care of fathers, Anthony says: ‘They have a preference, I think, to deal with the mother. We've noticed it at both the school and the nursery. I went and filled out all the paperwork so I put my details first, but they've always only ever contacted my partner.’ He does say it's less apparent now with school than it was, say, with health visitors and midwives and all that earlier. So, he's indicating there is maybe some improvement in sort of how he feels positioned. But still, he does this kind of marginality, there's this kind of ‘on the side of things’ in terms of how he's positioned.
And crucially, there are all sorts of other ways, that we can sort of broaden this much more into the various other ways in which both fathers and mothers are positioned in particular ways. So, we could think about other parents and how they might position one another. And so, in the case of sort of primary or equal carer fathers, other mothers often want to communicate with their partner rather than them about their children, to organize playdates, to organize parties and various other things. Again, sort of reinforcing centrality of the mother, reinforcing kind of marginality of father in various ways. And, you know, we can go on, say, workplaces obviously have a critical role to play in terms of the role that fathers have, fathers’ families, fathers’ peers, media… Whole huge, huge sort of area in terms of how fathers are sort of presented through media, through marketing of various kinds and so on. And policy, of course as well, that the UK has shared parental leave scheme, people probably know, kind of institutionalized the mother as central and the father as marginal, by having a system where the leave by default is the mother's and it has to be kind of transferred to the father, if they want to sort of take shared parental leave. Ehm. And I guess maybe what's really interesting is that of course fathers themselves and mothers internalize all of this in various ways and then, you know, I think what came out in some of our research, at least, is the ways in which that partners kind of reinforce such things through the roles that they take up in their interactions with each other in relation to those roles, if even if they sort of don't want to.
And I think perhaps, you know, some people have talked about maternal gatekeeping, the notion that that mothers sometimes prevent fathers from sort of taking on more work. But I think Tina Miller was right to say it's much more of a process of sort of mutual reinforcement, that sort of taking place really between partners in quite sort of complicated ways sometimes.
So yeah, kind of I guess this notion of marginality and sort of positioning fathers as marginal, I think is sort of interesting and something that could be explored more. And so, what consequences does that have? And I guess I'm just going to give you some examples from my research. So mental health I thought I do with firstly, maybe that's the last obvious one of the two that I'm going to talk about.
So, Ranjana and I found, once we've been researching fathers who had suffered from mental health difficulties after or during the process of having a baby, that the lack of preparation and support for fathers, as fathers, in terms of them and what the process meant for them, along with the internalization of this sort of marginal positioning as the supporter, could have quite dire implications for their ability to cope with and deal with mental health problems, when they arose for them, often after having a baby. And so there was a sense of ‘it's not about me’ in father's narratives, it's not about me, that this is not supposed to be about me. It's not okay for me to be having struggles at this point. This is not supposed to be about me. It's definitely not okay for me to require support of any kind at this point. It's not about me.
So yeah, fathers are kind of scripting their struggles. We thought through what we called repertoires of illegitimacy. It's not… the feelings that I'm having are not legitimate at this time, and that then sort of connected with this kind of coming in of sort of masculine stoicism in the face of struggle. And that feeling like an essential thing to do at that particular moment, that one has to struggle through, one has to be stoic in order that everyone else and themselves can focus on the needs of mother and baby. And this was the case even for fathers who presented themselves as not very masculine fathers, who like talked about sort of sharing their feelings with people quite a lot of the time. So, John says: ‘So those feelings I didn't really feel that I could share with my wife or anyone because I felt guilty about having them. Before, I suffered stressful breakups of relationships, and you go and cry on your mum's shoulder, whereas this time I felt that I couldn't seek that because the centre of attention should be my wife rather than me.’ So, for us, there's a connection between that and all that saying to fathers about what their position and role is during this kind of process: it's not about me, I'm not at the centre of this. I shouldn't be at the centre of this. So, you know, that then sort of leads to feelings of failure, spirals of guilt, struggles to come to terms with things and significant struggles seeking support.
So, how about caregiving ways, then, and that sort of, you know, positioning of fathers. And, as Margaret said, there's lots of research that has quite rightly shown increasing numbers of fathers aspiring to have sort of intimate connections and extensive involvement with their children. And in many cases doing so to a significant extent, but normally still in the role of secondary carer. Not sort of getting over that sort of line, that there actually is a kind of equality, or that they're sort of going further still and being sort of primary carers.
And it's kind of like the… I don't know if people remember this, but there was an Alexa advert. Does anyone remember the Alexa advert where there was a father who took one day caring his partner's baby? Oh no, never mind. It's an interesting advert. It depicts him in a very kind of, quite sort of sympathetic, generous way. He's shown to be very competent with a baby, very caring. He has an intimate connection with it, very clearly. He's working super hard. He's super committed. But it's for one day. And Alexa has to convey to him instructions on what he's supposed to do at different times because he's clearly not the main carer. So, he's kind of intimately connected. He's… But there's all of this stuff going on that's very, very positive. But ultimately, he's still sort of secondary carer sort of thing.
And interestingly, the equal primary caregiver fathers that we talk to in our study also started that fatherhood in that secondary role in most cases. And, and it was unusual circumstances that normally had enabled their horizons to shift away from that marginality to, to enable them to sort of envisage taking on a role which did get towards that sort of equal position or further. And so, redundancies, partners having particular struggles at home, partners sometimes finding that they were unable to work part time when they went back to work, lack of nursery ability, various other sort of things that had come up, that had sort of changed things and prompted fathers to sort of take on these unusually sort of intensive caring roles. And then, after an initial steep learning curve, fathers had come to embrace these roles very extensively, in a way that somewhat surprised us, I suppose, very wide-ranging responsibilities and coming to see themselves as largely interchangeable with their partners in various respects and in a way that we found quite striking.
And in most recent research, we found that such roles have proved enormously durable too, through various sort of challenges and changes across sort of a period of five years between the different phases of our research. Nevertheless, there were still ways in which even these unusual fathers sort of still had that kind of marginality in some respects. So, they did have significant struggles to connect either on or offline with networks of other parents, most of whom were mothers in terms of the more active people in their communities. Anything from taking toddlers to playgroups to navigating parent WhatsApp groups was a big challenge and one that many of the fathers really struggled with and some kind of gave up on. So, Robert says: ‘She typically has a closer relationship with these women than I do. So, the net result is it's always a bit easier for her to be doing the contacting.’
And they also have struggles with institutions that expect to communicate with mothers. So, another father says: ‘I think my wife tends to take the lead with those people. I think that's partly because that's the expectation on the part of the people offering those services. So, it's just easier to her to lead, for her to lead those conversations.’ So, in spite of how far they had come, and they had come an awful long way, fathers’ involvement in what Andrea Doucet calls ‘community responsibility parts of parenting’ was very limited in most case, and much of that was deferred to their partners, even if the father was a primary carer in most other respects. And the role of parental organization in decision making, what Gillian Ranson calls ‘executive responsibility’, also tended to be lower than their partners in many cases. And again, that was even sometimes when they were doing most of the kind of everyday caregiving. And there was kind of a broader sense that, even if the father was doing most of the everyday care, their partner kind of was still seen as the default primary carer. So, like if all other things were equal, she would probably be ‘doing it’ kind of thing. And that was sort of interesting too. So, there was a still sort of sense of ambivalence about their role, even though they were in other ways very, very committed to it. So, part of that links to sort of specific barriers to do with communicating with other parents and with institutions. But we also think it has a lot to do with the longer-term marginal positioning of fathers; and to deal with the intense pressures on mothers, not only to be the primary care, but to be responsible for particularly sort of intense, expanded versions of what mothering is, with which Charlotte Faircloth and various other people have sort of written about so effectively.
So very quick conclusion. Sorry. Yeah, there's lots of grounds for optimism, but quite a lot of the negative stuff I've talked about, I suppose. But our study I think did show that, once established, equal and primary carer roles among fathers can endure quite effectively through various challenges and changes. And that suggests maybe it's really worth us getting what happens at the start of the process as bright as we possibly can, in terms of policy preparations for this, all of this stuff about how we're positioning people. And there's also in our work with health visitors and various others, we found all sorts of signs of sort of positive change going on there, albeit against very sort of scant resources; and hints perhaps of better support for fathers and leave in some workplaces, too. But much more to be done, I think, to overcome how the positioning of fathers makes it hard to navigate wellbeing challenges, as I've said, and also creates challenges developing obviously more equal care and work roles. Okay, thank you.
Esther Dermott
Thank you very much. Thank you very much for inviting me. I may have to slightly steal your poster and cut the top of it because I also am 50 years in 2023. So, I'll keep it as my own little banner and I hope for my birthday later in the year. But so, and it's slightly odd to have this opportunity to reflect back and realizing that I've been studying fatherhood for about 25 years. No, not on my own, but collaboratively, and most notably with Tina Miller. But yeah, so hopefully picking up on some of what Margaret said, I'm going to look back a little bit at some of my earlier work and kind of ideas, and think a little bit about how they may have changed, moved on, or perhaps we're still asking the same questions and I haven't really moved on in 25 years of doing academic work. So that's depressing.
Maybe just to say something, a little bit about when I started research. So, I have to say that Margaret's work was, as Alison said as well, was, you know, really important work that I read when I first was interested in fatherhood. I don't know if that makes you feel worse, but it was… Sorry (laughter). I think the other work that I read, that I read that was really interesting was Davidoff and Hall’s Family Fortunes. So, socio-historical kind of work around middle-class men, Victorian, and 20th century into the Trump-century Victorian era, if I remember correctly. And some of that was about saying: we've actually got ideas of masculinity and fatherhood a little bit wrong. And actually, there's lots of accounts of men expressing emotions about their role as fathers, but it's just not captured in very public ways. It's captured in diaries and very kind of personal kind of accounts. So, I think that, along with Margaret's very positive, you know, idea that perhaps fatherhood could be the route towards greater gender equality inspired me.
And then the third element that I think got me interested in fatherhood was perhaps a little bit more strangely. So, I worked as a research assistant on a project on lesbian parenting. And the project made me realize further the absence of fathers in lots of kinds, but also that the lesbian parents in that study were doing equal parenting in really interesting ways. And in ways in which kind of some of the economic accounts that mothers and fathers seemed to justify for their inequality. So, the one that I often kind of quote to people is the idea that: ‘Oh, well, if men can earn more than women, then it makes more sense for fathers to be full time workers and women to either, as mothers, either stay at home with children or to work on a part time basis; financially, that one just makes sense’. And the lesbian couples would say: ‘Okay, yeah, we also care about economics. But actually, it makes much more sense for both of us to work part time, because then we're not putting all our eggs in one employment basket and one person isn't giving up on their career and having to take a big career break, which will damage their career in the future’. So, a different way of making an economic argument without the same gendered expectations that resulted in quite different patterns of work and care. And so, all of those things together, well, that kind of inspired me to think, well, what is actually happening with fatherhood in the late 1990s, I guess by this point.
And, I suppose then. So, I'm going to throw out a few slightly disparate thoughts perhaps, but maybe I'll say upfront what I think are the big questions maybe that we can discuss a little bit further or that the audience might like to engage with, which I guess are: what counts as change in fatherhood or fathering practices and what makes change happen. And I think Margaret and Paul also already talked about some of those things. But to me, those seem to be really important questions as a sociologist, maybe they're important kind of questions, if you're trying to think about social transformation and kind of any setting. So, I don't think they're unique to fatherhood, but I think there's something that kind of holds together some of some of my research kind of over the period.
And I guess I have been a little bit eclectic and I've researched fatherhood, so I've been involved in qualitative projects, as well as quantitative projects. I've moved a little bit more into social policy. I've worked with some social geographers, some psychologists more recently, people in human computing interaction who are really socially kind of interesting in terms of how they think about work, social work, interdisciplinary work, about kind of creative methods for understanding fathers’ experiences. So, I'm a little bit… What's a janitor of all trades? I don't know. So, whatever the appropriate name is for that. So, a little, a little bit eclectic.
But to go back to, you know, when I wrote Intimate Fatherhood, I begin, I began book… I went back and looked at the introduction last week. We haven't looked at that for a very long time. And I started with a little anecdote. I was sitting in a seminar which was actually about migration and ethnicity, nothing to do with fatherhood. And what struck me was that the two male presenters both referenced their parenting and their fatherhood status as by way of a kind of an aside in their introductions. So, one took out a watch, maybe not a mobile phone back in the day to check his time, and it was a child's little blue kind of Kiddy watch style. So, he mentioned that he'd have to kind of take it, borrow it from his son that morning in order to do that. And then, the other presenter talked about how his you know, his productivity as a as an academic had gone down since having children. So, and what struck me was that both of those was an aside, wasn't that has to do with their talk and it was mentioned, albeit in the rarefied atmosphere of an academic seminar room, as in quite a normal way, that this wasn't anything particularly exciting or revolutionary.
And so, I suppose what I tried to, what I was documenting through both qualitative studies, that have been done with interviews, interview-based study with fathers, but also some quantitative survey analysis about fathers’ time and employment, was to try… What I guess I can kind of conclude, was that fathers were talking about doing things really differently.
Now, admittedly, Margaret had already said that, you know, again, almost a generation previous to that, that fathers talked about doing things differently. But I thought this was a different generation who are really doing things differently. So, these fathers talked about that they were doing things differently to their fathers, that they were more engaged, that they understood their children, they were doing lots more activities, sometimes that they were doing things differently to their peers or their siblings, and they might not be doing as much as theirs, as their wives or female partners were, but they were at the kind of the vanguard of what they were doing. Not all the fathers, there were a few fathers who were exceptional, but even the fathers who wanted to adhere to a more, inverted commas, ‘traditional breadwinning father’, still kind of positioned themselves as being a little bit unusual in doing that, that that wasn't kind of typical. They viewed themselves as… One, I think described himself as a bit of a dinosaur for not for having a kind of a split between a stay-at-home mother and a very long hours working lawyer father.
But what seemed so, that seemed to be a change that they felt. And that was documented as well in some of the survey data about activities. What was causing the change? Well, I wasn't quite sure what was causing the change, but the argument that I put forward was it was actually, it was largely women that were causing the change: it was mothers. So that lot of this was driven by mothers who did not want to be stay-at-home mothers or and were demanding greater involvement from their partners. Or, it was a feminist ideology, a feminist kind of commitment from both men and women that actually, a little bit like Paul you talked about, I don't know if you describe it as explicitly feminist, but a commitment, an explicit commitment to equality that had existed prior, that they wanted to then maintain and would work and kind of, you know, commit to doing things to make sure that that happened. So, it didn't happen as part of the mainstream. It had to be kind of quite strongly worked towards.
Then I, you know, did some more general other work on kind of parenting. I think wanted to not perhaps research fatherhood when I was early in the stages of being a parent myself, I think that was or maybe my partner wasn't so keen on the continuing research of fatherhood at that point. And, and, I think although I worked on fathering in kind of other ways, I didn't really come back to it for a few years. And so, I'm going to make it as if that was the 2015 special issue, though I was doing work between then. And the 2015 special issue that Tina Miller and I put together and also wrote on as well, I guess I came into that special issue feeling a little bit annoyed, because kind of going and looking at all the fatherhood research that had been done since I'd written, I felt there were lots of accounts and we were all still kind of saying the same thing! And in fact, Tina and I went to a conference and we were asked by an eminent sociologist at the time: ‘Well, is there anything really new here going on?’ And we were quite offended at the time, but actually, I think it was a good question. Was there anything new? There were numbers of other accounts saying: ‘Well, we're doing things differently from the previous generation’, and lots of other fathers still saying, you know, continuing to kind of the same, to say the same thing. And I felt a little bit annoyed by that.
And I think then I shifted to suggest that perhaps what could make the change a little bit better was the policy angle. So again, I was just following Margaret, and the kind of like them, researching parental leave. So, that perhaps parental leave not just at the highest policy level, but at the institutional, the management, the organisational level, that that was where we could push a gender equality; and not just a gender equality, but actually a positive fatherhood agenda and make the difference, rather than having to rely on feminist sensibilities from individual sets of couples, which was maybe a bit unlikely.
So, so, I decided that maybe policy was where we would focus, and Tina, who is a much more positive person, I think, than me generally, you know, persuaded me, you know, through discussion. We kind of work that, well, maybe there had been some significant change over, you know, the previous decade or so, but that rather than this, you know, the massive revolution which hadn't taken place, maybe there had been some element of evolution or dissolution among some of the worst aspects of gender, gender division of labour and of care. So, we tried to think about, well, maybe if there was, we could think about change as being some durability of some of those shifts; so that those kinds of ideas that fathers… there's an expectation about involvement at birth and in early years, there's an expectation and a taken for granted-ness about child… father's involvement and small ways, at least on kind of early level kind of child, childcare, but perhaps a durability of that over time. We should think of that as being a significant change so that it's incremental. But if we take those incremental shifts together, then it's more than the sum of its parts, was the phrase that we used. So, perhaps policy might be a good lever and actually lots of little changes sitting together. Maybe I shouldn't be kind of quite as negative as I had been before.
We did try and think a little bit about employment practices and pitched that employment changes to employment practices weren't sufficient, working and worked a little bit with economic geographers because the idea was that… although that might be a prompt into a different kind of activity… You talk, Paul talked about some of the fathers you interviewed (who went) through experiences of unemployment, that that being a kind of a catalyst, but that an on a short-term basis that shouldn't be enough. We'd have to see a durability of changed practices over time, after a period of, for example, unemployment in order to feel a change had been significant.
And I'm afraid I've gone on way too long, I think. But this is the problem: not timed notes. Okay (laughter) So, sorry, everybody, it’s really hot and… aren't you lucky there's not four people? (laughter)
So, one final kind of thought. And there's not really a conclusion, I suppose, but I suppose it's something I've been thinking about more recently is about where do we look for change? And we did say a little bit about this and the special issue a while ago. But I worry a little bit that, as fatherhood researchers, we have a tendency to look towards the most privileged fathers, as if they are the ones who are going to be doing things that are exciting and different. And I think I may have even written this, you know, that if you've got all the resource and privilege and advantages, well, then maybe that is where the change will happen. And I think perhaps Gillian Ranson… Don’t want to say that she definitely said that, ‘cause I might have made it up, may have argued that as well. But I think we're kind of doing a disservice to fatherhood studies as a whole if we focus on the professional, white, Global North, Guardian-reading, you know, kind of fathers, you know, who are doing some kind of shared care, that's not to dismiss your work, Paul, at all, sorry about this.
But I think that there's an interesting question about which fatherhoods, plural, we study. So, most recently I've been working again with Tina on a project around migrant Syrian fathers and the way in which they… to the UK, to England; and the way in which they think about fatherhood and do fatherhood; which does challenge some of these ideas about, you know, fatherhood is a new involved activity because these men are doing lots of different kinds of involvement with their children, if you captured activities. But they're not entirely happy about it because it's not reflecting the kinds of fatherhood, and particularly the level of financial support, that they really want be able to provide for their children. So, who are we talking about when we talk about fathers? Maybe that's not the question. And not just actually that we focus on some of the privilege, but then there, I think sometimes is a tendency also to focus on the most marginalized. So that's where I can kind of criticize my myself as well… So, that, you know, do we focus on those who are most marginalized, most difficult, and that actually a lot of the everyday fatherhood activities isn't captured very well in our qualitative research. And I know there are people around the room who have done research in that area, but what picture can we capture? And then another final challenge is that: if we have lots of diverse fatherhoods, is it meaningful to think about fatherhood in the singular at all? Thank you.
Alison Koslowski
Oh, thank you. Well, that was great. What I propose now is to take questions from the floor and not let the panel answer them, but rather collect up and then we'll go round again for your individual responses. See how many times we get through that over the next half an hour. So, who wants to, wants to kick off any thoughts? Yes. Alison has offered to bring the mike round.
Speaker 1 from the audience
Hi there, I'm an administrator here at UCL, so I'm here through the PACT Network of Parents and Carers. And I was really interested in and all of what you were saying, but one question that came into my mind was, and you were hinting at it strongly at the end, how have things got worse the last few years? And I'm saying about the gig economy, lots of people, mean lots of people, I mean, here at UCL, we found out our security staff, for example, are about to be... There’s going to be a wave of redundancies, but they're working 60 hours a week because they're outsourced. And I don't think anybody here, you know, who's employed by UCL directly is working that many hours. So, some of them are going to be fathers. And that of course means that, I mean, how are they going to put the same amount of time, effort and resources into their children if they're in that situation? So, there's been a massive rise in that over, you know, the last decade or so. So, I'm just wondering if that is showing in the research as well. So, I guess that's my question, thanks.
Alison Koslowski
Ok. Anybody else? Thank you.
Speaker 2 from the audience
Hi, I'm from the Centre for Research and Social Policy at Loughborough University. We do a lot of work on living standards and low-income families. I'm doing a study at the moment, not necessarily on fathers, but it's on non-resident parents, and by nature a lot of those are fathers. And I'm just interested, you touched on sort of the social policy and policy that the Social Security system… I'm just interested in your thoughts on that, because for non-resident parents, it doesn't really support them, them being a parent because they're classed as a single person. And, particularly for people on low incomes, on universal credit, for example, they're only entitled to single accommodation help, single accommodation. So, it's just sort of interested in. And so, thoughts on social policy from the Social Security system side of things and what, what your views are they sunny on, on that side of things.
Alison Koslowski
Great question. Thank you. Oh, so I'll just get you. Thanks.
Speaker 3 from the audience
I'm a PhD candidate at Birkbeck College. And, Paul, you mentioned about fathers’ mental health, particularly in perinatal period, and about not feeling able to seek support. And even those who are able to seek support… We're aware that particularly mental health support services are really stretched, and perinatal support services, health services are really stretched. So even if they did seek support, it might be difficult to obtain. I'm just wondering: in your various researches of fathers, if there are things that you've observed that they can or could do that can promote their own wellbeing without needing to rely on the support of others. Thanks.
Alison Koslowski
Thank you. We could collect another question, if there is one. No. Okay. I invite the panel to respond to those questions, but also to pick up on each other’s reflections. And Margaret, would you like to…
Margaret O’Brien
Yeah, I'd like to thank you for the questions and really interesting. And on the diversity of fathers, it's really important. And in the field and certainly in parental leave research, we're also highly aware of the polarization issues that you've described, both in terms of employment clarity, and also family change, separation, multiple changes and so on.
And even within, for example, some profiling we've been doing with NADSN, represented in the room, we see great heterogeneity here for non-residential fathers in Britain. We've done some national profiling. And just on that one, you know that you have some men who have children abroad, as well as outside the UK, as well as here, non-residential fathers. You have some, you know, this co-parenting model in non-residential fatherhood is increasing as is non-residential motherhood. Non-residential motherhood is more normative, I think, work to do for women, and still centralizing the maternal identity in our culture. So, there's a lot of work, research to draw on.
It doesn't help the policy inequalities that we have in Britain, which are just awful at the moment. For example, on parental leave for fathers and mothers, and those of you that look at our leave, you could have a look at our Leave Network publications, Alison's very involved in and others in the room, Peter Moss and so on. You know, you see that we are one… That we are so down the league in terms of providing income replacement for even those that are eligible to receive paternity leave, parental leave. So, the gig workers you've mentioned, if they're a man and would like to take paternity leave and they don't meet the criteria, for example, of secure employment 24, 26 weeks before the arrival of the baby, by the 15 weeks before delivery, they actually don't have access to the lower, lower paid option, which is a maternity allowance that women have access to. So, last government, New Labor Ed Balls was pushing this through for fathers in Britain, low-income dads to get access to this, to a paternity allowance in the way that mothers have. I mean, it's paltry, is £156 a week, is a bit more than the minimum wage, bit more than sickness benefit, but it's something. So, I think that access to parental rights, and access to holidays, all of those basic provisions are not… are being dismantled by the new economy of… Well, what does one call it? Nonsense. Well, the new economy of neoliberalism, I don't know what it is, which is more than neoliberalism now. It's every man or woman for that person for themselves. In many ways, that's just my pessimistic view just now.
Paul Hodkinson
You know, I think I was going to say something a little bit similar on that one. Just that, you asked Margaret about, you know, where is the second revolution kind of thing? And it could be that, you know, women doing more work, worked for neoliberalism and capitalism in various ways, you could possibly argue; men doing less work probably doesn't work so well for neoliberal and capitalism; which I guess means that policy has to do something about it and has to intervene in various ways. But yeah, it's some, it's a very good point about the gig economy and, you know, where is the prospect of realistically, you know, finding the way to have the time and the space and the energy to, for fathers to become more involved in that circumstance?
I thought I should answer that, the one about… thanks for the question about fathers and mental health and especially thinking… Because it made me think about how my talk was very much sort of rendering these fathers as quite passive in the face of everything that they were faced with. And actually, in various ways, they weren't. And I mean, they did struggle very significantly with various things, but many of them did sort of try and find ways of coping gradually.
And one of the things that we looked at in the research particularly was their use of sort of digital resources of one kind or another. And this absolutely wasn't some kind of magic panacea or anything like that. But some had found that the ability to just sort of on their own search for information and that kind of thing was massively useful. And there are various sort of fathers that have suffered mental health difficulties that have, you know, do blogs and have become activists and that kind of thing. And many of them found that useful. Various different ways that, some kind of semi disclosing as well online, sometimes to strangers, sometimes to people that they knew, sometimes in kind of coded ways, you know, sort of posting an article about fathers in mental health without any comment, for example. And, you know, this one guy sort of gave us quite heart-rending story actually about how he posted this thing in the hope… And he said this was deliberate. Right. He wanted someone to notice that he was posting this thing and to sort of say something or to reach out to him. Nobody did. So, it was quite a sort of disappointing thing. But there were various things like that, and there were other cases where it sort of had worked and they had sort of found sort of groups of people to talk to, and that then sort of led to them to seek professional help and so on.
So, yeah, there were various things that they did and that and I think most of them did become somewhat proactive, although it wasn't always… It didn't always kind of get them the kind of support that they wanted. And of course, it doesn't replace the need for proper support, not just after it's happened, as it were, or while it's happening, but sort of in the preparation and the… You know, there are various sort of campaigners on this, who just are sort of campaigning for the notion that fathers should just be asked if they're doing okay at certain points during the process, which generally sort of doesn't happen. Thank you.
Esther Dermott
Thanks. Jumping on the last one, first of all, which... But the answer is not really so much in relation to mental health, but it is about the peer, the idea of peer support networks; which I think there's certainly good research from other areas and workplaces about places where men, fathers, can be open about the difficulties that they find as a father. And again, that's a kind of a normal conversation over: ‘Don't really have water coolers anymore’… But the equivalent of that. People are in the office, shared experiences so a kind of an acceptability, a willingness for middle managers, other people, to talk about their own experiences and to kind of to share that, and that that can build useful peer support networks, which then, as Paul says, means that an openness when you get something back and even a bit of understanding, although, obviously, that's not going to resolve significant mental health issues, but it does, you know… It means a less, you know, perhaps something about not being so isolated, I guess, and those spaces… And there has been some work, Lars Plantin in Sweden, and I was going to say that there's a kind of a fatherhood bingo thing, which is that it's really unusual if you people are talking about father research and no one's mentioned a Nordic country explicitly… So, I think I kind of like fail. I didn't know it was a challenge to not say Sweden... Ah! But I maybe on that kind of goes…
So, then to move on to the other questions. I think unless we have some kind of state recognition of the need for supporting care, and let's just say care broadly, not parents, but all forms of kind of care; that it can't be entirely relying on people buying care in order to work very, very long hours, then we can't have a kind of sustainable sets of kind of familial relationships, family ties, whether that's about fathers or whether it's people looking after elderly care issues and, you know, more social democratic kind of set ups, you know, show the way that that can be done a bit better. Is it all a bit depressing at the minute? Yes, probably.
And then, the question what the background living standards. So, a little while ago, no, I did write something about non-resident fathers and poverty, and argued that actually not that all non-resident fathers are living in poverty, but that they are a kind of, are probably an unacknowledged peer group. That, you know, that for those who are poor, there are, have a lot of difficulties and not just financial poverty but also social exclusion. And that those kind of seem to sit together, at least in the survey that we did, the PSA Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey… (cough) excuse me… On the separating-parents issue, though, I would just say that again, one of the issues is that if you have relative low-income before you separate as a couple, then both resident and non-resident partners are going to find it very difficult to maintain a standard of living for themselves and their children across two households. So, I think there's been good research done by Gingerbread, but by others as well. I don't think the solution is that resident parents are sitting in luxury and have got lots of money and non-resident parents aren't. It's actually, which I'm being slightly flippant and I don't mean to be, but I was at, yeah, there was a discussion about child maintenance recently in the, in a special House of Commons Committee and that was kind of slightly the framing like: ‘Oh well, maybe we should just reduce child maintenance because that would make non-resident fathers’ lives easier’. But also, that that doesn't resolve poverty issues for children and resident parents. So again, I don't think we can kind of do anything unless we have kind of better levels of state support, whether it's through children or directly or at least not to target those around you. What kind of housing situation we're into those kinds of debates, and maybe some of those wider social policy, political debates are beyond today's discussion, but…
Alison Koslowski
Thank you, Esther. OK, we've got time for another round. I know you're probably melting over there in the corner. Ask a question. It’ll keep, it’ll wake you up. (laughter).
Speaker 4 from the audience
I do that annoying thing: more of a comment than a question. But just to kind of pick up on what Esther said, I really appreciated that call for kind of a more stratified approach to care, because I think quite a lot of the discussions have been about the early stage of, you know, baby… doing parental leave, but actually, you know, a lot of the research that you all have done as well is sort of pointing to the fact that it's when children move into sort of childcare, that actually a lot of these sort of gendered inequalities get really entrenched because certainly in the UK it is so astronomically expensive. And that sort of sets up these patterns of, you know, employment. But also, it's a kind of, you know, call on a Scandinavian example.
I just wanted to sort of ask the panel's thoughts on changing conceptions of childhood or the child and how that might influence some of the debates that we've been having today. And the example I'm thinking of is having recently been out in Denmark with some colleagues there who are looking at sort of, you know, early childhood and education. They're sort of recognizing that there's a shift going on such that policymakers are now feeling a little bit uncomfortable with how well-embedded childcare is into their infrastructure and sort of going: ‘Mm, actually, is this what's best for children or is it, you know, we just doing what's best for adults?’
And of course, I was like: ‘Oh God, no!’ We all look at you as like, you know, the shining example, because at least in my head, when you have such amazingly well subsidized childcare, it enables men and women to live full lives as citizens, you know, beyond just their roles as parents. Because what I see, at least in the UK, is this kind of pushing down of the responsibilities onto individual couples that then sort of causes these very tense sort of interpersonal negotiations and, you know, these sort of stories of resentment or gender inequality or whatever, rather than this more sort of stratified approach… Where if we took a social responsibility for childcare, it would actually take the pressure off men and women. So, as I said, it's not really a question, but it was just to sort of ask your thoughts on how you think the conception of the child has maybe changed over the last 50 years and how that sort of influenced some of the things you’ve worked on.
Speaker 5 from the audience
Thank you so much. That was really interesting. Slightly more micro question, I think, hard to follow… You talked about same sex parents and research with same sex female parents. And just sort of anecdotally, there are quite a lot of same sex parents at my children's school, and we have conversations about the gender roles and the sort of split between work and responsibility and primary care giving for children. And I wondered… Sort of those conversations tend to reflect more traditional gender roles where one person within that same sex couple will sacrifice their work and their career in the interests of sort of serving the children. And I wondered how the sort of broader research fits with that, but then also wondered more about how same sex couples, where both people are fathers, plays into this relationship.
Alison Koslowski
I'm going to take chairs privilege. That's all right. And so, the cost action we're part of is around social sustainability, is the core social theoretical framing that we're trying to work out what it means. So, we’ve been being thinking about that a little bit and I wonder that in terms of the knots to your question, what counts as change? Something that came up the other day was, well, why I think I've been struggling with the concept of social sustainability is I think about ecological sustainability: we know what we want to keep from the planet. But with social sustainability, a lot of the time we focus on the problems or what's not working, and so we don't want to keep that. So, it doesn't work as if you think directly. So then, how about actually if you flip it, that what do we want to keep about the way… what things are working or what things are better than… what things are different? And what do we need to do to make those things, once you've identified them sustainable. So, focusing, I'm doing a tina, focusing on what's the positive, yeah, so that we can then, yeah, flipping it in that sense. That would also help me with my social sustainability. I keep… Any other? Okay, Esther, do you want to start? We go back down the other way this time.
Esther Dermott
Okay. Thank you. Yeah. So, question or comment, I mean, I think I'm with you and I'm not sure we have very good evidence that we're being unfocused or uninterested in children by that kind of structure. But, but maybe there is something to explore there.
I'm going to jump on kind of two elements off of your comment to say something maybe a little bit different. So, one, I do think that there's, we still also have a lot of focus and fatherhood research on very early years and perhaps, you know, preschool and then kind of primary school. And I do think there's some you know, there's at least a question about is there something interesting to look at with fathers and their older children into secondary school, teenage, post-school age? What are those relationships? What does care and dependency and responsibilities look like at that stage? But then also, I think perhaps into kind of adulthood, because maybe that flips some of the questions so that if we're thinking about relationships between parent and children, about kind of intimacy and a relationship and positive relationship over a period of time that are dynamic, that's also the positive bits and it's going to say to you, then that changes us; it shifts our thinking away from quite an outcome-driven idea about what good parenting is. So: ‘We just have to get kids to this stage… Phew! Done! Got to the next stage, right? Great!’ ‘Oh, they haven't done so well at this stage. It's quite educational kind of focus. Oh, therefore failure as a parent.’ So, I would… I think… So, that's a little bit cheeky on your comment, but also the positive bit is, I think, we have moved a little bit into thinking about the emotional connection, the relationship not quite… Margaret could talk about more, the kind of the psychosocial, it's not so much my… But I think that a positive shift in how we think about relationships and relationality in relation to fathers and children, rather than only:
‘Oh, if we get fathers to do this, kids’ GCSEs will improve’, which is a much more transactional idea about relationships.
And to your question, I'm going to have… I hope someone else has done more recent reading than me, because I'm a bit out of date and I don't know well enough what the divisions of labour are like among same sex male partners. And that is an interesting question about whether gender just plays out differently because the idea of being the stay-at-home dad with the male partner, does that play it differently? I don't know if any of you are equal parents. You didn't have any same sex male couples, did you?
Paul Hodkinson
No, we deliberately want to study that sort of heterosexual dynamic where there's ‘a heterosexual woman, heterosexual man in the same household’ kind of thing. So, yeah, it wasn't something that we really covered.
Esther Dermott
So, sorry, that ‘I don't know’ is the answer to that.
Paul Hodkinson
Yeah, I think I'm probably in a similar position in relation to that. I'm going to guess it's a little bit sort of out of date, but Gillian Ranson's work Against the Grain (Against the Grain: Couples, Gender, and the Reframing of Parenting) included both heterosexual and gay couples that were sort of parenting in sort of non-normal ways, many sort of equal carer relationships. And I'm trying to remember, if I remember rightly, there were some that were very equal and others where they were sort of semi-equal, but there was a sense that they decided one was going to take on sort of primary carer role, even though it was kind of both were sort of heavily involved. But again, it's probably not something that I'm massively knowledgeable about.
Yeah. To question… Yeah, I’d, we'd, having done… So, we originally just did our research as a kind of fixed thing myself and Rachel, on equal and primary carers, and then we sort of, because of the pandemic, actually decided to sort of go back and talk to the five fathers five years later. And I think we'd really like to do that again, if it's possible for us to kind of stay in touch with them, whether it will be or not, I don't know. And it's, it is a real gap: I think you sort of mentioned teenagers that, you know, fatherhood and teenagers, I think, would be a, you know, sort of huge area, which I'm not aware of very much research having me down on. I mean, I think it is a gap and I think there is that tendency to focus on the early periods and that maybe there's a good reason for that, but there's an awful lot that's sort of missing… The childcare stuff you were talking about. I was… I know… I'm not sure if I remember this, so I'm probably going to embarrass myself now, but it was making me think of Fraser and the kind of the ‘universal breadwinner model’, which is kind of like where everyone goes out to work and everyone gets childcare, versus I think what she might call the ‘universal carer model’, which is more the model that kind of everyone doesn't go out to work all the time and both men and women are sort of doing a significant amount of caring and balancing that with work. And it's yeah, it's kind of a tough debate, isn't it? Because there are problems with just completely relying on childcare because often it's, you know, kind of cheap labour provided often by sort of not particularly well-paid women in many cases. And it could be argued that, you know, it sort of plays into the kind of neoliberal system and prevents people from having that kind of balance in various ways. And I guess when I first became involved in this, I was quite sort of convinced the answer is not sort of childcare. The answer is: get men to do more care kind of thing. I think it's actually more complicated than that, now. But, yeah, I think it's a really sort of interesting thing to raise…
Alison Koslowski
Very quickly, now after your comment, we're going to move to drinks and nibbles. So...
Margaret O’Brien
Okay, great. Sounds fun, although I'm probably fall asleep after last night. But anyway, again, just want to… a couple of observations. I think we need to think, we need to reflect on the language we use about children and about caring for children. I mean, I personally, I know where people use unpaid care, but I don't like it. I think it's very mechanistic. I think I will continue to use it when I need to. But, you know, caring for children, being with children is terrible, can be terribly joyful, irritating, everything, all the other emotions. So, you know, in our society here, we tend not to… We don't celebrate children enough, I think, actually… At all of their ages. And you know, when people go off on leave, we say: ‘Oh, poor you, what a burden…’ often, rather than: ‘Great, you're going to have all this... You’re not going to have time for yourself, you’re going to have time with your kids’. And as somebody who's been through that, it's very short, actually. It sounds very… This maybe is not right on or whatever… But is that it passes really quickly and there's some lovely moments that you remember. And children have fun. They're also very difficult and they can have problems and all of that. So, I just like to think about the language, we could think about our language. And I know my colleague Peter Moss hates the phrase childcare, doesn't it? What is it? And wants us to use early education and care, early child's education and care. And it's a hard one to force people to do that. And I understand why we talk about child care institutions, because, you know, particularly women need help with that, with that negotiation and reconciliation, and so do men, of course, but with the burden of working hours, I think what's happening is pretty hard for women as well as men.
Conceptions of childhood, then, when you look at the language and I mean, Denmark is fascinating country in many ways, and some people suggest children are parked in the way that you've described possibly. But then, there's all the data on happiness and orderliness and fun. And we've got Danish people in the room. There’re also parents. So, something’s working. And in Finland as well, something is working. They’re more complex, in many ways, societies. So, language celebration children… Our government do not celebrate children enough. They don't invest in children. They don't invest in the care of children or the care of caregivers to children. And throughout life and…
And I just said this on the same sex and multitude of sexes and fluidities of gender. I think Susan Golombok’s book is great place to start: We Are Family, and there's people in the room working on that in that area. And there is, there isn't enough. There are not enough projects on a far the same male sex as it were, irrespective of identity. And that's a real gap in the field. I don't think there's a project at the moment. Is that right Kitty on this… Sorry, would you just help?
Catherine Jones
Susan Golombok has done some longitudinal studies on two fathers’ families through adoption and through surrogacy in the UK and in the US and in more from a psychological perspective than some of the more sociological perspectives being explored today. Yeah.
Margaret O’Brien
Any messages to help the room before we finish?
Catherine Jones
Correct me if I'm wrong, Susy, but generally it shows that same gender couples share childcare more actively, possibly, than couples who’re heterosexual, so they tend to negotiate between themselves about what was best for them, rather than along more like stark primary and secondary caregiver lines. Yeah.
Margaret O’Brien
Thank you. Well… that works.
Alison Koslowski
Thank you very much, everyone. So, would you please join me in thanking our panel for such a thought-provoking and entertaining time. (Clapping).