How Scotland's dads are swapping bread-winning for child-raising

Like thousands of dads across Scotland, Covid revolutionised fatherhood for Ravi Ladva. Despite lockdown’s agonies, homeworking meant he could finally spend “real” time with his daughter Kripa.

There’s a generational chasm between Ravi and his own dad when it comes to fatherhood. Ravi’s Hindu family fled east Africa in the 1970s. “They were refugees,” he says. Times were tough. His dad’s life was “pretty much work, 16 hours a day”.

Ravi’s mum provided “the softer side” of parenting. When Kripa was born eight years ago, Ravi says, “I wanted to do things differently. I didn’t want to do as my father did”.

Today, you’ll find Ravi playing the game Warhammer with Kripa each evening. “I concentrate on the things she enjoys,” he says.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but without the pandemic, Ravi adds, as a dad, “I’d always be running in deficit”.

 

The revolution

Ravi represents what’s being called “a childcare revolution” in Scotland. Research by the charity Fathers Network Scotland (FNS) – which campaigns to “improve children’s lives through the positive involvement of dads” – shows that 45% of men now spend more than 25 hours a week caring for their children.

By comparison, explains FNS director Cathy Sexton, 1970s surveys showed fathers spending “five minutes per day

– 35 minutes per week – involved in their children’s care”.

The “fatherhood revolution” started when GenerationX boys hit manhood in the late 1980s. The once much-derided “new men” of the 1990s rejected “macho” stereotypes and prioritised parenting as much work.

That slow social change ticked along nicely until Covid put rocket boosters under it. Millennial dads like Ravi, who’s 35, took what GenX started and ran with it. Lockdown homeworking gave them a taste of quality time with their children and they didn’t want to lose it, Sexton explains.

But there’s a downside. FNS today releases a deep-dive report into what Scottish fathers say they need now –they’re spending more time with their children than their own fathers ever did.

The picture painted by FNS is of men enduring daily battles to make their commitment to fatherhood work. Nearly 90% of Scottish dads say they “are struggling to juggle the competing demands in their lives and feel like an afterthought when it comes to parenting”. Employers, the NHS, schools and government must do more to help men be the fathers they want to be, Sexton feels.

Many men may have changed – “transforming family life”, as FNS says

– but society and government hasn’t yet recognised that. No wonder Sexton calls this a “quiet childcare revolution”. It’s all going on within family homes, not talked about in the media or parliament.

Cathy Sexton, director of Fathers Network Scotland. Pic Gordon Terris Herald & Times

The dads

LET’S return to Ravi and those other Scottish dads, chatting about modern fatherhood: a conversation that would have been unlikely in his own father’s era.

These men are part of Dads Rock, a Scottish charity that support fathers. There’s Thomas Lynch, Dads Rock co-founder and father of two; new dad Chris Duffy; and David, though that’s not his real name. He wants anonymity. David is in a same-sex relationship. He and his husband have just adopted their son, and worry about privacy.

Chris, a 37-year-old accountant, is one of Scotland’s lucky dads. His employer gave him four months’ paternity leave. For most, it’s two weeks. For the self-employed, there’s nothing.

Those four months were crucial for his wife, recovering from an emergency caesarean, and daughter Genevieve, so he could bond with her. When Genevieve arrived, Chris’s office had already shifted to hybrid working. He’s in the office three days and at home two. “I love it. It means I see my daughter during the week.”

He fizzes with delight at just feeding her lunch. Genevieve is weaning and Chris can’t stop laughing about her “blowing raspberries”. It wasn’t like this for Chris’s dad. “Mum stayed at home,” he says.

Chris’s dad ran himself ragged working hard and trying to be there for his kids at weekends and evenings. Chris says he works to live, he doesn’t live to work.

“Being with my wee girl – that’s the absolute highlight.”

Like many new dads, he fears making mistakes. Chris jokes that he thinks about the infamous Philip Larkin poem This Be The Verse “once a week”. The poem begins: “They f*** you up, your mum and dad.”

However, he hopes the “greater level of emotional intelligence” that many men now have means today’s children will grow up happier and safer than previous generations, with dads fully engaged in their lives.

This brings him to the issue of paternal mental health. Unsurprisingly, many new dads experience depression and anxiety. But it’s not a big NHS priority.

When the health visitor came to do post-natal mental health checks with his wife, Chris asked whether dads could get checked too. He was told: “Sorry, we don’t do anything for dads. Have you heard about this group called Dads Rock?”

That shocked him. Chris knows his experience of family life is fortunate. Low-income parents suffer stresses middle-class families never experience. Parenthood in the shadow of foodbanks corrodes mental health.

That’s one reason, Chris feels, dads need mental health support. But it’s not the only reason. A shadow stalks the dads’ conversation: domestic violence. These are good men, who love their partners and want to be good fathers. But, evidently, they’re aware that a minority of men aren’t like them. Obligatory mental health checks for new fathers would red-flag dangerous men, the group agrees.

Thomas’s children are 15 and seven. Fatherhood made him think long and hard about his own dad. “My dad’s job was to work, that was his role. Then he retired and died. That was a lesson to me. I loved my dad. He was great. But I didn’t want to be like him in that respect. He missed so much.”

So fatherhood has changed, but society and employment haven’t kept pace. All dads – including the self-employed - should get at least six weeks’ statutory paid paternity leave, Thomas feels.

David and his husband debated who would stay at home – taking the potential career hit – and become their son’s primary caregiver. It was David who assumed the role, though he knows it’s “a privileged middle-class position” to be in, and others aren’t as fortunate.

David, however, doesn’t want their son to grow up thinking he lacked ambition as he stayed at home to raise him. So he’s writing a novel. “I want to set him an example,” he says.

“Honestly, I surprised myself, as talking about being a full-time dad had a certain element of shame.” Some still consider being a stay-at-home dad “a second-class job”, he adds. That clearly stings an ambitious man.

Some dreadful assumptions are made about fatherhood. People have said to Thomas that they thought Dads Rock was “for broken men”, he explains. “It’s really interesting that the perception of an organisation which supports dads is: you must be supporting men who have something broken within them. But that’s just society.”

A mums’ support group would never be seen like that. Similarly, another assumption is that Dads Rock is only for single fathers. Far from it.

Some even confuse support groups and charities for dads with what Thomas calls “something dark”: the men’s rights movement, often riddled with misogyny.

There’s nothing anti-feminist about these men. They want to be better dads – and better men and partners – to further equality for women, not limit it.

Thomas adds another hard truth to the discussion. Yes, the pandemic meant many dads could spend more time with their children, but for low-income families that blessing came with pain too.

Living on benefits and lockdown isn’t a happy mix. Nor is low-paid homeworking in a one-bedroom flat with children needing love and attention. And then, of course, there were millions of essential workers – many low paid – who had to leave their children daily and not stay at home.

“Remember that phrase from the pandemic?” Thomas asks. “We’re in the same storm, but not in the same boat.”

 

The campaigner

CATHY Sexton knows that some may consider it odd that a woman who’s a stepmother runs a charity like Fathers Network Scotland, campaigning for more support for dads. But it means she comes bias-free. Certainly, nobody can accuse her organisation of sexism.

What troubles Sexton most is that men have changed when it comes to fatherhood, but society hasn’t kept up. Today, her organisation is upping the ante: calling directly on the Scottish and UK governments, as well as employers, to recognise the role fathers now play in society, and support them properly.

FNS says that men are now starting to feel the same pressures that began to burden women in the 1980s and 1990s: the social expectation to be perfect, “juggling being present for their children and providing for their family”.

A staggering 85% of fathers say they need more support. The priorities are: a better work-life balance; more support from schools; and better healthcare, especially around mental health. One-fifth of dads want “greater acknowledgment” of their “role as caregivers by society”.

The more help and recognition fathers get, then the better the life experiences of not just children, but also mothers, FNS says. More than one-third of dads, for instance, now spend 10 hours a week doing housework. That’s a huge cultural shift in a few generations.

Many dads feel state services don’t “value” them. FNS says this is especially significant for low-income families. Dads playing an active role in their child’s life reduces the attainment gap. Think how easy it is for middle-class parents to be heard by teachers, compared to low-income parents. FNS also wants “family-friendly work” to become the norm for employers.

As low income families often struggle if dads take unpaid leave when children are born, FNS wants paternity leave overhauled. Sexton favours the Scandinavian model where both parents get 240 days’ leave.

FNS also wants mental health services to pay more attention to fathers after their child’s birth. Sexton says she couldn’t quite believe it when the research she commissioned showed how the pandemic had changed fatherhood.

“Cynically, I thought we’d gradually see things return to normal. Dads would go back to work and the status quo. But that’s not what we’re seeing,” she says.

“The pandemic was a catalyst for change that was brewing. Essentially, dads were becoming more and more involved with their children as we go through the generations, then Covid accelerated that.”

But dads are still finding themselves “excluded at the school gates. Dads are essentially feeling the flipside of the inequality women felt in the workplace, but in the childcare arena”. Culturally, fatherhood in Scotland is “going through a big shift” – a “blossoming” – but society must catch up.

Sexton is loath to generalise about fatherhood – especially as dads from ethnic minorities, gay dads, and dads in low-income homes face challenges most white, straight, middle-class dads never face. However, the one big shift for fatherhood across Scotland has been dads embracing homeworking where they can. Again, if they can, dads who are made to work in offices are seeking other jobs, Sexton explains.

“They want flexibility so they can be involved in family life, support their partners and be there for their children. They’ve got a taste for that and don’t want to give it up. But that creates tension between being there for children and providing financially,” she adds.

“More money means more time away from children.”

It’s the male equivalent of the absurd 1990s “superwoman” trend, when high-flying executives like Nicola Horlick – said to balance careers and motherhood, and still look great – were held up as examples of perfect womanhood. That put unbearable pressure on women, and still does. “Men are now feeling the same,” says Sexton.

The changing shape of masculinity lies behind this “new fatherhood2. Increasingly, men have fully embraced gender equality as well as a “gentle, fathering-masculinity, rather than the unengaged, unemotionally-intelligent masculinity. That’s good for everyone”.

Stereotypes of men as useless dads

– incapable of changing nappies – are dying out thankfully, Sexton adds, as we’ve reached a “cultural tipping point”.

The 1990s “new man” was “an outlier and early adopter” of this updated masculinity but now, says Sexton, “it’s become mainstream, and Covid pushed it towards being the social norm”.

To Sexton, this represents modern fatherhood finally catching up with biology. Men are meant to be with their children. Testosterone appears to drop permanently when men become fathers. In evolutionary terms, that means wild youth is over and calm parenting now matters. “There’s a biological imperative,” says Sexton. “Evolution made men primed to be dads, not an add-on but co-parents.”

In fact, men were often well-engaged parents until the Industrial Revolution, Sexton adds. In predominantly agricultural societies, most families lived rural lives, with both parents working on the same small farm, sharing child-raising responsibilities. Men and women clearly had very gendered roles parentally in this period, but the idea of men disappearing all day to go to work wasn’t the norm.

Evidently, today’s changes around fatherhood offer a chance at real equality for women. If men share half the childcare and housework responsibilities, women should have the same opportunities as men at work. And, of course, the more that both parents are engaged in a child’s upbringing, the safer and happier that child will be.

Sexton imagines a utopian future where there’s as many “caregiving dads” as “breadwinning mums”. That, she says, is “the gold standard. That’s what we should aim towards”. It would also address the gender pay gap where women’s careers start suffering when they take time out to raise children, while their partner continues working.

Men need to begin hearing from society at large that fatherhood is respected and valued, Sexton feels. Few men make a big deal about this change to fatherhood, so nobody really acknowledges just how significant a shift has taken place. “This gentle revolution – of dads feeding, nurturing, putting socks on – is quietly happening in the background. Dads aren’t asked about this. Nobody tends to ask dads anything.”

Sexton refers to the “fatherhood forfeit”, adding: “Dads now face similar problems that mums faced 30 years ago. When dad is the principal caregiver, he’s treated more poorly. Before, there was a ‘motherhood forfeit’ in the workplace. As more dads become the principal caregiver, there’s persistent stigma in the workplace.”

Many dads talk of asking for leave for childcaring responsibilities and bosses saying ‘why can’t your wife do it?’.

The “expectation” that mothers must be the principle caregiver is “deeply unfair to women”, Sexton says. “Why should the woman be the go-to person?” The pitiful paternity leave for men symbolises fathers “beginning their parenting life with inequality from within the system”.

Evidently, none of this means that giving birth and breastfeeding don’t demand special treatment – in terms of time off and state support – for women. It’s simply a call, Sexton says, for fatherhood to be given a little more respect than it currently gets from society.

A father’s health data isn’t collected in the same way as a mother’s. “The mother’s information is aligned with the child’s,” Sexton says. “Dads’ records aren’t.”

Doing so would provide valuable research material on both child and father, and help dads parent better.

It could also, if matters are looked at from a darker slant, potentially flag domestic abuse risks. In other cases, some dads suffer from depression after children are born, a subject that’s little discussed. More attention to fatherhood from healthcare professionals would change that.

“It’s a hangover from when dads weren’t even at the birth,” says Sexton

– a symbol of a style of fatherhood that’s long gone. Absent fathers, disengaged fathers, fathers who value work over child-raising “cast a long shadow”, says Sexton.

A present, loving father can help “determine the rest of a child’s life”. State failure to recognise and support that “is almost criminal”, she adds. Research shows that having two engaged parents means better outcomes for children, Sexton explains – that’s why schools and nurseries need to involve fathers as much as mothers.

“What might that mean for kids?” Sexton asks. “What might that mean for society? For Scotland? To me, it would mean we really could become the best place in the world to grow up.”

The changes that have happened to fatherhood over recent decades “are so fragile, so emergent”, she says, “that I fear if they aren’t supported, nurtured and valued by society, then we might lose it all, we might go backwards”.

She adds: “That wouldn’t be just a shame, it would be a tragedy.”