Fathers Fight For Lead Role In Childcare

A new battle of the sexes, dubbed the ‘Daddy Wars’, is raging in the home rather than the workplace, according to new research.

An increasing number of men, deprived of their role as a breadwinner, are competing with their partners over childcare as they try to reassert their lost authority.

‘Fathers are challenging mothers’ sphere of influence in the home because they feel it is the one area left in which they can assert themselves, exercise their power and define themselves in the home,’ said Dr Caroline Gattrell, author of Hard Labour: The Sociology of Parenthood

Toby Byrne, a doctor in Hammersmith married to Susan, a barrister, said: ‘When our son was born last year, I consciously made the decision that being a hugely involved father was a role I could make my own. Susan found it a bit difficult at first. She even said she felt her role as a mother had been slightly usurped. But I feel it’s given me a direction and security I was lacking. I’ve never been happier.’

Gattrell’s paper, ‘Whose Child Is It Anyway? The Negotiation of Paternal Entitlements Within Marriage’, will be published next month in the peer-reviewed Sociological Review. She found that men develop strategies to secure their position at the centre of the home. ‘I saw fathers in dual-career couples consciously mobilising their so-called “paternal rights” as a reaction to the shift in the traditional patriarchal culture of power and authority,’ she said. ‘They asserted their paternal “rights” in a way that suggested that children have become the focus for power and negotiation struggles.’

The Daddy Wars are in full swing in the US, where a growing group of men are passionate about why fathers should be as fully involved in raising their children as any mother. Last month’s US Men’s Vogue featured a polemic from Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Charlie LeDuff about how he had given up the rat race to ‘stay home and raise his daughter’.

In Britain, however, fathers still work the longest hours in Europe. A 20-year study by the Economic and Social Research Council found that working mothers do a ‘double-workload’, working an extra 15 days a year when home responsibilities are taken into account.

Adrienne Burgess, author of Fatherhood Reclaimed: The Making of the Modern Father, said she was exasperated by Gattrell’s conclusions. ‘Men can’t win,’ she said. ‘Women say they want men to fully share responsibility at home, but when that happens they complain. What we want is a world where men and women feel just as powerful and in control as each other in both the public and private sphere.’

Burgess’s report inspired Harriet Harman, the Minister for Women, to call for a shift in flexible working hours to create a new ‘cultural norm’ in which men stay at home to bring up their children as often as women. ‘Fathers play a vital role in bringing up their children,’ said Harman. ‘Both mothers and fathers should balance earning a living while bringing up their children.’