Fathers spending time with the kids? Great. Just don't ask me to do any homework
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Version 0 of 1. Father's Day went unmarked in the Gimson household. On noticing an advertisement for some gift no man in his senses would wish to receive, I issued instructions to my three children that they should ignore a festival set up by the manufacturers of golfing accessories. I am happy to report that these instructions have turned out to be superfluous. It is true that Ed Miliband has taken the chance to make a characteristically tentative suggestion to extend paid paternity leave for fathers. He is said to believe that "giving fathers more rights is good for the mother and the children". This is a convenient doctrine: no one can object to making life better for mothers and children. But good motives do not always make good policy. Robin Harris relates, in his generally sympathetic biography of Margaret Thatcher, how a moral sentiment led to an administrative disaster: "The Child Support Agency, which was very much Mrs Thatcher's creation and was inspired by her indignation at the failure of absent fathers to pay for their children's upkeep, turned out to be notoriously incompetent." The irrepressible urge of politicians to justify what they are doing in moral terms is fully shared by David Cameron. When promoting the same-sex marriage bill, the prime minister waxed eloquent on the value of commitment. But this trenchant belief in commitment has not found expression in any proposals to make divorce more difficult. It has instead led to tax incentives to stay married which are so modest that they have been widely ridiculed. There is a lot of rather nauseating rhetoric, by politicians of all complexions, about the determination to help "hard-working families". Our rulers wield a moral club with which they wish to bludgeon us into accepting that they are on our side. Their statements are phrased in such a way as to make it impossible, without declaring oneself to be a disreputable person, to disagree with what they are saying. This coercive style of rhetoric is one reason why so many people have stopped listening to what politicians have to say. When I hear the term "hard-working", I feel the urge to make the case for laziness, or for exerting oneself no more than moderately. Perhaps Father's Day at least gives me a pretext to make the case against unremitting hard work. Our children need our attention. They would like, perhaps, to eat a meal together, hold a conversation or play a game, without feeling their mother or father is incapable of hearing a word they say, because they are constantly preoccupied by thoughts of work. That fathers may be getting their act together is suggested by one academic study. It found they spend seven times as long with their children as did their own fathers, 40 years ago. It is a pity to be so consumed by one's work that one sees them only on rare occasions, and then through a blur of exhaustion. Let us hope the trend continues. Which is not to say that children should be encumbered with help or supervision at every hour of the day and night. Several times in recent weeks, fathers have said to me that they must go home to help their children prepare for exams. Some of these fathers have acquired such a command of the syllabus that it is a pity they are not themselves sitting the papers. I cannot approve of such unremitting parental involvement in actual school work. Fortunately for her, our older daughter is in any case sitting exams in scientific subjects with which I am incapable of helping. She has instead asked me why there is not a single working pen in our house. This defect is one at least that I can try to remedy. |