DADS DO MATTER

. . . even if they’re always at work and infuriatingly clueless when they’re at home!

MY DAD was a quiet, dignified lowland Scot, a career diplomat who studied philosophy in Freiburg, Germany, before the war, and was a BBC German Service announcer during it. He was not what you could call a ‘New Man’. While he spoke four languages elegantly, he was not given to displays of emotion, which annoyed Mum at times. I doubt he ever changed a nappy, or indeed cooked a meal. But he was our dad. And he was loyal to us.

Some of my best memories of childhood are when, posted to France, he took us off on Sundays to run and roll through a sloping local woodland to a restaurant for chicken and chips. He would raise philosophical ideas way above our heads, asking how we knew that trees and stones were still there when no one was looking. He made up knock-knock jokes in silly accents on car journeys. Later, he and I argued, courteously but determinedly, about the Vietnam War.

I thought of Dad as I read actress January Jones’s comments on fatherhood last week. She spoke about being a mother to her son Xander, who made her ‘whole’ and delights her every day.

Then, in comments which many will find extraordinary, she added that she was glad she has no partner, because — daft killer line of the week — ‘[Xander] doesn’t have a male person in his life saying: “Don’t cry,” or “You throw like a girl.” All those sh***y things dads accidentally do.’

Oh, dear. One might bitchily point out that mothers can also pass on stupid ideas to their children.

It’s true that some of the best mothers raise children without fathers, after widowhood, difficult divorces, desertion, lone adoption, same- sex coupledom or — very occasionally — because they simply chose to go it alone.

But I have never heard a sensible one — even among the latter group — actively rejoicing at the absence of a father figure.

However, the feelings January expresses are, apparently, becoming more common.

Some single mothers now prefer to be called ‘solo mums’; the word ‘single’ seemingly implies a man should have been involved. There’s no need for a father, say these few. Sometimes such comments seem to go beyond the natural determination not to let it affect their child, and instead cross over into a perverse pride in doing it without a man.

PERHAPS anticipating criticism at the perceived lack of male role models in little Xander’s life, January Jones says she might get a ‘manny’ (male nanny), and that her male friends ‘want to be around her son because he’s such a fun kid’. But this isn’t the same as a father. Family friends and employees are going to be on their best behaviour round the little princeling. The function a father provides is entirely different — one absolutely vital to a child’s emotional development.

A father may seem more distant, sometimes sterner and more demanding than the mother, or just more favourable to adventure, endurance and competition.

You can’t generalise, but it’s true that men often offer a breezier kind of parenting.

Young fathers today may presume that equal- parenting means identical-parenting. It doesn’t. We don’t have to return to a Victorian idea of father as hero; a godlike, wise mentor. But there is no sense in his being a clone of mum.

There is as much nourishment for the growing child’s spirit — for sons and daughters both — in sharing a workbench, talking football, playing rough untidy games or being taught to throw overarm. (No, January: that does not have to involve remarks like: ‘You throw like a girl.’)

psychologists have long said that in the early years, children see a mother as a home, a womb, a safe place, an extension of themselves.

A father, however, takes you closer to the world outside, plays more rumbustiously, treats small tumbles with a laugh and brisk ‘Oops-a- daisy’ rather than worried solicitude; perhaps even makes fun of tantrums.

It’s not about hardcop, soft-cop.

More about one parent being a refuge, the other an adventure.

Sometimes the genders swap over and it’s the man who tends the home fires and is there for cuddles, while the woman climbs Kilimanjaro or sails round the world.

Again, fine. But there are two crucial jobs there, whoever does them, no matter how many mannies you might employ in an attempt fill the void.

It’s notable that boys have their own particular needs of a father. Steve Biddulph, the wise and entertaining child psychologist and author of raising Boys, a groundbreaking book on development, says fathers can recognise the particularities of male nature, and the storm of hormones at puberty. They can also ‘teach boys how to inhabit a male body’, and show that a real man can be tender, domestically helpful, protective and in control of the flooding emotions of adolescence. A real father has much more of a rounded role to play in his son’s life than the cliched ‘You throw like a girl!’ dad of January Jones’s imagination. While teachers, coaches and friends can certainly help, it is the father who teaches daily how to be a good man. Daughters need that, too. A widow I know who raised three girls with her mother’s help bemoans their problematic love lives: ‘In one way they don’t trust men, because of what they read; in another way, they don’t see through the bad ones. Males to them are either demons or gods. If only their dad had lived.’

But what should a father be like? Is there a template? I was struck recently after reading a new important piece of research from Oxford University, which did two things.

It confirmed that children grow up more secure if their father cares about them and shows it. Hardly surprising. But within that truth is the important observation that you need not necessarily be a full-on, equal-parenting New Man for this benefit to be felt.

Some 10,000 families were studied and questioned when infants were small, and progress checked again when the children were 11.

Fathers were scored on three factors: emotional response, security in their role as fathers, and how involved they were in domestic chores and childcare.

The fascinating thing is that the third element hardly mattered. What mattered was love and confidence, including a bond with their partner.

‘It is psychological and emotional aspects of paternal involvement in a child’s infancy that are most powerful in influencing later child behaviour,’ Dr Charles Opondo, who led the research, said.

even those men who — like my dad — spent long hours at work and didn’t do practical, hands-on domestic childcare, were shown to have a strong, benign influence. The Oxford report concludes that, as long as both parents are happy and committed to their children, everyone does best.

Single mothers can be excellent, but have a trickier job to do.

The report also feels like a stark warning to divorcing families: that a woman who has split from her partner does her child no good if she excludes and belittles the father, as far too many do. Unless he’s a monster, the children need to respect and love him.

But another conclusion is very heartening: that a man who is uncomfortable with baby-paraphernalia can still be a great dad. A working mother has every right to demand a decent amount of help, but that’s for her sake.

For the child, it doesn’t seem to matter too much if dad refuses flatly to wear a babysling, pushes a buggy only on sufferance and panics at being left in charge of small children for long periods. He is not necessarily a bad father. Just different.

even the most baffled new father may come into his own when his children are old enough to talk to and share enthusiasms.

AS IT happens, I married one who enjoyed it all. He cooked, grasped the principle of how babygrow poppers work and was better at bathing infants than me (it does help to have great big bloke’s hands, what with all the soapy wriggling). A New Man, if you like.

But this metrosexual style is not the heart of fatherhood.

Unless (and it is a big unless) he is souring his marriage by idly avoiding the hard work, what counts is that dad cares, and that the children know it.

So if he’s in tricky corporate merger talks, or a government minister steering a Bill through an all-night session, the fact that he’s delighted to see them when he does get home will register.

In reality, dual careers mean that decent men generally do their share at home. But cut them some slack.

As Mike rosen’s book Goodies And Daddies observed when New Men were emerging, you can do the baby stuff with nappies and burps and fish-fingers ‘in a blokey way’.

Mothers sometimes cling to their systems, and tell fathers off for incompetence.

I remember during the toilettraining years my own husband brought a child indoors with wet pants, apologising that he’d forgotten to ask ‘ need a potty?’ because they were watching a house-marten building its nest.

Being in a good temper I was actually pleased, because I knew how mumsily boring I had got on the subject, so it was good the poor child was reminded that the wonders of the natural world outrank dry trousers.

The glory of dads is partly that they’re not mums. The glory of human beings is that everyone is a bit different. Football dad or philosophy Dad, outdoorsman or CeO, scholar or joker, they can all be great. The key thing is the love.

So, January Jones, if a good man comes your way, adores your child and wants to be dad — rejoice!