PROBLEMS OF A MODERN DAY DAD

Callers aired what have become familiar themes concerning the hairier sex: worried women observed that males of the species are failing in school, failing as workers and failing in bed; angry men complained that women had robbed them of their paycheques, their pride and - metaphorically, I think - their private parts as well.

Then came a voice of a lone mum from south London. Her attitude was stark: "I don't need men, I don't want them, I've had it up to here with them. Me and the kids are better off without them.

" Of course, generations of women have complained that the fathers of their children are a dead loss when it comes to the hard graft of family life, the parts of parenting which involve nagging teenagers to finish their homework or stripping pee-soaked beds at dead of night. But this caller was truly striking, both for her utter lack of sentiment and for her conviction that there was nothing - nothing - her children's father could contribute to their lives that would be worth the grief of having him back.

And it's not difficult to see why.

New EU statistics show that nearly a quarter of all families in Britain are headed by lone parents, the great majority of them women. It is important to realise there is a variety of reasons why women end up as lone parents, not all of which are wholly or even partly the fault of feckless, useless or wicked men.

Even so, you can bet that a good number of the adults at the helm of Britain's 1.8 million lone parent households are women who've reached similar conclusions to that angry phone-in caller - or at least learned from hard experience that they and their brood can get by without having a man about the house. As a result society, however reluctantly, is becoming accustomed to the idea that men are often only marginally involved in the upbringing of their children and, at worst, a positive hindrance to it. This is a recent development. Not so long ago, our idea of the model family always had a father at its head, and a family without one was seen as some kind of aberration. Furthermore, it was often assumed that the absence of a father was the mother's fault. As recently as the mid-Eighties it was unmarried teenage mothers, rather than absent fathers of all ages, who were denounced as the prime threat to the Britishway of family life.

The subsequent shift in perception has a number of causes.Treasury number-crunchers and Conservative politicians concluded that social security balance sheets would make sweeter reading if those absent fathers were chased forchild support rather than leaving the taxpayer to bear the burden.

The advent of the Child Support Agency was not the only reason fathers began getting a bad press. There was also a burgeoning mood of unease about violent fathers and fathers who sexually abused their children.Then there were fathers who worked all the time, went out with the lads all the time or bolted to the bed of the first unencumbered babe to cross their path. Suddenly, Bad Dads seemed to be everywhere. Yet in parallel with these Bad Dad stories, there have been other, more cheering ones.

There seems to be a growing desire, not least among fathers themselves, for today's dads to be different from those of previous generations: more involved in the upbringing of their children, more available for them emotionally. It is not difficult to find men who feel they've never really known their fathers, even if they have appreciated his diligence as a "traditional" provider during their childhoods. Today's fathers tell social researchers they'd love to spend less time at work and more at home at the centre of family life, to "be there" for their children in ways their own fathers were not. Maybe some of them are lying. Maybe some of them really mean it but do not really know what being an up-to-your-elbows parent means. And maybe that's why a lot of women who go out to work are enraged to find that their men are still leaving most of the childcare to them, along with the cooking, cleaning and sock-pairing. Even so, it is hard to see how our huge concerns about the family can be tackled fully unless men are drawn as deeply into the heart of family life as women are. 

Fostering that will require political will and a cultural acceptance that men have as much to offer as parents as women do, including some special qualities of their own. It will mean more paternity leave and shorter working hours than the 50 or more worked by a third of fathers at present. If their children desire it, and with proper safeguards in place, it will mean encouraging greater parental involvement by fathers who no longer live with those children, not least because it will make them more likely to pay child support. It also means men learning to think about fatherhood in different ways - and in so doing realising that Having It All is not just a matter for women. 

Dave Hill is the author of The Future of Men (Phoenix).    
Never at home: Declan Molloy, 48
Absent Dad: Pat Hutchinson, 43
Single father: Nigel Rosser, 36