Staying Attached

Fathers and Children in Troubled Times

Gill Gorell Barnes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429919466
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

This book is about the changing social contexts for fathering in the United Kingdom since the end of the Second World War, and the social moves from patriarchal fatherhood to multiple ways of doing 'dad'. The book questions why fathers have been marginalised by therapists working with children and families. It proposes that theories of psychotherapy, including attachment theory, have failed to take father love for their children, and the reality of changing social fatherhoods, sufficiently into account, consequently affecting related practice. Different contemporary family structures and multiple variations of relationship between fathers and children are considered. Many fathers, brought up within earlier patriarchal frameworks for viewing fatherhood are still trying to exercise these within contexts of rapid change in expectations of men as fathers. They may find themselves in troubled and oppositional relations with partners and oftern children. Examples are given for thinking abour fathers in different relationship transitions, including 'non-live-in' fatherhoods, re-entering children's lives after long absences, fathering following acrimonious divorce, and a range of social fatherhoods.

CHAPTER ONE

The changing social context for fathering in the United Kingdom in my lifetime: the family and fathers remembered following the Second World War

Men, women, work, family, and babies

Following the end of the Second World War, family life had to reorganise around the inclusion of fathers returning from the world of combat. Contemporary studies of the family did not include any difficulties this reinstatement had involved, and also ignored variations in gendered family practices—ways that men and women might have behaved within the privacy of the family that were different from roles publically assigned for “mother” and for “father”. Idiosyncratic contradictions that might have been tolerated and even enjoyed in family life in the 1950s were not reported, so that how fathers “behaved” in families is recorded under broad research agreements on how family life was put together: the domain of sociology vs. the idiosyncratic and anecdotal interpretations of how this was actually have lived (more the domain of diaries, biography, comedy, popular songs, and seaside postcard jokes (Orwell, 1941)). The larger institutionalised construction of family, with a preferred frame of two parents, is our official version of family life (Mogey, 1956; Young & Wilmot, 1957).

The 1950s and the 1960s marked the rise of “maternal” pre-eminence (Bowlby, 1951). Women were urged to prioritise looking after their babies over working outside the home. This emphasis on childcare was in part to compensate for the retreat of women from the marketplace, encouraged in order to allow men back into the labour forces at the necessary level after the war. Anecdotally referenced by Grace Robertson, who herself went on to become a world-famous photographer, was the gratitude and guilt women felt towards the men who had fought and won a terrible war and

not wanting to steal their work … you couldn’t avoid the men who had been hurt in the war: they were everywhere, blind or scarred, on crutches or in wheelchairs. This made women less voluble on the subject of equality than they might otherwise have been … I could no more have thought of feminism in the face of what I could see in the streets than I could have flown to the moon. It would have been indecent as far as I was concerned. (Robertson, quoted in Cooke, 2013, p. xix)

The primary role consigned to women, to have babies, also marked the significance given to re-populating a society decimated by war through bombing and loss of civilians as well as loss of fighting men: “the chief means of fulfilment in life is to be a member of and reproduce a family” (Oakley, 2014). During the Second World War, men had been distanced from the daily experience of their families and in the immediate post-war period of re-entry and accommodation into family life their role as breadwinner was privileged. A father’s role was socially defined as “the economic provider and the emotional support of mother” (Bowlby, 1953, p 15).

Creating homes for families: public policy and private life

Standards of living for families as a whole improved in the context of massive rebuilding programmes following the bombing and destruction of civilian life in some of the major cities in the UK (Imperial War Museum London Blitz Archives), creating new possibilities for family living. The population of Britain at every social level had been shocked to discover the quality of life many families had suffered in pre-war housing, and there was a national wish to give families of all social classes the opportunity for a better quality of life. A further emphasis on the importance of motherhood as an activity arose from public recognition of the deprivations experienced by children during the war, both within their homes through bombing and as a result of evacuation, an attempt to avoid the effects of bombing on children. Evacuation itself had opened up wider public awareness of the poverty and associated poor nutrition and health standards within which many children were raised, creating a public momentum for social change. There was a “spirit of hope” pushing forward the legislations of the Welfare State—health, housing, and benefits all being proposed as part of a better quality of life. The importance of the well-being and connectedness of people throughout the country was a new social recognition, and became a post-war principle of shared belief embodied in the early post-war construction of the Welfare State “a place where young people, besieged for six years of war could finally feel they had a future. You could fairly feel the rush of air as they raced forward to greet it” (Dundy, quoted in Cooke, 2013, p. xv). In the early 1950s, rationing ended, economic policy showed growth, and there were higher wages. Numbers of babies could be controlled through increased use of birth control (but within marriage only; at that time, contraception was provided only if a woman produced a marriage certificate). These were all factors contributing to pleasanter homes, husbands more at home, shared activities such as radio listening and, subsequently, watching television, more participation in family life, a move towards the modern “involved” dad and, though not yet realised, the father as co-parent.

Fathers in family life following the Second World War: glimpses of gender and role

Lamb (2013), the foremost researcher on fathers’ roles in family life, confirms that social scientists of the 1940s and 1950s did not study fathers. In the aftermath of war, little was recorded about how meaningful emotional and psychological relationships were formed by and with fathers. Unusual performances of “father” in daily life, therefore, falls to those of us who remember these from our own lives to supplement what research studies describe. A vignette of my own family variations follows below. Fathering, like mothering, involves the repetitive enactment of patterns of daily care and the distribution of these among family members depending on their age, gender, and competence: feeding the family, doing the laundry, paying the bills, management of children’s lives, problem-solving, boundary-keeping, regulation of emotions, homework assistance, stress management, demonstration of affection and aggression at expected and unexpected times. Patterns of family “chores” as well as emotional and relational life for fathers in families are unlikely to have been organised in any single manner.

Women sociologists of the time dismissed the “romanticised” stereotyped picture emerging (from the male sociologists of the 1950s) of the large, three-generation, gender-divided, working-class family. Oakley noted how Gavron, the first woman and feminist sociologist to address similar terrain in the UK, considered men’s and women’s particular experience in her analysis. Gavron’s accounts of family life differed from other pictures painted of fathers by showing how small numbers of men were actively entering the domain of hands-on fathering (over five per cent doing “anything or everything” and a further twenty-seven per cent doing most things except nappies (Gavron, 1966, cited in Oakley, 2014). The Newson studies (conducted by a married couple, thus including perspectives from both genders) concurred that men were playing a larger part in family life, with thirty per cent of fathers of one-year-old’s putting their children to bed and over eighty per cent playing with them regularly. Their study shows differences related to social class, with more involvement from fathers higher up the class scales of their time. Their population was not in London, but in Nottingham, and social, gender, and family norms were likely to have been differently constructed relating to the labour practices of their population (Newson & Newson, 1963). The research field of sociology, and, therefore, the subjects studied, was itself tightly controlled by men, including a patriarchal stance held at the London School of Economics. This is likely to have affected what could be investigated and recorded in relation to changing patterns in family life and controlled research into gender and change itself (Gavron, 2015; Oakley 2014).

Female strength was acknowledged in the reporting of family life in the UK, but not complemented by knowledge of men’s changing behaviours in the family. In the 1960s and the decades that followed, rates of maternal employment amplified, with the growth of industries that were machine or technology led and offered new, as well as part-time, employment for women. So also did the growth of commerce and administration, catering, and the service industries, providing further work for women compatible with family life. The expansion of teaching, nursing, and social services also provided opportunities for women, like myself, to train and work in professions approved by the contemporary male “gaze” as non-threatening. Attitudes were changing between generations. The increase in the employment of married women naturally had an effect on married relationships, as many wives were now released from complete financial dependence on their husbands. Therefore, they became freer to think for themselves, exchange ideas with other women in the workplace, and express different opinions at home (Gorell Barnes, 1990). The high wages that school leavers were able to obtain gave sons and daughters more financial independence from their parents, and the establishment of the Welfare State—in particular the National Health Service—now offered services for those events in life for which parents were once the only source of help and advice. The “family” moved towards becoming a collective of thinking individuals, in many cases with attendant anxieties about role, power, and new gendered freedoms. By the 1990s, fifty-nine per cent of mothers were working; a decade later, seventy per cent of married mothers were working, the hours depending on the age of their children (Brannen et al., 1997).

Family patterns and men’s social experience

The social and emotional positions through which boys work towards becoming fathers have always been diverse, affected by wartime or peacetime, by ethnicity, culture, class, family composition, and by idiosyncratic experience. Shared male cultural experience runs in parallel with individual development: schools, religious venues, playgrounds, sports changing rooms, “hanging out” spaces such as teenage bedrooms, music venues, clubs and gangs, coffee bars, workplace canteens, as well as pubs. Shared “cultural” input from radio and, after the 1950s, television is now overtaken by social media and multiple cultural choices. Until 1963, there was also the powerful collective experience for men of doing National Service—two years in one of the armed forces or work associated with defence. War, and men as fighters of war and “protectors of women and children”, remained a powerful aspect of respected masculinity into the mid-1960s and continued to influence ideas about fatherhood. The job of becoming a father, and developing any parity as a parent, remained secondary to what was required of men in life outside the home, an ideology also subscribed to by many women. This further contributed to the elevated positions of “authority” often accorded to men across a wide number of social domains. The research ideology and premises about how family life should be conducted also remained within this framework, promoting the peacetime ideal of cohesion, rather than looking at differences in family life.

In addition, how might a father’s beliefs about his role in his child’s life have been affected by contemporary wider economic systems? Fatherhood roles in the 1950s and 1960s were strongly related to the requirements of production, and the expectations held of men in the workplace, which “excluded men from the home as effectively as they held women to it” (Lummis, 1982). A father’s beliefs about fatherhood were primarily linked to current traditions related to labour. The structures of many industries and their particular disciplines in different parts of the UK were strongly associated with how family life was run.

How do men develop their ideas about fathering from their families as well as society?

Walters (2011), in her research, found that where fathers had experienced closeness to their own fathers, they were more likely to be participatory with their own children. However, clinical work, as well as non-clinical interviews with fathers, suggest that when a father has had a bad fathering experience himself, good enough care from other relatives can mitigate the effects of this and he could strive to achieve a better relationship with his own children than his father had with him. He might also feel freer to try out better practices. As Sam, who is bringing up his daughter as primary parent said,

“My dad was virtually never home … barely at home, used to beat us frequently. What can I say about my dad, I think my dad was awful. My dad was awful, you know, but you still love him don’t you … he was just … I think my dad taught me the dangers of excessive masculinisation very early. I just looked at it even as a kid. This is weird … this is not right …” (Gorell Barnes & Bratley, 2000)

Quality of fathering alone might be less significant in influencing a father’s determination to become a hands-on parent than wider family experience of being nurtured by mothers, sisters, elder brothers, uncles, and grandfathers. Recent websites (e.g., Fatherhood Institute, 2012) now offer forums where men can explore questions about what makes a “good enough” father with other fathers and offer practical advice and models of practice (Cabrera et al., 2000), However, this was unavailable to the fathers discussed later in this book, who relied mainly on male relatives and friendship groups as well as their “mum” to instigate better fathering.

Social discourses and individual narratives: male and female power—multiple intersections

Men still continue to hold the larger political and economic power in the UK, still dominating the institutions of government, judicial, and military systems and the world of international business. However, the population of men and women is now moving to women in the majority (51% in the UK in 2015), and there has been an increase in women gaining larger percentages of the intake into professional trainings in the old as well as the new universities. The former organisation of gender balance within larger social systems has the potential to be in rapid disequilibrium in the next half century, in spite of male resurgences of power in different parts of the world. Many schools, particularly public schools, have formerly contributed to rigidified ideas of masculinity and fatherhood through their attitudes to growing boys. They have traditionally reinforced distance from femininity, and paradoxically created idealisation of it, dependence on it, and disrespect for it (Burck & Daniel, 1995). This has had the power to shape and restrict men’s tenderness and their capacity for intimacy, and to form emotional connections with others close to them. With the increase of co-education in all sectors of education within the UK, girls’ influence will have more ongoing impact on these former arrangements of power and intimacy in the future, despite the chauvinist backlash that many girls are experiencing in schools and on line. Men’s capacity for intimacy will change. The patterns that still affect the majority of men over fifty who are currently fathers are now largely in flux for those under forty.

While recognising the reality of men’s power, I have chosen, for diverse reasons, to take a position in my work with fathers estranged from their children that also considers men’s emotional disadvantage. This is often shaped by the same social and economic processes that gave them power in more public domains. When power is moved from one domain to another, from public to private, to contexts constructed around intimacy and caring, some men might not understand the basic principles of the systemic change involved and find themselves on the margins of family life. How can we usefully harness the complementary power of women on men’s behalf? While changes in fatherhood have inevitably been linked to changes in motherhood, the wider changes and growth in women’s power in the world outside the home demand further and more rapid changes of men within the domain of family life—changes for which they have often been unprepared, and have sometimes been unwilling to make.

What is a father for, and who decides? Changing social discourses

The expectations of a father within the home have changed over the past fifty years from being the “mother’s part-time helper” of the 1960s to becoming the “co-parent” of the twenty-first century. However, there remain many fathers who have themselves not been raised to share household and childcare tasks in a responsible manner. They are often taken by surprise at the powerful impact of the emotional tasks involved in day-to-day child rearing. Changes in the collective social consciousness about gender, power, and men’s roles in the UK and Europe in the past twenty years have left many contemporary fathers behind in an assortment of troubled contexts. They are often ill equipped to respond to the wider de-construction of old style patriarchy, but choose to fall back on its rhetoric when challenged to perform differently in family life. The introduction of greater shared paternity leave in 2015 (Paternity Leave Policy, 2015) offered further opportunity to change this frame; but there are many reasons, primarily led by the economics and pressures of workplaces, which have militated against change (Jacobs, 2016). Becoming a real dad is less likely to be regarded as an optional “add on” in a father’s life now, and more likely to be a requirement from mothers and from children demanding involvement and responsibility.

Gay fathers

With the legal recognition of same-sex marriage coming into force in March 2014, the primary structural family feature of “institutionalised patriarchy”—father as head of the heterosexual and legally privileged form of family—became invalid. While heterosexual family life remains the predominant form of family, it is no longer exclusive in law. This can further free fathers to “invent” fatherhood forms and expand definitions of family in multiple ways, as gay fatherhood has shown. Inevitably, as male partners are having their own children, there will also be dramatic changes in the range of motherhoods. Some aspects of this are touched on further in Chapter Eight.

Fatherhood following breakup: children as players in the definitions of what a father should be

Following partnership breakup, changes in fatherhood also need to develop congruence with children’s wishes. An influence that men often do not face until they have to do so is the power their own children carry to shape the way they will perform fatherhood. This scrutiny and questioning by children has meant that many fathers can no longer expect that formerly held assumptions about the nature and status of being a father can be taken for granted. Following a separation from a mother which he has initiated himself, a man’s children will be especially unlikely to subscribe to any ideas he might have about “rights” or respect “due to him as a father”. This will be particularly true if the children have no understanding of why he left and of his chosen way of life away from them and their mothers. Even where a father is secure in the knowledge of his own biological parenthood, other men are often preferred as social father by a mother. Social fathers will often form an equally strong attachment to the child if they are actively involved in co-parenting with the children’s mother. The more we go into the texture of what a father is “for”, the more we recognise how strategically mothers might re-position themselves on behalf of children and family life. This can involve choosing partners whom they regard as more suitable for social fatherhood, relying on their own family and friends, or preferring to “go it alone” rather than sustain the uncertainty of relationship with former “unsatisfactory” partners.

Non-traditional fatherhood

I have always been interested in the use of the term “non-traditional fatherhoods”, presuming, as it did, that there was a “traditional” fatherhood against which other models of “doing father” were to be measured. As noted above, the parental features specific to fathering (other than relations of power and control) were given little attention by early post-war family research. Lamb himself became responsible for much of the resea...