Compensating for the father famine

What a mixed up and conflicted society we live in. It seems to boil down to not so much a breakdown between the genders but the different amount of trust and respect individuals feel towards the opposite sex.

Twenty eight percent of all families with dependent children are being led by just one parent, predominantly female. This has come about through a combination of changed attitudes and changed government provision. As we cannot possibly know the circumstances of all these families I am inclined to accept that collectively there is culpability on both parts. But the overriding ethos of socialists (and male socialists are just as much a part of this attitude) is that men are nearly always at fault when it comes to domestic difficulties. And so the past forty years has seen an increasingly feminist-influenced state compensating for his shortcomings.

Unfortunately there is a tendency for some people to turn into what you repeatedly tell them they are - deadbeat dads. And so, even more recently, it hasn't been enough to just replace fathers - they must also be financially and emotionally punished for their inadequacies.

NOW we have schools crying out for male teachers to compensate for the father famine. Yet the expectations these guys have to meet (and suspicion they must endure) is keeping them well away. Who can blame them?

What worries me is those women who don't embrace feminist fascism in their everyday lives, don't do a very good job of opposing it. I understand why. "If you are not with us, you are against us," is the intimidating reception one encounters if you dare to criticise their cherished beliefs and institutions.

Some men are no angels. But 90 percent of those I have had anything to do with are not womanising pricks, or control freaks, or 'out-of-tune with their feelings' or bad fathers. That may be my good fortune. But I hope that it is more about expectation. We find what we look for. And if women have a singularly low opinion of men, men will reflect it. Heaven knows how the sons of men-maligners mature into anything but men worthy of malign. Behind every bad man is a mother.

Much of the feminist distaste for men, especially amongst the lower socio-economic ranks, has now developed into mutual loathing - except when temporary emotional and physical needs demand a ceasefire. Then babies result. And it becomes the preschool and school and secondary schools job to present the child with a positive male role model. But how is he viewed by the mothers? And what has she already inculcated in her female or male child? Is it ever going to be enough to expose a child to one good male role model she has to share and can only keep for a year? And if she is very young and inclined to physically express her fondness for her daddy-substitute, he has to keep her at a cool and uncompromising arms length. Is that really enough to compensate for a father?

I have a flashback to sitting on the back of my father's easy chair on Sunday afternoons while he watched the rugby, me endlessly combing his ever-thinning hair. He never complained. When I was sick he was very patient and would rub my tummy if I was hanging over the toilet vomiting. When I squashed my pet mouse accidentally, breaking its leg, my father made a splint and brought him back to health. (My ever-practical mother wanted to drown it).

It is just too sad that so many kids will never experience a good and loving father. And it is even sadder that the state, which is partly to blame for this tragedy, is now desperate to correct it through the education system. As I said last week about Key and Clark's youth policies, it is too little and too late for many of these children.