After a period off-line, I’m back, with a whole new set of ideas about how to improve support for families. I have rejuvenated my blog (lots of pictures of leaping children!) and I have found a fantastic new foundation for my work at Connect Assist, led by Patrick Nash, the real thing when it comes to social entrepreneurship.

Why am I going to bother to blog? The answer to that question came to me in 2010 when I received a gracious email from a researcher at Nick Clegg’s office, thanking me for the ideas that she had found in my blog and had passed onto him for a speech on the family.

I have set myself four challenges:

• I want to spearhead a revolution in how maternity and early years services engage with families, by making use of state-of-the-art communications – the kind of stuff that most families are far more familiar with than family services! I am working on this with Connect Assist.

• I will continue to campaign for better support directly for children during family separation. I am frustrated that the Kids in the Middle campaign did not achieve this central objective.

• Having sold Dad.Info to Family Matters Institute, I’m helping them to build it up as an on-line resource for fathers – it already gets 10,000 visitors a month, but it could do so much better! We are also working on a new project, Fathers’ Breakfasts, a fantastic corporate programme originating in New Zealand – we want to get the Prime Minister to speak at the first event.

• Following my study in 2011 for Action for Children on children and social capital, I want to see the work of Dr Gary Melton in USA given proper consideration in UK. He demonstrated fantastic reductions in abuse and neglect through a programme that focused on getting families to help each other, rather than it being all about services (us) helping families (them).

Needless to say, I’ve got some other ideas up my sleeve, but I need to test them out on people first!

I have written to Frank Field in response to his speech about fathers and child poverty. I have copied it to Iain Duncan-Smith and Nick Clegg.

In summary:

• Child poverty is a family function, not just an issue between a child and a “primary carer”. The ability of adults in the family to earn and to care and to cooperate with each other all have a critical influence on the child.

• In the UK, all supports to family assume that a child in poverty has only one parent even in the case where two parents are sharing things 50/50. In Australia a child can have two single parents, both supported in their contribution to the child’s life.

• There are strong aspirations in families to build on – for fathers to be close to their children, for mothers to continue a role outside the home, for parents to live cooperatively.

Dear Frank Field,

In your Attlee Memorial Lecture, you cast the spotlight on fathers as part of the child poverty issue. And you talked about the feminisation of the child poverty debate. I think you are right. The policy of the previous Government was a combination of a commitment to child welfare and a commitment to the autonomy of women, particularly vulnerable women. Both were important objectives and in a few cases the best or only way to support the child is to support the mother alone. But along the way, this policy has led to a persistent tendency in the child poverty strategy to overlook the resource that other members of the family represent for their children, both financially and in other ways. The family perspective has been missing.

In May 2009 I addressed the issues of fathers in particularly in a letter to Beverley Hughes MP, then Minister for Children. I quoted a UNICEF 2006 report that stated “Fathers’ involvement is one of the greatest, yet most underutilised, sources of support available to children in our world today.” [Engle 2006]

I made the following points in that letter, points that I think will be instantly recognisable to you:

• Within intact families, the way in which the father works is important. When fathers struggle with casual labour at low pay, their time spent with their children is severely compromised, and this has an independent negative effect on children’s outcomes, as well as placing severe constraints on the mother’s capacity to earn. There is evidence that improving the literacy, numeracy and general education of low income fathers, as well as helping them into employment and working with them on their fatherhood, have together a positive impact on lifting their children out of poverty.

• This effect is also found where fathers do not live with their children full time, with more child support paid by men whose educational, employment and fatherhood needs are all addressed together (in the same way that support is provided to mothers). So far, in the UK, there are no employment programmes targeted at men who are fathers, whether they are resident with their children or not: the fatherhood of male Job Seekers is not normally identified, and the men are treated by this service as if they were single, childless men.

• The more that young/low income mothers and fathers are supported as a ‘parenting team’, particularly in the early years, the greater the chance they will remain as cooperative parents. In a US study, when a maternity service adopted a policy of talking with young fathers and establishing their paternity (nothing beyond this) – child support payments increased.

• For parents living apart, we have a system that designates only one as the carer and all supports – both with parenting and with earning – are directed at them. The other parent may be identified by the Child Support Agency, but when this happens, this parent will be offered no support to become an effective breadwinner – let alone support to be an effective care-giver. This applies even to parents who are sharing care 50/50.

• Child poverty statistics are based on the child’s experience with only one parent. However, the poverty of the child’s other parent is also relevant because this is correlated with non-payment of child support and also with low contact with the child.

• In Australia, there is a fundamentally different system for separated families. Instead of classifying only one parent as the parent in all separated families, if the other parent cares for a child at least one night a week, then this parent is classified as a parent too. The child support, tax credit and benefits systems work together to support both these parents as earners and carers.

Where I think a bit differently from you is on family roles – the mother as ‘the carer’ and the father as ‘the earner.’ Few families these days, even with one relatively high earner, can manage on one parent’s income, so both parents need to be able to earn and provide support with caring. This sharing of earning is also an important way of spreading financial risk in a family. This is the case in separated, as well as intact, families.

But more significant than this economic reality is the issue of motivation. The pattern of both parents employed and both undertaking caring fits with the aspirations of the vast majority of mothers and fathers in the UK today, and is found widely in low income families. Over the last fifty years, a new aspiration has grown among men in all social groups and in all post-industrial countries quite spontaneously: to be engaged actively in the care of their children. This parallels the aspiration of most mothers to take part in the paid work force.

The mother at home, father out working model of care is a very recent invention in human historical terms and we are coming out of the short period of history during which it made sense. Human families have evolved through the collective parenting of children by ‘mothers and others’ – who, under certain circumstances, have regularly been men – fathers, brothers and grandfathers. So much so that men, like women, are highly adapted to the caring role; for example, proximity to a pregnant woman and a young baby triggers hormonal changes in men and very significant changes in behaviour towards nurturing and support. And since these newly-awakened instincts are accompanied by a drop in aggression, the close care of children is found to have a ‘civilising’ influence on males, which is likely to make their engagement in contemporary society more productive.

I have worked with fathers in prison and I remember one Governor saying to me that nothing comes close to a motivator for change in men than the desire to have a close relationship with their children – a relationship that almost invariably leads to greater financial support. And what is more, interventions to support this father-child relationship are actually rather simple, inexpensive and extremely effective. The reason we do not do them rests in the paradigm that we operate by, not be the challenges of the approach itself.

A family approach to poverty

So I would like to put before you some specific proposals to build on your radical ideas.

The core principle should be that we hold every single father and every single mother as equally responsible for their offspring. For this to happen, we need to designate both as ‘parents’ in the employment/benefits systems and support both with earning and caring.

I should point out that this principle of equal expectation has just been legislated for the first time in the Welfare Reform Act, which comes into force next year. This requires both parents to register their children’s births. This new default provides a foundation for the child poverty strategy and indeed that was the intention of this legislation.

I would like to propose the following targets for family poverty:

• The child needs each parent to contribute money, thereby allowing the other parent to provide more care.

• The child needs each parent to contribute care, thereby allowing the other parent to earn more.

• The child needs both parents to contribute as high quality care as possible, because this makes a substantial difference to outcomes.

• The child needs parents to cooperate with each other, irrespective of where each lives.

On this last point: some weeks ago I attended a lively family event in Brixton attended by a large number of young families. The occasion was the launch of a new locally made film on fatherhood. The audience was asked to vote on a variety of statements about fathers (we all had hand-held devices to register our responses). The answer to the question, “what is the most important thing a father should do” was overwhelmingly to get on well with the mother. This view was held by both men and women, mothers and fathers. And the recent Good Childhood enquiry, held by the Children’s Society, also revealed family relationships to be children’s top priority. Cooperative parenting is the dominant aspiration.

With best wishes, etc.

“Dads who don a pinny and muck in with the housework are less likely to get divorced than those who leave it to the missus.” That’s the story in the Mirror today, also in Times, Telegraph, Independent.

This research at the London School of Economics confirms the same findings in USA and Scandinavia.

The issue is not whether mothers work, it is how fathers adapt to this by changing the way they operate too. And the reality is that men’s work is not changing nearly enough. The irony is that all the emphasis on helping mothers, without focusing on fathers, has steadily made things worse, particularly giving mothers 39 weeks leave and fathers only 2 weeks.

The other day The Independent published an article on marriage, A taxing problem for single-issue campaigners. Sarah Cassidy set up a “mums’ panel” from Mumsnet to consider the issues and interviewed a number of women (and only women). The only men she referred to were the political leaders (all men, obviously). Babies are a women’s issue, families are a women’s issue and now, taking this idea to an extreme that becomes manifestly absurd, marriage is a women’s issue.

It reminds me of the times when our girls were on the way and just born.  The midwives and health visitors often made the same assumption: because it was about a baby, the conversation could only take place with the mother. Is there any part of modern life where there is more extreme stereotyping than the public face of family life? The other day I was hoovering the stairs and it occurred to me that there is absolutely no external representation at all of what I was doing; it is utterly invisible.

In a few weeks time I am launching a book about parenting and family life. I am not just writing about men in families, I am writing the whole thing, including motherhood and child welfare. I wonder how the media will react to a man taking a role that only women inhabit? Fingers crossed, the novelty will work to my advantage – watch this space!