Penguin envy

'Not many human dads would fancy devoting nine weeks to solo childcare at -60°C with no food and only snow to drink. Not many mums would enjoy trekking off in the meanwhile to collect the fish without even a prospect of chips to go with it.'

Hard to disagree with...

The Guardian's Film Blog critiques modern parenting in a fascinating article that pits the humble human against that paragon of 'good enough parenting', the penguin - taking in Happy Feet, Mr Popper's Penguins, Madagascar and the March of the Penguins.

More than an 'oo' with Typhoo

Typhoo Tea's advertising campaign with Ben Fogle sums up in 20 seconds what the entire media industry likes to communicate to and about fathers, all the time.

"This is women's stuff...and you're crap at it."

The Boston Blog Party

Dads in the US are fighting the 'half-wit' stereotypes with which advertisers across the globe damn fathers. Check out this article from Boston Magazine about a campaign for Ragu pasta sauce and the ever-growing power of the daddy bloggers.

The whole jigsaw

There’s much to admire about the St Giles Trust children and families project, featured in Saturday's Guardian as one of the newspaper's Christmas appeal charities.

The article tells the story of Juliet, an 18-year-old whose mother is a victim of domestic abuse and is now being supported by the Trust – allowing Juliet to attend university rather than spending her late teens and early 20s looking after her mum and younger siblings, and thus missing out on her education.

So far, so inspiring – and yet in one important sense this story sounds typical of so many where public and/or voluntary services intervene in families’ lives: support is focused on the mother, but (from what we’re told in this article, at least) nobody’s doing anything to engage with the father. 

We’re not talking about an ‘absent’ dad here – the article tells us that Juliet’s siblings stay with him some weekends. We hear that the charity is supporting the mother 'to ensure the children are supported'. But what's happening to ensure the children's safety when they stay with their father?

Has anyone tried to speak to him? Do services know where he's living (and with whom) and whether it's an appropriate place for children to be? Is there a strategy for challenging his alleged abusive behaviour and/or (if the abuse, as implied by the article, was 'light' enough to permit continued contact) for helping him think about how he parents his children after the split, and what he can do to help them cope with the separation?

The article's failure to address the fatherhood angle might suggest St Giles hasn't gone there (yet)...or it might be that the author didn't think to ask the right questions. Either way, let's hope for the kids' sake that this crucial part of the jigsaw is filled in soon.

When rusty scissors just won't cut it

Sonia Poulton seethes about feckless fathers in today's Daily Mail - prompted (as is so often the case when fatherhood pops up in the tabloids) by the extreme case of one Jamie Cumming, a 34-year-old who's about to have his 16th child, by the 14th woman he has impregnated.

Few could disagree with Ms Poulton's outrage, and there's little doubt that 'the system' should come down harder on such 'deadbeat dads'. What's missed out here - and is so often omitted from policy and media analysis - is that the 'the system' fails almost completely to engage with fathers. Not just the feckless ones, but all of them.

The answer to this is not to take a pair of rusty scissors to Mr Cumming's nether regions, tempting as it might be to do so. It's something much more comprehensive. Check out this blog from the Fatherhood Institute, written around the time of the summer 2011 riots, to get a sense of where we might start.

Step away from the pigs

If you're thinking of buying any Peppa Pig merchandise this Christmas, just remember Daddy Pig and what a sad portrayal of fatherhood he provides our children with. Surely we can do better than this?

Women's troubles?

The ever-wonderful Lucy Mangan points out the stupidity of politicians targeting female voters in this week's Stylist column.

Apparently our illustrious Prime Minister David Cameron is in a panic over women deserting his party in droves. So much so that he's appointed a special female adviser. Who will, no doubt, recommend all sorts of lovely, un-integrated new policies to do with families, designed to sound good on Loose Women. Because only women, of course, are interested in such matters.

Since when did mothers (all women have kids, right?) have the monopoly on caring about everything to do with having, looking after and educating our nation's children? Like dads are all there sat on the sofa obsessing about defence procurement and transport policy...

Thank heavens Lucy's out there to question this nonsense, at least. Do us a favour, Mr Cameron. Don't bother.

A very modern bravery

In an editorial in this week's Spectator, the magazine's editor Question Time regular Fraser Nelson says David Lammy MP is 'brave' to talk about the importance of fathers in his book Out of the Ashes: Britain After The Riots.

Mr Lammy was brought up by his mother, and a line of argument in the book (which I haven't read by the way - and I'll wager Mr Nelson hasn't either) is, apparently, that the absence of fathers from many young boys' lives probably goes some way towards explaining why the riots happened.

According to Mr Nelson, such a claim could 'cast him out as a heretic' from his own party.

Poppycock - politicians of every hue talk about 'absent fathers' all the time. What marks Lammy out is that a) he has, having been born black and brought up in Tottenham, a very personal perspective on the rioters' issues, and b) he puts his money where his mouth is by heading up the All Party Parliamentary Group on Fatherhood, which goes some way towards putting fathers and fatherhood on Britain's political map.

If that's bravery, let's commend it!