12/05/04

I Fear For My Sons

Bettina Arndt

The Age

The messages from society are clear - so why would anyone want to become a father? 

Young women aren't free to choose when to have children because their men aren't interested. Men are too self-absorbed, too career-oriented. That's the latest suggestion to emerge in the debate on fertility, where men are now being scolded for failing to shoulder the collective responsibility of a declining birthrate.

But why should men be interested in fathering children? Confronted with the very strong societal message that children do fine without fathers, is it so surprising that some men decide the risks of having children are just too high?

Every week we see pregnant celebrities flaunting their decision to bear children on their own. There are howls of outrage when governments try to confine access to IVF services to families with fathers.

Children do just fine without fathers, is the constant refrain. All you need is love, mother love. The message is clear - fathers are disposable. Surely this makes taking on the job of the throwaway father a mug's game?

Conservative columnist Maggie Gallagher, on the Townhall.com website, recently described a conversation she had with a young college student who was raised in a single-mother household. They were talking about the debate on same-sex marriage. The student was convinced kids did just fine in lone-parent or same-sex households. "Kids just accept whatever their family situation is. It doesn't matter," the student said.

"What about you?" Gallagher asked him. "Do you think you'll matter to your kids?"

The young man was taken aback by the question. "No," he said finally. "Not really."

If it is beginning to dawn on young men that many people think fathers don't matter, if they realise they have a good chance of partnering a woman who sees them as irrelevant to raising children, if they are beginning to believe themselves that they would be unimportant in the lives of their future children, why would they want to get on board?

Forty-four per cent of young (18 to 34-year-old) men questioned in the 2003 Australian Social Attitudes Survey agreed that "a single parent can bring up children as well as a couple" - compared with about two-thirds (63 per cent) of same-aged women. So two in three young Australian males are likely to partner a woman who may think she can do just as good a job parenting on her own, and almost half these men don't see fathers as essential.

That's a lot of males having bought the message that they won't play a critical role in the lives of their future children.

Many have yet to discover how much their kids will matter to them. "Fatherhood is seen by most men as the most salient emotional experience of their lives," says Adrienne Burgess, a former adviser to the Blair Government on fathering.

It matters, and it can annihilate men when they experience that intense connection and then have it taken from them.

I'll never forget a painful conversation I once had with a mother who watched her adult son give in to despair when his ex-wife disappeared with his nine-year-old twin sons. After spending months trying to track them down, he gave up and killed himself. The mother saw it coming but didn't know how to help.

All those years she had tried to protect him - bandages on grazed knees, comfort when a night-time bogeyman came calling, solace when other children snatched his favourite toy. She'd never imagined he could end up in such pain.

It spooks me. Having spent many, many hours over the past decade trying to comfort men who have confronted similar losses, who face the indifference of the Family Court to their struggles to remain fathers to their children, I'm nervous for my sons.

Much as I would want them to one day know the extraordinary joy of being a parent, I fear it is a risky course. Fatherhood is like playing with illicit drugs that promise unimagined delight but also the very real possibility of blowing your life up from under you.

The worst thing is they may not be given a choice. Men are always at risk of the "supposed accident", when the woman decides she is ready even if the man is not.

I once watched a TV chat show where men who had been tricked into paternity - through holes in condoms and other dastardly acts - faced a largely hostile female audience. The women weren't interested in the emotional and financial fall-out for these duped men. "If you don't like it, keep it zipped," was one woman's response.

Keeping it zipped. That's too tough an order - but avoiding fatherhood must be tempting.