Listening to fathers
Summary
Fathers have been in the news a lot recently, not always to good effect. Even Bob Geldoff has lent his name to the “father’s rights” movement with a recent Channel 4 polemic. In the middle of all this rhetoric and emotion I’ve felt that we’ve been missing hard facts so I was pleased to see that UK family-support charity Parentline Plus has released Hopes, Stress and Love – Listening to fathers based on the issues that fathers raise in calls to the charity’s help line. More disturbingly the report identifies high levels of stress and feelings of isolation in many of their male callers and a significant level of concern about conflict with partners / ex-partners and the effect of this on the children. The authors conclude with a call to all family support services not only to recognise the essential role of fathers but also to understand that reticence to seek help is in many cases made worse by a perception held by many men that support services are biased against them.