Dad song #8

If you find yourself committed to a mental institution, who you gonna call? Daddy, of course.

Prison Dads

I've just watched 'Prison Dads' on BBC iPlayer. It's part of ‘Baby Britain’ a season of BBC Three programmes exploring what it means to be a young parent in Britain today, and how having a baby changes your life. I thought I'd skip ‘Don’t just stand there, I’m having your baby’, which followed ‘clueless first time dads’.
‘Prison Dads’ is a documentary from Ruth Kelly covering six months in the lives of fathers at Glen Parva in Leicester – the biggest young offender’s institution in Britain. Prisoners there are five times more likely to be Dads than other men their age, and as I have written elsewhere this is a growing, worldwide issue. Although the offences and treatment of their beleaguered other halves of some of the Dads featured made it rather difficult to identify with them, you’d need a heart of stone not to get a tear in the eye at the dawning realisation that ‘That’s all gone now, for good that is. Won’t see him do his first words, trying to crawl, all that funny baby stuff’.
The children are growing up with the situation and don’t know any different, with one being told that Dad is ‘on naughty holiday’. These Dads are just kids themselves, hankering after school days as they chat in their cells. Some grew up in the same way themselves. You just have to hope that they will have plenty of professional support on release, to face up to their adult responsibilities and break the cycle.

Faddy Daddies are fussier eaters than the kids?

I've just received a press release claiming 'men are worse than toddlers when it comes to eating fruit and vegetables', with almost half of mums saying they use 'stealth health tactics' on their other half.


Suzie Robinson from Hertfordshire said: 'My husband will only eat carrots and sweetcorn; I am forever pureeing vegetables and sneaking them into sauces to widen his veg intake. I am concerned the kids will copy their father and end up being as picky as him.' Other tactics used to disguise vegetables include covering with cheese or sour cream, hiding them in soups, blending them into smoothies or simply lying about the contents of meals. 

Guka Tavberidze, founder of SaVse – the drinks producer who conducted the survey – said: 'Take chips out of the diet of many men and the reality is that there is too little vegetable content. Eating vegetables is an essential part of a healthy, balanced diet and if men aren’t prepared to tuck in, it’s no surprise that their partners are resorting to stealth techniques.'
 
The press release continues:
'SaVse, a new and surprisingly delicious vegetable smoothie invented in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia is set to revolutionise vegetable consumption in the UK. Recipes blend large quantities of vegetables with fruits to create a sweet taste. No sugar or preservatives are added.
In blind taste tests, 98 percent of respondents were unable to detect the presence of broccoli in SaVse smoothies, despite it being a principal ingredient.  Eighty two percent said that they thought that Savse’s broccoli-based smoothie contained fruit alone.'

Now a few things spring to mind. Firstly, if you want to find out about Dads' vegetable consumption, why not ask Dads? Secondly, 'surprisingly delicious' is never a good start for a new food and drink product. And finally, I like my veg but a broccoli-based smoothie is just wrong.

Ug… are all Dads cavemen?

Due to this cold weather we've been having (I don't know if anyone has mentioned it?), a trip to the cinema has become a staple of our weekends of late. What better opportunity for a Dad to have an afternoon nap?

On Saturday, we went to see The Croods, an animated film about a cave-dwelling family dealing with continental drift and the dawn of ideas. Now, let me say from the outset, I liked it. The boys loved it, with my youngest declaring it even better than Top Cat: The Movie, which – given that TC gets an average rating of just 2.8 out of 10 on Rotten Tomatoes – doesn't sound like much, but believe me it is.

But unfortunately, my enjoyment of pretty much any film at the moment has been scuppered by a mild obsession with the Bechdel test and my own Dad equivalent, the Sutton test.

In brief, the Bechdel test is three simple questions used to identify gender bias in fiction:

1. Are there at least two women?
2. Do they talk to each other?
3. About something other than a man?

The Croods has four female characters (I think the baby is a girl) – 50 per cent of the cast. One big tick. 'Eep', the curious young woman wanting to break free from the shackles of her family, is potentially a really strong role model, but then it turns out really she just loves shoes and boys and is mainly struggling to choose a different man to follow aside from her Daddy. DrMathocist writes about that here.

Those female characters do talk to each other, a couple of times I think, for a few seconds. But I can't recall them discussing anything other than the Dad or the new boyfriend. I'm happy to be proved wrong, but it does seem pretty amazing to me that it's so hard to find a film that passes the Bechdel test!

Anyway, how about the Sutton test? Just to remind you, this is also three simple questions:

1. Is there a man in it?

2. Is he a Dad?

3. Is he being anything other than a dickhead?

It's a tricky one, this. Yes, there are men in it, and one of them, Grug, voiced by Nic Cage, is the Dad. He spends much of the film being a dickhead. His main rule is 'Never not be afraid', he tells depressing stories and he gets punched in the face by monkeys (much to the amusement of his family). So far, so familiar. There's also a rivalry with his daughter's growing love interest which I'm sure many Dads would relate to, and it reminded me of the fantastic 'Cuckoo' and this Phil Jupitus routine.   

But as the film develops, so does Grug. The key exchange with the boyfriend, Guy, has Grug defending his stifling rules by saying:

'I guess I was just busy keeping them all alive'.
'It's ok, that's what Dads do', replies Guy.

Despite bemoaning 'I can't change, I don't have ideas, but I have my strength and right now that's all you need', Grug does then go on to have an almost painful moment of cognitive enlightenment… we are seeing thousands, millions of years of evolution and brain development compressed into a few seconds. And I suppose the film is encouraging an audience of sleepy Dads, dragged along to see the film, that they too can change – they can keep their family safe while encouraging creativity, independence, in short to let their children live a little.

I think most Dads are aware of this. But when I do lose the plot in parenting terms, it tends to be over 'rules' that probably aren't anywhere near as important as keeping them safe from a prehistoric monster, so it doesn't hurt to have the odd reminder.

So I think The Croods passes the Sutton test. I realise I may be reading too much into all this, but hey at least it kept me awake!

Famous Dad #2 and #3

Today's 'famous Dads' illustrate failings at the most basic levels of fatherhood.

Rule no. 1: Don't sacrifice your children.

In the story of Abraham and Isaac from the Bible, the founding father of the Israelites was commanded by God to offer his son up as a sacrifice in the land of Moriah. He travelled for three days until he came to the mount that God told him of. Abraham gets Isaac to carry the wood upon which he would be sacrificed (well, you would, wouldn't you?), and when Isaac gets a bit suspicious and asks where the animal is that they're going to chuck on the fire, his father replies "God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering". The just as Abraham is about to actually sacrifice his son, "the angel of the Lord" appears and goes "woah woah woah, you weren't really going to do it were you?! We were just having you on!". The angel points to a ram "caught in a thicket by his horns", at which point I imagine Abraham is feeling pretty daft and definitely not Dad of the year.

Still, for his obedience Abraham received a promise of numerous descendants and abundant prosperity. I just wonder whether, years later when Abraham and Isaac were sharing a pint in a cosy tavern, Abraham said: 'Isaac, you remember that day we went to the mount and sacrificed the goat? Well, you'll never guess what…'

Of course, the story of Abraham has featured in a few songs, including Leonard Cohen's 'Story of Isaac', which may well have been inspired by Wilfred Owen's 'The parable of the old man and the young' as it seems to speak to the cruelty and futility of war. Here we hear the story from 9-year-old Isaac's perspective, with the suggestion that maybe he was a bit more clued in to what was going on than the Bible version makes out. There's also Bob Dylan's 'Highway 61 revisited', where Abraham switches from an incredulous "Man, you must be puttin' me on" to a Tarantino-esque "Where do you want this killin' done?" rather too quickly for my liking. 

Rule no. 2: Don't devour your own offspring.

According to Roman myth (inspired by the original Greek myth), it had been foretold that one of the sons of the titan Saturn would overthrow him, just as he had overthrown his father, Caelus. Not one to take any chances, Saturn ate his children moments after each was born. After being caught out by this five times, his wife Ops eventually hid his sixth son, Jupiter, on the island of Crete, deceiving Saturn by offering a stone wrapped in swaddling in his place (I suppose he'd never had the chance to learn the difference in feel between a baby and a stone). Jupiter eventually supplanted his father just as the prophecy had predicted.

The Spanish artist Goya depicted Saturn devouring his son in a famous painting.

Wikipedia says: 'Various interpretations of the meaning of the picture have been offered: the conflict between youth and old age, time as the devourer of all things, the wrath of God and an allegory of the situation in Spain, where the fatherland consumed its own children in wars and revolution. There have been explanations rooted in Goya's relationships with his own son, Xavier, the only of his six children to survive to adulthood, or with his live-in housekeeper and possible mistress, Leocadia Weiss; the sex of the body being consumed can not be determined with certainty.'

I used this painting on the cover of The Psychologist following our 2008 redesign. It didn't go down too well.

Do daughters cause divorce?

Did you know that parents of girls are more likely to divorce than parents of boys?

A decade ago, economists Gordon Dahl at the University of Rochester and Enrico Moretti at UCLA identified the gap, and noted that it widened as you added girls to a family. Parents of three girls are 10 per cent more likely to split than are parents of three boys! And an unmarried couple is more likely to marry if they learn their unborn child will be a boy than a girl. The figures vary with country: in Vietnam parents of a girl are a whopping 25 per cent more likely to divorce than parents of a boy.

Does this suggest that boys are an asset to a marriage and girls are somehow a liability. Steven Landsburg, also of the University of Rochester, has looked at this argument. Maybe Dads prefer boys and will put more effort into keeping the relationship together in order to raise them? 

Or is it that women who have daughters have less need for a husband? Anita Kelly, a professor of psychology at Notre Dame, points out that nearly 75 per cent of all divorces involve a wife leaving her husband, so the question is not why do men stay for boys, but rather why mothers of daughters are divorcing more than mothers of sons.

Professor Kelly concludes:

… wives with daughters are less likely to stay with their husbands because they know that with a girl, they’ll never be lonely or without help. Thus, they may be less willing to tolerate any bad behaviors from their husbands (and less willing to stay married) because they don’t need their husbands as much. This idea could even explain why couples expecting a girl are less likely to marry: A woman carrying a girl anticipates that she won’t need a husband.

What do you think?

Easter egg competition