Daddy or Chips

Writer Horatio Clare continues his quest to understand the state of modern fatherhood in the UK. In this episode he considers the post-war to early 21st century Dad. Using his own family as a starting point, Horatio focusses on London and Wales where he himself grew up. He reflects on how he was fathered and his own experience of fathering. If one big rupture in the role of dad was with the creation of the Victorian state, is another in the aftermath of WW2? From the suburban dad and the apogee of the nuclear family in the 1950s to the Fathers for Justice movement, the role seems to have been in flux. From the end of the war to the 1990s an ever greater share of the labour force were women. Though parity is yet to be achieved, fathers are no longer automatically expected to be the breadwinners, or necessarily the better paid parent. At the same time, a growth in the rate of divorce means more fathers aren’t with their children all the time. Horatio explores the impact on his life of his own father being absent and the cyclical nature of the so-called crisis of masculinity.