The Fatherhood season currently airing on BBC4 is long overdue. While acres of column inches and thousands of broadcasting hours have been spent dissecting and debating how women's lives have changed in recent decades, the attendant effect on men has received, comparatively, much less attention.
Yet it's an equally tortured subject, as Frank Field's intervention confirms. David Cameron's poverty adviser said in a lecture that "upwardly mobile, very successful women" had dominated the debate about poverty, and it was time to discuss the responsibilities of unmarried fathers – and possibly withdraw their benefits if they refused job offers.
The BBC4 season examines what it means to be a father from countless different angles. Child psychologist Laverne Antrobus talks about the biological changes that occur when men become fathers, novelist Andrew Martin takes a light-hearted gallop through three centuries of literary fatherhood, John Lennon's role as a father is dramatised, and Men About the House surveys the canon of iconic dads in sitcoms.
But perhaps most compelling is the three-part Century of Fatherhood series, which is a rather touching set of documentaries about how the role of the father has changed over the past century, drawing on the testimony of fathers themselves. And one of the most pertinent issues it raises is how many modern fathers feel wronged by the family courts system – despite (or maybe because of) the revolution that has taken place in parenting.
When marriages break up, courts still typically award the mother the marital home and primary custody rights – regardless, in many cases, of whether or not the father has been the primary childcarer. There's a lot wrong with this. Not only are more fathers than ever before acting as "stay-at-home dads" – their number has increased tenfold in the last decade – but the system does a disservice to a great many working women, too.
One in five women in Britain now earn more than their partners. And if these women – the family breadwinners – are granted primary custody in a divorce, they must by default take on the greater burden of responsibility for raising the children, regardless of what the domestic arrangement was before. So while fathers typically get to see children during their leisure time, on weekends, mothers are forced into the position of "fun police" during the week – the enforcers of homework, bedtime, early mornings. There may also be an extra strain placed on their careers, as they now have to juggle school runs, sort out childcare, care for sick children and so on solo.
This can be deeply unsatisfactory both for the many fathers who are used to – or desperate for – more time with their children, and equally unfair on working mothers who may like nothing more to enjoy some time with their children on weekends.
Of course, there's a good reason why the system is set up the way it is: more often than not, it's still the mothers, who may have had maternity leave and/or worked part time during the children's early years, who shoulder the lion's share of the parental responsibility during a marriage. But this is not always the case – and it's wrong for our laws (and, more broadly, our society) to assume it is.
We need a system that is fairer and more flexible, and looks at the realities of each complicated family situation, rather than enforcing legal precedent based on outdated and harmful gender stereotypes. Britain now has some 600,000 stay-at-home dads, and countless more who work part time or freelance in order to look after their children. These men – and their children – deserve a voice too.