Ed Cumming: I thought becoming a dad would make me macho. I was wrong

Daily Telegraph UK

2 Sep, 2023 07:00 PM3 mins to read

I would teach my children how to bowl leg spin, make a fire and, in time, shoot a gun. Photo / Getty Images

Opinion

OPINION:

Few archetypes are less relevant to modern parenting than the “father figure”. Millennia of culture have encouraged a vision of the father as a strong, powerful man, able to defend his home and hearth while encouraging moral backbone in his many children.

Although he could be stern, he was also fair. Discipline was his department. Even Don Draper, the adulterous, alcoholic advertising executive and hero of Mad Men, managed to pull off being disappointing yet chic, building a wooden Wendy house while sinking cans of beer.

Before I had children, I wondered if the experience would transform me into a more macho figure. I have never been easy to confuse with Jon Hamm, the actor who plays Draper, but I hoped I might grow into the role a bit.

Jon Hamm as the traditional patriarch Don Draper in Mad Men. Photo / Supplied

With the responsibility of my new office weighing on my shoulders, I would become more of a traditional patriarch. My office would smell of mahogany and pipe smoke. When I emerged, it would be to dispense wisdom.

I would point out small errors in homework and teach my children how to bowl leg spin, make a fire and, in time, shoot a gun. I would be loved and respected. Maybe even slightly feared, when the occasion called for it.

None of this came to pass. If any dregs of machismo lingered, parenthood quickly drained them. It came as no surprise to read that scientists at the University of Western Australia who analysed 11 studies, including more than 20,000 men, found married men to have lower levels of testosterone than single ones.

One of the researchers said that the lower levels “might reflect the stresses of family life, including children in the household”. Well, yes. Nothing is less testosterone-fuelled than being a dad in 2023.

I suppose cooking looks quite tough when Marco Pierre White does it, but you don’t often see him blending salmon, broccoli and sweet potato to make freezer mush. The closest I have come to hunting and gathering is bulk-buying nappies off Amazon.

Forget Don Draper - a more realistic model for modern fatherhood is Kevin from Motherland, the BBC parenting comedy: a beta or possibly epsilon male who trundles around on a bicycle, tries to be friends with all the mums at the school gate, and is master of all the children’s schedules.

Few would argue for a return to the bad old days, but at least it was expected that fathers would work. The risk today is that we use ignorance and incompetence to excuse not doing anything: neither hunting nor gathering nor putting the bins out.

My Spotify playlists were a final redoubt. These were a sanctuary of stroppy adolescent tastes, where I would still be recommended heavy metal and rap music, whose angry words I could mouth while I lifted tiny little weights at the gym.

But the revolution has reached there, too. Halfway through a workout the other day, I was startled by a song that is evidently now one of my “most played”: “Let It Go”, from Frozen.

I should probably heed the lyrics.