John Dolan: Less of the ‘deadbeat’, it’s time us dads stood up for each other

“It’s not easy to juggle a pregnant wife and a troubled child, but somehow I managed to fit in eight hours of TV a day.”

Ah, Homer J. Simpson, patron saint of the deadbeat dad, you really do have a lot to answer for when it comes to perceptions of modern-day fatherhood.

And it’s isn’t just the nuclear plant worker with a nuclear family who has become a standing joke for the silly, selfish, greedy portrayal of dads that is so common in culture.

The brain-washing begins young.

Take the blundering porker in kids’ cartoon Peppa Pig. When Daddy Pig is not getting stuck in soft play tubes, or unable to do press-ups, he is afraid of heights, or misreading maps. “When Daddy Pig reads a map, we always get lost,” complains long-suffering Mommy Pig to her cackling piglets.

The Simpsons and Peppa Pig have been around for decades - and are very well-made - but surely fathers have become much better at the aul parenting lark in that time?

Yes, say many surveys and studies.

No, says popular culture.

It’s still all too common to find TV comedies, films, and ad campaigns involving a family that casts the dad as the stooge - an idiotic, bumbling clown who is good for nothing but raising the levels of mirth among his always-patient and oh-so-perfect family.

It was a relief, therefore, to find one of the coolest dads around, actor Brendan Gleeson, calling this out the other day.

The 70-year old Dubliner, father to four sons, including fellow thespians Domhnall and Brian, said he is tired of watching fatherhood portrayed in negative terms on screen.

Gleeson, who plays a dad in his new film H Is For Hawk, emphasised the importance of celebrating fatherhood on screen.

“I think dads have got an awful hard time lately,” he said at the recent BFI London Film Festival. “And I don’t believe that every dad is toxic, and I don’t think anybody else does either.”

He plays a beloved father in his new film, and stated: “I think I suddenly got very tired of watching fatherhood portrayed as something that was almost an abuse, or that was toxic in some way, or in some way truncated by where you had these emotionally stunted people walking around that couldn’t hug their kids, whatever it was.”

Gleeson added that “the beauty that is within fatherhood needs to be celebrated. I think young men need to see it. It needs to be reaffirmed”.

Well said, Brendan. I can only hope TV and film executives have an open ear when it comes to this issue.

As a dad of four myself, it can be infuriating to see fathers being belittled all the time - and what message does it send to young people, particularly the impressionable pre-schoolers who watch Peppa Pig?

While it’s true that men generally, and dads in particular, have a penchant for self-parody - there is no female equivalent of ‘dad dancing’ is there? - the joke does start to wear thin by the time your kids become adults themselves and you ponder all those years of love and self-sacrifice.

There was a reminder of how much dads are ignored and unheard in society in an excellent documentary on the BBC this week.

In Joe Swash: Forgotten Young Dads, the ex- EastEnders actor and winner of I’m A Celebrity ...Get Me Out Of Here!, reflected on his own journey into fatherhood, with an absent dad, and spoke to other father in the UK about their experiences.

Swash, 43, has four children - three with celebrity wife Stacey Solomon - and cares for two more of her children from a previous relationship, so is something of a superdad.

However, he spoke on the show about the lack of support and positive male role models for dads when they are starting out, and of how many are undermined.

“Being a dad is a real big part of my life, and I remember feeling so vulnerable, so unprepared for my first child, not really knowing anything, and not really having anywhere to go for some help,” Swash said.

“Whenever I’d go to a child-parent club, it was always for mothers and the child. I never felt included.

“There are a lot of absent dads out there, and I want to know whether they are absent because they want to be or because there wasn’t enough support for them. And if that’s the case, I want to shine a light on that and let people know there’s got to be something done to make the situation better.”

Any solutions in the UK would be required reading here, too.

I wasn’t young when I became a dad - I was in my mid-thirties - but I do remember wanting to be different to the previous generations who tended to take a step back, and to make an earnest effort to feed my babies and change nappies.

As the children grew, I tried my best to be there for them as much as possible (I’ve no idea how Homer crammed in eight hours of TV a day!). The bedtime story became my job for nigh on 15 years, and I can still recite chunks of the most popular books.

Naturally, their mother was doing all of this too, backwards and while in heels - as was said of Fred Astaire’s dance partner, Ginger Rogers - and sometimes even when pregnant!

If parenting was a competition, dads would lose almost every time, it’s true - but men have made giant strides towards genuine co-parenting in recent times, and that ought to be acknowledged, not mocked.

The most recent report on State Of The World’s Fathers - produced in Ireland by The Men’s Development Network and Treoir - really hammered the ‘deadbeat dads’ trope.

The survey of 12,500 people in 17 countries revealed a narrowing of the traditional parenting divide. In Ireland, 84% of men and 81% of women said it was the most important thing they had done in their lives.

Some 82% of men stated that they share caring responsibilities equally, and 86% said they feel as responsible for care work as their partners.

Yes, dads still lag significantly behind mums regarding hours spent on care and housework, with the latter devoting on average an hour and 18 minutes more per day to them.

But this disparity may be down to the fact women are still more likely to stay at home or work part-time than men; if this shifts, then dads would presumably even things up.

In any case, will a 50-50 split of parenting duties ever be possible in the average household - given factors such as breastfeeding, and the fact mothers often have more stringent attitudes to cleanliness, allied with an innate desire to do certain tasks.

A clue to this can be seen in one question in the study, which showed 30% of men felt changing nappies, giving kids a bath, and feeding them “are mother’s responsibilities”. That figure is too high - but consider 20% of women agreed with the statement, and you see how hard it can be for men to wrestle some parenting duties away from the Irish mammy.

Suffice to say, the vast majority of men are committing totally to parenthood. The fact we are doing this with so few positive role models makes it a greater achievement.

As Joe Swash said: “We need to celebrate the positive role models out there, the people that are doing good, people that are bringing up their kids, that are loving them, are gentle and compassionate.”

Yes, but you won’t find many of those role models if you switch on the TV, Joe.