This week I have the privilege of recommending as a Christmas present for at least one half of humanity a book called Things for Dads to do with Kids, by Sam Carroll, published by Parental Equality Publishing and available generally. It is a small, pocket-sized book, a looseleaf, ring-bound production costing €7 (£5.50). At once it is child-sized and manly.
It may be the most radical book ever published for men. Certainly it provides an antidote to the stream of anti-man poison emanating from academia, the media and public life, in the relentless effort to destroy what is left of cultural fatherhood in western society.
A celebration of the common space inhabited by fathers and children, it is a list of 178 things for dads and their children to do together. It is, as the author says in his introduction, "an invitation to fathers to enhance their relationships with their children and to raise the awarenesss of their unique interaction with their child's development". It is fundamentally a book about time, the most precious gift a father can give his child.
Some of the suggestions are pretty obvious: "Go to a carnival or a circus"; "Make daisy chains"; "Play blind-man's-buff"; "Make a swing". But many are not obvious at all: "Follow a river to its source"; "Make your son or daughter responsible for getting up in the morning by giving him or her their own alarm clock and teaching them the time (let your child choose and buy the clock)"; "Get haircuts together"; "Discover an interesting part of town, walk through it tossing a coin at various intersections to decide which way to turn next".
All activities have been coded with symbols to provide ease of reference. There are light-bulb symbols grading activities for age, clock symbols for time, and pound symbols for cost. Activities are also listed under headings: "character building", "life skills", "health and fitness", "socialisation" and "awareness of environment". None of the 178 things-to-do has any requirement for a court order.
Unless you already have a sense of why it might be so, it is hard to explain why this is such an important book. Firstly, because it now exists, because in its smallness and simplicity it says something we are barely aware is in need of saying: "Fathers matter". It is a book every father, past, present and to come, should carry around in his pocket to remind him of who he is.
Secondly, it is important because it does not approach fatherhood from the perspective of the sociologist or the psychiatrist or the psychoanalyst or the lawyer or the feminist or the psychologist or the dream therapist, but from that of fathers and children. Nothing could be simpler or more radical. Sam Carroll's qualification is simply that he is a father.
Skirting around this book is the ghost of the four million-year-old Great Father, destroyed by the Industrial Revolution which removed him from the home and made his powers invisible. It was not, as Robert Bly has observed, a premeditated killing: "Industrial circumstances took the father to a place where his sons and daughters could no longer watch him minute by minute, or hour by hour, as he fumbled incompetently with hoes, bolts, saws, shed doors, ploughs, wagons. His incompetence left holes or gaps where the sons and daughters could do better". Thus, fathers were rendered invisible. "Have you ever wondered", asks Sam Carroll in his introduction, "why dads feature so rarely in home videos and family albums?" The answer? "Dads are usually the ones behind the cameras! It is time to bring fathers into the picture".
This book is a celebration of the things father have always done but which have been ignored or discounted. This is not a book for "new men", but for men who know there is nothing new under the sun, and who don't need experts to tell them what is right. Neither is its central purpose the literal communication of its contents, but the symbolism of its existence.
In the years since I became an adult, the denigration of manhood/fatherhood has reached unspeakable extremes of toxicity as, to promote an ideology fundamentally concerned with money-making, an elite corps of manhaters has pumped out the poison on an industrial basis, into the channels of a willing media. Any attempt to counteract this is met with intimidation, ridicule and ad hominem attack. Simultaneously, there is the even more pernicious efforts of certain men to unload their own unresolved guilt by dumping it on men and fathers in general, insisting on "apologising" for the wrongs of men.
Sam Carroll's book is in part an initial response to the discovery that it is impossible to tackle the forces of darkness in a full-frontal attack, which is why this book is so welcome and so beautiful. In a lifetime, perhaps, copies of this book will be found among the belongings of men who loved their children when it was all but illegal, and then it will blossom with all the meanings I have outlined.
jwaters@irish-times.ie