Reclaiming or reshaping fatherhood

There is an emerging trend to recognise the importance of fathers in health service provision. This is consistent with feminist objectives to reshape fatherhood to enhance gender equity in the home and in the workplace. How best to include fathers in services, overwhelmingly utilised by mothers, is now a topic of considerable interest. However, the desire to reshape fatherhood in ways conducive to gender equity is easily coopted by conservative political agendas which do not seek to reshape fatherhood but reclaim the rights of fathers by reinstating paternal authority within the family. This cooption is facilitated by new fatherhood discourses utilised by many service providers which blame mothers for the lack of fathers' involvement in early infant care. The paper argues that mother-blaming is aggravated by service providers who fail to understand the nature and extent of maternal anxiety and by unrealistic images of the new father. (author abstract)