Maneka Gandhi, minister for women and child development, recently said that legislation for paternity leave “will have little impact in India, where men do not even avail their existing leave entitlements to share the responsibility of child care”.

And she is being trolled for having said so.

Yet, it is true. It is true that in our society caring is women’s work. When a child falls ill, it is the mother who takes the day off from work to do the looking after; it is the mother who knows the name and phone number of the paediatrician or whether a vaccination is due. It is mom who knows the after-school activity or playtime with friends. Men work outside the home. Only. Well, mostly. However, it is this move from ‘only’ to ‘mostly’ and to ‘also’ that legislation can help with. It can push to support joint responsibility for the care of children in a family — which many men do, and want to, and are good at. The State can hold this process back for a few generations or egg it on.

Since the 1970s, researchers in social sciences and mental health have been crying themselves hoarse that the early involvement of men in the lives of their children benefits entire communities. It reduces crime, increases productivity and decreases the burden of mental illness in families, especially among the womenfolk. MenCare, an international non-governmental organisation, has taken up this call and its statement released in February this year, highlights the virtues of paternity leave. “Equal leave policies for both parents — policies that are well-paid and non-transferable — have been gaining global attention in recent years, for good reason. They have proven to be some of the most effective policies in encouraging men’s caregiving and promoting greater equality in the household, workplace, and society as a whole, particularly when embedded within broader strategies to reduce and redistribute care work,” it said.

Do we want greater equality in the household and in society? Or is ‘women and child development’ lip-service to maintaining patriarchal status quo?

There comes a time when a child needs someone more than the mother. Not because she is no longer good for the child, but because the mother is not enough. In order to understand what this means, one needs to look closely at relationships as they unfold from birth. The father is an important figure who moves from being the protector of the mother-baby unit, to being an independent carer for the baby. For the child’s long-term personality development and membership in civil society, the father is more significant than grandmothers and nannies (no offence to them) because the baby learns to live in a group, to share, to bear envy, because of the father’s presence. It is the father’s presence that creates more siblings, it is the father’s presence that creates a world beyond the cocoon of mother and child. A child needs two active parents who are different from each other, because that is how we, as humans, learn to appreciate diversity — by first accepting and loving the differences that our parents embody. And Indian society needs this diversity more so now.

In my clinical practice, one family at a time, I see children struggling with the ill-effects of emotionally unavailable fathers. These children, usually male, come in very angry, disrupting school, not learning, aggressive towards their mothers or are at the other end of the spectrum — flat, self-sabotaging, passive, helpless, abusing addictive substances. Neither of these — aggressive or passive — are good templates for future fatherhood, especially if their impression of their own fathers is marked by absence.

I have noticed that where the mothers are keen to include the fathers as partners in looking after children, the fathers are not averse to being involved and then things change very quickly. It is as if they were only waiting in the wings to be invited or assisted in this task. They seemed to want to be there for their children and, despite their ambivalence, could not remain bystanders for long.

However, I always have to actively ask for the father to attend the session. Without this initiative, fathers would ‘automatically’ get left out of their children’s daily, ordinary struggles — at school or in relationships. Someone, somewhere in the wider system, if not the mother-child pair, has to ask for the father to be there. Maybe the minister can be part of this wider system.

Sustaining such structural changes in the family dynamics will take much more than the initiative of individual psychologists and teachers. It will require Indian society and, therefore, extended families (including grandmothers) to become more thoughtful about how fathers need to be more actively involved with their children. These bonds are made as early as the first year of life, because when we are little, love is physical care. As the grandmothers already know too well, love is in the feeding, bathing, massaging, changing and carrying. These early bonds make it much more likely that a child will reach out to a father when older — for advice, for support or to emulate. Early distance makes for later distance.

India needs to sit up and recognise the link between a father’s absence as a carer and the joint responsibility we have towards it as a society. Women and child development cannot work by leaving out the fathers.

Nupur Dhingra Paiva is a clinical child psychologist in private practice and teaches at Ambedkar University, Delhi

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