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Personal experiences which have influenced the lives and opinions of those involved in social care.

"Children need fathers!" we are told, often sanctimoniously, when the issue of single mothers is aired. Well, what happens when the father needs support to provide parental care for the child?

Sometimes I look after my two-year-old son Lewis independently of my wife. But I have difficulties. I use a wheelchair much of the time. When I do walk, I use two sticks, which means I can't pick Lewis up and field footballs or toy fire engines.

Sometimes I pay someone to spend several hours with us on Saturdays, allowing me to take Lewis to the park, set up messy painting sessions and undertake various other educational activities.

A further difficulty is that I am a man. If a mother had problems looking after her baby, social services would be round before you could say Pooh Bear. In fact they have been known, when a disabled woman becomes pregnant, to threaten to take over child care completely.

I have requested social services support through the direct payments scheme, which enables disabled people to employ their own support workers. My local social services disabilities service and the children and families service have played ping-pong with the request since it was made following an assessment in November last year. Despite my telephone reminders, very little has happened.

It is clearly a disability issue, since it is I who need the support. Recently I have had three calls from social workers from the children's department. Fathers aren't that unusual, but the department clearly thinks I am. Last week, however, someone called who knew about direct payments and said she would arrange a new assessment with a view to resolving the matter.

When I asked another disabled father whether he'd tried to get support, he said "It's not worth the hassle". Michele Watts' book¹ featured comments from fathers such as: "I don't believe in social workers", and "I try not to have much to do with social services."

There may, in the minds of social workers, be a conflict between their role as protectors of children under the Children Act 1989 and their role of supporting disabled people under the NHS and Community Care Act 1990. I suspect that that is what is happening in the case of myself and my boy, but the advent of direct payments should lift the responsibility from the social workers' shoulders. Maybe that's difficult to take, or perhaps there's a little residue of prejudice that disabled people can't possibly do an adequate job.

We've muddled through. Lewis has grown one year older and a whole lot heavier. But there's a general question involved. If fathers are going to take more responsibility for the care of their children, then their role as parents should not be ignored when they need support.

¹ M Watts, Disabled Parents: Dispelling the Myths, Radcliffe Medical Press, 1997

Nick Lewis edits Ready Willing Able, rwa@lineone.net