What fathers really need to teach sons

Does the evidence of my inadequacy as a father have no limits? I've long since confessed to spending too long in the office and being stressed and tired at home.

But even the morsel of self-respect I used to feel for the time I would spend with my boys at the cinema or watching TV is under threat. Apparently, instead of discussing whether Buffy was any good in Scooby-Doo or teasing my two boys about Man United's failure to win anything last season, I should have been introducing them to key concepts in maths and English.

According to "Dads and Sons - A Winning Team", a government pamphlet being sent to a million fathers of adolescent boys, trips to the cinema should be used to get the boys to calculate the ticket sales needed to make a profitable return, while watching soccer is an chance for them to write a newspaper-style match report.

The latest government foray into family policy has produced a predictable backlash along the lines of "Nanny state gone mad". As politicians of Left, Right and centre have found out, when it comes to the family you're damned if you do include it in political debate about the decline of the traditional family and damned if you don't. Ridicule awaits anyone who suggests concrete measures by which government might cautiously intervene in family life.

I can think of worse ways of getting fathers to give a bit of thought to how to use play and leisure to make school learning seem a bit more relevant. But it is powerless against the far more influential trends which make fathering a tough business. Really, the problem between fathers and sons is not that they don't know what to do when they are watching TV together. For millions of youngsters, the issue is not how to improve the way they relate to their dads - it is having any kind of useful relationship at all.

Even in the twoparent family, the challenges to the father-son relationship run deep. In contrast to widespread belief, today's parents are spending more time with their children. Modern dads may not share the burden of parenting equally with the mother, but they are more likely to be more involved with all aspects of their kids' lives than were their own fathers. My own father, a noted progressive sociologist, never sang a lullaby and, to the best of my knowledge, never attended a parents' night. I religiously troop along to every one and I don't think I, or he, are untypical of our respective eras of fatherhood.

Despite the emotionally ambitious nature of modern fathering, no amount of structured play will compensate sons for the more troublingmessages they are getting-from their dads. I worry that we are transmitting a sense of pessimism and uncertainty to our children - the belief that the world is a hostile, difficult place, with no leavening idea of optimism or progress worth pursuing.

However wrong our fathers may have been in their certainties, at least they had some. A lot of men of my generation feel uneasy showing authority towards their children. It is something I felt myself when my boys first told me that someone hit them in the playground.

Was I to urge them to sock it to their aggressor? Or is the done thing now to try to facilitate negotiation? We all resolve these matters our own way - but it did make me question the lack of certainty my generation feels about so many things, large and small.

At the heart of this unease lies the dwindling of belief in fatherhood as a role of transmission: the handing on of progress and tradition. Over the past two decades, a very important change has taken place. We no longer believe our children will live in a better world than us.

Free of the shadows of war, at least of the conventional kind, benefiting from massive advances in technology, science and medicine and steadily getting richer, we have had it pretty good in comparison with the fears of families throughout history. At the same time, we have lost faith in progress.

Thirty years ago my grandfather told me how the colour television was a symbol of the thrilling new world I would inherit. It was something he looked forward to, through me, with pride and anticipation. Now while knowledge advances at a pace and scale granddad would have marvelled at, we feel more frightened than liberated by our ever-growing potential to shape nature. Our children are often taught to fear more than they are taught to hope.

One reason why change now strikes us as threatening is the decline in tradition and continuity in families and wider society. Where once fathers expected their sons to continue the family trade or profession, few either expect or want this to happen.

Do the increasing numbers of us working in the dynamic but ephemeral "knowledge economy" feel we have anything to pass on? Can we imagine a management consultant taking his son to the atrium of the City HQ to say "one day, son, all this will be yours"? Increasingly, a lot of us can't describe easily what it is we actually do for a living - let alone hope that our kids might want to do something like it.

Bridging the ideas of progress and tradition was the vitally important glue of social mobility. Fathers measured their success by whether their sons did better than them. In the postwar decades millions of working and lower- middle class fathers watched with pride and envy while their sons became the first in the family to reach university, to travel the world, to own their own home. Now that we, as parents, have achieved all that, we have little to aspire for in our children beyond an insipid hope that they will "be happy".

But I am a good liberal at heart and therefore I can't - or won't - allow myself to sink into the trough of complaint. Progress is never well-served by pessimism Fathers can once again feel they are leading their sons on a path to somewhere.

Our loss of confidence in ourselves as parents should provoke us into a more honest debate about the kind of world in which we want to bring up our children and whether we're going about it the right way.

I hope the Government's pamphlet does jog us all into being a dab hand at encouraging our kids to be future mathematicians or entrepreneurs. But more than that, I hope we can find in ourselves something worth believing in and passing on to them.

That's not a job for the state, nanny or otherwise - it's a job for all of us.

?Matthew Taylor's book, What Are Children For?, co-authored with his father, Laurie, is published next year.