Interview: How parents can break the barrier

Six months after the birth of her first child, she and her husband attended the baby's routine check up. "My husband asked the health professional a question and she looked across and directed her reply to me, even though it was he who had asked the question in the first place," explains Abigail.

The health professional instinctively subscribed to the deeply entrenched view that parenting is first and foremost a mother's responsibility and that men play a marginal role at best.

This attitude is one that Abigail, who is a principal lecturer and course leader in psychology within the University of Huddersfield's School of Human and Health Sciences, is deeply committed to overturning.

She aims to see "gender taken out of parenting", as she puts it, and took a major step when she conducted a workshop at a large conference held by a think-tank named the Fatherhood Institute.

The institute has launched an initiative entitled Hit The Ground Crawling, described as a "groundbreaking antenatal training programme for expectant and new fathers".

Abigail spoke to a mixed gathering of health professionals and fathers, showing them how antenatal care can be made more inclusive. She drew on intensive research she conducted at ante-natal classes run by the National Childbirth Trust, when she made recordings of 60 hours of classes and subjected them to a close analysis. She discovered that, even though men attended in significant numbers, the classes were very much directed towards the expectant mothers.

"Men are seen very much as secondary parents, as bumbling assistants," she says. The Fatherhood Institute workshop looked at strategies for tailoring antenatal provision to different groups of fathers, such as single fathers, stay-at-home fathers and teenage fathers in order to improve their confidence and experiences of parenting.

One role allotted to fathers is that of mother's carer.

"For example, in the days after birth, they are expected to look out for signs of the baby blues. If the mother starts to have difficulties, fathers are seen as people who have to be told by health professionals what they should be doing, as if somehow they wouldn't instinctively know what their partners need."

Abigail rejects divisions of responsibility based solely on gender. No aspect of parenting should be reserved for women, she believes. When it comes to caring for babies and children, she states, there is no task that men cannot do as well as women – obviously aside from breastfeeding – even though they might need some training and a boost to their confidence – which ante-natal classes could provide.

She and her family practise what she preaches. Her husband, a former bookseller, is a stay-at-home father, looking after their two young children. The arrangement has worked well; her husband has been a perfectly capable child carer.

This is one example of a sea change in attitudes that could be underway, Abigail believes. For one thing, societal attitudes to masculinity are changing with regards to parenting, and the recession might have hastened the process, resulting in more men likely to remain at home, involved in child care.

"Men might do some things differently, but they can do them just as well as women."