Adrienne Burgess delivering keynote adress

Mothers are simply better equipped than fathers to look after children, according to conventional wisdom.

This traditional view – accepted as gospel for generations – is challenged by Adrienne Burgess, Research Manager at the Fatherhood Institute in London.
Males can parent just as well as females, even with new babies, she said in an interview with Relationships Australia, a major sponsor of a forum in Perth in September on men and their family relationships.

Hoping to challenge stereotypes and give serious change a chance, she recalled being impressed by experiments that put babies into the arms of men and women – none of them parents – who had been asked to perform simple tasks.

“Men coped neither better nor worse. Women dropped the feeding bottle, for example, just as often as the men did. Women can mess up as much.”
Adrienne, who has two step-daughters in their 40s and a daughter of 25, mentioned another experiment that related to emotional, rather than physical, measuring up.

“Tapes of screaming babies were played to men and women, whose responses were filmed. They also had lie detectors attached to them, to note measures such as heart rate. The women’s faces did look more troubled than the men’s, but the actual physiological responses, which measured anxiety, showed no difference between the sexes.”

Adrienne, born in Australia and brought up in Canberra, has a diverse background that prepared her well for a career investigating the multi-faceted world of parenting in a world changing faster than at any time in history.

“While doing a degree in English and drama at the University of Bristol in the late 1960s I was lucky enough to have a job writing a regular column for the Sydney Morning Herald. It was called London Bird’s Diary. After graduating I was an actress for a few years but continued to write, for Cosmopolitan magazine, among other publications.”