Father’s Day is just under a week away, and no doubt a lot of the shopping will be starting soon. But what do dads really want? A home brewing kit? A new tie? A piece of a child’s craft to sit on his desk at work? A photo frame?

One way of finding an answer is to plug in his personality type and interests at a web site like presentpicker.com. You may get some helpful, or surprising, tips.

But if you were to ask a bunch of dads what they would really like on Father’s Day, perhaps deep down the answer would be quite different. That, at least, is what Tony Payne, author of the new book “Fatherhood”, thinks.

“Scratch the surface a little, and you’ll find that many men worry about how they are doing as a father. So what they really want is to know that they’re doing a good job, as many of them suspect that they aren’t.

“This anxiety is made worse by a couple of very contemporary problems.

“First, most men in our culture find themselves separated from their children for much of their waking lives. Even those of us who stay married don’t see all that much of our kids, let alone those unfortunate enough to go through separation and divorce. In human history it hasn’t always been like this. But the fact that it is like this now makes fatherhood even tougher.

“But the second problem is that, after the feminist revolution of the last 30 years, no-one’s exactly sure these days what a father is, and what he should do.”

That’s why Tony Payne says he has written his book, “Fatherhood: what it is and what it’s for”.

“Once we start to get a better vision of what fatherhood is all about and the job that God has given us to do, then we can start to work out some of the life/work balance issues that mean we can plan for more time with the kids and how we are going to spend it with them. Hardly anyone is going take the risk of telling their boss they want to work less hours, just on the vague feeling that they should be spending more time with their family. But if you have a firm grasp of the vital job God has given you and what it should look like in practice, well it’s going to shape the way you spend your time and the way you act each day in a thousand different ways. It will make you a better father.”

Tony Payne is speaking at a free ‘Fatherhood’ seminar this coming Tuesday night at Covenant Christian School, in Belrose, and his book (in either print or audio form) is available through Matthias Media and all Christian bookstores.