Toby Young: A few home truths about fatherhood

In the most affluent parts of the Western world, a historic transference of power has taken place that is greater than anything achieved by the Trade Union movement, the women's movement or the civil-rights movement – and it hasn't even been accompanied by its own movement. Fathers, who enjoyed absolute authority within the household for several millennia, now find themselves at the beck and call of their wives and children. Indeed, most of my male friends are not fathers in any traditional sense at all. They don't guide their children through the moral quandaries of life; they guide them to their extracurricular activities from behind the wheel of a Vauxhall Zafira.

This is the subject of a new memoir by the American writer Michael Lewis called Home Game. It documents his struggle to cope as the husband of a modern career woman and the father of three children. "At some point in the last few decades, the American male sat down at the negotiating table with the American female and – let us be frank – got fleeced," he writes. "Women may smile at a man pushing a baby stroller, but it is with the gentle condescension of a high officer of an army toward a village that surrendered without a fight."

No sooner has Lewis's first daughter arrived than he is transformed into a surrendered husband, forced to take her to a succession of "Mommy and me" classes. It isn't long before he has been thoroughly brainwashed by the politically correct mumbo-jumbo that passes for wisdom on "parenting courses". "I understood that my job was no longer to force the party line upon Quinn," he writes. "My job was to validate her feelings." His wife, who used to look up to him as a glamorous writer, begins to view him as an "unreliable employee".

As the father of four young children, this strikes a powerful chord with me. However, Home Game ultimately proves a bit disappointing. It starts promisingly, diagnosing a problem that most men dare not talk about, but Lewis is soon reduced to making jokes about the subject rather than offering serious social analysis. This is a profound and far-reaching change in British and American family life and it deserves more serious consideration from one of America's finest writers.

'Home Game' (Penguin, £8.99) is out now