Chris Cleave has been a hands-on father since his children were born, but as a man he has often felt like an outsider at the nursery or school gates. Why do men feel unable to take on an equal role in childcare?

When our first child was born, I vowed to spearhead a movement of fathers who would take an equal share in bringing up children, participating in schooling, and generally being awesome. As my wife pointed out at the time, a woman will just do something, whereas a man must spearhead a movement.

According to the Fatherhood Institute, 82% of full-time, working dads say they'd like to do more childcare. But it's not easy. My own retreat from spearhead to spear butt is instructive. At first, as I was a writer (read "unemployed"), I looked after our firstborn while my wife worked. By the second month of this arrangement, I had become exhausted and gained undying respect for full-time parents, and so a childminder was found. We slowly figured out that she was just parking the children in front of the television set, so we tried a nursery. The nursery staff were all moonstruck, staff turnover was rapid, and I got weirded-out that the mums at the nursery gate wouldn't acknowledge my presence. The place was so ditzily feminine that we didn't want our boy there. So we found another nursery. It was exactly the same, only pinker.

When our second child was born, my wife went part-time. Shortly afterwards we were amazed to discover that a part-time nanny costs roughly the same as two nursery places. We hired a wonderful nanny, and she was not a man.

My defeat had become a rout. Now we have three children and I have a flexible job that lets me spend a good number of hours with them, but it's hardly the fatherhood revolution I envisaged. In an effort to redeem myself, I thought about volunteering as a class rep at our child's school. I even got as far as attending a fact-finding meeting. The teacher looked directly at the three mothers and one father (me) therein assembled and said brightly: "OK, mums, let's get started!" Now my wife is a class rep, and I get to read her newsletters.

Siân Rowland, the former deputy head of a primary school who now coordinates a healthy schools programme in south-west London, acknowledges that even great schools are not necessarily set up to involve fathers. "Dads are disenfranchised," she says. "There's a culture of 'Take your book home and read it to Mummy'. You have to be quite delicate, because not every family has a male role model in it. So we try to get male role models in, because otherwise the only people kids see reading, writing, and eating carrots and hummus, are women."

But this is where another set of problems begins. In the aftermath of the Soham murders in 2002, the level of public suspicion against those – especially men – who come into contact with children prompted the government's new vetting scheme, which is likely to require any adult spending more than one day a month with children to register with the Independent Safeguarding Authority. The general atmosphere of suspicion may lead to men in particular being put off from volunteering. There is certainly a shortage of men lining up to help out.

"You end up wheeling in the local vicar," says Rowland, "just so the kids can watch a man reading a book. We're so paranoid about paedophilia and the safety of children that perhaps we're nervous of bringing in men. A biological dad might just scrape the grade, but if it's a stepdad or an uncle, people get paranoid."

Less dramatic than the paranoia, but no less insidious, is a feeling harboured by many that there is something effeminate, and effeminising, about fathers who seek to develop caring relationships with their children. Responding to an article I wrote for the Guardian a couple of years ago, arguing that dads should get more involved, one man wrote: "Over 30 years ago, I changed nappies, nestled infant heads against my breast while lightly pulling on a bottle, talced pink bums and bathed soiled infants. Now as I contemplate my son's trajectory I wonder if I might not have done better to remain aloof, swoop down upon him when he turned 12 and drag him into the forest to make his first kill and smear his face with blood. It is conceivable that if sons do need fathers, it is because they are not mothers."

Suspicion and traditionalist views of fatherhood, it seems, conspire to prevent fathers from getting more involved with their children, at home and at school. On top of these are the economic factors that operate to keep fathers in work and force mothers out. Rob Williams, the chief executive of the Fatherhood Institute, thinks that parental leave is key. "Now maternity leave is so much longer than paternity leave," he says, "it has led to the woman becoming officially viewed as the child carer, which actually gives women less equality in the workplace. It's counter-productive. Before a working couple has children, the woman earns 91% of the man's salary. After kids, it drops to 67%. The driver is the leave system, which makes a break in women's careers but not in men's. The leave system itself is deepening gender inequality. The rational decision for any couple is for the mother to stop work and be the carer. This will be true until maternity leave and paternity leave are more equal."

The inequality of the leave system is arguably the sign of the government's failure to make the imaginative leap between its long-held policy of getting more mothers into work with its corollary: getting more fathers involved with childcare. And if that is bad news for fathers who want to look after their children, then surely it is equally bad news for mothers who want or need to work – at over 60%, the substantial majority.

Indeed, the closer one looks at how unfair the system is to fathers, the more one realises how tough it is on mothers. In the eyes of modern Britain, mothers seem able to do no right. A study published to fanfares last week found a very modest statistical correlation between mothers working and their kids imbibing fizzy pop and spending time in front of the TV. Naturally, the media sexed it up into Mammageddon. "Working mothers' children unfit" was BBC Online's headline. The same day's BBC News at Ten delivered a damning verdict on the children of working mums: they were sitting in front of the TV, eating too much and doing too little.

Why, in 2009, was our nation's mouthpiece scolding mums and ignoring the role of dads?

Working mums see this stuff and are invited to feel guilty. They also look at their non-working or part-time peers volunteering as school helpers and class reps, and maybe feel even more guilty. That's right, working ladies of Britain: now you're not only going home to your fat children, but also you're going to have to read about what your fat children did at school in a newsletter produced by women with thin children who never watch TV or drink fluid with bubbles in it. Oh, and full-time mums: despite the fact that you are doing an amazing job and making our schools work for us at the same time, you can feel guilty that you are not fulfilling your career potential or providing a professional female role model for your children.

It seems that the media, the schools, the spectre of paedophilia, the prevalence of absent fathers, the policies of the government and perhaps even our own machismo conspire to prevent dads taking an equal share in bringing up our young children. Meanwhile, working women are demonised as unfit mothers, while full-time mums are made to feel left-out or unfulfilled. Isn't modern Britain groovy?

On the bright side, there's always the global economic meltdown. "With the recession," says Siân Rowland, "we're starting to see more dads picking up kids at the school gate. So maybe they'll start a male gossip revolution and it will change the way dads get involved." When I put this to a friend, he suggested that the male gossip revolution will begin on the day that beer is served at the school gate.

Another friend has done the next-best thing. He has organised a dads' night for our children's school, and had the foresight to stage it at the local pub. Once a month we go along and, while it's hardly a school governors' meeting, it's an informative first step. It's here that I've learned how much more involved fathers would like to be in schools and childcare, and how frustrated both mothers and fathers feel at their exclusion. Most parents, I think, hope that we are at the start of an era that will be more inclusive of fathers and less judgmental about mothers. Maybe one day, mums and dads will go to the parents' meeting – or the pub – together. Assuming, of course, that a babysitter can be found.