I took my 10-year-old, Eva, to see a Regent's Park production of To Kill a Mockingbird last week. Afterwards, I asked her, half jokingly, if she saw me very much in the mould of Atticus Finch. She replied that she thought I was more after the style of Homer Simpson.

To Kill a Mockingbird is a book that has many themes – racism, innocence, the nature of justice. But what chimed most powerfully, and poignantly, with me was the portrayal of fatherhood – poignantly because the role model of Atticus – as a dignified, kind, worthy man who represents an ideal for the community and his children – has more or less disappeared from popular culture.

The most moving moment for me in the play was when, after conducting a brilliant but doomed defence of the unjustly accused black worker Tom Robinson, Atticus walks past the public gallery where his children, Scout and Jem, have been watching. One of Robinson's supporters, the Rev Sykes, says to them, "stand up, your father's passing". They stand – proudly.

I found this very moving, because it is a model of fatherhood lost to the modern world. We are all Homer Simpson now. This is inevitable and justified. Centuries of women being second-class citizens were bound, in the righteous backlash that is feminism, to curtail the status of men, who were revealed to be – rather than heroic – sexist, emotionally narrow and sometimes violent (like the "bad" father in To Kill a Mockingbird, the wicked and abusive Bob Ewell).

At a cultural level, no one could argue with the Simpsonisation of fathers, and the dominant portrayal of them in advertisements, popular drama and films as little better than children, when they are not being violent or weak. Fathers, and men in general, had it coming. But I just wonder – isn't there a danger that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater?

For whatever is happening at a cultural level, at an individual level there are any number of fathers who are decent, dignified, kind and wise. I have even met some of them. Their role model – the person they aspire to be, whether or not they have read To Kill a Mockingbird – is Atticus Finch, not Homer Simpson. But that is now an unattainable idea, because the culture would stand against the acknowledgement of such a man, if he existed. It would be resisted with the same kind of force, although with different motives, as a woman who claimed she existed only to please men.

This is not merely a shame. It works against the interests of the very forces that seek to hold the dignity of fathers as questionable (as a compensation for the fact that, at a mass level, men continue to hold the political and economic levers). For without a good role model, adults react much the same as children – they live down to expectations. They will not make the effort if they know their efforts are doomed before they start.

Mothers, girls and women are not short of positive role models, but fathers, boys and men exist within a culture that holds them, at a purely personal and domestic level, as second-rate citizens. Well, so be it – we are not so feeble, I hope, that we cannot accommodate this. But it must be especially hard, I think, for boys growing up today, particularly those in fatherless families – around one million in this country, according to a report this week by the Centre for Social Justice this week – to think well of themselves and their futures with a default cultural position holding that they are always on the brink of backsliding into sexism, violence or simple incompetence. Boys need role models such as Atticus, and girls need fathers they can respect as well as lovingly mock.

"Stand up – your father's passing" is an echo from a lost time that will never return. But the echo itself must never be lost, or all of us – men, women and children alike – will be the poorer for it.

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