Publishers have long realised that there was a good deal of money in books for mothers. Mothers, I have heard, spend a good deal of time with their offspring and as a consequence develop any number of anxieties about how to rear them. The anxieties start, it would appear, even before conception.

For fathers, matters are slightly different. Most men would rather be reading Bravo Two Zero or The Da Vinci Code than The Expectant Father: Facts, Tips and Advice for Dads-to-be by Armin A Brott and Jennifer Ash. Until not too long ago, a plausible title for a book on fatherhood might have been something like How to Train Your Child to Make You a Whisky and Soda After a Long, Hard Day at the Office.

Now, though, fathers are expected to muck in. And, being clueless, they need advice, too. Publishers, mindful once more of a gap in the marketplace, have stepped in to fulfil the need.

The problem is one of tone. Books about motherhood have as their primary intent the desire to inform. They are practical, and if they sometimes contradict each other in terms of technique, they do not really do so in terms of tone: they are brisk, precise and, for a man, unimaginably dull. (There has lately appeared a subgenre, which may be classified as the I-Hate-Motherhood book, whose best practitioner is Rachel Cusk; her grim A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother is perhaps best approached as consolation, not advice.)

Men's books, though, begin with the dilemma about how to approach the subject. This basically boils down to two choices: jokey or mawkish?

At this point, I would like to stake a claim for my own involvement in the genre: 10 years ago, I wrote for GQ a jokey, yet genuinely terrified account of what it was like to be a man whose partner was undergoing pregnancy. It was called Diary of a Pregnant Man - Lord, how we laughed - and was, in form at least, a loose parody of those month-by-month guides to pregnancy that women have been able to draw succour from for so long.

I suspect that I was not the first to write such a piece, but they were thinner on the ground then; certainly thin enough on the ground for the then editor not to reject it on the grounds that there was too much of that kind of stuff around already.

Well, now it seems there is. Even the idea of Expectant Fathers - see the title of Brott and Ash's book above - is no longer being played except for the mildest of laughs. However, the tones do vary, as I said, between jokey and mawkish.

Ian Sansom's book, The Truth About Babies (Granta, £10) may be inclined a little too much towards the cute for my taste, but Sansom is no fool and does, at least, know how to write. He just happens to be interested in babies, because he's had one. I have had three and I'm still not interested in them. I am very interested in my children, but that's another matter. (For a start, they're not babies any more.)

Sansom, though, is not pretending to write a book of advice. When he describes the spine of a baby trying to sit up as like asparagus, he is not trying to tell us anything we might find useful; he is just noting a striking simile, which is what good writers with a bent towards the poetical often do. He had intended to write something more useful, but, as he found out, babies and serious book-writing do not mix very well if the serious book-writer is also looking after the baby. He had to snatch odd moments whenever he could.

In this he has much in common with Marcus Berkmann's book, Fatherhood: The Truth (Vermilion, £10.99), and not just in the title, which presumes that there is an unambiguous truth out there which can be had for around a tenner. Page two of his book describes, in some detail, why it took him so long to write it. He thought he could knock it out in six months, like his first book (Rain Men, about village cricket, extremely funny). It has taken him, he says rather crossly, "a fuck of a lot longer than six months". However, it does indeed contain much very good advice. The tone is jokey but Berkmann has taken the unusual route of being both funny and true, such as when he describes, in the section devoted to labour, the condition of the hospital vending machine that fathers are always eventually forced to use. "This will be nearly empty, with only the nastiest crisp flavours left and a very elderly Bounty bar that appears to be moving. You mull over the choice. It's just lovely to be out of the room. Some fathers-to-be can stand in front of a vending machine for up to 20 minutes. It could be the last peace you ever know."

It gets, in fact, even more useful than that, with advice on scrounging for second-hand car seats, the importance of changing mats, and the sinister looks men get in maternity wards.

Berkmann does not gloss over the unsavoury details, and knows how to transmit this information to men who appreciate a funny line. In fact, it's so funny that even I enjoyed it, and have read it for pleasure - and I have made my position on babies quite clear.

There's a similar approach in Stephen Giles's From Lad to Dad (White Ladder Press, £7.99). The cover shows a worried-looking man peering over a pregnant belly, in the same posture as Chad, the wartime graffito of someone peering over a wall and saying, "Wot, no beer?", etc. There is a cover endorsement by Lawrence Dallaglio, the former Engand rugby captain. It is fairly useful, if not as funny as Berkmann's book. It is also subtitled How to Survive as a Pregnant Father, which, I think we have now established, is not an original line any more. But there is nothing objectionable about it.

Then there are titles such as Jon Smith's The Bloke's Guide to Pregnancy (Hay House, £8.99), which came out last March; its title admits of no ambiguity as to the contents, and for all that it may have scared off those men who do not consider themselves blokes, this hasn't stopped it from entering the best-seller lists and still hovering at their fringes in a respectable way. It seems that the sensitive men either have their own books already, or are happy reading their partner's.

Or there's The Pocket Idiot's Guide to Being a New Dad (Alpha Books, £9.95) by Joe Kelly, also author, previously, of The Pocket Idiot's Guide to Being an Expectant Father. Men may be now brazenly being called idiots, or even pocket idiots (the syntax is unclear on this point), but the word "Dad" only appeared on the British edition; they are perhaps more dignified, certainly less humorous, in Minnesota, which is where Kelly hails from. Then there's the self-explanatory She's Had a Baby... And I'm Having a Meltdown , by James Douglas Barron (Quill, $11, but it's available at Amazon.co.uk). The meltdown it describes is not, incidentally, anything like a real meltdown, and its humour, in common with the Pocket Idiots' and Blokes' guides, is not up to Berkmann's standard.

Men, you begin to understand, like to appear tough or jokey when they go to the childcare section of the bookshop. How long, you wonder, before we see The Bravo Two Zero Approach to Being a New Dad?

Which leaves us with the most remarkable book of the lot: The One-Minute Father by Spencer Johnson (HarperCollins, £6.99). Here is that mawkishness to which I referred before, in spades. It struck me, as I gasped in disbelief, that here was, possibly, the very worst book I had ever read. The books mentioned above talk about the early stages of parenting, but, because their authors have not got to that part of the child's lives where you are obliged to have conversations with them, no advice is offered as to how to do things like get them to stop standing on the table, or sticking their brother's head down the toilet, and all the other wizard japes children get up to when they realize they have the power to maim and disturb.

Johnson, it appears, has. He has also become, I presume, quite nauseatingly rich by writing a series of books called The One-Minute Manager, The One-Minute Sales Person and even The One-Minute Mother. The idea, stretched out over 112 pages in large type, yet still giving the impression of scantiness, is that if you treat your children like some sales team in need of motivation, and give them reprimands, "praisings" and goals which can be expressed in one minute, you can, as the front cover promises you, "[improve] every moment you spend with your child".

In case you miss any particularly cogent point, it is usually repeated on its own in much larger type. Examples. Page 39, in its entirety: "Have You Hugged Your Child Today?" Page 66, in its entirety: "I Simply Let My Children Know By The Way I Treat Them That I Am Glad They Are Who They Are". Et cetera.

No tale of Narnia, or the furthest reaches of space, or the mental processes of the insane, ever had less contact with reality. It is also remarkably emetic, and the sensitive may well need a bucket. The first trick of discipline, apparently, is to go a bit like this: "Tell your child in no uncertain terms how you feel about what he or she has done. 'I AM ANGRY. I AM VERY ANGRY!'"

That's the first half of the one-minute reprimand. After a couple of pages of strikingly obtuse variations on what has just been said, depending on whether you feel sad or annoyed ("I AM ANNOYED. I AM VERY ANNOYED!"), we are finally told how the second half goes. "Now take a deep breath and calm down. When you are ready, look at and touch your child in a way which lets him know you are on his side. Then for the next half minute or so, quietly tell your child the rest of the truth. It is what he wants and needs to hear most from you right now: that he is a good person and you love him."

There is a more thoughtful appraisal of the situation in A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values by John R Gillis (Harvard University Press), when this learned historian points out that fatherhood has always, and presumably always will be, considered faintly ridiculous by society as a whole. It is good to remember that, although do not turn to Gillis if you need to know how to sterilise a bottle.

And, as a friend once told me, the only bit of advice he had found consistently useful throughout his life as a parent was: "Do what the woman asks you to do, and on the same day if at all possible."