As rising Labor star Tanya Plibersek takes her place as deputy opposition leader, we assume she’s come to an arrangement with her husband on taking care of their three young children. She’s managed to find a way, notwithstanding those that question how she could possibly be both a mother of three and a senior politician. Questions, of course, never asked of a father and politician.
This debate about Tanya, and more generally about the level of female representation parliament and business, has made one
thing abundantly clear: more men need to man up and become primary carers for their children. I’ve done it, and can report it is the best decision I ever made.
I’m a regular guy who put his career on hiatus for a year or two to raise his son, while his wife pursues her profession.
Yes, I found taking up the role of primary carer quite strange. Even in a wealthy, modern society, in the year 2013, there are certain roles still doggedly persist as being either ‘male’ or ‘female’. Child-rearing seems to be one of them. People also seem to completely lose their minds when a woman becomes Prime Minister, but that’s a separate issue.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics the father is the stay-at-home parent only 5% of the time. Apparently though the trend is up, with ABS also reporting that the number of men taking on the role has nearly doubled over the past decade.
Fair though to say that it is still far from the norm. Unusual enough to take a man into a strange head space when he makes the attempt. There has, for example, been days when I’ve found myself waving my finger at my wife and announcing, “you don’t appreciate what I’m doing”, or sitting at home and brooding that my role as carer JUST ISN’T VALUED.
Which is nonsense in the first instance, as my partner was the primary carer for the first year of my son’s life, and which is exactly right in the second instance.
Of course ‘feminised’ work is undervalued. It has always been thus. Work traditionally associated with women is either simply invisible, underpaid or – in the case of child rearing – not paid at all.
Raising and nurturing a child is treated by the economy as being less valuable than important male-dominated occupations. Like, for example, being a radio host who regularly denounces climate change as a socialist conspiracy, or a broker selling toxic securitised mortgages to Icelanders, or a TV chef yelling at quavering apprentices on a reality cooking show. All those socially useful things men do to make the world a better place.
So while I may not be screaming about chaff bags over the airwaves, I am learning the ancient art of child whispering.
Now, when my son speaks, as a talkative boy not yet two years old, I can translate what he’s saying for mum. I know the tricks to making him eat when he’s being difficult, I can smell a poopy nappy at fifty paces; I can pick in an instant the signals from a hungry child, a thirsty child, a bored child, or the suspicious quiet of a child who’s carefully placing my limited edition Lord of the Rings trilogy in the toilet bowl.
As an aside, how a single parent does all these things and hold down a job is simply beyond me.
There are times, yes, when my partner gets home and the dinner is ready and I tell her how many poops our son did that day. And then she tells me in return about some complex management problem she solved on a multi-million dollar project. “Oh” I think to myself, my shoulders wilting.
But that’s fine, I just crack open a beer, switch the channel to mixed martial arts and feel the surging machismo of my manhood return.
As may be clear by this point, I have the luxury of an educated, intelligent, well-remunerated wife. But this is 2013. Most professional men have this luxury. In fact, there are more young women these days with university degrees (30 per cent) than men (27 per cent).
Women of my generation (X) and the ones that follow are just as likely as a man to want a career, are likely to be better educated than a man, and therefore also likely to have greater earning potential. If you’re not willing to share professional and personal responsibilities with a woman like that, then something is going to break.
Of course, blaming social convention is to simplify the issue. This matters, but so do the policies of the average Australian workplace.
Most Australian parental leave schemes, public and private, provide leave disproportionally to the mother only. Men may get one or two weeks after their child is born, if they are lucky. At the national level, for example, the proposed Coalition PPL program and the current scheme brought in by the Labor Party offer only two weeks to the father.
While many (though nowhere near enough) workplaces will allow flexible working conditions for mothers, most do not have the same policies in place for men. There is rarely latitude enough so that if a dad wants to work part-time or job share during his child’s early years, he can (to say nothing of macho office cultures where staying late is the norm). Nor, in many cases, are the HR mechanisms in place to ensure a six month or one year hiatus from a job does not equal career suicide (again, we aren’t there on these points with women either – not even close).
So yes, the barriers to being a stay-at-home dad are many. But these do not explain the figure of 5% referenced earlier. To be blunt, if you’re in a situation where you can afford to have one parent stay at home, bloody well take it. Forget cultural expectations: man up and take one for the team. The team being your partner, who is just as ambitious and educated as you, and your kids, who’ll benefit from a positive male role model who is present in their lives.
They’ll love it, in fact. And you will too.
This article first appeared in New Matilda in October 2013.