Modern parents need to stop swapping roles

BEING parent-friendly is all the rage these days. There’s probably a parent-friendly special in McDonalds. Everyone is at it – employers, politicians, members of boards, the Government.

In a bid to be more Danish, Leo Varadkar plans two weeks’ extra maternity and paternity benefit for mums and dads within the first year of their baby’s life as part of reforms in Budget 2019.

The €240 per week each up for grabs will surely get voters excited.

But whenever our Government tries to be more parent-friendly, there’s a catch; it’s like when a social media giant gets a new pinball machine in the canteen. Let’s butter them up – if we do candies on casual Friday, maybe they won’t notice how tough their jobs are.

Even though eligibility criteria are not yet thrashed out, the deal should include most parents, certainly working PAYE parents, who are among the biggest tax contributors in the country and yet many can’t afford to buy or even rent a home.

Trying to accommodate them ahead of the Budget will make them feel less bad about their lives. And there is an election coming up.

Mr Varadkar was careful to address the fact that men can be at home too, and women will be more rested before returning to work to be even more productive.

It’s all we read these days. “More must be done to have women on boards and taking on huge jobs, while raising a family.”

Really? Must it though? In the US, only

17.7pc of board members are female, in Ireland only 16pc, while the UK has 25pc of women leading FTSE 100 companies. The injustice.

Now lots is being done to help women through the ‘messy middle’. That, according to ‘Forbes’, is the bit when they have kids. Women start in the workplace at

50/50 and yet only 6pc of them become CEOs, obviously dropping off when kids come along.

A global analysis of more than 2,000 companies, conducted by Credit Suisse between 2006 and 2012, found that companies with a female presence on the board did better in key metrics, including stock performance.

Shares of companies with female direchours tors and market capitalisation of more than €10bn outperformed similar businesses with all-male boards by 26pc.

I was wondering why everyone was so keen to get women on boards. Nothing to do with gender balance, just greed.

That’s why they get a few extras thrown in, like crèche support, breast pumping breaks, a few extra days’ maternity leave, ‘Bring Your Child To Work Day’, some sick days – that way selling your life to your employer becomes easier.

For some reason, this is meant to be a good thing. Just like a lot of women, I don’t want to be a CEO or have some job that keeps me in an office for 16 a day. No amount of cash is worth that.

I spent today plane-watching with my daughter. It was amazing, just running along as the planes were landing 100 metres in front of us. I was delighted that I could do this on a weekday without asking for permission.

The extra time and money with baby is great but I would still argue it would be better to encourage women to work from home more, thereby saving money on childcare and making life easier in general – but it’s frowned upon. For some reason, people still have to be in offices.

Which brings me to the male part of the new pro-parent movement.

Luckily, we have moved on from a time when men were in the pub or in battle while women gave birth.

Today you’ll see men walking down the street in dungarees, carrying the baby in front of them.

Modern society demands men be more like women, and women more like men, but the simple truth is: brand new dads can’t do stuff instinctively.

They don’t breastfeed... yet – even though there’s probably someone in Silicon Valley working to change that.

Rather than get in the new mum’s way, doing stuff that does not come naturally, they might use the extra paternity leave time to learn important dad tools – like how to drive, make tree houses, fix things.

The point is that swapping genders isn’t necessary at this point.

Men, who are now taking on a more active role in the raising of children, are also finding themselves in a unique position where they get abundant praise for doing what is necessary, while their wives still do twice as much without acknowledgement.

A lot of modern women go along with it, but the modern myth of the supermom isn’t possible despite the relentless demands imposed by social media.

Modern society demands men be more like women, and women more like men