The men who take sharenting seriously
Shared parental leave is available to all and yet being a stay-at-home dad is still not cool. Here, Jimi Famurewa meets the men giving it a rebrand…
Strangers in big cities may not say hello to each other, but flexibly employed dads certainly do. In playgrounds and parks across the country, it is a brotherhood of sorts. However, it’s a brotherhood with an image problem.
Last month, the Department for Business announced that – with take-up for shared parental leave estimated to be just 2% – it was launching a £1.5m campaign to encourage more of Britain’s 285,000 eligible fathers to make the leap, including salary incentives for those who opt in. Financial jitters are undoubtedly behind the average guy’s reluctance to swap business for baby yoga. But there’s also a pervading cultural stigma that’s swaying even the most enlightened of men.
Think stay-at-home dad and there’s every chance you probably conjure up Kevin from BBC Two hit comedy Motherland: a neutered, touchy-feely numpty, haplessly trying to get his high-powered wife to sleep with him.
Thankfully, though, there are also signs that the tide is turning. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s partner – TV presenter Clarke Gayford – has announced that, when their first child arrives in June, he’ll take a career break.
It’s a ‘lean out’ attitude that chimes with my own decision, made two years ago, to downshift from a full-time job at a newspaper to go freelance (although my self-employed wife was still providing the bulk of the care) so I could take a more active role in family life. And, equally, it tallies with a changing employment landscape: last year, official figures revealed that the number of working mothers in the UK had risen by a million in 20 years.
Sweden is the best role model. A couple of years ago, I was sent to report on the ‘latte papas’ who, aided by financial dividends and decades of equality legislation, think nothing of taking six months off to look after their kids.
The thing that has stayed with me from that trip – even more than the shrugging, urbane Swedish dads who stubbornly refused to see themselves as progressive superheroes – is a kindly older woman I met at a playgroup, who told me her husband drew baffled chuckles when he decided to become a stay-at-home dad back in the ’70s. Old-fashioned attitudes did not evaporate overnight. And our new wave of stay-at-home dads may just be the shock troops setting a fairer world in motion. Here, four men offer their tales from a new parental frontier.