When did modern dads forget their life skills?
Who doesn’t love a good, old-fashioned Easter egg hunt? Golden bunnies and bright foil wrappers, chocolate chicks and Creme Eggs… God bless St Cadbury.
Children yelling, screaming and pushing each other into shrubs as they furiously scrabble for cocoa solids may be sweet to watch, but it leaves a bitter taste once you consider that wrestling over Lindt balls is the nearest thing to outdoor fun a great many of the nation’s children will experience until July.
That sounds like exaggeration. Tragically, it isn’t: a damning survey carried out last year revealed that a fifth of all children don’t play outside at all on an average day.
Worse than that, three-quarters of British kids aged five to 12 spend less time outdoors than prison inmates, whose right to 60 minutes of daily exercise in fresh air is enshrined in UN guidelines.
Frankly, if the only way our tweenagers can be persuaded to leave their screens for 20 minutes is the prospect of competitive hyperglycaemia, then something is rotten in the state of parenthood.
But – get this, ladies! – for once, just this once, it’s not our fault.
Having spent years taking the flak for just about everything our offspring do or don’t do, finally Daddy is in the dock. And, you know, I’d be lying if I didn’t confess to just a little schadenfreude.
According to a new poll, fathers are failing to pass on basic life-skills to their children, such as pitching a tent, polishing shoes or repairing a bicycle puncture. Shame on them, each and every one.
Now, the survey was carried out by Fishing TV, so I think we can all see where this is going, but without wishing to carp (apologies…), it does mark something of a watershed in the way we view parenting roles.
Admittedly, the rather Thirties rundown of what’s being lost reads like a Swallows and Amazons bucket list – using jumpers as goalposts, making a catapult, learning the countryside code… – and would make it straight on to every feminist’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
Mummy’s crime sheet would presumably involve failing to teach cupcake-baking, ironing and the importance of putting on a nice dress before Daddy comes home.
But, laughable sexism aside, it’s nice just this once to see a soupçon of reproach cast towards the man of the household. Not by their exasperated womenfolk, either, but by other men.
Manly, all-weather men. The sort of men who sit, solid and unmoving, on riverbanks, eyes locked on the middle distance, feeling suffused with relief they aren’t at home being nagged to teach the kids the names of trees and how to tie knots.
Women feel guilt all the time; so nothing new in us feeling anguished about being too tired, lazy or disorganised to be A Good Mother. Heck, it’s why Mumsnet was invented.
But maybe, just maybe, aspersions cast from the fishing lake might spur our husbands into a little more proactive parenting.
Now, at this point, I should add I do know lots of men who are relentlessly hands-on, immensely sporty and bike-obsessed. We watch them from our sitting room window as they set off on Saturday mornings, a peloton of wobbly kids and gung-ho parents heading to the coast or the shops or the M25.
“Why don’t you ever do that?” I demand of my spouse.
“I’d rather be at home with you,” he lies, thinks better of it and says his overpriced man-bike needs a service.
That’s not to say my Amplefortheducated spouse hasn’t taught our children useful things: how to construct a perfectly proportioned Hawksmoor church from Lego, the arcane rules of beagling and how to tell a Benedictine monk from a Cistercian at 60 paces.
We go camping several times a year if we can – a third of children have never slept under canvas – and his tent erection (wait for it) is as strong and stable as anything decreed by Kubla Khan. He can also build a fire that may or may not stay lit depending on the dryness of the wood shavings, the quality of the kindling and the pull of the moon, but he’s just not a Bear Grylls sort of guy.
His favourite part of the Great Outdoors is the sitting-around in a field, shooting the breeze with a cool beer with his mates, while I’m off getting everyone’s kids filthy and stained on a minibeast-cum-foraging for berries expedition.
I’m a country girl at heart and rather proud that both my daughters, aged 15 and nine, are tree-climbing, denbuilding hoydens. I once sent the big one to a week-long survival camp and she loved every grimy moment of it.
The wee one is helping me rear tadpoles in a bucket so the fish in our urban pond don’t scoff them as soon as they hatch.
But such activities, along with growing vegetables, crabbing and even making a good cup of tea, have now been designated Dad Jobs.
So what’s stopping them just getting on with it? Six in ten fathers admit their own fathers were far more hands-on when it came to passing on life skills, the same number said they struggled to get their children away from their games consoles and out of the house.
Such stand-offs require stealth, not confrontation (as any mother familiar with the universal, “choose your battles wisely” strategy of domestic warfare will know) – and Easter provides an ideal moment.
Strew chocolate eggs round the park, hide them in the trees, conceal them in your herbaceous border. Confiscate all electronic devices, send them out and ask Daddy to supervise.
Then lock the door, draw the curtains and let them survive in the wild. The kids don’t need to be back at school for a fortnight, by which time they ought to be well-schooled in the university of life. Happy Easter!