On the bright side, lots more men are what used to be called “involved fathers”, while also trying to hold down full-time work. Yet I shouldn’t feel lucky, it should be normal. I feel lucky to have a partner who took five months of shared parental and annual leave, who feeds (we combi-fed, which set the tone from the start), changes, comforts, plays, cooks, shops, sorts the childcare payments, night-weaned the baby and – the worst task of all – deals with the nappy bins. Take the loathsome phrase “Daddy daycare”, or the fact that my husband is frequently congratulated for taking his own son out for a walk – something that has literally never happened to me. Since having a baby, I’ve been depressed by how little some men seem to get away with doing when it comes to their own children, and how normalised that is. It can feel like boasting to go into just how much your male partner does (I’m only discussing heterosexual relationships here). Walker writes about staying awkwardly silent during conversations with other women about their useless partners. There are more and more female breadwinners, but according to the Office for National Statistics, women still do 60% more unpaid work than men. I hate the term, but Walker makes a salient point: that men who share childcare equally with their partners, including the mental load, are still rarer than they should be. “A doesband knows where the Calpol is and when ballet kit is needed … He gets up with the children and does bedtime he feeds them, bathes them, does the school run knows when their nails need to be cut and that behind their ears can get gunky.” “A doesband has his own hectic job, but still does his fair share at home Without Being Asked,” writes Harriet Walker, the Times journalist who coined the term. A re you a “doesband”? The latest irritating portmanteau refers to a husband who parents his own children.
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