Jayne Dowle: Wake up to the reality of dozy dads and working mums

It was only 10.30am, and I knew that the daily constitutional wasn’t scheduled until 11.30am. No one picked up the phone. I rang again. And again. And finally, a drowsy voice said, “hello”. I won’t say I panicked, but I wasn’t very happy. Apparently Jack, who was about 18 months old at the time, was quite happy in front of Thomas the Tank Engine). All I know – all I wanted to know – was that they were both still alive when I finally made it back home at seven o’clock that night.

So, stay-at-home dads? We could write a book. Or at least a chapter. Perhaps the timing would be just right. A new survey of 2,000 families by insurance provider Aviva has found that there are now 10 times more stay-at-home dads in Britain than there were a decade ago.

This means there are 1.4 million men who are the primary carer for their children. That’s one in seven families where the traditional roles have been reversed.

Almost half of those dads who find themselves at home are there because it was the only way to allow the main family breadwinner to keep on working. In other words, they have got no choice. And the number of stay-at-home dads looks set to rise.

In general, women under 30 now earn more than young men, because they are more likely to end up in skilled professions. Traditional chaps might find a bloke in a pinny akin to a vision of hell, but in a generation or two, it might become so much the norm that no-one will even bat an eyelid, never mind bother to write a column about it.

When Dave was a stay-at-home dad we didn’t really have a choice either. We had moved back up to Yorkshire after living in London for years and he was finding it hard to secure steady work. The sensible solution, for a few months at least, was for him to stay at home whilst I earned the money where I could.

So we’ve been there, and he’s washed the T-shirts, and cleaned up the sick, and made the meals and done the endless tidying, and drawn the line at ironing, it must be said. But juggling his life? Oh yes, he’s got that down to a fine art. Laptop on the kitchen table, baby in the highchair, toddler throwing food at the wall. He can even cook a Sunday dinner, no mean feat, even for a woman.

Within a year though, Dave was off away for work for months at a time, leaving me on my own with (by now) two little darlings under five. That was almost as much fun as ringing from a train to find your husband asleep in sole charge of a one-year-old.

But what this whole juggling, balancing, child-rearing thing has taught us is that these days, there is no set pattern. Parents have to be prepared to give and take like never before. No-one’s job is secure. No-one knows if next week they will suddenly find themselves wondering what to do with the rest of their lives. And if children are involved, it has to be pragmatism to the fore. There is no room for misplaced male pride when food has to be put on the table, no matter which half of the partnership is paying for it.

And let’s be positive. Having dad at home can bring so much into a child’s life. I doubt whether my husband would put breaking his collarbone whilst playing football in the garden with Jack in his Top 10 of parenting moments. But I know that he is proud that he has spent so much time with both his children, especially when they were very small. And they learn so much from him. He is far more patient than me, and will sit and go through homework at teatime, when being such a deadline addict, I always let them leave it to the last minute. Which normally means that window between breakfast and the school bell ringing.

So, it’s all good, this stay-at- home dads trend. Or is it? There is a very serious point to be made here. If dads can indeed do the job of mums, why can’t their rights as parents be taken just as seriously?

David Norgrave’s Family Justice Review was the perfect opportunity to reflect common practice in law. But it seriously misses the chance to bring family matters into the 21st century.

His conclusion, that children are always better off with their mothers, and that fathers have no legal right to see them at all, not only perpetuates the stigma of the “single mother” but fails to reflect what is happening in more than a million families across the land.

Stay-at-home dads are a great idea. But what happens when the home they have is broken?