How do you solve a problem like modern fatherhood? According to Jonathan Reynolds, Secretary of State for Business and Trade, paternity leave is how. As he launched his new review looking into maternity, paternity, shared parental leave and financial support offered to new parents this week, Reynolds stated that he wanted it to become as ‘culturally accepted’ for fathers to spend time at home after a baby is born as mothers.
Must modern paternal love be predicated on a father singing ‘Wind the Bobbin Up’ at Monkey Music?
Reynolds, a father of four, must know that paternity leave take-up in this country is notoriously poor: only 59 per cent of fathers took paternity leave after the birth or adoption of a child, with many citing the low rate of statutory pay (£187.18 per week) as the reason. Nearly two decades after the establishment of paternity leave in this country, research conducted by University College London suggests that the UK has the least generous paternity leave entitlement in Europe. Apparently, as a nation, we have some serious Daddy issues.
But let me flip this on its head for a moment. What if the barriers to paternity leave are not economic? What if fathers don’t want to take paternity leave beyond two weeks because they want to preserve traditional gendered roles in a partnership? What if – and this is truly unfashionable to say – fathers want to care for their children from the relatively distant pulpit of the paterfamilias? Can paternal love still take place if a father observes his offspring sleeping peacefully in the evening as he loosens his tie? Must modern paternal love be predicated on a father singing ‘Wind the Bobbin Up’ at Monkey Music?
Contemporary wisdom holds not, laying ‘toxic masculinity’, damaged children and depressed fathers at the door of current paternity leave directives. The Guardian reports that ‘bad policy’ has far-reaching implications, citing a report from Georgetown University that posits that the children of ‘traditionalised’ couples find it hard to bond with their fathers. For their part, fathers who only take two weeks of paternity leave are at risk of ‘poor mental health’ according to Elliott Rae, founder of campaign group Parenting Out Loud. If reports are to be believed, fathers who choose to head to the relative safety of work after two weeks of nappy-changing and baby rocking, are going to hell in a handcart, their children total strangers to them.
As ever, allow me to counter this argument with my own experience. After the birth of our first child, my husband took the weekend off before he went back to work, kissing the new and very noisy occupant of our flat goodbye at 6 a.m. Although he was entitled to two weeks of paternity leave, he chose not to take it up, something I am quite sure had nothing to do with the ‘stigma’ of paternity leave or the back-slapping bravado of Goldman Sachs bankers who congratulate their colleagues who return to the desk straight from the labour ward. Put simply, I think he needed – and wanted – to go back to work. I believe that his much fretted over mental health was better because of it and, by extension, mine.
Did I worry for his future bond with his new daughter? Not a bit of it. We both understood that the equilibrium of the household would be far better if someone got to maintain their sense of ‘normal’ and furthermore that not all ‘Daddy’ bonds are established at 3 a.m. in a darkened nursery. Fatherhood, after all, is a long game. The noisy baby is now seven and thinks that Daddy is, quite simply, the best person in the world ever: ‘I’m sorry, Mummy, but he’s just funnier than you’. Fine; great!
When our second child was born, my husband did take two weeks of paternity leave, partly because I needed someone to do the school run. My memory of this time is rather diffuse, but I recall us eating crisps and watching several disturbing documentaries on Bitcoin and Jimmy Savile while the baby slept in the middle of the day. I did not, as I recall, experience any extreme euphoric uplift in my mental health because he was there and I certainly don’t think that the gender revolution or pay gap in the home could have been altered in those two weeks or – heaven forbid – any longer.
So, how do you solve a problem like contemporary fatherhood? Maybe we could apply the wind the bobbin up approach: ‘wind it back again, wind it back again’, and see if the old ‘Trad Dad’ bobbin was any better. It couldn’t, at any rate, be worse than the current bobbin: pulled in so many different directions that it risks unravelling altogether.
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