Parental leave for fathers and husbands

My blog and twitter feeds are remarkably eclectic.  One line of content I often find myself reading might be classed as "old fashioned", or even traditionalist.  I'm not a great fan of the traditionalism as a concept (it seems to me to be a contradiction in terms), but the older I get I do tend to think that "the old ways" in general have merit to them.

This was brought into sharp relief for me this evening when I read a story on the ABC website by the always-perceptive Annabel Crabb.  On the subject of why men tend to take little or no parental leave she wrote -

In 2015, at the University of Adelaide, researchers decided to talk to some fathers in great depth about the decisions they made at work and why. Not just about the decisions they made as fathers, but also about what they felt were the expectations of them. Many of these men worked full-time, and many employed some kind of flexibility. ...
Significantly, the men tended to describe and identify themselves with reference to their work and their need to provide for their families, not through their roles as carers. They explained their flexible work as something they'd earned through being good workers; it was all calculated by reference to work.

The article goes on to note that workplaces in general tend to be much less flexible where fathers (as opposed to mothers) are concerned.  This is probably true, at least based on my direct experience.  Nevertheless, the passage above suggests something about family dynamics this is more profound than a mere quibble about working conditions.



It seems to me that a father who works faces a more-or-less intractable problem.  I'm old-fashioned enough to think most men pride themselves on being hard-working, even when their work-ethic is less than entirely voluntary.  This dovetails with the economic imperative to work hard after children are born.  Children are flatly expensive, and you become desperately aware that one or two little people now rely on you absolutely to get things right.  This, too, helps you to keep working.  Working all the time, incidentally, is a good way of actually avoiding having to choose between work and family.  Like many drugs, one of work's values is that it saves you from having to confront some problems.

This all makes it seem simple, which is where we get to the problem: most men love their wives.  Even if being an involved father isn't what we're naturally called to, we know that our significant other is doing it hard and we want to help.  I don't think any man is ever indifferent to that.  So, there we immediately find ourselves pulled away from work and into the domestic realm.  But once there, a 'push' starts to work as well.  Notwithstanding the comments to the Facebook post above, my impression is that many women have mixed feelings about their husbands are an active part of the domestic space.  On one hand, there's mistrust (it was not until they were many months old that The Ex trusted me to take our daughters out on my own).  On another hand, there is esteem: my impression is that, for many wives, their husband as breadwinner remains a person worthy of respect (as it does for the husband: nothing was more crushing than being reminded that I did not earn enough to allow The Ex to spend longer at home with our daughters).  And on a third hand, I suspect there is a fear that asking too much of an employer may place the working spouse's job at risk.

A Barmaid at Work in Petty's Hotel, Sydney, 6 pm, 1941 (Image from here)

Put like this, it becomes easier to understand the Australian custom of the six-o'clock-swill, where men going home after work would drink as much as possible before the bars closed.  Cushioning the transition from work to home is understandable, if not actually laudable.

All of which says to me that whenever husbands are pondering whether to agitate for parental leave, they should think through the issues this way: Good Husband; Involved Father; Hard Worker: Pick any two.