Category: Feminism
The Return of the Mum
Shrink Grows Kids is 2 years old! And more exciting things are happening: I have been offered two book deals and am about to sign up with the lovely people at Pan Macmillan for my first ever book. So thank you to everyone who has read and supported my little site. Your reads gave me the confidence to continue and it has led me to things beyond my imagination.
Those who followed my journey from the start may have realised by the tone of some of my blog posts that I started this blog as a child psychiatrist that had been somewhat cast aside by her profession for her decision to work a maximum of 3-days a week such that she could be there for her children. Working so little is highly frowned upon in a profession where apparently working till 10pm and on Saturdays is deemed a standard working week (thanks Mr Hunt). In the battle of children vs career, for me children had to win out.
It’s a tough decision faced by many driven parents and I respect the individual choices made by others even if they differ from mine. For me, I am lucky enough to be married to a banker who pays the mortgage and financially as my post-tax income would have been equivalent to quality childcare, money was negligible in the decision making. Unluckily, being married to a banker means that for much of the time parenting responsibility falls to me as Banker is often out of the house before 06:30am and not back again until 8pm, if he is even in the country. Thus I squarely felt the responsibility of how our children turned out was down to me. As a child psychiatrist who spends days and years hearing and helping children and families that have struggled, it seemed implausible not to at least attempt to practice what I believe and preach: spend time with children.
For quite some years I took positions that allowed me to work a 3-day week by virtue of my being over-qualified and under-paid and saw friends and colleagues speed by in the race to the top. It was not without its frustrations, anger, tears, self-hatred and despair. What was the least anticipated, yet most destructive was the loss of identity. I would never have seen myself as one for airs and graces and felt that I took people on face-value, but it was amazing how naked I felt when stripped of a prestigious job title. Signing on reluctantly for gym membership post-baby fat one time I felt wounded to see that the lady had listened to my description of my work circumstances and had written: Occupation: House-wife/ Doctor.
I had never identified myself as a house-wife. A mother yes, but not a house-wife. I don’t and doubt I ever will darn my husband’s socks (although once my mother-in-law did offer to teach me).
It was with this inkling that I wanted something more that I tentatively set up my blog. Slowly by slowly, with your help, a sense of confidence and purpose grew that even if the system would not support me, I could use my skills to support myself. I started speaking to friends about work outside of the NHS which although I loved, had rejected me for my lack of ambition/ work-ethic/ dedication because of my insistence on limited hours. We set up a little private practice which has been doing great. This led to more confidence in my ability, to connections and friendships which have led to more and more opportunities, which have eventually culminated into a return to a prestigious NHS position on MY TERMS – 3 days a week. Alongside, the material from my blog has continued to grow, albeit slowly of late, and I am still pinching myself that a publisher is willing to support me in growing it into a book. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that I could or would become a writer.
My horoscope predicted that 2016 could be one of the best years of my life (so be happy all Pisceans) and I am really looking forward to the year. My message to other parents that chose children over career is to say “Believe in yourself”, give it time, you never know where it might lead you and soon you’ll be back on top.
THANKS FOR SUPPORTING MY BLOG.
WATCH THIS SPACE FOR NEWS OF MY BOOK!
Here are some posts from rock bottom that might help:
Advice to My Former Self – Desperate Working Mother of Two Young Children
Did You Get Maternal Adjustment Disorder?
This Boy Can
I love Sport England’s “This Girl Can” campaign to get girls into sport with glossy ads showing ordinary girls and women of all shapes, sizes and colours enjoying sport. Set to high octane music it oozes adrenaline, power, energy and confidence. It’s about sport, but also ultimately about self-esteem. Its underlying message is that women should be confident about themselves and their bodies, which is a great message which is why the campaign has been so acclaimed. There have been a number of other positive Ad Campaigns empowering women to achieve, study maths and science, aim high, aspire and be ambitious. GREAT! Despite all that women have achieved in the last 100 years, I can attest that women still underestimate their ability in the workplace and this media encouragement is totally welcome.
However, it doesn’t work on its own.
How do I know this? Because I, and all girls that were fed through an ambitious, high expectation girls’ school in the nineties already heard this message and were already ambitious and aiming high. We flew the flag, but like the generations before us were cut down to size when we reached the higher echelons of our organisations, or the minute we fell pregnant. Many of us even felt bitter towards the encouragement that we received as young women because we were fed a dream that society could not yet deliver.
The bottom-line is that there is only so much women can change and society’s current solution of “encouraging women to change” (codified in encouraging women to become “more” confident/ ambitious/ this-that-and-the-other) in order to fit into pre-existing male oriented organisations and structures has not worked. Not only has it not worked, but it continues to perpetuate the myth that the reason that inequality has not yet been achieved is because women have not put in enough effort into changing “they do not put themselves forward”, “they shy away from leadership positions”, “they choose to opt out”. The implication is still “Women are not good enough”.
This perspective turns a blind eye to the fact that it is also institutions and their cultures that need changing. Women are being put off by bullying and macho cultures exemplified but not limited to the goings-on in British politics (men are driven to suicide by it, so why would women want to engage?).
And, if society wishes there to be a next generation, SOMEONE needs to look after the children. For many of us, we believe this strongly and fundamentally should be parents. If we continue to one-sidedly empower girls and women to take on rewarding and powerful careers, what is society’s solution to “parenting” and “family-life”?
What is the solution?
It may not seem attractive at first (but isn’t it the job of slick Madmen to make it so?), but I believe that for every “This Girl Can” ad that goes out; there should also be a “This Boy Can” ad. Footage of boys crying, talking about their emotions, helping another child, reading, drawing, dancing, dressing up as a Princess. Footage of men sticking on plasters, listening to the ideas of their female colleagues, talking to their daughters, nursing their elderly parents, helping children with their homework, picking up children from school, doing the laundry, cleaning the house, cooking the family dinner. These latter activities are the really important things that keep Britain going. The Engine of Britain is not just the boardroom, but the living room, dining room and kitchens across the country. Without the domestic engines, no one could get to work. As long as these activities, pivotal to family life, are undervalued and represented as “female” or lower order tasks, there can be no escape for women from the home and no “respect” for women overall.
Many boys and men already do these things and they need to know that their efforts are appreciated and the ones that are not doing these things need to be empowered and enabled to do so, else any women’s empowerment program will be futile. As long as we continue to view ambition, aspiration, hard-work, determination and ruthlessness as the only virtues worth rewarding and publicising, we are devaluing and undermining the equally valuable virtues of compassion, loyalty, understanding and sensitivity. As such we marginalise the fantastic people who possess these traits and create future generations with warped and unbalanced ideals. Much as I applaud campaigns to improve body confidence, body image problems in women will continue to be problematic as long as there are men who objectify women. While empowering girls is good, we must also focus on educating boys, and I feel that this part is lacking.
Whilst many may feel that traits are gender specific (typically masculine: ambition, determination etc.; and feminine: compassion, empathy etc.). I don’t believe this to be the case but that from a young age children are taught to emphasize these traits within themselves and suppress other traits to conform to gender expectations. While great Ad Campaigns like “This Girl Can” try to address this imbalance for girls, what we desperately need in concert is a “This Boy Can” campaign to empower boys to truly be themselves.
I really hope that someone steps up to the mantel and does it.
Patchwork Childcare
Whoa! Where did September go?
Apologies for going quiet for a month but things have been hectic, what with school start, new job and September being conference season for child psychiatrists. The last month has been about patch working childcare and prioritising, which sadly meant no time to blog. I’m hoping that it will calm down a bit now that October is here. Phew!
Unfortunately the new and hard won London NHS Consultant job has meant that I can no longer drop off the children at school on the 3 days a week that I work. I am not quite sure who worked out the logistics that school should start at 8:50 am, and work should start at 9am, because who in London can get to work in 10 minutes….? And which childminder would want to come for just an hour of work in the morning to take children to school?
Then there was the afterschool care. I am lucky that my mother has always taken the children 2 days a week after school. I say, “lucky” – but of course, luck has little to do with it. I purposefully moved home to the other side of London from my job expressly for this purpose so I have to endure a 75 minute commute each way. I just had one afternoon to fill, so a Nanny or Au Pair was not needed, and I had fought hard to get a part-time job to stave off this need for full-time childcare. After meeting a few young ladies over the summer that might have potentially been able to take the kids after school a day a week, I settled on one and sat on my laurels thinking the problem was solved. One week before school start and I text to confirm arrangements, only she has disappeared off the face of the earth. I suddenly felt immensely sick that just as I was about to return to “a career” where I had left off, I was struck down again by the nagging problem “who will look after my kids?”
I thought about starting a breakfast club at the school with a rota of parents or paying a parent of another child in Big Sis or Lil Bro’s class to take them. I looked into which other parents might be interested. And as each cock-a-mamy plan fell through, the same sinking feeling. It was then that I had my revelation. The solution was so simple that looking back I cannot believe that I didn’t think of it immediately.
Before I tell you the solution, I want to share with you an old brain teaser:
A teenage boy who grew up having never met his father has a terrible road traffic accident. He is rushed to hospital and straight into emergency theatre, the surgeons gather around ready to operate, but just then the lead surgeon looks at the boy’s face and gasps saying “I can’t operate, this is my son”. What has happened?
Before you make some sort of long winded reply about how the surgeon recognised the boy to be his son because they looked so similar, I will tell you that the answer is that the surgeon is the boy’s mother. Yes, a FEMALE lead surgeon.
And so, you can see how many of us can be blinded by gender stereotypes. Hopefully, you might fathom that my solution to my childcare problems was to make Banker involved. Yes – men can do childcare! He was made to drop the children at school, at least one of the days I was at work, and also told to make arrangements for the children to go to after school club once a week. Why should I be the only one suffering an ulcer over this?
Just as I was taken aback by my realisation that fathers could actually contribute to regular weekly childcare duties, rather than just at the weekend, he too was surprised to be asked! I am amazed that he had sat through my endless rantings of “maybe we could pay so-and-so to take the children”, without once suggesting that part of this responsibility was his, and he could offer a solution. There ensued of course the typical grumblings… “important job”… “impossible” … “money” … “promotion”… “blah” … “blah” …”blah”.
However, I was lucky enough to know that one of his colleagues was able to wrangle a late start to drop his children off at school a few days a week. You see this colleague had just spent a tonne of money fighting for shared custody of his children following a divorce such that he could have the privilege of taking them to school half of the week. So I pointed out to my darling banker that I was offering him exactly this privilege without the expense of divorce and custody battle. Bargain!
Humour aside though, surely childcare arrangements are a shared responsibility, why does it so often fall to mothers? Even when fathers are doing childcare, it is because the mothers have told them to do so and given them explicit instructions of where things are and what to do. I for one would like some time off from the thinking and planning as well as the doing. And how come good divorced fathers are so great at arranging time off “important” work to be with their kids?
Contentious, but I will put it out there just for contention: Maybe if they had always done so they mightn’t be divorced?
My International Women’s Day post: A gender for parenting
It’s International Women’s Day again! Last year I griped about the career prospect inequalities for women and I am pleased to say that although it’s not exactly “all change at the top”, I think that the world is waking up to women in the workplace and the agenda for change here has started rolling into place. So this year, I am moving the gender agenda on…
A few months ago I attended a fascinating talk on the impact of post-natal depression in mothers on their children. As you can probably already guess, the impact is not just for the duration of the mother’s depression, but due to the massive development of the baby’s brain in the first year of life in response to its environment, problems in its “environment” (which is largely provided by the baby’s primary carer) can be life-long. For mothers to get depression (or worse still, psychosis) at this time is crippling as not only does it affect them for the duration of their illness, but can impact the child LIFE-LONG. I don’t think any other mental illness can have such a profound effect.
The talk went into much detail about the observed negative outcomes in children and the mechanisms that led to these outcomes. In brief, lack of love, warmth, responsive parenting, talking and interacting with babies in “motherese” lead to abnormal or insufficient normal brain connections in the baby (motherese is the repetitive and sing-song baby-like voice that mothers adopt when talking to babies that is infinitely nauseating to non-parents – isn’t it darling? Yeees-it is! Yeees –it is!). Many clinical trials have been undertaken to treat post-natal depression to prevent these negative outcomes in children, such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and anti-depressant medication, but all with marginal effects. Really interesting stuff that I am sure I will blog about in more detail another time.
A PhD student had done some interesting work around the ability of depressed mothers to differentiate between a distressed cry and a non-distressed cry from various recordings of a baby crying. Depressed mothers can typically not differentiate the cries and find all cries aversive. Interestingly though, depressed mothers that had been musically-trained (played grade 4 or above piano) continued to be able to distinguish a distress cry from a non-distressed cry from her baby presumably because of their superior ear in differentiating musicality in sounds. This led to the suggestion that training in music may be protective in some way for the negative impact of maternal depression as these mothers preserved the ability to identify distress in their babies. Someone suggested teaching mothers the piano in pregnancy.
When questions went to the floor, other people suggested a blast of oxytocin nasal spray. Oxytocin is the “mothering” hormone released in pregnancy and during breast feeding and given to apes has been found to increase “maternal behaviour”.
Tentatively, I put up my hand. From the back of the hall (I have not yet escaped my student-style sitting at the back of packed lecture theatre habits) I wait my turn to be picked. “Umm – wouldn’t it just be easier to ask the dads to step up and do the parenting bit?”
It struck me as obvious that if the best anti-depressants were contra-indicated in breast feeding, and available anti-depressants were not achieving good enough effects and CBT was taking too long to treat mothers, that one should look not to new and under-developed drugs like oxytocin or expensive and frankly bizarre suggestions of NHS funded piano lessons for mothers to “cure” the mother; but to additional support that could take over the “warmth, love, responsive parenting, engagement and social interaction” with the baby. The clue was in the term “parenting”. Dads are parents too.
What amazed me was the response.
Maybe I had asked a silly question. Maybe there were already piles of research, unread by me; that excluded fathers from nurturing a baby. There was an awkward silence as if I had breached some sort of sacred unspoken code of conduct. There followed mutterings from the row of my esteemed male colleagues sitting in the front row. I imagined that they were saying “Trust her (rampant feminist implied) to bring this up!”
The speaker responded to my question thus (as verbatim as I can remember but cannot be vouched to be word for word): “Yes, but people don’t respond well to being told to do things, and of course there is already a large role for fathers to support their wives. Often fathers are at work and are not available to do this.”
Yowzers!
I wondered if I had time travelled to the 1960s.
Can it be that in the 21st century, my esteemed, brilliant, talented, caring profession is still stuck in a time-warp? Decades after my predecessors saddled mothers with terms such as “Refrigerator mother”, “Schizophrenogenic mother”, “Good-enough mother”, “Tell me about your mother” and volumes on the paramount importance of maternal bonding and maternal attachment – can it be that we have not moved on from the primeval importance of mothers to babies? I am not disputing Bowlby here; I agree that attachment is vital. My dispute is with the gender requirement. Why can’t fathers bond and attach to their children – particularly if the mother is down or out?
My view on the issue is this:
Parental bonding and responsive parenting to babies is vital.
Biology provides some mothers with an advantage over fathers for bonding through pregnancy, birth and breast-feeding hormones. This hormonally driven advantage is lost once mothers stop breast feeding. In the UK, less than 1% of mothers last to 6 months of breast feeding. The hormones do not make mothers “better” at bonding, but makes them “desire” to bond and care for their young – kick starting the supposed “maternal instinct”. If there is a strong “desire” to parent, maternity hormones are completely unnecessary, which is why mothers who adopt babies are still perfectly wonderful mothers without having exposure to any maternity hormones. Believe me when I say that it was not oxytocin that told me that if my baby is crying I should pick her up, and if my baby is crying and her nappy stinks that I should change the nappy. That’s just common sense and I don’t need hormones for that.
Some mothers lack this advantage over fathers (having low levels of hormones or being unresponsive to hormones) and have no “maternal instinct” and are uninterested in babies (in the same way that many men lack the “aggressive instinct” that they are supposedly stereotyped to possess). Many men possess a “nurturing instinct”, in the same way that many women possess an “aggressive instinct”.
Some mothers get post-natal depression and are completely incapable or are severely handicapped in bonding and responsive parenting.
The conclusion should therefore be that fathers who have a strong desire to bond and care for their babies are no worse parents than mothers. Once mothers have stopped breast-feeding, they and their husbands are equally placed biologically to provide the love, care and nurture that is required to support a baby’s development. If a mother has post-natal depression or is uninterested or incapable of parenting for whatever reason, than the father is better placed to provide the love, care and support (provided he is not also disinterested or depressed), and particularly if he is warm and loving.
And yet, no one is shouting this from the rooftops, because there is no evidence to support this.
Just piles and piles of research on the bad outcomes for babies raised by mothers with problems.
Why is that?
Because in the past, it was the mother’s role to nurture babies and look after children. The body of evidence regarding mothers has built up over time. People writing research proposals and funding bodies granting money for research want to see an evidence base for the work that researchers they fund are building on. There is very little that has been done on fathers as the main carers for babies because up until the last few decades, this just happened so rarely. Even today, the vast majority of funded research in the parenting area relates to looking at mothers and their children. There is no evidence that fathers can care for babies, but equally, there is no evidence that they can’t. There remain large personal and societal incentives for many people and organisations NOT to produce research and data that may support equality in parenting capability. Yet, anecdotally, the gay dads that I have met (both personally and professionally) have largely been fantastically capable of love, warmth and responsive parenting and I am just sad for the many children whose lives are inordinately altered by mothers with post-natal depression where fathers have not stepped in.
The next stage in gender equality is surely to evaluate if the skewed evidence that we have been fed by parenting researchers who lived through a different society is scientifically relevant going forward, and to generate new evidence on parenting; where parenting is not just a proxy for “mothering”. My profession should be at the fore front of this, advocating for this research to take place and stamping out the gender bias in parenting. For if going forwards we are moving towards equality within the workplace (which we are), are we as child psychiatrists going to hinder this progression by continuing the rhetoric of hanging the responsibility of childcare on to aspirant mothers, or are we going to apathetically hang back and allow governments to enact it’s solution: to hand childcare over to the state? I believe we should speak with one loud voice for parental responsibility for parenting. Both parents in concert where possible and gender being irrelevant.
I am reminded of Harlow’s controversial primate experiments. The baby monkey chose to lay with the wire frame dummy covered in faux fur that gave it warmth and comfort, rather than the wire frame monkey that gave it milk. It is love that matters not mammary glands, and I am confident in my assertion that mothers and fathers are equally capable of that.
Shrink grows kids: One year on
Shrinkgrowskids is officially a year old, and I am so glad that I have made it to this milestone! Thank you to the 117 subscribers and the many more regular visitors. Shrinkgrowskids is being read in 102 countries worldwide, and especially in the UK, USA, Australia, France and Brazil. If you are reading this in Brazil, “Hello!” I do not know who you are but thanks for your time!
When I started writing a year ago, part of the impetus was as I was frustrated that a Consultant Child Psychiatrist was unable to find work that fit in with parenting responsibility. During the school day I wanted to do something with my knowledge, not just the dishes. I would meet up with other women (lawyer, business consultant and tech consultant) in local coffee shops complaining about the career paths that we had given-up out of necessity, not truly free will. Over the year, I have come to realize that times-they-are-a-changing and that there is nothing that can hold back the tide of change for equality any longer.
Employers will increasingly be encouraged to promote women
Men will become increasingly involved in parenting
Men and women will become treated more equally at work
Parents will not automatically be assumed to be mothers
Children will be happier raised by parents of both genders
I am finally seeing and living through change. I might get to witness the end-game of feminism in my life-time. Thanks to the major research funding bodies colluding to only fund research in institutions that are putting in place strategies for gender equality, over the last year, my University has been falling over itself to send women like me on Women’s Development Programs and Mentoring schemes. Although some schemes need fine tuning and we are yet to confirm if lip-service converts into true commitment; with a gun-to-its-head it really looks like progress is going to be made on this. Thank you funding bodies!
This leads me to believe that progress and change can and will eventually filter to all professions, we just need more “financial-guns-to-heads”. Many of my friends in the city say “yes, but it won’t work in banking/ law/ accountancy/ consultancy”; because “of the nature of their work” and “client expectations”. Yet, who dictates “the nature of their work” and why do “clients expect” things to be delivered at awkward times of the day (or rather night)…? We as a society do not have to accept the status quo. We can press for change. Given incentive everything can change.
It reminds me of the arguments made by people opposed to the European Working Time Directives (EWTD; European laws that prohibited doctors from working more than a 48 hour week) for doctors when I was a trainee. In those days, we worked 96 hours a week. On some weekends, we worked Saturday 9am through until noon on Monday. I’m telling you the sleep deprivation of motherhood was nothing compared to this and after this experience all-night breast feeding was a doddle. Believe me, it is far easier to wake up and slap a baby to your breast than it is to wake up to catheterise a gentleman. It was thought “impossible” for the system to change to allow doctors to work less because of the “vital” work that we doctors were doing. How could patient care be transferred safely from one doctor to another? Impossible!
Well, as it turns out, all doctors have now moved to shift work without a massive rise in the death rate of patients. Indeed arguably care is better as doctors have had a decent amount of rest. I can never forget the poor patient that sat in hospital for a whole week without being seen by any doctors as my colleague on a weekend shift had forgotten to put his name on our patient list. The medical system was forced to change by financial penalties for non-compliance, bringing with it a surge of female applications to medical school. Medicine is still not ideal, men still dominate the upper echelons and prestigious specialties, but at least the days of long hours culture is gone. It is not beyond the wit of man to change systems in other institutions to afford their employees a better work-life balance; their talented junior women a real shot at success and their talented junior men a shot at being a decent father. They just need the financial incentives, because at the end of the day, money is the only cattle prod that works.
Indeed, it is money (or rather lack of it) that will likely be the solution to my other bug-bear: the lack of high-functioning part-time jobs in medicine. After struggling to find a position in London happy to take me on a part-time basis, it turns out that the NHS are so short of money that they are now happy to employ part-time Consultants. Not because they value retaining female staff or work-life balance, but because they no longer have enough money to pay for full-time consultants. Either way, it is good for me and other parents who wish to work part-time as a Consultant in the NHS. Fingers crossed that over the coming years something will turn-up for me. In the mean-time I’m thoroughly enjoying my University position that allows me to interact with some of the greatest minds in Child Psychiatry, and on my days off, as waiting lists have exploded in the NHS; private practice is booming. It is hard to argue against well-paid work that can easily be fit in between the school drop-off and pick-up. It’s sad that this can only be done in the private sector, particularly for a die hard NHS supporter like me.
What of my coffee-morning compatriots? After a period of part-time work at a lower level, the lawyer has succumbed and returned to full-time work at Big Law Firm and has employed a nanny. The business consultant has set up her own successful business, which operates on her terms within school hours. The tech consultant moved out of London and is content to be a stay-at-home mother. We all moved on, and its now pretty hard for any of us to find time for a cuppa. Maybe its that the children are growing, maybe its a sign of the times, but good women can no longer be kept down.
The other day a younger male friend who just got engaged told me he was thinking about taking his wife’s name…
Who knows where we will be a year from now?
In the meantime, I hope you will continue to read my blog. Here are some of my reflections on parenthood from the last year.
Did you get Maternal Adjustment Disorder (MAD)?
Confessions of a BME Oxbridge Female
I’VE BEEN MENTIONED IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES!
In Simon Kuper’s article in the Financial Times October 24th 2014 “Confessions of a white Oxbridge male” he mentions me in his concluding paragraph:
“We [white Oxbridge males] have expanded our caste a little. We now recruit some non-whites (preferably Oxbridge men). We’ve even begun admitting Oxbridge women. We just sideline them professionally the moment they make the mistake of giving birth.”
OK, not quite a name-check, but I’m one of the women he is talking about. Since he has given his career confessional (which he says included an easy ride into Oxbridge and journalism); I thought I’d give a view from the other side. No one may be interested, as who wants to hear a BME (black/ minority ethnic) females’ voice when they can hear the voice of the white male, but it saves me a lot of money in therapy.
Unlike Simon’s dad, my dad was no Cambridge educated establishment figure. He was born son to a peasant farmer in 1940s Taiwan. Taiwan in the 1940s bears no resemblance to the bustling developed country it is today, and had a predominantly agricultural economy. Life for a subsistence farmer was hard and tied to the will of the weather. Growing up, we were forever regaled with my father’s hard-luck story. If we ever complained about having to go to school, we would get lectured about “You’re so lucky you can go to school. When I was young I had to plead with my mother to go to school, then I had to walk 10 miles round trip to school barefoot wearing my father’s cut off trousers, feet calloused and bleeding.” We would then mercilessly make fun of it in the manner of the Monty Python 4 Yorkshire-men skit by adding “That’s nothing, when I was a lad, I had to crawl naked on my hands and knees through dark underground tunnels to get to school”, etc. etc.
At the heart of it though, and particularly in adulthood, I truly respect the climb he made to give us, his children a better life. He was the 5th of 11 children. None of his preceding siblings had completed primary school education, and they were forced to enter child labour at a nearby factory where they were physically and verbally abused on a daily basis. On finding that he was to suffer the same fate, he cried until a neighbour took pity on him. This neighbour, having heard from her daughter that my father was the brightest child in the class, persuaded my grandmother to allow him to enrol for secondary education, just for a year at least. The pattern continued with ever more cycles of crying and pleading “Just one more year of school”, until my grandmother eventually realised that all this crying and intellectual sentimentality probably made him too soft for factory work. So they let him continue with education and work in the evenings and holidays in repayment for not shouldering the family’s load. In term time, as his school was far away, he sofa-surfed and freeloaded on classmates from richer families to get by until eventually, he made his way up to University to study civil engineering. On graduation he landed a job as a hydraulic engineer in one of Taiwan’s harbours thus having successfully climbed out of manual labour into the professional class through hard-won education.
Having worked 10 years as an engineer and saved hard, he followed his dream: he applied for a PhD in civil engineering at Swansea University in the UK. That’s how my family immigrated to the UK. I was 3 years old at the time. Compared to the life that my father had, my life has been charmed. A family of 5 was frugally but happily fed and watered on a PhD stipend. My sisters and I had no toys but made chess sets from the cardboard of a cereal packet. We avidly read Enid Blyton books and cuddled bears purchased from the second hand stall at the school fete. We begged our friends to share their penny sweets and chocolates with us. We learnt that material things did not matter, we had the most important gift of all: A LOVING FAMILY.
My father whose life experience was of class discrimination in Taiwan and racial discrimination in the UK also passed on another life lesson: you will face discrimination, but if you work twice as hard as the others, you will succeed, don’t let anyone stop you. We took his advice, and for a while, nothing stopped me.
With this work-ethic instilled, school was a breeze; we went to the local state primary schools as my parents couldn’t afford anything else. Without the seemingly now obligatory tuition, my sisters and I all waltzed into the local Grammar school which saw 1000 girls sitting for 90 places. A clean sweep of As (A* was not around at that time) in 10 GCSEs, 1 AS-level and 3 A-levels, saw me arrive at Cambridge University to study medicine. Whad’ya know? My dad was right – unstoppable.
A funny thing happened at Cambridge. As soon as I arrived, the porters and students all commented on my good English. Initially, I took great offence at this: how else did they think I got all those As at A-level to get here? Later I realised that in my college undergraduate intake of 120 that year, I was the only BME girl who was not a foreign student. Everyone just presumed that I was a foreign student and were hence surprised at my grasp of the English language. Russell Group Universities routinely bump up their atrocious record on BME admissions by admitting BME fee-paying foreign students. These same “cash cows” that aid University BME stats are also paraded in all University promotional material. One of my best friends, a mixed race foreign student who was the only black student in my college year, always made it front and centre in the college prospectus.
This memory came back to me as I read Simon Kuper’s article and I began to do some research in this area. For the period covering my time at Cambridge in the mid-90s, statistics show that of Home students (non-foreign students) 50% of admissions came from state schools, 40% were female and 5% were ethnic minority. If you do the maths, this makes me one of the 1% of the Home University students that was a BME, state school female; or to really put this in perspective, I was 1 of 30 in the entire year at the University *. If only I was lesbian, then I would have been one of three!
Thankfully in my day, there were no tuition fees. Even so, although my parents were now earning good incomes, their income was such that I was still eligible for means-tested hardship funds at Cambridge and I took these as well as student loans. Although I did not work in term time (which is forbidden at Cambridge due to the rigour of the courses), I worked every Christmas and summer holiday; initially for minimum wage at a dry cleaners, and then realising that I had more potential than this, at twice minimum wage as a medical secretary. This afforded me the extravagance of May Balls and to travel myself interesting (Eastern Europe, New York, San Francisco, Cape Town).
Despite being accused at times of “only having been accepted at Cambridge because I was a BME female” a cheap jibe from the threatened, I knew that my grades matched those of the privately educated white males, and I graduated with a 2:1, the same as the majority of the white males. I took a University academic prize with me and took up employment at the best clinical and academic centre in Europe for my medical specialty.
Interestingly, having Cambridge on my CV suddenly meant that people assumed I had a privileged upbringing. A senior colleague once told me to accept a colleague’s arrogance by saying “you can’t be too hard on him because he came from a poor background, he had to work through medical school, he didn’t come from a privileged background like us”. I didn’t think it appropriate to buy sympathy and bring up my summers and winters sorting out the shirts of Japanese business men. At a dinner party with a Professor of Economics at a leading University, he bemoaned the number of foreign Chinese PhD students at his University who came from rich families and expected to be “spoon-fed” their degrees. He asked how my family came to the UK, and I said “My Dad came to do a PhD”. He immediately gave me a scornful look that said “Oh – you are the spawn of one of them”. It didn’t seem apt to say – “but he got there through sheer hard work having worked 10 years to support himself to get a place there”. At an appraisal, I was once told that I “had a reputation for being forthright and assertive”. I meant to cry out “Do you think that people wait with baited breath to listen to what a BME female has to say?” but I didn’t. He followed it up with “We British don’t like it.” I presumed he was excluding me from being British due to some sort of apartheid era definition where “Britishness” was coded in skin colour, as my family and I have lived in Britain and held British passports for 30 years. I meant to respond, but I didn’t.
People that didn’t know I had been to Cambridge continued to mistake me for the nanny/ maid/ cleaner. I mean to correct them, but I don’t.
The reason being that this stuff is like water off a duck’s back. Over years, the BME state school woman develops a skin as thick as a rhino. From the braying “Ching Chong China Man”, “Go back to your own country” taunts from the playground to the assumptions in the workplace that the reason you have made it is because you paid your way or were promoted in an affirmative action. It may have knocked me back but it has never stopped me going where I wanted to go.
What did stop me?
Wanting to work part-time**.
Apparently, this is impossible.
Not only in medicine, but my female Oxbridge friends in law, media, finance and other competitive jobs say the same thing. As much as I hate to admit it, a white Oxbridge male is right again, and by the time we’ve had the second child, we’re well and truly side-lined. While I doubt it is beyond the wit of man to operationalise part-time/ flexible working in high income jobs, it is currently beyond the will of man: the white Oxbridge man.
So I set a challenge for my husband, a white Oxbridge male, my friends and former classmates who will inevitably inherit the mantle of white Oxbridge male power: use your power to effect change and equality for the women in your organisation – if not for your wives then for your daughters. For if your daughters become trapped in domesticity in later life; then they need only look in their white Oxbridge fathers’ eyes for culpability.
References:
Statistics from House of Commons report on “Oxbridge “elitism”” by Paul Bolton. http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/sn00616.pdf
*this rough calculation is based on an approximate number of 3000 home admissions a year and on the distribution of females and state school candidates being similar within the BME admissions as within the University overall which may not necessarily be assumed.
**by part-time I really mean less than 4 days a week, as everyone knows employers are happy to negotiate a 4-day week where you subsume a full-time role for part-time pay.
Why the stay-at-home mother is more vital than the female CEO to achieving gender equality
The female CEO and the stay-at-home-mother have often been pitted against each other in the media as arch enemies. Popular press likes to publicise the idea of the stay-at-home mother lambasting the female CEOs (or other high-flying career women) for “selfishly pursuing their careers while neglecting their children”, whilst stay-at-home mothers are looked down upon for perpetuating female stereotypes and being “bad role models” for their daughters, basically “letting the side down”. Yet, in my opinion, feminism is about choice in an environment of equal opportunity. The choice to be a CEO or a stay-at-home mother is a personal one, and I feel that either choice is respectable. The trouble is that the “equal opportunity” part is not quite there yet in our society, and to this end, although much has been made about the need for more female CEOs, I actually think that the stay-at-home mother (or a working mother that is heavily involved in parenting) has more to contribute to advancing feminism than the female CEOs (if they are childless or largely delegating parenting).
I watched Emma Watson’s speech for the HeforShe campaign in solidarity, having been a life-long feminist. What interested me was that at one point Emma describes her realisation of gender inequality when she was called “bossy” for “wanting to direct a play she and her siblings put on for her parents, whilst the boys were not”. I am presuming that it was her parents that called her “bossy” (as if it were her siblings, then why didn’t she just tell them where to go), which made me think about our responsibilities as parents in the pursuit of gender equality. Had Emma Watson’s parents; and every other parent in the world fostered and promoted the self-belief, confidence and ability in their daughters, and cared as much about their future academic and employment prospects as they did their sons, then we would not have gender inequality. Of course, Emma got the last laugh, perhaps because she was “bossy”. Good for her.
I attribute any academic successes that I have had 100% to the fact that I did not have a brother. Taiwanese parents of my parents’ generation had a strong preference for sons. My parents had told me that they had hoped especially that I would be a boy, having had 2 daughters already, and were disappointed when they found that I was yet another girl. They had no choice but to put their hopes and aspirations into us girls and foster and promote our abilities as if we were boys, capable of anything. My father spent time teaching my sisters and me computer programming and electronics when we were in primary school. I was never interested, but my sisters went on to study engineering and maths at top universities. Had we had a brother I am sure that things would have been different. Our brother would have been the one encouraged and burdened in equal measure with the pedestal, and we girls would have been left to cultivate a pastime. When I went to study at Cambridge, I was one of a few British Taiwanese children to get there, and it was no surprise to me that the only other female Taiwanese students that were there were ones without brothers. I read somewhere that China is seeing a surge of successful female business women and entrepreneurs and I wonder if this is related to the one-child policy, such that families are now invested in their only child, whatever the gender.
In the West, where the gender preference is less explicit, one can almost believe that the problem does not exist, but when you examine behaviours more closely, you begin to see that gender-based parenting is also pervasive. We can blame media and society at large as much as we want, but the reality is that we are all culpable: from the toys we buy, the behaviour we encourage, the expectations we hold, the activities we choose to do, the assets that we praise and our own day to day behaviour and language.
Even when we think we are being gender neutral, or are trying to be, we are not because gender bias is so subtle. How many parents of boys have actively gone out to a toy store and bought their son a baby doll, a push chair and a bottle? How many parents of girls have done this? From my inspection of the bedrooms of the little boys I know, I would say that very few boys have been bought dolls specifically. The parents will make the justification “Oh, he was never interested in dolls, he’s a boys-boy – so we didn’t bother”. Yet, from my experience of little boys with older sisters whom they look up to and wish to emulate, the majority enjoy playing with baby dolls in the preschool years (before peer pressure). Even more so if actively encouraged, as you would naturally encourage a girl. That’s just one example of many.
How many times have you praised your daughter for looking beautiful or commented on her clothes? How many times have you done this for your son? How many times have you praised your daughter’s social skills, whilst praising your son’s mathematical ability? How many times have you persisted with a 1:1 craft activity with your daughter even though she was bored and you ended up doing it yourself, while saying that your son does not have the patience for it and taking him out to run around in the park instead? When it’s a boy’s birthday party, how many times have you bought Lego as a present, while choosing a craft jewellery kit for a girl? In answer to that last question I can reveal that at a recent joint birthday party for my kids, the total tally on craft activity for Big Sis was 5/20 and 0/20 for Lego; for Lil Bro he scored a whopping 8/20 on the Lego, 0/20 for craft. We are all guilty to a greater or lesser extent of the above perpetuations of gender stereotypes; myself included.
This type of unconscious gender bias has been studied in relation to the lack of advancement of women in academia and the workplace and is thought to be one of the driving factors for lack of women in science. The King’s College London website has some interesting papers on this issue and says:
“Unconscious bias refers to the biases we have of which we are not in conscious control. These biases occur automatically, triggered by our brain making quick judgments and assessments of people and situations based on our background, cultural environment and our experiences. There is a growing body of research which suggests unconscious biases influence key decisions in the workplace and are responsible for some of the enduring inequalities that are evident today. One example is a study by Moss-Racusin et al (2012) which examined the assessment of applications to science faculties from students applying for the position of laboratory manager. The same application was used 127 times and randomly assigned either a female (64 times) or male (63 times) name. Selectors rated the male applicant as significantly more hireable than the female applicant. They also chose a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant. The gender of the selector did not affect responses.”
My view is that it is not only in the workplace that these unconscious biases are occurring. By virtue of being unconscious they permeate every aspect of our lives, including the parenting of our children. What effect does this have?
In my line of work, “behavioural management” is a parenting technique that uses discriminant encouragement, rewards and praise to shape children’s behaviour. It can be used to get a child to do anything from concentrating longer to eating their greens. If our parenting is guided by unconscious bias that encourages, rewards and praises our children according to gender stereotypes, then we are unconsciously using behavioural management daily to shape our children into gender-based norms. It is only by making bias conscious that we can act in a child-centric rather than gender-centric way when acting and responding to our children.
How does this relate to the title of my post?
A female CEO can improve the lot of women in two ways. Firstly they can inspire and prove to the world that women are capable. However, the reality is that aspiring women will look at the few female CEOs and scrutinize their lives. Do I have the same intellect, ambition, personality? Am I willing to work as hard and sacrifice as much? For the majority of women, the answer will be “No”. Secondly, a female CEO can influence the culture at the top and enact policies that will help women reach the top. However, these policies and helping hands can only be extended to women that have already climbed to the middle and are reaching up to the top, and at the moment, there are insufficient numbers of women in that position. We are forever told that the reasons that there are so few CEOs, MPs, establishment figures, is that there are a dearth of applicants. So, in my view the impact of a female CEO is extremely limited.
OK, but surely the stay-at-home-mother is the antithesis of feminism? I say, NO, a stay-at-home mother that parents in a way that promotes gender equality can produce citizens of the next generation that expect equality. Boys that become men that respect women, value women, understand women and believe that men and women are equal partners in work and parenting. Girls that become women that respect men, value men, understand men and believe that men and women are equal partners in work and parenting. A stay-at-home mother that enacts child-centric rather than gender-centric parenting can create a new generation of citizens that can change the socio-political landscape. At present, given the billions of stay-at-home mothers worldwide compared to the handful of CEOs, I would have to conclude that the future of feminism depends on stay-at-home mothers practising child-centric parenting. Unbiased parenting by CEOS, stay-at-home mothers and their partners/ husbands has the ability to give our daughters a true choice of stay-at-home mother, CEO or both.
This is not something we need to lobby for; it’s something we can enact now.
Yes He Can
Can a man change nappies?
Yes He Can. (Astronauts use Velcro to strap things down. They are mainly men. Sewage workers deal with excrement. They are mainly men.)
Can a man puree vegetables?
Yes He Can. (I have seen many men do this on Masterchef)
Can a man bottle feed expressed milk/ formula?
Yes He Can. (Vets and farmers bottle feed lambs all the time. They are mainly men.)
Can a man sterilise bottles?
Yes He Can. (Chemists and pharmaceutical scientists sterilise their equipment all the time. They are mainly men.)
Can a man do the laundry?
Yes He Can. (Commercial launderers (think army, hotels) are mainly men)
Can a man cook the dinner?
Yes He Can. (Most professional chefs are male – particularly the highly paid ones)
Can a man sing nursery rhymes?
Yes He Can. (Justin, Andy and all those other men on CBeebies)
Can a man take a child to the doctors?
Yes He Can. (Unskilled task, any numpty can do this)
Can a man drop-off and pick-up at a nursery?
Yes He Can. (Unskilled task, any numpty can do this)
Can a man wipe a child’s bottom?
Yes He Can. (I hope so at least, as it is easier to wipe some one else’s bottom than your own)
Can a man read the letters that come back from school?
Yes He Can. (Any literate person can do this)
Can a man buy a fancy-dress costume?
Yes He Can. (Many shop buyers and traders are men)
Can a man book a ballet class?
Yes He Can. (Many events organisers are men)
Can a man check a child’s homework?
Yes He Can. (If he has the intellect to be able to do the homework, he is qualified to check it)
Can a man book a dentist appointment?
Yes He Can. (If he can book his own appointments for work/ leisure, he can do this)
Can a man pick up an unwell child from school?
Yes He Can. (Unskilled task, any numpty can do this)
Can a man iron on name labels on to clothes?
Yes He Can. (Unskilled task, any numpty can do this)
Can a man sign a permission slip?
Yes He Can. (I presume he can write his own name)
Can a man test a child’s ability to spell?
Yes He Can. (I presume he can spell)
Can a man make an Easter hat?
Yes He Can. (Mister Maker is a man)
Can a man read with a child?
Yes He Can. (Any literate person can do this)
Can a man arrange a playdate?
Yes He Can. (If he can arrange his own leisure activities, no reason he cannot arrange someone else’s)
Can a man interview a nanny/ au pair/ babysitter?
Yes He Can. (Many men interview staff for jobs)
Can a man go to parent’s evening?
Yes He Can. (Unskilled task, any numpty can do this)
Can a man watch a school play?
Yes He Can. (Unskilled task, any numpty can do this)
Can a man give a cuddle?
Yes He Can.
There you have it. Confirmation, with observational evidence from a medically qualified doctor, trained in medicine, genetics, psychiatry and psychology. There is no medical, genetic, psychiatric or psychological reason why men cannot do any of the above.
Where men are not doing these things, there are only 2 reasons:
- Men don’t want to.
- Women don’t want them to (they don’t want to nag or fight with their partner/ they want control over parenting and the household).
Men are a highly skilled and under-utilised resource within the home. Their involvement should be encouraged.
It strikes me that if all men and women worked together to enact equality in their own homes, equality in society would follow.
Did you get Maternal Adjustment Disorder (MAD)?
Image from my favourite MAP London T-shirt
Maternal adjustment disorder (MAD)
This is not a real disorder, but it should be.
Adjustment disorder is a real disorder (included in World Health Organisation mental health classifications) and I have just bunged “maternal” in front of it to describe how I and many other mums I know felt when we became mums.
The legitimate diagnosis of adjustment disorder is described as a “state of subjective distress and emotional disturbance, usually interfering with social function and performance, and arising in the period of adaptation to a significant life change or to the consequences of a stressful life event. The stressor may have affected the integrity of an individual’s social network or the wider system of social supports and values” (ICD-10). It’s supposed to apply to stressors like migration, bereavement or adaptation to illness or disability; but why not modern-day motherhood?
Having a child is a significant life change. What I found distressing was not the obvious sleepless nights, financial pressures, breast feeding, fevers blah, blah, blah, but the subtle but seismic change in identity and power. As much as I’d like to say that this life-changing experience affects both genders equally, currently I do not think this is true, and by-and-large for most families, the brunt is borne by the mother.
This is of course a modern-day phenomenon as even one generation ago; women grew up without expectation of financial independence, of autonomy, of economic power. They were defined by their husbands and felt no big loss when they settled down to have a family. They came from a position of inequitable power and continued.
For me, up until childbirth, I enjoyed financial independence. I was quite satisfied with my identity as a doctor with intelligent colleagues and friends, thank you very much. I had a healthy salary, I rented my own flat, I owned my own car; I bought whatever I wanted with my money. For a time, Banker lived in MY flat and drove MY car. At another time, I lived in his flat and drove his car. We shared the household chores. Our relationship was 50:50.
So where did it ever say, that once you pass a melon-sized being from out of your nether regions that that contract with your partner, with society, with your own self had to be torn away with your placenta?
From hence forth, I was no longer me. I was Mrs Banker, or mother of Big Sis and Lil Bro. Even though I had kept my own surname, once Big Sis and Lil Bro came along with their Dad’s monogram, it was inevitable that I would now be referred to as Mrs Banker. Staunch refusal to change my name on my passport led to my being interrogated at Heathrow airport for child trafficking as the official doubted my relationship to 2 year old Big Sis due to non-matching surnames. Thankfully, Big Sis came to the rescue as I started my feminist “Taking your husband’s name is an outdated sexist practice” rant at the official by saying “Why are you getting cross MUMMMY?”
I was still a doctor, of course, and yet, not the academic high-flying, arse-kicking-doctor-stroke-clinical-academic-jet-setting-to international-conferences-doctor I had set out to be. For ease of life, I went from full-time clinical work with academic productivity, to full-time clinical work with no academic productivity, to part-time clinical work, to part-time research work. It eased my life, but the loss of status and identity still tastes bitter. It’s only two steps and a push to considering an art-course, or maybe running a loss-making boutique funded by my husband to keep me quiet…I’m joking, but some jokes speak truth. Several other doctors I know have given up medicine when their children came along which is such a waste of talent, and yet, the NHS (like many other employers) does very little to support high-level part-time working, preferring to source doctors from abroad.
Stepping back in a career is sufficient to “affect the integrity of an individual’s social network”, as work is not just about money, but about esteem, about intellectual stimulation, about friendship, about intelligent conversation. It’s replacement with discussions about faecal consistency with other MAD mums, raucous bouts of “Jelly on a plate” to a mute baby, and various “telling offs”, rebukes, unrequested nuggets of parenting advice, raised eye-brows and generally being spoken to like an idiot, from teachers/ parents/ friends/ the supermarket check-out lady/ any random stranger, just doesn’t bear comparison.
And the first (and last) time Banker ever dared utter “What have you been spending my money on?”…that stuck in the throat. Never since graduation had I had to ask permission to spend money. I earned money; I spent it how I saw fit. Yet, with declining hours of work, come diminished income and the inherent shift in power dynamic in the relationship. As I am now “at home more”, there somehow passes an unspoken expectation that the days of shared laundry, cooking, cleaning and household chores are over. An unspoken expectation that money has to be “asked for”, and “kindly bestowed”, a nagging worry of “Could I manage financially alone, having stepped back on the career” should the worst happen and our relationship falter, – or worse still, would I feel I could not leave?
At times I stared at myself in the mirror and barely recognised myself. I had turned into “Hockey-mom”. There is nothing wrong with Hockey Mom, but she was not who I had ever identified myself with.
But at least the children will be grateful for my presence won’t they?
The other day, Big Sis said: “Mummy, you’re lazy”
“Why?” I questioned.
“Because you only work 3 days a week.”
%$£”&*!! [Thought – not spoken]
I’m telling my story, but I know many other mums who have felt the same.
The treatment for adjustment disorder?
Nature’s anaesthetic.
Time.
Most of us learn to accept our fates, and “adjust” to survive.
Some of us find new pleasures in our new roles, however unexpected.
I guess that’s the beauty of life.
Caveat: some people do not get better from adjustment disorder, and their diagnosis shifts to depression. This goes for MAD too, and depression in mothers is pretty common.
The changing roles of fathers
Gender roles have been slowly changing since the time that women got the vote. Female roles have evolved dramatically over the last 50 years, seeing women being able to reach the top in all professions, and outperform boys on all educational assessments. However women are still yet to emerge from their gender role cocoon to spread their wings and sadly, the men are still on the chomping green leaf stage having made themselves sick with gorging on cupcakes, slices of salami and the like. Whilst women over the last 50 years have been grappling with identity, work-life balance, how they need to adjust/adapt to survive their new role environments, the early men were burying their heads in the sand, adopting the “we can carry on as if nothing has changed” attitude, such that modern men are now needing to play catch-up. Now that women have proved themselves in the workplace, male change is required to follow, and it is men now that need to face the internal struggles and adaptations to keep apace of the new world order.
There has of course been significant change. A father’s duty in the past was to provide financially for the family: the roof over the head, the food on the table. He was the “respected” head of the household, often feared and emotionally distant from his family, using his financial power to dominate. You only have to watch films from the last century to see the difference between fathers of the past and those of the present (try Mary Poppins, Peter Pan and the Sound of Music to name a few). Go even further back and you get versions of Cinderella where Cinderella’s father does not die (as in the Disney version), but is complicit in her enslavement. The funny thing about this is, that Cinderella’s father is never described as being a “wicked” father, that adjective is reserved for the stepmother, as fathers in those days naturally abdicated family matters to their wives and seemingly do not need to get involved even when their child is sleeping in the fireplace and cooking their tea.
My father was a more progressive father than many of his generation. He talked to me about science and encouraged me to write (terrible) poetry as a child, he painted with me, he drew cartoon characters using icing on my birthday cakes, he took me to all my playdates, birthday parties and hospital appointments (as my mother could not drive), he was always home for dinner, he always came on holidays and took pleasure in taking me to my University interviews. That said, there was never any discussion with my mother about whose career was going to be compromised for the children, he didn’t change nappies, he rarely cooked, he didn’t do the laundry, he hardly ever did a school run, he never attended a sports day, he could probably never have named more than one or two of my friends or teachers and there were years in our childhood when he was working abroad. These latter are things that my husband does not have a hope in hell of getting away with. These latter have now become commonplace for modern day fathers.
As women have begun to win at work in significant numbers, so the financial dependence on men within the family and the power this yielded has fallen away. Given that young women are matching their husbands on income, they have begun to question why: they should be the ones to sacrifice their careers, they should be the ones to manage the household, they should be the one to care for their elderly in-laws? Given that there is no legitimate answer to these questions, they have been more able to expect and demand their partners to do more.
Unfortunately, this has led to an identity crisis of sorts for men. For some men of my generation, this pressure to change has come as rather a shock. Brought up by pipe-and-slippers dad and pinny and Sunday roast mum, they had been schooled to believe that their identity and self-worth lay in their career. Their white-haired male bosses with “stay-at-home wives” are even more entrenched in this ideology reinforcing their old-fashioned views. Fearing for their esteem-defining careers, they work ever longer hours citing its’ good is for “the family”. They fear being mocked by their peers for a less prestigious career and being deemed a loser and sexually unattractive by women. They resent their wives’ close relationship with their children and seek to re-assert themselves into the family by authoritarian parenting and old-fashioned discipline. They experience their wives requests to be more involved in the family as “nagging”.
Thankfully, more and more men are rejecting this model of family life and male norm. As a new parent my husband popped in to our neighbour’s fancy dress party with Big Sis in a Baby Bjorn, not bothering with the fancy dress theme. One party guest commented “Hey, great fancy dress idea to come as Suburban Dad” – not realising that the baby was real, this was not fancy dress and that Banker just WAS a suburban dad. So pervasive now is the image of a proud new father walking around with a baby strapped to his chest that it is no longer of comedy value, merely the norm. A baby is worn much as a campaign rosette; a badge of honour and ideology for any man. From Michael McIntyre’s fatherhood repertoire to Jamie Oliver’s family meals in minutes, the remote and respected father figure/ salary-man has definitely been toppled and has hopefully been banished to history. Further, images of desirable male role-models travelling en famille with sexy women on their arms (I’m thinking Pitt and Beckham) are knocking-on-the-head the notion of disrespect for loving and engaged fathers, and contrary to popular belief, I’m pretty sure that the strong and beautiful women of the future will be seeking men happy to roll up their sleeves to change a nappy, not someone for whom to fetch a whisky and the paper for.
I am totally encouraged by the fact that many young men these days have little or no expectation of the traditional gender roles, they wax lyrical about the right spicing for chicken, are forever bursting into tears on Britain’s Got Talent and actively want to be involved with their children. This is thankful as the majority of young women have places to go and careers they aim to achieve. The only stumbling block that I can see is in the corporate world; still run by old male traditionalists who have not yet scanned what is on the horizon – a future workforce pushing for change in work-life balance.
In my children’s eyes, my husband and I are interchangeable parents. He is just as capable as me (although, I still like to think I am a little bit better) of soothing an ailment, of bathing and reading stories, of checking spellings, of watching a school play, of cooking the dinner (although he likes to think he is better at this than me) and doing the laundry. He is just as capable of making my children laugh and understanding their problems, and of asking how they are. I can sleep easy that if I should die, they will be well looked after emotionally, and not left to sweep the fireplace.
To engaged fathers everywhere:
HAPPY FATHERS’ DAY.
shrink GROWS kids 