‘Tis the season of giving, but forget little Saint Nick with his commercial Christmas, it’s the other Nick (you know, the one who happens to be deputy prime minister) who’s offering the ultimate present for parents this year.
The Liberal Democrat leader has helped spearhead brand new legislation which, for the first time in British history, allows parents to divvy-up maternity leave as they see fit, regardless of gender.
Specifically, both mothers and fathers can now share almost a year’s leave at their convenience, including 37 weeks paid.
These revised parenting parameters, which came into effect on 1 December and apply to all children born from April 2015, mean dads will no longer get just two weeks off (often at a monetary loss) but, instead, will benefit from quality bonding time with extra cash on top of their statutory pay (like new mothers do as standard), while their other halves get a richer set of post-pregnancy possibilities. Win-win.
Granted, as far as seasonal surprises go, it might not be that PlayStation game we’ve had our eye on or a vintage bottle of something Scottish, but the greatest gifts are always those we never thought we wanted, then can’t live without.
This is one of them. For years, men have been spending thousands of pounds on legal battles to see their own children, often, to little avail. Like modern-day, male equivalents of the suffragettes, they’ve been forced to scale buildings dressed as superheroes to prove their worth as equal parents. Even Bob Geldof was short-changed by the family court system - and he created Band Aid, for goodness sake.
But now, in a sign of real gain for gender equality, the system itself will be paying for fathers to swap the boardroom for the playroom, which is a revolution not to be sniffed at. Not least because, like all the best parity measures, it benefits everyone fairly. Primarily us, but crucially our children and partners too.
See, by fortifying men with the option to be at home, free of their utility as money-makers, we’re also liberating women out of their biology as baby-makers.
Historically, families have been forced to make childcare decisions based on these crude baselines because the financial consequences of it was tied up in business. Even recently, when paternity leave was initially extended to a fortnight, few men took it because a father’s leave was monetised much more cheaply than women’s, making it a non-starter for any employee with dependents.
For centuries, only the polar extremes of the parenting spectrum were financially viable; which valued money over all else. But no more.
Fortunately, we are already programmed by (a very smart) Mother Nature to raise offspring as a team.
When I interviewed Adrienne Burgess from The Fatherhood Institute while researching my book, she shed some borderline-divine light on the matter.
“There is absolutely no magic ingredient women have when it comes to being parents,” she told me. “Both genders don’t know a thing when their babies are first born. Everybody’s cack-handed. It’s something any person, male or female, learns on the job and, as they do, their bodies attune.
“Studies show that becoming a parent, whether a mother or a father, happens in your body. A man’s hormonal balance changes as he holds a baby. The same thing happens with women who adopt. In other words, men are equally hard-wired to care for children just as women are. The only difference is cultural: the world thinks fathers are uninterested or lack specific skills which their partners are ‘born with’, but this is a total myth. One that puts pressure on mothers and underestimates fathers.”
This approach doesn’t just better serve men and women across gender lines, but businesses too. See, it would allow women to side step the career gap if they were better-suited to the breadwinner role, while taking the pressure off men to be the only earner, meaning companies would have staff who actually wanted to be there, grafting, rather than privately pining for parental involvement.
This doesn’t mean we should brace ourselves for complete role reversal, of course. Instead, we now have the simple freedom to interchange responsibilities where necessary.
For years, women lamented whether they could have it all: career, marriage and family. In fact, the debate continues to this day with no definitive answer. Perhaps because no one stopped to ask whether men could, or should, too. It was simply assumed they already did, but, as many mates of mine will attest, missing your child’s formative years for a mounting in-tray is not the best of both worlds. It’s merely an incomplete half.
Thankfully, both men and women can have it all – but only when they’re in it together. And now, for the first time, we genuinely can be.
Peter Lloyd is a journalist and the author of Stand By Your Manhood: A Game-Changer for Modern Men
