Oh… Couldn’t You Find A Real Job?
By Harald Braiding-Buss
Hardly noticed by the rest of society, the working wife/stay-at-home dad family type has become firmly established in New Zealand. But old stereotypes die hard.
I guess my own story is pretty typical for a housedad. We came to New Zealand more than 5 years ago while my wife was pregnant with Linda, our firstborn.
I had trouble to find a job, but I probably didn’t look too hard, either. My wife, Hendrikje, had job interviews even while she was pregnant, and it became clear pretty soon that it would be more or less a breeze for her to find work.
We opted to both stay home until Linda was 8 months old. Hendrikje then started work as a research technician and that’s how it had been ever since.
Now we have another daughter, Nicky, and I have part-time work with the Father&Child Trust, but it is me who has to organise his working life around the kids, while the family as a whole is organised around Hendrikje’s work.
Redundancy or unemployment is probably still the most common initial factor, but perhaps fathers no longer frantically look for paid work when there are other options.
Somehow, saying you couldn’t find work (or your wife was earning more, anyway) is still more acceptable than saying you wanted to be home with your child. And, after all, most housedads magically find at least part-time work as soon as the situation allows.
No doubt, it’s been rough at times and yes there were and are times when I wish I could get away from the kids, just to be left alone, take refuge in the child-free environment of a workplace.
But crazily enough, those days when I do work all day, I think of my children and what they are doing at the moment. Being a housedad is what I want to be, not what I have to be.
Even official census figures suggest our number is rising. Ten years ago less than 2% of two-parent families with one parent at home were looked after mainly by dad. Now it is 8%. Since the 1991 census, the number had risen by 15%, while at the same time the number of at-home mother families has dropped by 20%.
In fact, proportionally, at-home dad families with preschoolers were the strongest growing family type in New Zealand and this growth went against a general trend towards two income families.
But census data only give the number of families where one partner is earning no income at all, not where one partner earns significantly more than the other. It also does not give the number of families where the father earns a full-time wage but is still the primary caregiver of his children because he works odd hours – an increasingly common situation.
Add to that the fact that any census is just a snapshot and many fathers find themselves in the situation of primary caregiver only temporarily, the total number of men who will be primary caregivers to their children at some stage in their lives is yet higher – quite possibly around 20 – 25% of all fathers with preschoolers.
This is amazing, since everyone seems to assume we are a small minority. At the recent “Fathering the Future” forum in Christchurch, an initial proposal by the late Children’s Commissioner Laurie O’Reilly to have a keynote speaker on these families was scrapped by the organisers after he died, believing it was not relevant enough.
And yet, statistically, there would be housedad (or single dad) families in every playcentre, Toy Library, Plunket nurse area, preschool or any other pre- school institution virtually everywhere in New Zealand.
The number of housedads would be high enough for fathers playgroups to form spontaneously – and yet there are few of them around.
I believe we need to be confident in claiming our place as fathers in these institutions, and at the same time stick to our identity as men and the way we parent our children without having to feel we would have to become “feminised” before we’re allowed at our local playcentre.
In my experience mothers, too, prefer fathers not to be like surrogate mothers.
Given the increasing prevalence of the father-at-home family it is also surprising that there is so little information about them out there. Agencies who are trying to meet the challenge of changing families are left out in the cold.
Even a fatherhood guru such as Steve Biddulph, whose books are the most widely used resources on fatherhood by New Zealand agencies apart from this newsletter, has not much to say about them, or about the father’s role for pre-school children in general.
Pamphlets or booklets for people like us are not available partly because the information base is too thin.
Getting involved in your local community (or writing a piece for this newsletter) are the best ways to counter stereotypes which do not help us or our kids.
