Worcester and Droitwich Branch
tended to be freelancers squeezing in a bit of paid work
here and there, shift- or part-time workers – all of us
were making financial sacrifices to spend time with our
children – sacrifices that won‟t be as acute (at least for
those in employment and as long as most employers
choose to do the decent
“all the fun you have at the
weekend and evenings doesn‟t thing) from April.
get diluted when you go to
seven days a week”
As an expectant new father,
no doubt you will have
played out all the arguments
against full-time parenting in your head. As well as worrying about money, my worries ranged from the inflexibility of my work situation, the fact there is a general cultural aversion to men playing an equal role in childrearing (and how the „gap‟ in my CV would be received
when I looked for full-time work again) through to more
practical concerns – including of course the fact that I
had no experience whatsoever of child-rearing and the
fact that all the baby-changing facilities in all public
buildings seemed to be in the bloody ladies. Some of
these concerns were, of course, well-founded and led to
our family being pretty broke for a while and to numerous highly public demonstrations of parenting incompetence in the early days, but I still see the investment of
time I made in looking after Emile (I don‟t like the term
„taking time off work‟ – child-rearing is unquestionably
work) as one of the best things I‟ve done.
First and most obviously, it‟s good for your child to have
their dad around as much as possible as early in their
life as possible. It hardly needs saying that research paper after research paper shows that children are less
likely to get in trouble, more likely to achieve in school
and grow into happy well-rounded adults if they have a
Worcester and Droitwich Branch Autumn 2015
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